Bad means corrupt good intentions
“Sending a policeman around to pick somebody else’s pocket is at the heart of the welfare state.”- Milton Friedman on the dynamics of the welfare state. “the badness of means will triumph over the goodness of the objective.”
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“Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money,by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale.” – Alan Greenspan
“Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.” -Alan Greenspan
“We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds…
[we will] have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers…
And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for [another]… till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery…
And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.”
(Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816
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