Big Government

Recorded at the Mises Institute Supporters Summit, 1 November 2008; Auburn, Alabama. Includes a brief introduction by Mark Thornton.

Money passing back and forth from the amorphous fiscal blob in DC and listed corporations is as difficult to follow as a shell game.The public is expected to sit blinking like a corporate mistress in a James Thurber cartoon.

Really smart guys (and now gals too) built impressive models that were quite rigorous in some respects, yet woefully deficient in others. In the case of economics, this hubris led to horrible government policies. We can only hope the same doesn't happen because of the climate models.

Middle America has traditionally been the largest and most effective force of resistance to the imperial garrison state.

My methods can be replicated. I hope to encourage others to take up the challenge — including the next generation of persons willing to aid the cause of liberty by going behind enemy lines.

But in fact, they have become responsible for great evil, the leading one of which is to contribute to the great lie that government is doing good for us.

Governments have made the war; only the peoples can make an unarmed peace.

A dramatic initiative to lower the costs of hiring could end up having great effects.

The truth is that the state must hide not only its wars but all of its activities. It hides its inflation. It hides the effects of its taxation and its protectionism. It fears anyone who draws the cause-and-effect connection between its activities and their deleterious consequences for the rest of us. It is the most destructive force in our world. Because that truth is so momentous, the state does everything possible to hide the smallest drop of blood.

ExxonMobil, lacking access to countries amenable to oil exploration, has invested less in finding new oil in 2007 that it did back in 1981.