Frédéric Bastiat exposed the fallacy more than 150 years ago, and yet many people who should know better apparently never got the memo. One of the latest examples of “the blessings of destruction” analysis comes from Paul Krugman, the 2008 Nobel winner in economics:

[T]he nuclear catastrophe could end up being expansionary, if not for Japan then at least for the world as a whole. If this sounds crazy, well, liquidity-trap economics is like that — remember, World War II ended the Great Depression.

So Japan is hit with three catastrophes, a massive and powerful earthquake, a tsunami, and radiation-spewing meltdowns at a nuclear power plant — and this is considered “expansionary”? If one wishes to understand the intellectual bankruptcy of modern macroeconomic thinking, Krugman provides material.

Krugman Not Alone

However, what the great Walter Williams calls “economic lunacy” is not limited to Krugman. Others are following suit, claiming that the destruction of property in Japan actually is a positive thing, economically speaking. Williams first points out what other “respected” economists have written:

Economic lunacy abounds, and often the most learned, including Nobel Laureates, are its primary victims. The most recent example of economic lunacy is found in a Huffington Post article titled “The Silver Lining of Japan’s Quake” written by Nathan Gardels, editor of New Perspectives Quarterly, who has also written articles for The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Washington Post.

Mr. Gardels says, “No one – least of all someone like myself who has experienced the existential terror of California’s regular tremors and knows the big one is coming here next – would minimize the grief, suffering and disruption caused by Japan’s massive earthquake and tsunami. But if one can look past the devastation, there is a silver lining. The need to rebuild a large swath of Japan will create huge opportunities for domestic economic growth, particularly in energy-efficient technologies, while also stimulating global demand and hastening the integration of East Asia…. By taking Japan’s mature economy down a notch, Mother Nature has accomplished what fiscal policy and the central bank could not.”

Harvard University’s Professor Larry Summers, former Obama economic adviser and Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, said the disaster “may lead to some temporary increments, ironically, to GDP as a process of rebuilding takes place. In the wake of the earlier Kobe earthquake, Japan actually gained some economic strength.”

Williams quotes Bastiat:

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

Williams then asks:

Would the Japanese economy face even greater opportunities for economic growth had the earthquake and tsunami also struck Tokyo, Hiroshima, Yokohama and other major cities? Would the 9-11 terrorists have done us an even bigger economic favor had they destroyed buildings in other cities? The belief that society benefits from destruction is lunacy.

Impeccable Logic

Williams’s logic is impeccable, yet time and again such wisdom is overlooked in favor of the folly of Keynesian “logic” on the alleged benefits of spending. As we have seen from those supposedly most learned in economics, formal graduate study of the discipline in some of our most august academic institutions is no guarantee that sound economics will be learned.

No, Japan is not experiencing the blessings of destruction. The Japanese people are going through sheer horror. To spin this tragedy into economic triumph is not just bad economics; it’s an obscenity.

Bastiat loved the market economy, and badly wanted it to blossom in full — in France and everywhere else. When he described the blessings of freedom, his benevolence shined forth. Free markets can raise living standards and enable everyone to have better lives; therefore stifling freedom is unjust and tragic. The reverse of Bastiat’s benevolence is his indignation at the deprivation that results from interference with the market process.

He begins his book Economic Harmonies (available at the FEE store) by pointing out the economic benefits of living in society:

It is impossible not to be struck by the disproportion, truly incommensurable, that exists between the satisfactions [a] man derives from society and the satisfactions that he could provide for himself if he were reduced to his own resources. I make bold to say that in one day he consumes more things than he could produce himself in ten centuries.

What makes the phenomenon stranger still is that the same thing holds true for all other men. Every one of the members of society has consumed a million times more than he could have produced; yet no one has robbed anyone else.

Bastiat was not naïve. He knew he was not in a fully free market. He was well aware of the existence of privilege: “Privilege implies someone to profit from it and someone to pay for it,” he wrote. Those who pay are worse off than they would be in the free market. “I trust that the reader will not conclude from the preceding remarks that we are insensible to the social suffering of our fellow men. Although the suffering is less in the present imperfect state of our society than in the state of isolation, it does not follow that we do not seek wholeheartedly for further progress to make it less and less.”

