Our Enemy the State

"Published in 1935, two years into the New Deal’s experiment in social engineering, this wry classic on the intensifying nature of incursions by state power into private economic spheres is a classic of libertarianism. Here Nock made his famous distinction between economic man – he who actually produces wealth by producing, manufacturing and trading – and political man – he who doesn’t produce anything and appropriates wealth produced by others and uses it to accomplish his own aims. “Before Roosevelt, before the Depression, you can’t imagine how much less government regulation there was in the United States.” Nock, a friend of H L Mencken, is also the author of an idiosyncratic libertarian autobiography called Memoirs of a Superfluous Man . Both books are available free online from blog.mises.org. Yes! This is a book for the general reader. It concentrates on the economy and how the government is involved in managing the economy. His belief is that anybody who gets in between the furniture maker and his customer is in the middle only because he wants to get some money out of it. That’s the way he views government interference in a free economy. He’s a beautiful writer. He was a self-educated man, but extremely well-educated and his memoirs are about how a certain type of education is no longer very useful in America. These people are all curmudgeons but amusing and instructive ones. You may not agree with everything they have to say, but they provide a useful counterweight to our expanding government. And we have such a huge government in America today. I don’t know how much of the economy it consumes but it’s got its fingers everywhere in our lives, so it’s a good idea for us to read some of these old-fashioned individual rights people. Well, it depends on your perspective. From my perspective some things have become so large and unwieldy that they need some kind of central planning, but libertarians certainly wouldn’t feel that way. They insist, and in fact I’ve been having this debate on my blog, that the free market will take care of everything, including education. My argument is that we can’t afford not to educate people in a democracy because they won’t learn how to become good leaders for one thing. And so you can’t just let it go to chance which, it seems to me, is what libertarians would do. And as to healthcare, well, I’m conflicted about that. This government screws up everything it does. I know Britain created a good system but I’m not at all sure that we can or will. We seem unable to do it the simple way, by extending Medicare for example. That would be good. But too many interests get in the way."