How an Economy Grows
and Why It Doesn’t
by Irwin Schiff
This is a copy of a book written by Irwin Schiff.
Mr. Schiff has freely released his coprighted materials on the web as part of Irwin Schiff’s Great Giveaway. His index of scans for “How an Economy Grows and Why It Doesn’t” are posted here. The pages displayed and linked below are Schiff’s scans with sequentially clickable links added, making the book easier to read online.
The illustrator, Vic Lockman (“Cartoonist for hire!”), has a web page here.
“It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now–independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one’s own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one’s neighbors–are essentially those on which the of an individualist society rests. Collectivism has nothing to put in their place, and in so far as it already has destroyed then it has left a void filled by nothing but the demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to what is collectively decided to be good.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Administrator
Author
June 6, 2014 7:52 am
“Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Administrator
Author
June 6, 2014 7:53 am
“Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily recreated in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s own conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Administrator
Author
June 6, 2014 7:54 am
“Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his absolute mercy. And an authority directing the whole economic system of the country would be the most powerful monopolist conceivable…it would have complete power to decide what we are to be given and on what terms. It would not only decide what commodities and services were to be available and in what quantities; it would be able to direct their distributions between persons to any degree it liked.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Administrator
Author
June 6, 2014 7:55 am
“It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Administrator
Author
June 6, 2014 7:56 am
“Everything which might cause doubt about the wisdom of the government or create discontent will be kept from the people. The basis of unfavorable comparisons with elsewhere, the knowledge of possible alternatives to the course actually taken, information which might suggest failure on the part of the government to live up to its promises or to take advantage of opportunities to improve conditions–all will be suppressed. There is consequently no field where the systematic control of information will not be practiced and uniformity of views not enforced.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Administrator
Author
June 6, 2014 7:57 am
“Few people ever have an abundance of choice of occupation. But what matters is that we have some choice, that we are not absolutely tied to a job which has been chosen for us, and that if one position becomes intolerable, or if we set our heart on another, there is always a way for the able, at some sacrifice, to achieve his goal. Nothing makes conditions more unbearable than the knowledge that no effort of ours can change them; and even if we should never have the strength of mind to make the necessary sacrifice, the knowledge that we could escape if we only strove hard enough makes many otherwise intolerable positions bearable.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Administrator
Author
June 6, 2014 7:58 am
“It is not difficult to deprive the great majority of independent thought. But the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced….Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken pubic support….When the doubt or fear expressed concerns not the success of a particular enterprise but of the whole social plan, it must be treated even more as sabotage.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Administrator
Author
June 6, 2014 8:03 am
“The word ‘truth’ itself ceases to have its old meaning. It describes no longer something to be found, with the individual conscience as the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence (or the standing of those proclaiming it) warrants a belief; it becomes something to be laid down by authority, something which has to believed in the interest of unity of the organized effort and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organized effort require it.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Administrator
Author
June 6, 2014 8:04 am
“The state should confine itself to establishing rules applying to general types of situations and should allow the individuals freedom in everything which depends on the circumstances of time and place, because only the individuals concerned in each instance can fully know these circumstances and adapt their actions to them. If the individuals are able to use their knowledge effectively in making plans, they must be able to predict actions of the state which may affect these plans. But if the actions of the state are to be predictable, they must be determined by rules fixed independently of the concrete circumstances which can be neither foreseen nor taken into account beforehand; and the particular effects of such actions will be unpredictable. If, on the other hand, the state were to direct the individual’s actions so as the achieve particular ends, its actions would have to be decided on the basis of the full circumstances of the moment and would therefore be unpredictable. Hence the familiar fact that the more the state “plans”, the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Administrator
Author
June 6, 2014 8:05 am
“We are ready to accept almost any explanation of the present crisis of our civilization except one: that the present state of the world may be the result of genuine error on our own part and that the pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals has apparently produced results utterly different from those which we expected.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Administrator
Author
June 6, 2014 8:06 am
“Our hopes of avoiding the fate which threatens must…[be to make]adjustments that will be needed if we are to recover and surpass our former standards…and only if every one of us is ready to individually obey the necessities of readjustment shall we be able to get through a difficult period as free men who can choose their own way of life. Let a uniform minimum be secured to everybody by all means; but let us admit at the same time that with this assurance of a basic minimum all claims for a privileged security for particular classes must lapse….”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Administrator
Author
June 6, 2014 8:06 am
“What Tocqueville did not consider was how long such a government would remain in the hands of benevolent despots when it would be so much more easy for any group of ruffians to keep itself indefinitely in power by disregarding all the traditional decencies of political life.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Administrator
Author
June 6, 2014 8:07 am
“Democracy is essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom. As such it is by no means infallible or certain. Nor must we forget that there has often been much more cultural and spiritual freedom under an autocratic rule than under some democracies and it is at least conceivable that under the government of a very homogeneous and doctrinaire majority democratic government might be as oppressive as the worst dictatorship.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Rise Up
June 6, 2014 8:24 am
@eugend66 says:
“How an Economy Grows
and Why It Doesn’t
by Irwin Schiff
This is a copy of a book written by Irwin Schiff.”
