Murray Rothbard on the Terrifying Idea of a Unitary World “Democratic” Government

But the inner logic of that mystique, and the basic logic of minarchist political theory, is at once simple and terrifying: unitary world “democratic” government. The minarchist argument against anarcho-capitalist libertarians is that there must be a single, overriding government agency with a monopoly force to settle disputes by coercion. OK, but in that case and by the very same logic shouldn't nation-states be replaced by a one-world monopoly government? Shouldn't unitary world government replace what has been properly termed our existing “international anarchy?”

Minarchist libertarians and conservatives balk at the inner logic of world government for obvious reasons: for they fear correctly that world taxation and world socialization would totally and irreversibly suppress the liberty and property of Americans. But they remain trapped in the logic of their own position. Left-liberals, on the other hand, are happy to embrace this logic precisely because of this expected outcome. Even the democratic Establishment, however, hesitates at embracing the ultimate logical end of a single world democratic state, at least until they can be assured of controlling that monstrous entity.


—Murray N. Rothbard, “The Nationalities Question,” in The Irrepressible Rothbard: The Rothbard-Rockwell Report; Essays of Murray N. Rothbard, ed. Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. (Burlingame, CA: The Center for Libertarian Studies, 2000), 229-230.

Anti-Trust Laws Illustrate Another Instance of Defining Property in Terms of Values, Not Physical Criteria

Anti-trust laws serve many purposes. From the point of view of the expert in law and economics, for instance, they function as a full employment bill, calling forth millions of hours of highly paid expert testimony. From the perspective of the neo-classical economist it furnishes an opportunity to demonstrate manual dexterity with average and marginal cost and revenue curves, “dead weight losses” and “resource misallocations,” the better to dazzle naive students. For the political ideologue, the theory of monopoly, upon which anti-trust laws are based, provides the “scientific legitimation” for the permanency of so-called market failures; it is a stick which can be used to beat up on the private property (capitalist) system.

For our purposes, anti-trust laws illustrate yet another instance of defining property in terms of values, not physical criteria. If company A sells a better product, or the same one at a lower price, how does it “hurt” its competitors? Only in value terms, not physical ones. As in the case of witch craft, or heresy during the period of the inquisition, there is no defense against the charge of monopoly. Promotion of consumer welfare is no defense; indeed, it is part of the indictment. Selling at a price lower than competitors’ is prima facie evidence of cutthroat competition; selling at a higher price indicates monopolistic profiteering; selling at the same price as everyone else is evidence of collusion. Since there is no fourth alternative, any firm is theoretically guilty as charged, no matter what its behavior. Similarly with quantity sold. Too much is pre-emptive, too little is monopolistic withholding, and the same as others is collusive dividing up of the market. Heads the anti-trust division and the Federal Trade Commission win; tails, the business concern loses.

—Walter E. Block, Property Rights: The Argument for Privatization, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism (Cham, CH: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2019), 15-16.

Benjamin Constant Waged an Intellectual War Against Theocratic Conservatives and Socialists

Constant was the first great liberal thinker who was compelled to wage an intellectual battle on two fronts, a situation that became typical of liberalism in the nineteenth century and into our own time. His enemies were the Jacobin and socialist descendants (for the most part) of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the one side, and, on the other, the theocratic conservatives such as de Maistre and de Bonald.

As against the egalitarians and socialists who aimed to overthrow tradition, especially in religion, Constant appreciated the importance of voluntary traditions, those generated by the free activity of society itself. In this respect, Constant was much superior to John Stuart Mill, whose distaste for all of the inherited ways of mankind has misled Anglo-American liberalism in highly unfortunate directions. Constant emphasized the value of these old ways in the struggle against state power. Having lived through the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic dictatorship, he was one of the first to understand the power of the modern state. Any element of social life that might act as a barrier to it was welcome in his eyes. Anticipating Tocqueville, and, in our century, thinkers like Bertrand de Jouvenel and Robert Nisbet, Constant wrote:

The interests and memories which are born of local customs contain a germ of resistance which authority suffers only with regret, and which it hastens to eradicate. With individuals it has its way more easily; it rolls its enormous weight over them effortlessly, as over sand.

