Earlier this week, the great historian/economist Tom Woods has been debunking some criticism from an anti-capitalist (see part 1 and 2, more debunking shall come). She provides a link to her blog via Twitter, so I figured that I would check it out to see what she believes. I also found that she has some grammatical errors and spelling errors, which kinda irks me (but I should be no judge because I do it too sometimes). I shall proceed to challenge her views, but I will not dig deep into them.
She claims that she is a progressive (no surprise), and stated the following: "To me Freedom is very important but so is Social Justice...then Free Market, Budget Accounting etc secondary...that is to me our Government's primary purpose is to Ensure Domestic Tranquility and Promote (enhance) the common wealfare and then worry about efficient managment..Goverment cannot be run as a business.." This is a typical sentiment of progressives. She of course puts safety over liberty. Government's primary purpose is to protect and promote individual liberty, that is, our God-given natural rights. Plus, she assumes that government must "take care of us" if it is to "provide for the common welfare". From what I gather, government-mandated social justice is more important to her than liberty.
She continues: "Our Founding Fathers created our Government within the concept and theory of balance. Balancing Power, balancing opportunities, maintaining the sacredness of individual rights balanced equally among all so that no one can infringe upon the rights of others, again a balanced concept." I don't really understand what she is fully stating here, but our Founders created a constitutional republic that was biased toward liberty and decentralization, rather being based on balance.
She further states that "In opposing extremism, I oppose extreme Captialism as well as extreme Communism or Socialism." But as I noted in a earlier blog post, this middle-of-the-road policy always leads to socialism. When the government intervenes into the market economy, the governmental intervention messes with the natural flow of the market, which causes some economic problems. For example, having a central bank printing money adds cheap credit on the market, which bamboozles businesses into thinking they have more money in savings, when they do not. Thus they invest money into long-term projects that will not be completed or be profitable, thus recessions and depressions are created. Eventually, the government intervenes again to correct the problem it created itself through the previous intervention, and this process repeats itself until the entire market economy is controlled and planned by the government. This is the great flaw in this progressive's belief that government and the market economy can be balanced.
She then gives a more outrageous statement: "to me our American Constitution, Declaration of Independence have many socialistic elements in it since our Founding Fathers were very skeptical about the concentration of power and wealth together. For this purpose Taxation was created to excercise a check on this type of corporatist power." There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution or the Declaration of Independence that even suggest socialism. The U.S. Constitution was specifically designed to protect liberty, and that includes economic liberty. That is why Article 1, Section 8, which outlines the only powers that the federal government may exercise, mentions nothing about government control of the economy. Plus, many of the grievances in the Declaration of Independence were against the corrupt and anti-capitalist system of British mercantilism. To say that these documents endorse socialism is a great folly. In fact, a majority of the Founders (with the exception of Alexander Hamilton and his Federalist followers) can be considered pro-free market capitalist libertarians. The Founders feared the concentration of power, not wealth. And taxation was created at the federal level to fund a strong national defense to protect the country from a foreign government (keep in mind that the federal government had no income tax until 1913. During this time, the federal government was funded by low revenue tariffs and the sale of federal land). Taxation was not created to check "corporatist power".
Another flawed statement she makes is as follows: "For our Founding Fathers TRUE INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM in the form of THE BILL OF RIGHTS can only be assured by an effective Government protecting and acting as referee between the success of the ONE to the success of the MANY...and the protection of those who fail or are made to fail by unforseen uncontrolled circustances. " The government under the U.S. Constitution was never designed to violate the rights of the minority in favor of the majority, nor was it designed to pick those who win and those who lose. The natural rights that are enshrined in the Constitution are to be enjoyed by everybody, regardless of one's wealth. True individual liberty means that the government allows everyone to exercise their God-given natural rights to the greatest extent as possible, so long as individuals do not use their rights to infringe upon the rights of others. In her statement, she envisions us living under a leviathan welfare-state that would forcefully take wealth from those who earned it to those who have not earned it.
I could go on and on, but she has so many false claims that it would take too much time to answer them all. I applaud Tom Woods for his knowledge of TRUE American history, and for his patience in dealing with people who insist on repeating the lies they learned in school.
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