He wished to emphasize the importance of free exchange for human flourishing. In chapter four he wrote,

Exchange is political economy. It is society itself, for it is impossible to conceive of society without exchange, or exchange without society. …For man, isolation means death….

By means of exchange, men attain the same satisfaction with less effort, because the mutual services they render one another yield them a larger proportion of gratuitous utility.

Therefore, the fewer obstacles an exchange encounters, the less effort it requires, the more readily men exchange.

How does trade deliver its benefits?

Exchange produces two phenomena: the joining of men’s forces and the diversification of their occupations, or the division of labor.

It is very clear that in many cases the combined force of several men is superior to the sum of their individual separate forces.…

Now, the joining of men’s forces implies exchange. To gain their co-operation, they must have good reason to anticipate sharing in the satisfaction to be obtained. Each one by his efforts benefits the others and in turn benefits by their efforts according to the terms of the bargain, which is exchange.

But isn’t something missing from this account?

Indeed, there is: the subjectivist Austrian insight that individuals gain from trade per se. For an exchange to take place, the two parties must assess the items traded differently, with each party valuing what he is to receive more than what he is to give up. If that condition did not hold, no exchange would occur. There must be what Murray Rothbard called a double inequality of value. It’s in the logic of human action – which Ludwig von Mises christened praxeology. Bastiat, like his classical forebears Smith and Ricardo, erroneously believed (at least explicitly) that people trade equal values and that something is wrong when unequal values are exchanged.

Perhaps I am too hard on Bastiat. After all, he was writing before 1850. Carl Menger did not publish Principles of Economics until 1871. Yet the Austrians were not the first to look at exchange strictly through subjectivist spectacles, that is, from the economic actors’ points of view. The French philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1780) did so a hundred years before Bastiat wrote:

The very fact that an exchange takes place is proof that there must necessarily be profit in it for both the contracting parties; otherwise it would not be made. Hence, every exchange represents two gains for humanity.

Well, perhaps Bastiat was unaware of Condillac’s argument. That is not the case. He reprints the quote above in his book and responds:

The explanation we owe to Condillac seems to me entirely insufficient and empirical, or rather it fails to explain anything at all….

The exchange represents two gains, you say. The question is: Why and how? It results from the very fact that it takes place. But why does it take place? What motives have induced the two men to make it take place? Does the exchange have in it a mysterious virtue, inherently beneficial and incapable of explanation?

We see how exchange … adds to our satisfactions.… [T]here is no trace of … the double and empirical profit alleged by Condillac.

This is perplexing. Clearly, the necessary double inequality of value is not empirical or contingent. Contra Bastiat, the double inequality explains quite a lot, and his questions all have easy answers.

Yet more perplexing still is Bastiat’s statement in the same chapter: “The profit of the one is the profit of the other.” This seems to imply what he just denied.

Bastiat’s failure to grasp this point had consequences for his debates with other economists. For example, he and his fellow “left-free-market” advocate Pierre-Joseph Proudhon engaged in a lengthy debate over whether interest on loans would exist in the free market or whether it was a privilege bestowed when government suppresses competition. Unfortunately, the debate suffers because neither Bastiat nor Proudhon fully and explicitly grasped the Condillac/Austrian point about the double inequality of value. As Roderick Long explains in his priceless commentary on the exchange,

[E]ach one trips up his defense of his own position through an inconsistent grasp of the Austrian principle of the “double inequality of value”; Proudhon embraces it, but fails to apply it consistently, while Bastiat implicitly relies on it, but explicitly rejects it….

Proudhon’s case against interest seems to depend crucially on his claim that all exchange must be of equivalent values; so pointing out the incoherence of this notion would be a telling reply. But Bastiat cannot officially give this reply (though he comes tantalisingly close over and over throughout the debate) because elsewhere – in his Economic Harmonies – Bastiat explicitly rejects the doctrine of double inequality of value.

How frustrating! Bastiat has so much to teach. But here is one blind spot that kept him from being even better.

It’s great to see interest in Bastiat growing!

This time it happened on p. 31, where Bastiat writes, “Socialists look upon people as raw material to be formed into social combinations. This is so true that, if by chance, the socialists have any doubts about the success of these combinations, they will demand that a small portion of mankind be set aside to experiment upon. . . . And one socialist leader has been known seriously to demand that the Constituent Assembly give him a small district with all its inhabitants, to try his experiments upon.”