I have a autographed copy of Irwin’s “Federal Mafia” book about the IRS. It is now one of the few books BANNED by the government. He signed it when I met him at a givemeliberty.org “tax honesty” conference back in 1999. Jim Banister, Devvy Kidd, Larry Beacraft, and William Benson (author of “The Law that Never Was” on the 16th Amendment) were all there.
From Wikipedia:
Irwin Allan Schiff (born February 24, 1928) is an American and prominent figure in the tax protester movement. Schiff is known for writing and promoting literature that claims the United States income tax is applied incorrectly. He has lost several civil cases against the federal government and has a record of multiple convictions for various federal tax crimes. Schiff is serving a 13-plus year sentence for tax crimes with his location listed as the Federal Correctional Institution at Fort Worth, Texas. His projected release date has been changed from October 7, 2016 to July 26, 2017.[1] Schiff is the father of investor and former United States Senate candidate Peter Schiff.
Peter Schiff is Irwin’s son.
Bostonbob
June 6, 2014 8:43 am
Looks more like the road to getting your ass shot off.
Bob.
eugend66
June 6, 2014 8:46 am
Rise Up,
I`m aware about Schiff`s family tensions with the US Gubmint. I also like Peter (except his support for the airhead S. Palin).
overthecliff
June 6, 2014 10:47 am
Oligarchs play book.
SSS
June 6, 2014 7:02 pm
“I also like Peter Schiff, except his support for the airhead S. Palin.”
—-eugend66
What’s wrong with Sweet Sarah? Here, I’ll let TBP visitors decide. This is NOT a photo caption contest. I absolutely FORBID any suggested captions.
[img[/img]
Coyote
June 6, 2014 7:15 pm
“If I take off my top, he won’t notice I missed few spots.”
AWD
June 6, 2014 7:22 pm
I’m not sure what Nazis, Sarah Palin, and serfdom have in common.
The quickest and easiest way to serfdom is debt. The banksters and Obama have indebted just about everyone in this country up to their eyeballs. Obama owns the millenials, who were stupid enough to vote him into office, twice. Now they’re graduating with $30,000 in debt, and they’re owned. Taxpayers are owned. The federal debt will never be paid back. It’s a joke.
That fat dumbshit CNBC host Leesman “I love the Fed and debt” stated this week that debt is what made our property. The last word in insanity. Productive capital is what made our prosperity, and now were $59 trillion in public/private debt, and ship $600 billion out of the country on the trade deficit every year (and growing). We’re finished. The government isn’t going to come to the rescue, WTF is the government going to do but put in food, price, and monetary controls? What can they do except confiscate your money out of your account to fund their continued socialism? We have a totalitarian dictatorship heading our way (we’re almost there now with emperor Obama), just like in the cartoons above. It won’t change the fact and reality of the debt and insolvency.
