What we are taught in our society and schools, from all official channels, is something like the following. For the sake of mankind’s well-being and improvement, some individuals need to exercise great power over others. On our own, we would have little if any philanthropic instinct. We would commit the vilest of crimes. Commerce would grind to a halt, innovation would cease, and the arts and sciences would be neglected. The human race would descend to a condition too degraded and appalling to contemplate. Therefore, a single institution needs a monopoly on the initiation of physical force and on the ability to expropriate individuals. That institution will ensure that society is molded according to the proper pattern, that “social justice” is achieved, and that mankind’s deepest aspirations have some chance of fulfillment. So entrenched in our minds are these ideas that it would hardly occur to most people even to think of them as propaganda. This is simply the truth about the world, people assume. It is the way things are. They cannot be otherwise. But what if they can? What if there really is another way to live? What if the sphere of freedom need not be so confined after all, but may expand almost without limit? What if the general presumption against monopoly applies to government just as much as it does to anything else? What if the free market, the most extraordinary creator of wealth and innovation ever known, and the most reliable and efficient allocation mechanism of scarce resources, is also better at producing the goods for which we have been told we must rely on government? And what if the state, the greatest mass-murderer in history, the great drag on economic progress, and the institution that pits us against each other in a zero-sum game of mutual plunder, is retarding rather than advancing human welfare? Just how liberating the libertarian philosophy becomes when you take a full step back and start to think for yourself.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 14:12:15 +0000
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