A Quote by Murray Rothbard
Throughout history governments have been chronically short of revenue. The reason should be clear: unlike you and me, governments do not produce useful goods and services that they can sell on the market; governments, rather than producing and selling services, live parasitically off the market and off society.
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By far the most numerous and most flagrant violations of personal liberty and individual rights are performed by governments... The major crimes throughout history, the ones executed on the largest scale, have been committed not by individuals or bands of individuals but by governments, as a deliberate policy of those governments-that is, by the official representatives of governments, acting in their official capacity.
Governments have been ceding power to big multinational corporations in the market. We see the manifest in a variety of ways. Where governments are giving up power to big international institutions like the World Trade Organization or NAFTA, which are disabling governments' ability to protect the rights of their own people.
Europeans tend to feel more positively about their governments than do Americans, for whom the failures and unpopularity of their federal, state, and local politicians are a commonplace. Yet Americans' various governments collect taxes and, in return, provide services without which they could not easily live their lives.
Globalization, meaning the global expansion of a market economy, is the only way we can guarantee widespread prosperity and peace. A lot of nations are just so small, that unless they can sell their goods and services on the market they're never going to develop, they don't have an internal market that's big enough to sustain anything.
In the market economy the worker sells his services as other people sell their commodities. The employer is not the employee's lord. He is simply the buyer of services which he must purchase at their market price.
When governments are selling, you should be buying. And when governments are defaulting, we should look at that as an opportunity.
We will not let governments off the hook. We will look to civil society to help us, to pin governments, to what they have committed to here. And we will report on it.
I have read a great deal of economic theory for over 50 years now, but have found only one economic "law" to which I can find NO exceptions: Where the State prevents a free market, by banning any form of goods or services, consumer demand will create a black market for those goods or services, at vastly higher prices. Can YOU think of a single exception to this law?
You'll have to have the governments sell off all of their public domains; sell off their railroads, sell off their public land. You'll essentially have to introduce neo-feudalism. You'll have to roll the clock of history back a thousand years, and reduce the European population to debt slavery. It's as simple a solution as the Eurozone has imposed on Greece. And it's a solution that the leaders and the banks are urging for responsible economists to promote for the population at large.
By allowing super wealthy corporations and individuals to avoid paying their fair share of tax, tax havens are denying governments' revenue that could and should be spent on schools, healthcare, and other essential services.
Governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them, and as governments are made and moved by men, so by them they are ruined too. Wherefore governments rather depend upon men, than men upon governments. Let men be good, and the government cannot be bad; if it be ill, they will cure it. But if men be bad, let the government be never so good, they will endeavour to warp and spoil it to their turn.
In human rights theory it is very important that governments still have the primary responsibility for the standards and provision of such services even if they no longer deliver them. They must insist that the private sector delivers without discrimination. So governments still have responsibility, including the need to influence business.
When globalisation means that many of the services that individual governments used to have direct power over are privatised, in education and health, even prison services, nonetheless national sovereignty still needs to be exercised.
If you have a company that doesn't sell its goods or services abroad and focuses only on the domestic market, it will keep paying a price.
Governments should be smaller. In fact, governments and countries in general are less important than we think they are. They take credit for processes they have nothing to do with.
Democratic governments are not delivering on their promises, which is partly due to the fact that governments are less powerful than they were after the Second World War. There were fewer governments then, but they actually had more political power.
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