Coyote
June 6, 2014 8:31 pm
Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face
They livin’ it up at the Hotel California
What a nice surprise (what a nice surprise)
Bring your alibis
Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said “We are all just prisoners here, of our own device”
And in the master’s chambers,
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can’t kill the beast
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
“Relax, ” said the night man,
“We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave! “
Coyote
June 6, 2014 8:49 pm
America the land of the Military/Industrial complex where government work makes free.Tune in, turn on, drop out of the race for freedom. Your cubicle awaits.
And for the masses, the government has a plan for their lives: communal dwellings with security fences, healthy food portions, plenty of exercise. Sign up now.
How an Economy Grows
and Why It Doesn’t
by Irwin Schiff
This is a copy of a book written by Irwin Schiff.
Mr. Schiff has freely released his coprighted materials on the web as part of Irwin Schiff’s Great Giveaway. His index of scans for “How an Economy Grows and Why It Doesn’t” are posted here. The pages displayed and linked below are Schiff’s scans with sequentially clickable links added, making the book easier to read online.
The illustrator, Vic Lockman (“Cartoonist for hire!”), has a web page here.
http://home.earthlink.net/~schiffeconomics/index.htm
“It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now–independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one’s own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one’s neighbors–are essentially those on which the of an individualist society rests. Collectivism has nothing to put in their place, and in so far as it already has destroyed then it has left a void filled by nothing but the demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to what is collectively decided to be good.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
“Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
“Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily recreated in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s own conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
“Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his absolute mercy. And an authority directing the whole economic system of the country would be the most powerful monopolist conceivable…it would have complete power to decide what we are to be given and on what terms. It would not only decide what commodities and services were to be available and in what quantities; it would be able to direct their distributions between persons to any degree it liked.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
“It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
“Everything which might cause doubt about the wisdom of the government or create discontent will be kept from the people. The basis of unfavorable comparisons with elsewhere, the knowledge of possible alternatives to the course actually taken, information which might suggest failure on the part of the government to live up to its promises or to take advantage of opportunities to improve conditions–all will be suppressed. There is consequently no field where the systematic control of information will not be practiced and uniformity of views not enforced.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
“Few people ever have an abundance of choice of occupation. But what matters is that we have some choice, that we are not absolutely tied to a job which has been chosen for us, and that if one position becomes intolerable, or if we set our heart on another, there is always a way for the able, at some sacrifice, to achieve his goal. Nothing makes conditions more unbearable than the knowledge that no effort of ours can change them; and even if we should never have the strength of mind to make the necessary sacrifice, the knowledge that we could escape if we only strove hard enough makes many otherwise intolerable positions bearable.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
“It is not difficult to deprive the great majority of independent thought. But the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced….Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken pubic support….When the doubt or fear expressed concerns not the success of a particular enterprise but of the whole social plan, it must be treated even more as sabotage.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
“The word ‘truth’ itself ceases to have its old meaning. It describes no longer something to be found, with the individual conscience as the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence (or the standing of those proclaiming it) warrants a belief; it becomes something to be laid down by authority, something which has to believed in the interest of unity of the organized effort and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organized effort require it.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
“The state should confine itself to establishing rules applying to general types of situations and should allow the individuals freedom in everything which depends on the circumstances of time and place, because only the individuals concerned in each instance can fully know these circumstances and adapt their actions to them. If the individuals are able to use their knowledge effectively in making plans, they must be able to predict actions of the state which may affect these plans. But if the actions of the state are to be predictable, they must be determined by rules fixed independently of the concrete circumstances which can be neither foreseen nor taken into account beforehand; and the particular effects of such actions will be unpredictable. If, on the other hand, the state were to direct the individual’s actions so as the achieve particular ends, its actions would have to be decided on the basis of the full circumstances of the moment and would therefore be unpredictable. Hence the familiar fact that the more the state “plans”, the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
“We are ready to accept almost any explanation of the present crisis of our civilization except one: that the present state of the world may be the result of genuine error on our own part and that the pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals has apparently produced results utterly different from those which we expected.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
“Our hopes of avoiding the fate which threatens must…[be to make]adjustments that will be needed if we are to recover and surpass our former standards…and only if every one of us is ready to individually obey the necessities of readjustment shall we be able to get through a difficult period as free men who can choose their own way of life. Let a uniform minimum be secured to everybody by all means; but let us admit at the same time that with this assurance of a basic minimum all claims for a privileged security for particular classes must lapse….”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
“What Tocqueville did not consider was how long such a government would remain in the hands of benevolent despots when it would be so much more easy for any group of ruffians to keep itself indefinitely in power by disregarding all the traditional decencies of political life.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
“Democracy is essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom. As such it is by no means infallible or certain. Nor must we forget that there has often been much more cultural and spiritual freedom under an autocratic rule than under some democracies and it is at least conceivable that under the government of a very homogeneous and doctrinaire majority democratic government might be as oppressive as the worst dictatorship.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
@eugend66 says:
“How an Economy Grows
and Why It Doesn’t
by Irwin Schiff
This is a copy of a book written by Irwin Schiff.”