As for the conservatives, they attempted to erect the Christian notion of Original Sin into the theoretical underpinning for a system of oppression, arguing for a strong state to keep a firm check on natural man. Constant was willing to grant some plausibility to the notion of the natural corruption of human nature. But how could this be turned into a warrant for an authoritarian state? Were the politicians born of an Immaculate Conception? As Constant wrote:

[There is a] bizarre notion according to which it is claimed that because men are corrupt, it is necessary to give certain of them all the more power . . . on the contrary, they must be given less power, that is, one must skillfully combine institutions and place within them certain counterweights against the vices and weaknesses of men.

—Ralph Raico, “The Centrality of French Liberalism,” in Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012), 224-225.

Positivists Rest Their Case on Misleading Analogies from the Epistemology of Physics But Human Action Is Not Like Physics

First, it should be made clear that neither Professor Machlup nor Professor Hutchison is what Mises calls a praxeologist, that is, neither believes (a) that the fundamental axioms and premises of economics are absolutely true; (b) that the theorems and conclusions deduced by the laws of logic from these postulates are therefore absolutely true; (c) that there is consequently no need for empirical “testing,” either of the premises or the conclusions; and (d) that the deduced theorems could not be tested even if it were desirable. Both disputants are eager to test economic laws empirically. The crucial difference is that Professor Machlup adheres to the orthodox positivist position that the assumptions need not be verified so long as their deduced consequents may be proven true—essentially the position of Professor Milton Friedman—while Professor Hutchison, wary of shaky assumptions takes the more empirical—or institutionalist—approach that the assumptions had better be verified as well.

Strange as it may seem for an ultra-apriorist, Hutchison’s position strikes me as the better of the two. If one must choose between two brands of empiricism, it seems like folly to put one’s trust in procedures for testing only conclusions by fact. Far better to make sure that the assumptions also are correct. Here I must salute Professor Hutchison’s charge that the positivists rest their case on misleading analogies from the epistemology of physics. This is precisely the nub of the issue. All the positivist procedures are based on the physical sciences. It is physics that knows or can know its “facts” and can test its conclusions against these facts, while being completely ignorant of its ultimate assumptions. In the sciences of human action, on the other hand, it is impossible to test conclusions. There is no laboratory where facts can be isolated and controlled; the “facts” of human history are complex ones, resultants of many causes. These causes can only be isolated by theory, theory that is necessarily a priori to these historical (including statistical) facts. Of course, Professor Hutchison would not go this far in rejecting empirical testing of theorems; but, being commendably skeptical of the possibilities of testing (though not of its desirability), he insists that the assumptions be verified as well.

—Murray N. Rothbard, “In Defense of ‘Extreme Apriorism,’” in Economic Controversies (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2011), 103-105.

Using Political Force, the State Lives on a Revenue Produced in the Private Sphere for Private Purposes

One would not think it difficult for scholars and laymen alike to grasp the fact that government is not like the Rotarians or the Elks; that it differs profoundly from all other organs and institutions in society; namely, that it lives and acquires its revenues by coercion and not by voluntary payment. The late Joseph Schumpeter was never more astute than when he wrote:

The friction or antagonism between the private and the public sphere was intensified from the first by the fact that . . . the state has been living on a revenue which was being produced in the private sphere for private purposes and had to be deflected from these purposes by political force. The theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.

Apart from the public sector, what constitutes the productivity of the “private sector” of the economy? The productivity of the private sector does not stem from the fact that people are rushing around doing something, anything, with their resources; it consists in the fact that they are using these resources to satisfy the needs and desires of the consumers.

—Murray N. Rothbard, “The Fallacy of the Public Sector,” in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, 2nd ed. (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000), 134.

