The Freethinker
09-30-2012, 11:30 PM
I have finished reading Bastiat's "The Law" and am better off having done so. Bastiat sheds so much light into statists' bastardization of laws into instruments of plunder. An awesome attack on socialistic thinking (and on how statists think people are walking amoebas incapable of faculties and who must be told what to do).
And now I move to "Our Enemy The State." I like how he compares other statist societies (Germany, Russia) to America at that time, and I particularly liked how Albert Jay Nock mentioned that:
- "It is obvious that private forms of these enterprises must tend to dwindle in proportion as the energy of the State’s encroachments on them increases, for the competition of social power with State power is always disadvantaged, since the State can arrange the terms of competition to suit itself, even to the point of outlawing any exercise of social power whatever in the premises; in other words, giving itself a monopoly."... BRILLIANT! statism at its best, taking away from the productiveness and diligence of private enterprise for its own enrichment!
- "First, the point to which the centralization of State authority has been carried. Practically all the sovereign rights and powers of the smaller political units – all of them that are significant enough to be worth absorbing – have been absorbed by the federal unit; nor is this all. State power has not only been thus concentrated at Washington, but it has been so far concentrated into the hands of the Executive that the existing regime is a regime of personal government. It is nominally republican, but actually monocratic; a curious anomaly, but highly characteristic..." - This brings me back to what I have learned in recent time thanks to other LIberty-minded writers (Lew Rockwell's website) and some of you RPF people - how the USA was at first a nation with powerful states and a not-so-strong central government, and then the latter reversed this and usurped power.
But the one that most stood out so far was:...
"... the erection of poverty and mendicancy into a permanent political asset. ..... The State, always instinctively “turning every contingency into a resource” for accelerating the conversion of social power into State power, was quick to take advantage of this state of mind. All that was needed to organize these unfortunates into an invaluable political property was to declare the doctrine that the State owes all its citizens a living."
Fellow lovers of liberty, I am a man who loves to read and I've got LOTS of reading to do about this stuff. Ron Paul. Ludwig von Mises. Murray Rothbard. And others. And I'm not going to stop!!!!!
And now I move to "Our Enemy The State." I like how he compares other statist societies (Germany, Russia) to America at that time, and I particularly liked how Albert Jay Nock mentioned that:
- "It is obvious that private forms of these enterprises must tend to dwindle in proportion as the energy of the State’s encroachments on them increases, for the competition of social power with State power is always disadvantaged, since the State can arrange the terms of competition to suit itself, even to the point of outlawing any exercise of social power whatever in the premises; in other words, giving itself a monopoly."... BRILLIANT! statism at its best, taking away from the productiveness and diligence of private enterprise for its own enrichment!
- "First, the point to which the centralization of State authority has been carried. Practically all the sovereign rights and powers of the smaller political units – all of them that are significant enough to be worth absorbing – have been absorbed by the federal unit; nor is this all. State power has not only been thus concentrated at Washington, but it has been so far concentrated into the hands of the Executive that the existing regime is a regime of personal government. It is nominally republican, but actually monocratic; a curious anomaly, but highly characteristic..." - This brings me back to what I have learned in recent time thanks to other LIberty-minded writers (Lew Rockwell's website) and some of you RPF people - how the USA was at first a nation with powerful states and a not-so-strong central government, and then the latter reversed this and usurped power.
But the one that most stood out so far was:...
"... the erection of poverty and mendicancy into a permanent political asset. ..... The State, always instinctively “turning every contingency into a resource” for accelerating the conversion of social power into State power, was quick to take advantage of this state of mind. All that was needed to organize these unfortunates into an invaluable political property was to declare the doctrine that the State owes all its citizens a living."
Fellow lovers of liberty, I am a man who loves to read and I've got LOTS of reading to do about this stuff. Ron Paul. Ludwig von Mises. Murray Rothbard. And others. And I'm not going to stop!!!!!