Latest Lists - Top ten list of political lies you are told ? and a lot more coming?

Top ten list of political lies you are told ? and a lot more coming?

Top ten list of political lies you are told, all designed to make you believe that government should have more power than it already has, so that it can create more of the disasters we are accustomed to: 10. My new program will generate jobs. Truth: only the market generates jobs on net. 9. My education program will reform schools so that they leave no child behind. Truth: the public schools do not work very good for the same reason no government program can work. They exist outside the market economy. 8. My program will save industry x. Truth: industry must be part of the market or else it is not really industry at all. 7. I won't raise your taxes but I will pass lots of new programs: Truth: all programs must be paid for. 6. As president, I will pursue a humble foreign policy. Truth: nothing in the office of the president encourages humility. 5. This war is humanitarian and winnable. Truth: war is nothing but a government program on a massively destructive scale, and just as error prone. 4. My reform will bring market-based competition. Be on the lookout for this lie, which market partisans are likely to believe. There is only one kind of genuine market, and it is rooted in private property and nothing else. 3. We will secure the nation. Truth: government cannot provide security better than markets, any more than it can provide food or houses better than the market. 2. Government is compassionate. Truth: men who seek power over the lives of others are the coldest, cruelest humans of all. 1. You can't love your country and hate your government. Truth: A person who loves his country loves liberty first. One hundred years from now, the great story of the latter part of the 20th century and the first part of the 21st century will be the vast improvements in life wrought by technology. Consider the web, the cell phone, the PDA, the affordable laptop computer, advances in medicine, and the spread of prosperity to all corners of the globe. What has government had to do with this? The answer is: nothing contributory. It has worked only to impede progress, and we can only be thankful that it hasn't succeeded. Through all of human history, governments have caused frightening levels of bloodshed and horror, but in the end, what has prevailed is not power but the market economy. Even today governments can only play catch-up. This is because of the reasons that Mises outlined. Government cannot control the human mind, so it cannot, in the long run, control the choices people make. It cannot control economic forces, which are a far more powerful and permanent feature of the world than any government anyway.

Public Comments

Obama for President.
Boy, you had me right with you partner until I read #6 on down. I believe that you are proverbially throwing the baby out with the bath water. Yes, governmental influence and interference in the market place has shown to be a big mistake (i.e., bad- totalitarianism, Leninist communism, EU socialist democracies, LBJ's Great Society; good- generally free market societies such as the USA and Japan). However, government is as much a vital necessity for a society and a nation as parents are for a family. 1) It is meant to provide the needed security, just as the parents would protect their own from any harm (i.e., When was the last time terrorists successfully attacked the USA? And, who were just recently apprehended in NJ and Trinidad for aspiring to terrorize our nation? The market place was not a major player in either of these successful federal sting operations.) 2) Government provides the vital need for structure and order in a society, just as their our rules set by parents for their children to abide by in a family unit. Can you imagine what it would be like if parents would allow their children to be free to do whatever they'd like from the time they were infants? I would venture to say that they would grow up to become like Zola's (the philosopher of Naturalism) primitive child, living like a beast, but not in the jungle. That would be just a microcosm of what it would be like without government regulating the citizenry, sheer wanton and total chaos! We'd kill each other, for sure. Btw, are you an anarchist, or more of a far left liberatarian who just so happens to ascribe to the Adam Smith model of economics?