Liberals Push the “Welfare” Part and Conservatives Push the “Warfare” Part of the “Welfare-Warfare State”

The indispensable intellectual role of engineering popular consent for state rule is played, for the Great Society, by the liberal intelligentsia, who provide the rationale of “general welfare,” “humanity,” and the “common good” (just as the conservative intellectuals work the other side of the Great Society street by offering the rationale of “national security” and “national interest”). The liberals, in short, push the “welfare” part of our omnipresent welfare-warfare state, while the conservatives stress the warfare side of the pie. . . .

The cruelest myth fostered by the liberals is that the Great Society functions as a great boon and benefit to the poor; in reality, when we cut through the frothy appearances to the cold reality underneath, the poor are the major victims of the welfare state. The poor are the ones to be conscripted to fight and die at literally slave wages in the Great Society's imperial wars. The poor are the ones to lose their homes to the bulldozer of urban renewal, that bulldozer that operates for the benefit of real estate and construction interests to pulverize available low-cost housing. All this, of course, in the name of “clearing the slums” and helping the aesthetics of housing. The poor are the welfare clientele whose homes are unconstitutionally but regularly invaded by government agents to ferret out sin in the middle of the night. The poor (e.g., Negroes in the South) are the ones disemployed by rising minimum wage floors, put in for the benefit of employers and unions in higher-wage areas (e.g., the North) to prevent industry from moving to the low-wage areas. The poor are cruelly victimized by an income tax that left and right alike misconstrue as an egalitarian program to soak the rich; actually, various tricks and exemptions insure that it is the poor and the middle classes who are hit the hardest. The poor are victimized too by a welfare state of which the cardinal macro-economic tenet is perpetual if controlled inflation. The inflation and the heavy government spending favor the businesses of the military-industrial complex, while the poor and the retired, those on fixed pensions or Social Security, are hit the hardest. . . . And the burgeoning of compulsory mass public education forces millions of unwilling youth off the labor market for many years, and into schools that serve more as houses of detention than as genuine centers of education. Farm programs that supposedly aid poor farmers actually serve the large wealthy farmers at the expense of sharecroppers and consumer alike; and commissions that regulate industry serve to cartellize it. The mass of workers is forced by governmental measures into trade unions that tame and integrate the labor force into the toils of the accelerating corporate state, there to be subjected to arbitrary wage “guidelines” and ultimate compulsory arbitration.

—Murray N. Rothbard, “The Great Society: A Libertarian Critique,” in The Great Society Reader: The Failure of American Liberalism, ed. Marvin E. Gettleman and David Mermelstein (New York: Random House, 1967), 508-509.

A State of War Continues to be Profitable to the Governing Class and to Officials Administering the Army

The fact that war has become useless is not, however, sufficient to secure its cessation. It is useless because it ceases to minister to the general and permanent benefit of the species, but it will not cease until it also becomes unprofitable, till it is so far from procuring benefit to those who practice it, that to go to war is synonymous with embracing a loss. . . .

Every State includes a governing class and a governed class. The former is interested in the immediate multiplication of employments open to its members, whether these be harmful or useful to the State, and also desires to remunerate these officials at the best possible rate. But the majority of the nation, the governed class, pays for the officials, and its only desire is to support the least necessary number. A State of War, implying an unlimited power of disposition over the lives and goods of the majority, allows the governing class to increase State employments at will — that is, to increase its own sphere of employment. . . . a State of War continues to be profitable both to the governing class as a whole, and to those officials who administer and officer the army. . . .

But while the State of War has become more and more profitable to the class interested in the public services, it has become more burdensome and more injurious to the infinite majority which only consumes those services. In time of tranquility it supports the burden of the armed peace, and the abuse, by the governing class, of the unlimited power of taxation necessitated by the State of War, intended to supply the means of national defense, but perverted to the profit of government and its dependents. The case of the governed is even worse in time of war. . . .

The human balance sheet under a State of War thus favours the governor at the expense of the governed.

