Mises Daily

This situation is not, however, a natural market phenomenon, but the direct result of various government programs — usually in the world's most developed economies, although developing countries are catching up — that aim to promote more environmentally friendly energy technology or energy self-sufficiency by subsidizing and mandating the diversion of a growing percentage of agricultural commodities such as corn, sugar cane, wheat, and so on, to the production of bioethanol and biodiesel.

Public buildings in the United States are islands of socialism in a sea of free enterprise, so the materials and workers are there.

The government wants to shape perceptions in order to minimize dissatisfaction with its irresponsible monetary and fiscal policies. When the financial press goes along and parrots statements that are obviously false, it fails in its duty to its readers.

One would like to think, though, that in view of the appalling massacres and destruction of the war, some better choices than the ones Churchill and Roosevelt made were possible.

"Those who anxiously await next month's government check prefer not to deal with the question of how goods and services are produced and under what political circumstances they are most efficiently provided."

More government cannot possibly offer the solution to the problems we face. Big government is the cause; freedom is the answer.

We can see the strength of the case for economic freedom even more clearly through proper economic theorizing. Free-market economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises arrived at the proper conclusions regarding socialism and interventionism long before the evidence on modern state planning was in.

But defending property rights - the only basis on which society can possibly exist in peace - is a worthy cause, and there are not nearly enough people doing it.

A free society includes the freedom to be unconcerned, insensitive, or stingy. If the forced looting of the taxpayers for foreign-aid payments has always been wrong, then — cyclone or no cyclone — it is just as wrong now.

There is still no such thing as a fair tax.