Last week in my article The Power of Self-Ownership, I discussed how uncomfortable self-ownership made the great Marxist political philosopher G.A. Cohen. Cohen saw that self-ownership leads to libertarianism, but he rejected libertarianism while he found self-ownership plausible. To save his socialism, he gave up self-ownership, but his reasons for doing so are weak.

Grove City College will host the sixteenth annual Austrian Student Scholars Conference, February 21-22, 2020. Open to undergraduates and graduate students in any academic discipline, the ASSC will bring together students from colleges and universities across the country and around the world to present their own research papers written in the tradition of the great Austrian School intellectuals such as Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Hans Sennholz.

“The essence of the interventionist policy is to take from one group to give to another. It is confiscation and distribution.”  – Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Introduction

Orthodox public goods theory and its corollary — the standard economic justification for government intervention — have both been based on particular definitions of efficiency and optimality. According to the orthodox approach, if a market is not operating “efficiently,” some sort of government intervention to correct the inefficiency may be warranted. But this view of efficiency is derived directly from a neoclassical view of market structures and in particular from the notion of perfect competition.

This year, as it has for several consecutive years now, the Tax Foundation reported that “Americans will collectively spend more on taxes in 2019 than they will on food, clothing, and housing combined.”

That the combined federal, state and local tax bill for the American populace is larger than the amount we spend on essential costs of living like food, clothing and housing certainly is an attention-grabbing snapshot of the federal government leviathan.

Warren and Sanders et al. are misled by the government’s inflation of the money supply into believing that the stagnation and decline of our economic system in recent decades is the result of growing economic inequality.

The truth is that both the appearance of increasing wealth of the rich and the reality of declining actual wealth are the result of the government’s pouring new and additional money into the stock and real estate markets, where the effect is to raise prices.