—Gustave de Molinari, The Society of Tomorrow: A Forecast of Its Political and Economic Organisation, trans. P. H. Lee Warner (London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1904), 168-170.

Chronic Inflation Worldwide Has Been Mainly the Consequence of Welfarism Run Wild

So the tendency of welfare spending in the United States has been to increase at an exponential rate. This has also been its tendency elsewhere. Only when the economic and budgetary consequences of this escalation become so grave that they are obvious to the majority of the people—i.e., only when irreparable damage has been done—are the welfare programs likely to be curbed. The chronic inflation of the last 25 to 35 years in nearly every country in the world has been mainly the consequence of welfarism run wild.

The causes of this accelerative increase are hardly mysterious. Once the premise has been accepted that “the poor,” as such, have a “right” to share in somebody else's income—regardless of the reasons why they are poor or others are better off—there is no logical stopping place in distributing money and favors to them, short of the point where this brings about equality of income for all. If I have a “right” to a “minimum income sufficient to live in decency,” whether I am willing to work for it or not, why don't I also have a “right” to just as much income as you have, regardless of whether you earn it and I don't?

Once the premise is accepted that poverty is never the fault of the poor but the fault of “society” (i.e., of the self-supporting), or of “the capitalist system,” then there is no definable limit to be set on relief, and the politicians who want to be elected or reelected will compete with each other in proposing new “welfare” programs to fill some hitherto “unmet need,” or in proposing to increase the benefits or reduce the eligibility requirements of some existing program.

—Henry Hazlitt, The Conquest of Poverty, Principles of Freedom Series (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996), 96-97.

The Welfare State Is Merely a Method for Transforming the Market Economy Step-by-Step into Socialism

Unfortunately, the third part of Professor Hayek’s book [The Constitution of Liberty] is rather disappointing. Here the author tries to distinguish between socialism and the Welfare State. Socialism, he alleges, is on the decline; the Welfare State is supplanting it. And he thinks the Welfare State is, under certain conditions, compatible with liberty.

In fact, the Welfare State is merely a method for transforming the market economy step-by-step into socialism. The original plan of socialist action, as developed by Karl Marx in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto, aimed at a gradual realization of socialism by a series of governmental measures. The ten most powerful of such measures were enumerated in the Manifesto. They are well known to everybody because they are the very measures that form the essence of the activities of the Welfare State, of Bismarck’s and the Kaiser Wilhelm’s German Sozialpolitik as well as of the American New Deal and British Fabian Socialism. The Communist Manifesto calls the measures it suggests “economically insufficient and untenable,” but it stresses the fact that “in the course of the movement” they outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.”

Later, Marx adopted a different method for the policies of his party. He abandoned the tactics of a gradual approach to the total state of socialism and advocated instead a violent revolutionary overthrow of the “bourgeois” system that at one stroke should “liquidate” the “exploiters” and establish “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” This is what Lenin did in 1917 in Russia and this is what the Communist International plans to achieve everywhere. What separates the communists from the advocates of the Welfare State is not the ultimate goal of their endeavors, but the methods by means of which they want to attain a goal that is common to both of them. The difference of opinions that divides them is the same as that which distinguished the Marx of 1848 from the Marx of 1867, the year of the first publication of the first volume of Das Kapital.

However, the fact that Professor Hayek has misjudged the character of the Welfare State does not seriously detract from the value of his great book. His searching analysis of the policies and concerns of the Welfare State shows to every thoughtful reader why and how these much praised welfare policies inevitably always fail. These policies never attain those, allegedly beneficial, ends which the government and the self-styled progressives who advocated them wanted to attain, but, on the contrary, bring about a state of affairs which—from the very point of view of the government and its supporters—is even more unsatisfactory than the previous state of affairs they wanted to “improve.”

--Ludwig von Mises, “Liberty and Its Antithesis,” in Economic Freedom and Interventionism: An Anthology of Articles and Essays, ed. Bettina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1990), 174-175.

