“Practically all government attempts to redistribute wealth and income tend to smother productive incentives and lead toward general impoverishment. It is the proper sphere of government to create and enforce a framework of law that prohibits force and fraud. But it must refrain from specific economic interventions. Government’s main economic function is to encourage and preserve a free market. When Alexander the Great visited the philosopher Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: “Yes, stand a little less between me and the sun.” It is what every citizen is entitled to ask of his government.”
Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest & Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics
“The ‘private sector’ of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the ‘public sector’ is, in fact, the coercive sector.”
Henry Hazlitt
“When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.”
Henry Hazlitt
“A man who is good from docility, and not from stern self-control, has no character.”
Henry Hazlitt
One definition of self-control: The ability to resist the otherwise uncontrollable urge to rip the faces off of people who provoke you (often via the use of the state’s apparatus) and further resist the reflex to rip the heart from their chest and feed it to them.
There are more than a few people alive today simply because it’s against the law to kill them (and thereby improve society.)