Two things occurred to me as I read this. First, you don’t have to be socialist to believe that people are raw material to be experimented upon. And second, in modern America, doubts or no doubts about success, experiments can be run on the entire country at once. No need to try things out first on a small district.

As for point one, I have in mind the current administration. The word “socialist” (as well as “fascist”) is thrown around too glibly today, and everyone ought to be more careful. Lots of bad things are being proposed that would interfere with the market process, but no one in power is proposing to replace the market with central planning. Ludwig von Mises called the philosophy behind the mixed economy “interventionism,” and we ought to be working to make that word the pejorative we know it deserves to be.

Point two, of course, refers to the Obama administration’s experiments on the health-insurance, financial, and energy industries. Without getting into details here, I want to emphasize the sheer presumptuousness of those experiments. Those are our lives they are fooling with.

Bastiat brimmed with controlled outrage at the French politicians and writers who so blithely presumed that other people’s lives were theirs to dispose of in grand experiment. He dissected the classical notion, popular among the pundits of his day and ours, that individuals are inert until a wise leader comes along and invests them with a principle of motion—“They assume that people are susceptible to being shaped by the will and hand of another person—into an infinite variety of forms, more or less symmetrical, artistic, and perfected,” he wrote.

This superior attitude is palpable throughout the Obama administration. One sees it in the words and tone of the President, Geithner, Summers, Emanuel, Sebelius, Clinton, and their allies in Congress. In a profound way, they are the anti-egalitarians. They know better than we. They exercise powers that we mere individuals outside of government can never possess. They dictate to us, but we can’t dictate to them. They get to determine our lives in important ways—which means that in those respects we don’t.

Yes, they claim to represent us. It’s a baseless claim! They are not our representatives. They do not know us, and they cannot really care about us. They are our rulers, gratifying their ambitions to “make a difference”—whether we want it made on our lives or not. If we don’t comply, they can take our liberty, our property, even our lives.

Depriving them of that power is a long and arduous educational process requiring a philosophical sea change. In the meantime, those of us who know that we, and not they, own our lives, need a battle cry. In dedication to Bastiat, I propose this:

We shall not be experimented upon!

* * *

When President Obama intervened in the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler, longstanding financial-legal precedents went by the wayside. What consequences will this have for the future? Richard Epstein ponders this question.

The numbers are in on Cash for Clunkers. Despite the program sponsors’ and participants’ euphoria, it was a bad deal all around. Bruce Yandle has details.

New Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom explained how people voluntarily coordinate to solve problems. Peter Boettke says every freedom-lover should rejoice in her prize.

When it opened its doors in 1914 the Federal Reserve System was supposed to bring stability to the U.S. economy. It didn’t quite work out that way. Chidem Kurdas explains why.

Why don’t we ever hear older people reminisce about how tough life was during the depression of 1920–21? Maybe it’s because that one, unlike the Great Depression, was what W. S. Gilbert might have called a short sharp shock. Robert Murphy describes the depression history forgot.

Mexico’s violent drug trade has spilled across the border, creating concern throughout the United States. There’s an easy way to stop it, Paul Armentano writes: End the war.

Belief in manmade climate change once led to large-scale economic and personal dislocation. That was in the nineteenth century. Will it happen again? Tyler Watts reminds us that we can learn from history.
Here’s what’s been on our columnists’ minds lately: Lawrence Reed recalls the influence that a movie had on him long ago. Thomas Szasz remembers those whom the criminal justice system has forgotten. Robert Higgs looks at the case for slavery. John Stossel finds it curious that big pharmaceutical and big insurance companies like Obama’s healthcare plans. Charles Baird analyzes the latest papal encyclical on labor unions. And Art Carden, confronting the claim that profit has no place in the healthcare system, responds, “It Just Ain’t So!”

Our reviewers test-drive books on the effect of higher taxes, the bloated presidency, the dollar, and Paul Krugman’s view of the economy.

It’s December, which means the issue wraps up with the year-end index, prepared by Managing Editor Michael Nolan.

“Nudged” by federal policy, the previous owners accepted a handsome payment from the rest of us for ridding the nation of older, more heavily carbon-emitting vehicles and replacing them with shiny new machines that required a lot of energy to produce but would, on average, yield lower carbon exhaust and greater fuel efficiency. The clunker statute gave consumers $3,500 vouchers if they purchased vehicles that yielded a four- to nine-miles-per-gallon (MPG) improvement in fuel economy, and $4,500 if the yield was ten or more MPG.

