max
08-27-2009, 11:00 AM
The late great Robert Welch (founder of the eeeeevil John Birch Society that CFR "conservative" Bill Buckley single handedly crippled) wrote this in the late 1950's...............
A government trying to step in and improve the workings of a free market is exactly like a man who takes a lighted lantern outdoors at noon of a bright June day to show you the sun.
But a government's answer to any criticism as to the inadequacy of the lantern is always to bring more lanterns and then more lanterns -- until eventually the smoke and glare of the lanterns so seriously interfere with and shut off the light of the sun that everybody actually has to work mainly by lantern light.
It is interesting to note, too, that in any society the government, and its allies who want to use the lanterns, always claim the justification that the society's economy is more complex than those which have preceded it. They insist that therefore the lanterns of planning and control are necessary and helpful now, no matter how futile and harmful they have been shown to be in the past.
A government trying to step in and improve the workings of a free market is exactly like a man who takes a lighted lantern outdoors at noon of a bright June day to show you the sun.
But a government's answer to any criticism as to the inadequacy of the lantern is always to bring more lanterns and then more lanterns -- until eventually the smoke and glare of the lanterns so seriously interfere with and shut off the light of the sun that everybody actually has to work mainly by lantern light.
It is interesting to note, too, that in any society the government, and its allies who want to use the lanterns, always claim the justification that the society's economy is more complex than those which have preceded it. They insist that therefore the lanterns of planning and control are necessary and helpful now, no matter how futile and harmful they have been shown to be in the past.