Goodbye to liberty

The political class and government establishments have drifted in incremental steps into this tragedy. Far from being the guiding hand for society, they are its destroyers.

We all look to government to supply what we used to provide for ourselves, in the naïve belief that it is our servant, it has our interests at its heart, and that it can deliver. Collectively we have chosen not social co-operation, but the disintegration and ultimate destruction of society itself. We labour under so many misconceptions about where our true interests lie that we have completely lost our bearings. We have in our time witnessed other nations destroy their own economic and social structures and do not see it happening to ourselves.

When reality intervenes, we deny it. The state controls money and prices. It makes economic calculation meaningless. It takes our property in the name of the common good to dispose of as it sees fit. There is nothing new in this: Keynes himself advocated the euthanasia of the rentier, or saver, in his General Theory, which is every neo-classical economist’s vade mecum. He advocated replacing the functionless investor with limitless state capital, and even capping the profits of the entrepreneur. We have been following Keynes’s grand fallacies for 90 years now. His vision is our sad reality.

The cost is our own impoverishment and loss of freedom. The state only values us for our contributions to it. We must be controlled for our own good. The state does not fear for itself so long as there is any wealth left to sequester from us and any freedom left to us to pursue non-statist objectives.

All the governments mentioned in the first paragraph are running out of their citizens’ money. Together, they are destroying their capital at an accelerating rate, just so that they may survive. They rely on mutual planning in the erroneous belief that it will save them, when the only chance for any one state to survive and eventually prosper is to stop conspiring and face up to the problems of its own making.

Instead, next year – when the weaker governments begin to collapse under the hammer-blows of economic reality – when they cannot hide the insolvency of their state-regulated banking systems, the stronger governments will sequester the remaining resources of their own citizens to prop them up, as Germany is doing to her people today.

To paraphrase Macbeth at his lowest ebb: It is a tale, full of sound and fury, destroying everything.