In all, according to Bloomberg, some $2.88 billion in tax money helped buy some 700,000 vehicles made up of the popular Ford Focus, Toyota Corolla, Camry, and Prius, along with some Hummers and Ford F-150 and F-250 trucks. These and a wide variety of other cars and trucks moved quickly from dealer lots to the homes of the blessed. In fact, the speed of the transactions was more than government could handle. The program was wildly popular.

Taken together the trade-ins had an average fuel economy of 15.8 MPG, while the replacements averaged 24.9 MPG. And according to Ford Motor Company, this kind of fuel-economy improvement translates to a reduction of five to ten million barrels of oil consumed over the next five years. (The nation currently consumes nine million barrels a day.) This will be oil that some other people can enjoy.

President Obama cheerfully termed the program “successful beyond anybody’s imagination.” Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, who administered the program, said the effort was “a lifeline to the automobile industry, jump starting a major sector of the economy and putting people back to work.” LaHood quickly added that while all this happened, “[W]e’ve been able to take old, polluting cars off the road and help consumers purchase fuel-efficient vehicles.” Economist John Lott surmised that “Only in Washington could a program that is spending money 13 times faster than was planned be labeled a ‘success.’”

Long-Term Costs

Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) predicted the economy would be spurred as the auto industry geared up to meet inspired demand.

The program was predicted to raise third-quarter GDP 0.3–0.4 of a percentage point and lift year-end employment by 42,000. August auto sales did indeed reach to the sky, but September sales plunged back into the basement again. The program stole sales from the future; it did not fertilize future sales.

Considering final costs, there’s serious doubt that the program was successful even in the short term. The doubt arises for at least three reasons. First, the program got political support primarily for its much-touted environmental benefits. Carbon emissions would be reduced—but at about ten times the cost of alternate ways of removing carbon. Second, there is Bastiat’s parable of the broken window to consider. And third, there is a serious matter of eroding social norms for conserving wealth. A crushed clunker with a frozen engine is lost capital.

Let’s consider each of these points.

University of California-Berkeley economist Christopher Knittel developed a rigorous assessment of the implied cost of carbon emissions under the clunker program (“The Implied Cost of Carbon Dioxide Under the Cash for Clunkers Program,” www.tinyurl.com/mrmtuy). Knittel made plausible assumptions about the average life remaining in vehicles removed from the road, the average fuel economy associated with those vehicles, and the resulting levels of carbon emission that would have survived in the absence of clunkers. Eventually, of course, the clunkers would have died a natural but less dramatic death. Knittel then estimated the carbon reduction gained by replacing the large fleet of clunkers with a new fuel-efficient fleet. When he ran the numbers, Knittel found the cost per ton of carbon reduced could reach $500 under a set of normal values for critical variables. That fell to $237 per ton under best-case conditions. And what does this tell us? The much celebrated Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade carbon-emission control legislation estimates it costs $28 to reduce a ton of carbon across U.S. industries. Yes, we are getting carbon-emission reductions by way of clunker reduction, but we are paying a pretty penny for it.

Frédéric Bastiat’s brilliant parable of the broken window reminds us that a street hoodlum throwing a brick through a window generates a series of job-generating transactions that might raise GDP by a trivial amount, if it could be measured. Indeed, the idea seems so compelling that people today often speak of the silver lining found in the clouds that create hurricanes. Think of the roofers that become employed.

But Bastiat’s key lesson is that a window has been destroyed—and it had value. Before touting the total benefits of the program we must take account of the destroyed vehicles and engines that represented part of the wealth of the nation. As Tony Liller, vice president for Goodwill, put it: “They’re crushing these cars, and they’re perfectly good. These are cars the poor need to buy.”

Finally, over the eons, human communities have contrived all kinds of devices to transmit critical survival skills and compatible behavioral norms. One of these has to do with conservation of wealth. “Waste not, want not,” we are told. “A penny saved is a penny earned,” we are reminded. Using politics to pay people to destroy valuable vehicles, or to hold crops off the market, or to produce ethanol that may use more energy in production than it adds when burned, teaches a lesson of anti-matter and wealth destruction. Considering all this, Cash for Clunkers sounds like a sorry idea that should not be the model for future policy.

