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“However, not only external expansion of state power is brought about by the ideology of nationalism. War as the natural outgrowth of nationalism is also the means of strengthening the state’s internal powers of exploitation and expropriation. Each war is also an internal emergency situation, and an emergency requires and seems to justify the acceptance of the state’s increasing its control over its own population. Such increased control gained through the creation of emergencies is reduced during peacetime, but it never sinks back to its pre-war levels. Rather, each successfully ended war (and only successful governments can survive) is used by the government and its intellectuals to propagate the idea that it was only because of nationalistic vigilance and expanded governmental powers that the “foreign aggressors” were crushed and one’s own country saved, and that this successful recipe must then be retained in order to be prepared for the next emergency. Led by the just proven “dominant” nationalism, each successful war ends with the attainment of a new peacetime high of governmental controls and thereby further strengthens a government’s appetite for implementing the next winnable international emergency.”
― The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy
― The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy
“Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.”
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“These people look upon inequality as upon an evil. They do not assert that a definite
degree of inequality which can be exactly determined by a judgment free of any
arbitrariness and personal evaluation is good and has to be preserved unconditionally.
They, on the contrary, declare inequality in itself as bad and merely contend that a
lower degree of it is a lesser evil than a higher degree in the same sense in which a
smaller quantity of poison in a man’s body is a lesser evil than a larger dose. But if
this is so, then there is logically in their doctrine no point at which the endeavors
toward equalization would have to stop. Whether one has already reached a degree of
inequality which is to be considered low enough and beyond which it is not necessary
to embark upon further measures toward equalization is just a matter of personal
judgments of value, quite arbitrary, different with different people and changing in the
passing of time. As these champions of equalization appraise confiscation and
“redistribution” as a policy harming only a minority, viz., those whom they consider
to be “too” rich, and benefiting the rest—the majority—of the people, they cannot
oppose any tenable argument to those who are asking for more of this allegedly
beneficial policy. As long as any degree of inequality is left, there will always be
people whom envy impels to press for a continuation of the equalization policy.
Nothing can be advanced against their inference: If inequality of wealth and incomes
is an evil, there is no reason to acquiesce in any degree of it, however low;
equalization must not stop before it has completely leveled all individuals’ wealth and
incomes.”
― Economic Freedom and Interventionism: An Anthology of Articles and Essays
degree of inequality which can be exactly determined by a judgment free of any
arbitrariness and personal evaluation is good and has to be preserved unconditionally.
They, on the contrary, declare inequality in itself as bad and merely contend that a
lower degree of it is a lesser evil than a higher degree in the same sense in which a
smaller quantity of poison in a man’s body is a lesser evil than a larger dose. But if
this is so, then there is logically in their doctrine no point at which the endeavors
toward equalization would have to stop. Whether one has already reached a degree of
inequality which is to be considered low enough and beyond which it is not necessary
to embark upon further measures toward equalization is just a matter of personal
judgments of value, quite arbitrary, different with different people and changing in the
passing of time. As these champions of equalization appraise confiscation and
“redistribution” as a policy harming only a minority, viz., those whom they consider
to be “too” rich, and benefiting the rest—the majority—of the people, they cannot
oppose any tenable argument to those who are asking for more of this allegedly
beneficial policy. As long as any degree of inequality is left, there will always be
people whom envy impels to press for a continuation of the equalization policy.
Nothing can be advanced against their inference: If inequality of wealth and incomes
is an evil, there is no reason to acquiesce in any degree of it, however low;
equalization must not stop before it has completely leveled all individuals’ wealth and
incomes.”
― Economic Freedom and Interventionism: An Anthology of Articles and Essays
“The General Theory was not truly revolutionary at all but merely old and oft-refuted mercantilist and inflationist fallacies dressed up in shiny new garb, replete with newly constructed and largely incomprehensible jargon.”
― Keynes, the Man
― Keynes, the Man
“Contrary to any claim of a systematically “neutral” effect of taxation on production, the consequence of any such shortening of roundabout methods of production is a lower output produced. The price that invariably must be paid for taxation, and for every increase in taxation, is a coercively lowered productivity that in turn reduces the standard of living in terms of valuable assets provided for future consumption. Every act of taxation necessarily exerts a push away from more highly capitalized, more productive production processes in the direction of a hand-to-mouth-existence.”
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Austrian School of Economics
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