Talk on Nevada: How business-government collusion can lead to tax increases
While most businesses and business people are very supportive of the free market, some are more than happy to use government coercion when it benefits them. In this interview, I detail a couple of examples that are occurring in Nevada right now.
For more, read my most recent commentary, "Live by the government, die by the government," or check out the Review Journal's great editorial from today on a similar issue, titled "Pork on the menu."
If you're interested in learning more about the dangers of government intervention in the marketplace, I strongly recommend you read The Law by Frederic Bastiat, a French political philosopher. It's available for free online, is short (fewer than 100 pages sans introductions) and makes the best philosophical case for limited government and freedom I've ever read.
Here's a taste on the subject of business-government collusion:But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.
Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law - which may be an isolated case - is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.
The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly, defending his acquired rights. He will claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage his particular industry; that this procedure enriches the state because the protected industry is thus able to spend more and to pay higher wages to the poor workingmen.
Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests. The acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder into a whole system. In fact, this has already occurred. The present day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretense of organizing it.
