Big Government

The Mises Circle in Houston, Texas. Sponsored by Jeremy S. Davis. Recorded 22 January 2011.

For a comedy movie, The Other Guys is a shining example of the kind of problems that plague our current financial system. While it is doubtful that the writers meant to use the movie to display the kind of underhanded affairs big business has with the government, it is certainly a subject interwoven throughout the film.

When the state spends more money than it receives in taxes — a fact indelibly written into the bond — it is deliberately committing an act of bankr

Lately, the supporters of big government have deployed an interesting twist to their arguments, claiming that it is a dirty right-wing lie that government has grown under the Obama administration.

Prohibition and the New Deal are alike in their professed intention. Both assumed the guise of disinterested benevolence towards the body politic.

Julian Assange, through WikiLeaks, has made available to society a vast collection of information that undermines the state’s legitimacy.

Government and the media bombard us with examples of real or often just imagined threats and expand them so that they become as big as our worst nightmares. As more of us buy into an overblown story, it takes on a life of its own and often becomes the accepted truth.

As Hans-Hermann Hoppe has <a href="http://store.mises.org/Democracy-The-God-That-Failed-P240.aspx">noted</a>, democracy is owned by no one. But neither is representative government. Both are marked by infantilized societies: time preference shortens, current consumption trumps wealth-producing capital formation, tax burdens increase, and government debt swells.

The fundamental question is, who is the owner of the funds paid in taxes? Is it the citizens, who have earned the funds and who turn them over under threat of being fined or imprisoned — or even killed — or is it the government?

We must face the fact, once and for all, that the argument of economists against the draft, though correct as far as it goes, is hopelessly narrow and inadequate.