Even though a sorry idea, the Obama administration will soon go forward with a cash for old refrigerators program. Unlike the clunkers program, the appliance plan will not require destruction of the old refrigerators and other items involved. The transaction costs are just too high. Nevertheless, let’s stop Cash for Refrigerators before the idea spreads further.

First, one may ask: how can Obama and his economic advisers know what kinds of jobs will position our economy to “lead the world” in the long term? Indeed, how can we expect anyone to know what kinds of jobs will be able to offer such a guarantee of wealth and security, considering the enormous complexity of our world? Billions of individuals are constantly making decisions based on their own expectations about the future. Potential ideological shifts and their inevitable changes to policy funding and support complicate matters further. This is without considering technological advancements that can turn the best-laid central plans into white elephants. There is little an individual or group can possibly know or predict for the future, particularly on such a large scale as three to four million jobs.

However, assuming Obama and his advisers are right—that his plan will indeed save or create that many jobs—what proof do we have that it will leave us better off than if it’s not implemented at all?

In his essay “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,” the French classical-liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat explained that there is a tendency to recognize only the intended consequences of an action (what is seen). However, there are often other, subsequent effects that are not perceived as connected to the action (what is not seen). Furthermore, the short-term effects of an action can sometimes be quite different from the longer-term, unseen consequences.

In the case of public works, Bastiat explained that government produces nothing independent from the resources and labor it diverts from private uses. When government borrows money to create jobs, what is readily seen are people employed and the fruits of their labor. However, what is generally not considered are the many things that could have been produced if the capital had not been removed from the private sector to fund the government programs in the first place. Such policies necessarily benefit some (the favored workers) at the expense of others (those who would have had the jobs that were not created) and eventually the taxpayers, who have to repay the debt.

What is Seen

New Deal public-works projects provided plenty of evidence for Bastiat’s theory. They not only failed to help lift the economy out of the Great Depression but also served to make it “great.”

First, many jobs created under FDR benefitted few besides those employed—in things like studying the history of the safety pin, collecting campaign contributions for Democratic Party candidates, chasing tumbleweeds, and cataloging 350 different ways to cook spinach. (See Lawrence Reed’s Great Myths of the Great Depression, www.tinyurl.com/7eecje.)

In addition, much of the “job creation” was directed according to political preferences, rather than where jobs were arguably needed most. For instance, a disproportionate amount of public relief went to western “swing states” expected to help Roosevelt win votes in future elections, rather than to the poorest states, such as those in the South, which were already solidly Democratic during this period. Relief and public-works spending also seemed eerily to increase during election years, and it has been shown that votes for FDR correlated closely with jobs and other special government benefits given. (See Burton Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America.)

What is Unseen

New Deal job-creation projects also impeded productivity by discouraging private firms from adopting new technologies. A prime example is a government farm in Arizona where a dairy crew discovered that it could turn a profit only by using milking machines, rather than milking by hand, and eliminating some jobs. But that would have violated the terms of a government loan. So the machines were not brought in, and the staff members who made the suggestion were fired. (Amity Shlaes tells the story in “The New Deal Jobs Myth.”)

Roosevelt is still celebrated for his job-creating measures because the people who gained employment were easily seen. However, what wasn’t (and isn’t) so easily recognized is that to pay for his public-works experiments, the government sucked up much of the available capital by selling bonds and collecting taxes, including a 5 percent withholding tax on corporate dividends and ever-rising income taxes. The top income tax rate hit a staggering 90 percent. Thus the New Deal had the unintended consequence of prolonging the Great Depression by diverting resources that could have been used to create wealth.

Barack Obama and his advisers should take a lesson from history. The New Deal and its public-works projects were a disaster, and it would be remiss to think they should be given another try. As Bastiat explained, government doesn’t create wealth; it only diverts it. When government controls wealth it inevitably tends to serve political ends rather than consumers. FDR’s New Deal policies are a testament to that, and if they are repeated in response to our current economic crisis, it will only hinder the recovery.

