Big Government

The Mises Circle in Naples, Florida. Recorded 26 February 2011.

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

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.