Economic Freedom and Compulsory Social Insurance Are Not Compatible

Every time I speak on the theme of social security I am in danger of being accused of going beyond my brief. . . . The social market economy cannot flourish if the spiritual attitude on which it is based — that is, the readiness to assume the responsibility for one's fate and to participate in honest and free competition — is undermined by seemingly social measures in neighbouring fields. . . .

I have repeatedly stressed that I consider personal freedom to be indivisible. With this conviction I have worked since 1948 to reduce all economic restrictions. A free economic order can only continue if and so long as the social life of the nation contains a maximum of freedom, of private initiative and of foresight.

If, on the other hand, social policy aims at granting a man complete security from the hour of birth, and protecting him absolutely from the hazards of life, then it cannot be expected that people will develop that full measure of energy, effort, enterprise and other human virtues which are vital to the life and future of the nation, and which, moreover, are the prerequisites of a social market economy based on individual initiative. The close link between economic and social policy must be stressed; in fact, the more successful economic policy can be made the fewer measures of social policy will be necessary. . . .

If we desire to guarantee a permanent free economic and social order, then it becomes essential to achieve freedom with an equally freedom-loving social policy. That is why, for example, it is contradictory to exclude from the market economic order private initiative, foresight and responsibility, even when the individual is not in a material position to exercise such virtues. Economic freedom and compulsory insurance are not compatible.

—Ludwig Erhard, Prosperity through Competition, trans. and ed. Edith Temple Roberts and John B. Wood (New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1958), 185-186.

The Eminent Swedish Economist Gustav Cassel Explained How a “Planned Economy” Must Lead to Despotism

Another result of the promise of instant utopia has been a gigantic growth of governmental power—of interference in the details of everybody's business and everybody's life. As this power has increased, it has also become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. In America the towns and villages have steadily lost power to the States, the States to the Federal Government, and Congress to the President.

One mark of the welfare state everywhere has been the gathering of power into the hands of one man. This is no mere unfortunate coincidence; it has been inevitable. Thirty-six years ago the eminent Swedish economist Gustav Cassel explained in a prophetic lecture how “planned economy,” long enough continued, must lead to despotism:

The leadership of the State in economic affairs which advocates of Planned Economy want to establish is, as we have seen, necessarily connected with a bewildering mass of government interferences of a steadily cumulative nature. The arbitrariness, the mistakes and the inevitable contradictions of such policy will, as daily experience shows, only strengthen the demand for a more rational coordination of the different measures and, therefore, for unified leadership. For this reason Planned Economy will always develop into Dictatorship.

—Henry Hazlitt, Man vs. the Welfare State (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1970), 2.

All Modern Dictators Believe in Social Security, Especially in Coercing People into Governmentalized Medicine

Perhaps the most spectacular “social” aspect of Nazism was its emphasis on health, as part and parcel of a racial nationalism. That was not accidental. The health, or rather sickness, propaganda employed by Bismarck elevated that aspect of social welfare to a prime political issue. Just why were such ruthless men as Bismarck and Hider so profoundly interested in the physical well-being of their subjects — and in high birth-rates! — while totally indifferent, nay, inimical to their mental integrity? But after a fashion so were their predecessors in the Mercantilist age, especially the ministers of the imperialistic Bourbons and the power-lusty Hohenzollerns. And so are their successors to this day.

Evidently, more than humanitarianism was at stake. Watching the world-wide growth of compulsory health insurance, from Icelandic fisherman to coal miners in China, I noticed something that seemed to be overlooked: that all modem dictators — communist, fascist, or disguised — have at least one thing in common. They all believe in Social Security, especially in coercing people into governmentalized medicine.

