A Quote by Hans F. Sennholz
Modern government has become a universal transfer agency that utilizes the political process for distributing vast measures of income and wealth. It preys on millions of victims in order to allocate valuable goods and services to its beneficiaries.
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The government transfers income and wealth according to the rules of politics, which make politicians the primary beneficiaries of the system, and the poor and needy the primary victims.
Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms. As for the victims, the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more. The Founders cannot have intended this perverse result.
You have to have a government to provide you with legal order, with stability, enforcement of property rights, enforcement of contracts, definition of rules and regulations - the rules of the game, so to speak - and to provide certain shared goods and services, public services. Several people have tried to estimate this and they come out with figures like government spending at 15% of GDP. In the modern world it has gone to 40% or above. So we are way beyond the optimal, and that is easier to say than what the optimum is.
To Republicans, I humbly suggest that we make it possible for Democrats to give up their quest for redistribution of income and wealth by our acceptance of an appropriate role for government in financing those public goods and services necessary to secure a social safety net below which no American would be allowed to fall.
While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet.
The US has developed two coordinate governing classes: the one, called 'business,' building cities, manufacturing and distributing goods, and holding complete and autocratic power over the livelihood of millions; the other, called 'government,' concerned with preaching and exemplification of spiritual ideals, so caught in a mass of theory, that when it wished to move in a practical world it had to do so by means of a sub rosa political machine.
Millions of individuals making their own decisions in the marketplace will always allocate resources better than any centralized government planning process.
Economic progress and justice do not consist in superbly equalized destitution, but in the constant creation of more and more goods and services, of more and more wealth and income to be shared.
Tariff policy beneficiaries are always visible, but its victims are mostly invisible. Politicians love this. The reason is simple: The beneficiaries know for whom to cast their ballots, and the victims don't know whom to blame for their calamity.
The effect of Welfarism on freedom will be felt later on - after its beneficiaries have become its victims, after dependence on government has turned into bondage and it is too late to unlock the jail.
In the words of Louis Brandeis, the Supreme Court justice, we have a choice between a democracy or vast concentrations of wealth. We have vast concentrations of wealth which has bought its way into our democracy with its political leaders who exemplify the merger of that economic and political elite.
Wal-Mart has become the whipping boy for political demagogues, unions and anti-traders. I suggest that they have the wrong target.... Wal-Mart exists and prospers because tens of millions of Americans find Wal-Mart to be a suitable source of goods and services..... unions and anti-traders should direct their outrage and condemnation at the tens of millions of Americans who shop at Wal-Mart and keep it in business.
A transitional government is the beginning of a transfer of sovereignty. It's a question of Iraqi security and moving forward with the political process.
In functioning high-income countries, the government guarantees the provision of essential goods and services: medical care, transit between cities, supplies for public schools, financial support to weather a period of unemployment.
Conventional wisdom on government's role in inequality often has it backwards. Tax reforms have resulted in a more progressive federal income tax; government transfer payments have become less progressive.
Redistribution divided society into two social classes: the beneficiaries of transfer, who are calling for ever more; and the victims, who submit unwillingly. It could hardly fail to injure social peace and harmony.
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