Other Schools of Thought

"The pensions/social security system is an intergenerational Ponzi scheme, the biggest scam ever invented."

For while the humanists would hear of no institutional check on state rule, one critical stumbling block still remained: Christian virtue. What was needed, then, to complete the development of absolutist theory, was a theoretician to fearlessly break the ethical chains that still bound the ruler to the claims of moral principle. That man was the Florentine bureaucrat Niccolò Machiavelli.

Above all, central planning allows a few who are the new elite to seek to control the total lives of the masses. It is this gigantic object lesson which brings the intellectual issues into focus.

In the end, this is the reason why progressivism as a system of economic thought is every bit as bankrupt as Social Security.

Men do well under a plan and its controls if the Gestalt to be accomplished makes sense, is not too distant, and offers rewards as well as challenges for different levels of skill. But this is quite different from a superimposed, infallible political philosophy which would urge on us an engineered society.

It is just a bit strange that companies would be, on the one hand, attacked for not providing enough in wages and, on the other, required to not provide any wages.

Wherever the doctor is being paid by the authorities and not by the patients, the outcome of compulsion is a set of fees that does not cover the investment in expensive instruments. This has an additional effect that could scarcely have been unintended: It forces the patient into governmentally controlled dispensaries which can afford the investment — at the taxpayer's expense.

By the 12th century, the Italian city-states had evolved a new form of government, new at least since ancient Greece.

"There is no point in making plans unless causal determinism is true; yet, if causal determinism is true, the very basis of central planning is destroyed, because the government planner is himself determined. By a strange lapse of logic, the believer in causal determinism always excludes himself from the system which he is putting into effect."

Prosperity meant the standing temptation of wealth to loot, and so the German emperors, beginning with Frederick Barbarossa in 1154, began a two-centuries-long series of attempts to conquer the northern Italian cities.