The United States of America, though theoretically a free country, suffers from an almost unbelievable amount of market regulation.1 Though often called a capitalistic country, the U.S.A. actually has a mixed economy—a mixture of some government-permitted "freedom," a little socialism, and a lot of fascism. Socialism is a system in which the government owns and controls the means of production (supposedly for "the good of the people," but, in actual practice, for the good of the politicians). Facism is a system in which the government leaves nominal ownership of the means of production in the hands of private individuals but exercises control by means of regulatory legislation and reaps most of the profit by means of heavy taxation. In effect, facism is simply a more subtle form of government ownership than is socialism. Under fascism, producers are allowed to keep a nominal title to their possessions and to bear all the risks involved in entrepreneurship, while the government has most of the actual control and gets a great deal of the profits (and takes none of the risks). The U.S.A. is moving increasingly away from a free-market economy and toward fascist totalitarianism. It is commonly believed and taught, particularly by those who favor the present "Establishment," that the market must have external controls and restraints placed upon it by government to protect help-less individuals from exploitation. It is also held that governmental "fine tuning" is needed to prevent market instability, such as booms and busts. A vast amount of governmental action is based on the theory that the market would speedily go awry without regulation, causing financial suffering and economic havoc. When politicians and so-called economists speak of "regulating the market," what they are actually proposing is legislation regu- lating people—preventing them from making trades which they otherwise would have made, or forcing them to make trades they would not have made. The market is a network of trade relation- ships, and a relationship can only be regulated by regulating the persons involved in it. From the book Market For Liberty, pg 18. The book Market For Liberty (1970) is free in audio or pdf format at: freekeene/free-audiobook/ freekeene/files/marketforliberty.pdf Read on Youtube: youtube/watch?v=JGKxp5nc1L8, Printed version at: lfb.org/shop/civil-liberties/the-market-for-liberty, or at Amazon. . . no man has a right to rule anyone else . .
Posted on: Wed, 07 Aug 2013 06:05:42 +0000
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