I have a autographed copy of Irwin’s “Federal Mafia” book about the IRS. It is now one of the few books BANNED by the government. He signed it when I met him at a givemeliberty.org “tax honesty” conference back in 1999. Jim Banister, Devvy Kidd, Larry Beacraft, and William Benson (author of “The Law that Never Was” on the 16th Amendment) were all there.
From Wikipedia:
Irwin Allan Schiff (born February 24, 1928) is an American and prominent figure in the tax protester movement. Schiff is known for writing and promoting literature that claims the United States income tax is applied incorrectly. He has lost several civil cases against the federal government and has a record of multiple convictions for various federal tax crimes. Schiff is serving a 13-plus year sentence for tax crimes with his location listed as the Federal Correctional Institution at Fort Worth, Texas. His projected release date has been changed from October 7, 2016 to July 26, 2017.[1] Schiff is the father of investor and former United States Senate candidate Peter Schiff.
Peter Schiff is Irwin’s son.
Looks more like the road to getting your ass shot off.
Bob.
Rise Up,
I`m aware about Schiff`s family tensions with the US Gubmint. I also like Peter (except his support for the airhead S. Palin).
Oligarchs play book.
“I also like Peter Schiff, except his support for the airhead S. Palin.”
—-eugend66
What’s wrong with Sweet Sarah? Here, I’ll let TBP visitors decide. This is NOT a photo caption contest. I absolutely FORBID any suggested captions.
[img
[/img]
“If I take off my top, he won’t notice I missed few spots.”
I’m not sure what Nazis, Sarah Palin, and serfdom have in common.
The quickest and easiest way to serfdom is debt. The banksters and Obama have indebted just about everyone in this country up to their eyeballs. Obama owns the millenials, who were stupid enough to vote him into office, twice. Now they’re graduating with $30,000 in debt, and they’re owned. Taxpayers are owned. The federal debt will never be paid back. It’s a joke.
That fat dumbshit CNBC host Leesman “I love the Fed and debt” stated this week that debt is what made our property. The last word in insanity. Productive capital is what made our prosperity, and now were $59 trillion in public/private debt, and ship $600 billion out of the country on the trade deficit every year (and growing). We’re finished. The government isn’t going to come to the rescue, WTF is the government going to do but put in food, price, and monetary controls? What can they do except confiscate your money out of your account to fund their continued socialism? We have a totalitarian dictatorship heading our way (we’re almost there now with emperor Obama), just like in the cartoons above. It won’t change the fact and reality of the debt and insolvency.
Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face
They livin’ it up at the Hotel California
What a nice surprise (what a nice surprise)
Bring your alibis
Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said “We are all just prisoners here, of our own device”
And in the master’s chambers,
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can’t kill the beast
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
“Relax, ” said the night man,
“We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave! “
America the land of the Military/Industrial complex where government work makes free.Tune in, turn on, drop out of the race for freedom. Your cubicle awaits.
And for the masses, the government has a plan for their lives: communal dwellings with security fences, healthy food portions, plenty of exercise. Sign up now.