A selected list of men who have claimed credit for, or have been credited with, introducing or strengthening and expanding governmentalized medical care reads like an extraordinary Who's Who:

• Prince Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany (1884);
• Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria (1888);
• Franz Joseph I, King of Hungary (1891);
• Wilhelm II, “the kaiser” of Germany (1911);
• Admiral Miklos Horthy, reorganizing the scheme as Regent of Hungary (1927);
• Nicholas II, Czar of Russia (1911);
• Vladimir Lenin-Ulianof, founder of modern dictatorship in Soviet Russia (1922);
• Joseph Stalin-Dzhugashvili, almighty Prime Minister and dictator of the U.S.S.R.;
• Joseph Pilsudski, Marshal and para-dictator of Poland (1920);
• Alexander I, King and dictator of Yugoslavia (1922);
• Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, the professor-dictator of Portugal (1919 and 1933);
• Benito Mussolini, Prime Minister and the Duce of Italy (1932 and 1943);
• Francisco Franco, military dictator of Spain (1942 and 1945);
• Yoshihito, Mikado of Japan (1922);
• Hirohito, Mikado of Japan (1934);
• Carol II, pseudo-constitutional King of Romania (1933);
• Joseph Vargas, President and would-be dictator of Brazil (1944);
• Juan Peron, President and boss of the military junta of Argentina (1944);
• Adolf Hitler, Chancellor, the führer of Germany (1933, etc.);
• Pierre Laval, Prime Minister of France (1930), later executed for his fascist activities;
• Ambroise Croizat, Communist Minister of Labor in France (1945);
• Georgi Dimitrov, the late chief agent of the global Comintern, Premier of sovietized Bulgaria (1948);
• Josip Broz, alias Tito, Prime and Foreign Minister, dictator, general secretary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (1947);
• Boleslaw Bierut, President and dictatorial figure-head of Satellite Poland (1947);
• Klement Gottwald, President of the Sovietized Republic of Czechoslovakia (1948).

This list of power dynamos — or symbols of power — with bleeding hearts for human suffering is by no means complete.

—Melchior Palyi, Compulsory Medical Care and the Welfare State (Chicago: National Institute of Professional Services, 1949), 18-19.

The Collectivization of Medical Costs Creates the Potential for a Limitless Rise in the Price of Medical Services

Insofar as medical services or facilities are limited in supply, the notion of the need-based right to medical care and the collectivization of medical costs to finance it create the potential for a limitless rise in the price of medical services. To understand this, imagine an auction. There are a large number of units of some good for sale. But there are not enough units for sale to satisfy all the bidders for all of their requirements. Thus some bidders must go away empty handed, or at least with fewer units than they would like. (As I indicated before, there could have been a larger number of units for sale, but the government does not let them on to the floor of the auction. It keeps them out by means of licensing legislation.) To the extent that the equivalent of the perverted notion of the need-based right to medical care prevails at this auction and the individual is relieved of financial responsibility by virtue of being able to charge his bids to a collective, there is simply nothing present to stop the rise in the bidding. No matter how high prices go, people still assert their alleged right to the item and go on meeting or exceeding ever higher bids, in the knowledge that their bid will be paid for by their collective. If this is an auction market for medical services, they go on bidding in the knowledge that their bids will be paid for by their insurance company or by the government. The only people who are eliminated from the bidding are those who lack medical insurance or the medical coverage of some government program. The rise in prices only stops if there are enough uninsured bidders who can be made to drop out of the bidding so that, for the moment at least, the insured ones can be satisfied.

Of course, when this situation was reached in the 1960s, and it was the uninsured poor and elderly who had to drop out of the bidding, the government soon stepped in to remedy the situation by making additional billions available for them, through the Medicaid and Medicare programs, so that they could carry on in the bidding for the supplies its licensing legislation had artificially reduced. Then, of course, the uninsured bidders who had to drop out of the bidding were drawn from a higher economic rank, namely, the lower middle class. This was because the rise in prices fueled by the government’s injection of still more funds into the medical market now surpassed their financial ability to pay.

