We are deceived by money - by Socialists!

Says Bastiat:

We are deceived by money. To demand the cooperation of all the citizens in a common work, in the form of money, is in reality to demand a concurrence in kind; for every one procures, by his own labour, the sum to which he is taxed. Now, if all the citizens were to be called together, and made to execute, in conjunction, a work useful to all, this would be easily understood; their reward would be found in the results of the work itself.

But after having called them together, if you force them to make roads which no one will pass through, palaces which no one will inhabit, and this under the pretext of finding them work, it would be absurd, and they would have a right to argue, "With this labour we have nothing to do; we prefer working on our own account."

A proceeding which consists in making the citizens cooperate in giving money but not labour, does not, in any way, alter the general results. The only thing is, that the loss would react upon all parties. By the former, those whom the State employs, escape their part of the loss, by adding it to that which their fellow-citizens have already suffered.

Copenhagen's Secret Service

Those who use Copenhagen's metro service these days (or go to the movies in Denmark) cannot avoid seeing a ridiciouls advertisement clip that Copenhagen municipality is wasting my tax-receipts on. A serious man knocks on a door of a surprised citizen, who is told how many pizza boxes and plastic glasses he has thrown on the streets for his entire life. The point? To make people feel bad about the city of Copenhagen FAILING to clean the streets of this filthy city. Yes, make people feel bad because a government spy has been accumulating information about everyday behaviour. Yuk!

The Case for Liberty

Economic science, in short, establishes existential laws, of the type: if A, then B. Mises demonstrates that this science asserts that laissez-faire policy leads to peace and higher standards of living for all, while statism leads to conflict and lower living standards. Then, Mises as a citizen chooses laissez-faire liberalism because he is interested in achieving these ends. The only sense in which Mises considers liberalism as “scientific” is to the extent that people unite on the goal of abundance and mutual benefit. Perhaps Mises is overly sanguine in judging the extent of such unity, but he never links the valuational and the scientific: when he says that a price control is “bad” he means bad not from his point of view as an economist, but from the point of view of those in society who desire abundance. Those who choose contrasting goals--who favor price controls, for example, as a route to bureaucratic power over their fellow men, or who, through envy, judge social equality as more worthwhile than general abundance or liberty--would certainly not accept liberalism, and Mises would certainly never say that economic science proves them wrong. He never goes beyond saying that economics furnishes men with the knowledge of the consequences of various political actions; and that it is the citizen’s province, knowing these consequences, to choose his political course.

From Rothbard's In Defense of "Extreme Apriorism". Beautiful!