The sheriff is patrolling his town one day when he walks between the general store and the window shop, across the street from each other, and sees that the latter is in shambles, while the former is thriving. This situation strikes him as quite unfair. Why, he asks himself, should the proprietors of these two stores, who (he presumes) spent comparable amounts of time and money in building their businesses, be separated by a large and growing disparity in their wealth and consequently their living conditions?

The sheriff decides he will take it upon himself to remedy the situation—to level the playing field—so he puts a brick through each of the general store’s windows. The window store is immediately flooded with business replacing all the general store’s damaged property. The sheriff is satisfied. He has succeeded in spurring the business of a struggling entrepreneur. His town is once again in harmony.

A month or so later the sheriff is walking the same beat. He notices that once again the general store, having recovered from the vandalism of the previous month, is maintaining a healthy business, while the window store is once again struggling. He decides to repeat his previous actions, once again tossing a brick through each of the former’s windows. And once again, the window store’s business surges as it is charged with replacing the damaged panes in the general store.

But the sheriff realizes that, left to its own devices, the general store will once again recover and resume its thriving business, while the window shop will again falter. So he decides to repeat his window-breaking routine every so often. By doing so, he reasons, he will be supporting an industry that would otherwise fail. He acknowledges the price that the general store will have to pay, but immediately dismisses this thought, realizing that such a thriving business certainly has the money to replace its windows every now and again.

Before this rampage of vandalism by the community’s civil servant, the owner of the general store had been contemplating ways in which to reinvest the revenue that his business was creating. He boiled the situation down to two options. On the one hand, he had been considering an expansion of his facilities. His business had been doing so well that he began to buy more products of more varieties, and, after a while, needed additional storage and shelf space. On the other hand, he thought, he owed much of his success to the hard work of his dedicated employees and felt they deserved a pay raise.

But before he could decide which of the alternatives suited him better, someone had begun to break the windows of his shop regularly. Although his business was not at risk, the costs associated with replacing the windows added up. He had to forgo his plans either for a physical expansion of his business or a bonus for his employees. (See Frédéric Bastiat’s discussion of the “broken-window fallacy.”)

After numerous occasions of vandalism at his shop, the owner of the general store goes to the sheriff and explains to him that the costs of replacing his shop’s windows are hampering his business and that he would like the sheriff to investigate. Much to the shopkeeper’s surprise, the sheriff admits that he, in fact, has been wreaking the destruction on the general store. The sheriff explains his logic, telling the owner that if those windows had not been broken, the business across the street would have gone belly up. As an officer of the law, the sheriff continues, he is charged with safeguarding the public—providing not just physical protection, but financial protection as well. He says that he cannot very well sit idly by and watch as members of the community who have entrusted their well-being to him are driven out of business and forced into poverty.

The general-store owner protests, but what can he do? Under threat of force (that is, of the law) he is told that he must endure the violation and destruction of his personal property for the benefit of the community. The sheriff continues to hurl bricks through the general-store window, and eventually the owner learns to live with this nuisance. Rather than expand his business—and the public service that it offers—or pay his employees more, he is forced to endure the oppression of the law for the sake of a business that could not survive on its own.

This is the crime of the state. Pragmatically, taxation is the enemy of innovation, the broken window in the general store. Philosophically, taxation is the moral—and universalized, or at least nationalized—equivalent of the sheriff’s vandalism. The state feels, in the service of the public, that it must violate the property of some for the benefit of others.

One need not advocate anarchism, however, to see the problems inherent in such a policy. Taxation arguably serves its purpose in providing public services. If the sheriff had restricted his duties to the physical protection of the community’s citizens, he would have been doing his job aptly. Likewise, the role of government must be restricted to the protection of the life, liberty, and property of its citizens. The state oversteps its bounds, however, when it violates one of those three rights—as the sheriff did, and as the federal government of the United States does—even for the benefit of others.

If the sheriff had not intervened, the owner of the window store may have realized that the community did not provide sufficient demand for his product for him to run a successful business. He could then have opened his own general store and competed with the one across the street. He could have vacated the building and rented it to the general-store owner, who needed additional space. But the sheriff’s violation of the right to property, actions that embody the spirit of welfarism and coercive equality espoused by so many in our own government, cannot be justified on any terms.

The United States is moving dangerously close to (and has maybe even arrived at) a system under which those charged with protecting and trusted to honor our rights regularly violate them in the name of mindless rhetorical utopianism and forceful egalitarian mediocrity.