Understanding these facts, incidentally, should make clear why the Clinton administration’s current proposal to force employers to provide medical insurance for the 37 million Americans who remain uninsured, leaves absolutely no alternative but price controls and rationing as the means of controlling costs. This is because if virtually everyone is now to have the need-based right to medical care and have his bills sent to the collective for payment, there will be absolutely no limit to the bidding and the rise in prices unless the government restricts the medical care he is allowed to have and determines the price that is to be paid for it. Try to imagine, for example, a situation in which there are 100 units of a supply available and 137 bidders, each of whom would like to have one unit of that supply and is in a position to send the bill for his bid to the government. The rise in cost to the government can only be controlled if the government imposes some kind of limitation on the amount anyone is allowed to bid for in this manner, such as 100/137 of a unit of the supply, and refuses to allow anyone to attempt to buy more by raising his bid even with his own money, because that too would increase the cost to the government.

—George Reisman, “The Real Right to Medical Care Versus Socialized Medicine,” http://www.capitalism.net/articles/SOC_MED_files/The Real Right to Medical Care Versus Socialized Medicine.html (accessed December 9, 2019).

The “New Orthodoxy” of the Public Debt Burden Is the Economic Analogue to the “Perpetual Motion Machine”

The ‘‘new orthodoxy’’ of public debt stood almost unchallenged among economists during the 1940s and 1950s, despite its glaring logical contradictions. The Keynesian advocates failed to see that, if their theory of debt burden is correct, the benefits of public spending are always available without cost merely by resort to borrowing, and without regard to the phase of the economic cycle. If there is no transfer of cost onto taxpayers in future periods (whether these be the same or different from current taxpayers), and if bond purchasers voluntarily transfer funds to government in exchange for promises of future interest and amortization payments, there is no cost to anyone in society at the time public spending is carried out. Only the benefits of such spending remain. The economic analogue to the perpetual motion machine would have been found.

A central confusion in the whole Keynesian argument lay in its failure to bring policy alternatives down to the level of choices confronted by individual citizens, or confronted for them by their political representatives, and, in turn, to predict the effects of these alternatives on the utilities of individuals.

It proved difficult to get at, and to correct, this fundamental confusion because of careless and sloppy usage of institutional description. The Keynesian economist rarely made the careful distinction between money creation and public debt issue that is required as the first step toward logical clarity. Linguistically, he often referred to what amounts to disguised money creation as ‘‘public debt,’’ notably in his classification of government ‘‘borrowing’’ from the banking system. . . .

The ‘‘New Economics’’ had finally moved beyond the elementary textbooks and beyond the halls of the academy. The enlightened would rule the world, or at least the economic aspects of it. But such dreams of Camelot, in economic policy as in other areas, were dashed against the hard realities of democratic politics. Institutional constraints, which seem so commonplace to the observer of the 1970s, were simply overlooked by the Keynesian economists until these emerged so quickly in the 1960s. They faced the rude awakening to the simple fact that their whole analytical structure, its strengths and its weaknesses, had been constructed and elaborated in almost total disregard for the institutional world where decisions are and must be made.

—James M. Buchanan and Richard E. Wagner, Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes, vol. 8 of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 36-37.

Both Monopolists and Communists Start with “Artificial Organization” and End with Terror

Suppose nevertheless that the partisans of an artificial organization, either the monopolists or the communists, are right; that society is not naturally organized, and that the task of making and unmaking the laws that regulate society continuously devolves upon men, look in what a lamentable situation the world would find itself. The moral authority of governors rests, in reality, on the self-interest of the governed. The latter having a natural tendency to resist anything harmful to their self-interest, unacknowledged authority would continually require the help of physical force.

The monopolist and the communists, furthermore, completely understand this necessity.

If anyone, says M. de Maistre, attempts to detract from the authority of God’s chosen ones, let him be turned over to the secular power, let the hangman perform his office.

If anyone does not recognize the authority of those chosen by the people, say the theoreticians of the school of Rousseau, if he resists any decision whatsoever of the majority, let him be punished as an enemy of the sovereign people, let the guillotine perform justice.

These two schools, which both take artificial organization as their point of departure, necessarily lead to the same conclusion: TERROR.

—Gustave de Molinari, The Production of Security, trans. J. Huston McCulloch (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009), 51-52.