Saturday, January 11, 2014

When Mises Pegged The Poverty Fighters

By Chris Rossini

Fifty years ago, in 1964, LBJ would drop the government hammer on Americans:
“Today we are asked to make war on a domestic enemy which threatens the strength of our nation and the welfare of our people...I have called for a national war on poverty. Our objective: total victory.”
What a horrendous mistake!

If only enough Americans had understood the ideas of Ludwig Von Mises; perhaps the whole disaster called "The War on Poverty" could have been avoided.

You see, exactly 30 years before the government hammer was dropped in 1964, Mises wrote a magnificent book called Omnipotent Government. Page 246 contains the right words, used at the right time, and in the right order:
“Planners sometimes describe their proposals as measures to combat poverty and want. The description is ambiguous. All economic policies are designed as remedies for poverty. Laissez faire too is a method of abolishing poverty. Both history and economic theory have demonstrated that it has been more successful than any other policy.”
The free market is the ultimate poverty-fighting method.

If you're at home right now, look around. If you're at work, look around the office. Ask yourself, "How much of this was created by government?" Of course, the answer is "None of it. Zero."

And we don't even live in a free market. Not even close! The stuff that we see around us is in spite of the government. Who knows the extent of abundance that our gazing eyes would see, were we to actually live in a land of liberty? Sadly, it has to be left to our imaginations, and in the realm of the unseen.

Here's the genius of it. The free market does not have to be "created". The government doesn't have to "set it up"....and thank goodness for that. They can't even setup a website.

The only thing that the government has to do, is to go away.

Thomas Nixon Carver said: “In the absence of force, peace and liberty simply exist; they do not have to be created or supported…In the absence of force, capitalism automatically exists in the same sense that peace and liberty automatically exist.”

Leonard Read echoed: "...liberty is not something we design and construct but, instead, is a felicitous situation in which people find themselves once authoritarianism is abandoned."

Government creates poverty. Every move that it makes only continues to hinder, saddle, impede, and obstruct the ultimate poverty-fighting method known as the free market.


Chris Rossini is on TwitterFacebook & Google+

10 comments:

  1. How much of this was created by government? Govt created the internet we're using.

    Brief History of the Internet
    http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet

    "Everyone in the tech world knows that the Internet got its start in the 1960s, when a team of computing pioneers at the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency designed and deployed ARPANET, the first computer network that used “packet switching”—a communications system that splits up data and sends it across multiple paths toward its destination, which is the basic design of today’s Internet. According to most accounts, researchers working on ARPANET created many of the Internet’s defining features, including TCP/IP, the protocol on which today’s network operates. In the 1980s, they strung together various government and university networks together using TCP/IP—thus creating a single worldwide network, the Internet."

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    Replies
    1. But the computers and the usefulness of the net are a product of capitalism.

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    2. Government agencies do sometimes produce useful things like the initial infrastructure of the World Wide Web. But mostly they are good at creating war, oppression, tyranny, injustice, intolerance, discord, division, animosity, violence, poverty, pestilence, starvation, corruption, inefficiency, waste, gargantuan stupidity and a steady stream of outrageous scandals.

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    3. Jerry, as always, your comment is simplistic and hastily conceived. It barely skims the surface of the internet's history. While ARPA was a major funding source, and some government employees participated in the development work, much of the research and work was done on a contractual basis by private individuals who were either affiliated with organizations such as the RAND Corporation or universities like MIT and Stanford. And ARPA had nothing to do with the development of hypertext--that was funded in part by a different group of taxpayers.

      If you truly believe that without government's prodding Paul Baran would never have come up with the idea of packet switching or the systems architecture which flows from it, or that TCP/IP would not have occurred Bob Kahn and others, or that Tim Berners-Lee and others would never have developed Hypertext, if you believe that none of this would have happened in a free and open market society unencumbered by government interference, then you richly merit the epithets some EPJ readers give you.

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    4. JW: Statist Shill

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    5. Anybody who believes this "government created the Internet" spiel is an idiot. Government DID NOT create the Internet. It was creates by a bunch of researchers only partially funded by DARPA. After that the government (NSF, to be specific) made building of the actual Internet (which is VERY different technologically from what it was during the days of ARPANET and NSFNET) very difficult by its insane Acceptable Usage Policy - and it took some brave people willingly violating the law to force the govt to acquiesce to opening the Internet to general public.

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  2. "Do-gooder" NGOs behind the war on poverty, the war on domestic abuse, the war on trafficking are most of them corrupt frauds.

    See the following:

    http://mindbodypolitic.com/2014/01/10/conflict-of-interest-in-corrupt-ngo-behind-slave-nanny-fraud/

    http://mindbodypolitic.com/2014/01/09/soros-ngos-behind-anti-trafficking-agenda/

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  3. More "do-gooder" "world-improver" shenanigans:

    Anti-terrorism US diplomat conspired with do-gooder corporate fat-cat NGO to entrap Indian diplomat - the anti-terrorism diplomat has now been kicked out of India.

    This follows the model of all color revolution psyops where neocon right-wing security/military works with "human rights" NGO to create a pretext to subvert a country's judiciary or government or provoke dissension and instability. (Read Land Destroyer Blog for the model).

    http://mindbodypolitic.com/2014/01/11/anti-terrorism-boss-behind-fake-slave-case-expelled-from-india/

    http://mindbodypolitic.com/2014/01/09/soros-ngos-behind-anti-trafficking-agenda/


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  4. @JW

    You proved the point. The net has turned out to be mostly a means to transfer money from little investors to big (Goldman was behind electrification of the central exchanges); steal IP, introduce high speed gambling, pornify the culture, brainwash, and the best of all - relentless spy.

    Freedom from searches and seizures, privacy even in your own home, medical privacy, all are dead.

    Gvts and corporations can blackmail you, the government can frame you, you can be tried in the media on blogs regurgitating nonsense and your name can be blackened for eternity.
    Your computer can record and spy on you. Your bank accounts can be stolen.

    We got Facebook and twitter nonsense. The world has become one dumb hive mind, easily swayed.
    The color revolutions depend on the net.
    We are living in a nightmare totalitarian prison....and most are too dumb to know it.
    Brave new world is here.

    Yes. Another govt. success story.

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  5. I meant "ELECTRONIFICATION" ...meaning electronic platforms.
    Sorry...

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