For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.
What the advocates of these tax rates fail to realize is that the greater part of the incomes taxed away would not have been consumed but saved and invested.
Planning other people’s actions means to prevent them from planning for themselves, means to deprive them of their essentially human quality, means enslaving them.
A new type of superstition has got hold of people’s minds, the worship of the state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion, of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the fashionable idols!
The main propoganda trick of supporters of the allegedly “progressive” policy of government control is to blame capitalism for all that is unsatisfactory in present-day conditions and to extol the blessings of socialism. They have never attempted to prove their fallacious dogmas.
For them the main thing is not to improve the conditions of the masses, but to harm the entrepreneurs and capitalists even if this policy victimizes the immense majority of the people.
The so-called liberals of today have the very popular idea that freedom of speech, of thought, of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from imprisonment without trial-that all these freedoms can be preserved in the absence of what is called economic freedom.
To the masses, the catchwords of Socialism sound so enticing… so they will continue to work for Socialism, helping thereby to bring about the inevitable decline of the civilization which the nations of the West have taken thousands of years to build up.
The gold standard makes the money’s purchasing power independent of the changing, ambitions and doctrines of political parties and pressure groups. This is not a defect of the gold standard; it is its main excellence.
The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.
All they did was to call their adversaries names and cast suspicion upon their motives. And, unfortunately, the average citizen cannot see through these stratagems.
