"Keynesians believe that long-run profit expectations, which have no basis in reality in any case, are subject to unexpected change. Economic prosperity is based on baseless optimism, economic depression on baseless pessimism."
"The state has only one role in the novels and it is entirely negative: it makes and enforces the fugitive slave laws."
Whether you are trying to understand the problem of growing governmental power yourself or are trying to communicate it to others, On Power can be heartily recommended as a stimulating and profound tract.
[Libertarian Forum, 1971]
"Revolution" has been defined, by all too many libertarians, as well as by most other people, as simply massive acts of direct violence.
But "revolution" is really the application of Aristotelian final causality to the process of social and political change, and should not be confused with throwing bricks or any other random acts of violence. But what does this mean?
Socialism means dictatorship, necessarily survives as dictatorship, and no centrally produced accounting ratios will change that fact. As such, competition is literally impossible under socialism, and this cannot be changed by the introduction of centrally administered accounting ratios.
I am making the simple observation that even if the US government "did nothing" according to the man on the street, it still would have been interfering very heavily in the situation in Haiti. The Haitians have been "enjoying" the help of the US military for years, which is partly why they were so ill equipped to deal with a powerful earthquake.
What Hazlitt is saying is this: "If we want to keep our free political system, here are the economic principles to which we must return."
But prosperity can't be printed. Government edicts won't magically make us better off. Their fatal conceit will only lead us to disaster.
But unlike today, the deflationists and hard-money men had the upper hand. As a result, the depression ended rather quickly (by 1821) when confidence in currency was restored and currency once again was redeemable in specie.
The way to bring the blessings of laissez-faire to the Polish people is first to secure it for ourselves. The enemies of free enterprise and private-property rights here in America are immeasurably benefitted when those who favor the free market are too busy worrying about the "tiger at the gate" to wonder at the absence of freedom right here.
