#111 – Some Quotes Against the State
For this week’s newsletter, I thought I would deviate from the usual format to share some quotes (and a poem) centered around a theme that has recently occupied my thoughts. Enjoy!
On employing coercion to attain one’s ends
“The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.”
— David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism
No one knows you better than yourself
“If your purpose is to make someone happy, you’re more apt to succeed if you make yourself the object. You’ll never know another person more than a fraction as well as you can know yourself.”
— Harry Browne, How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World
Reality doesn't change when you change price tags
“The federal government could make a Rolls Royce affordable for every American, but we would not be a richer country as a result. We would in fact be a much poorer country, because of all the vast resources transferred from other economic activities to subsidize an extravagant luxury. To have politicians arbitrarily change the price tags, so that prices no longer represent the real costs, is to defeat the whole purpose [of an economy: to make trade-offs, with the prices of a market economy representing the costs of producing things].
Reality doesn't change when the government changes price tags. Talk about ‘bringing down health care costs’ is not aimed at the costly legal environment in which medical science operates, or other sources of needless medical costs. It is aimed at price control, which hides costs rather than reducing them. [...]
Whether in France during the 1790s, the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik revolution, or in newly independent African nations during the past generation, governments have imposed artificially low prices on food. In each case, this led to artificially low supplies of food and artificially high levels of hunger.
People who complain about the ‘prohibitive’ cost of housing, or of going to college, for example, fail to understand that the whole point of costs is to be prohibitive. [...] The idea [that ‘basic necessities’ should be a ‘right’] certainly sounds nice. But the very fact that we can seriously entertain such a notion, as if we were God on the first day of creation, instead of mortals constrained by the universe we find in place, shows the utter unreality of failing to understand that we can only make choices among alternatives actually available.
[...] Trade-offs [as opposed to solutions] remain inescapable, whether they are made through a market or through politics. The difference is that price tags present all the trade-offs simultaneously, while political ‘affordability’ policies arbitrarily fix on whatever is hot at the moment. That is why cities have been financing all kinds of boondoggles for years, while their bridges rusted and the roadways crumbled.”
— Thomas Sowell in Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays
On the “origins of poverty”
What causes poverty? Nothing. It’s the original state, the default and starting point. The real question is: What causes prosperity?
The irony of using force to achieve equality
“A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.”
— Milton Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement
A saint said
“A saint said ‘Let the perfect city rise.
Here needs no long debate on subtleties,
Means, end,
Let us intend
That all be clothed and fed; while one remains
Hungry our quarreling but mocks his pains.
So all will labor to the good
In one phalanx of brotherhood.’A man cried out ‘I know the truth, I, I,
Perfect and whole. He who denies
My vision is a madman or a fool
Or seeks some base advantage in his lies.
All peoples are a tool that fits my hand
Cutting you each and all
Into my plan.’They were one man.”
— David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism
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