by F.R. Duplantier
Some people think you don't know how to spend your own time and money!
"Each of us, in his private capacity, is constantly planning for the future," observed the noted economist Henry Hazlitt in a classic essay recently reprinted in a new book called Private Means, Public Ends: Voluntarism vs. Coercion, published by the Foundation for Economic Education. "We are making these plans," said Hazlitt, "both in our capacity as consumers and as producers." Sometimes things work out just as we reckoned; sometimes they don't. This is as it should be. After all, who knows better than we do exactly what our goals and aspirations are? Why shouldn't we reap the benefits when our plans succeed, and suffer the consequences when they fail? How else can we know if a goal, or the path we've chosen to reach it, needs changing?
There are certain people among us, however, who are convinced that we are not planning as we should -- or that we would be better off if we let them do our planning for us. "They talk as if the world of private enterprise, the free market, supply, demand, and competition were a world of chaos and anarchy, in which nobody ever planned ahead or looked ahead, but merely drifted or staggered along," said Hazlitt. These Planners want to help us out by making plans for us. They expect us to recognize the superiority of their plans and eagerly adopt them, but they will, if necessary, enlist the support of government to compel us to accept their plans.
"The government Planners will, of course, try to persuade people that the Master Plan has been drawn up for their own good," said Hazlitt, "and that the only persons who are going to be coerced are those whose plans are 'not in the public interest.'" The Planners justify their use of coercion by arguing that "the free market produces the wrong goods," or that "the free market does not produce enough goods."
The Planners are convinced that "consumers should be supplied, not with what they themselves want, but with what bureaucrats of exquisite taste and culture think is good for them. And the way to do this is to tax away from people all the income they have been foolish enough to earn above that required to meet their bare necessities, and turn it over to the bureaucrats to be spent in ways in which the latter think would really do people the most good."
This, of course, is a recipe for failure. "When people who earn more than the average have their 'surplus,' or the greater part of it, seized from them in taxes, and when people who earn less than the average have the deficiency, or the greater part of it, turned over to them in handouts and doles, the production of all must sharply decline," Henry Hazlitt declared, "for the energetic and able lose their incentive to produce more than the average, and the slothful and unskilled lose their incentive to improve their condition."
7800 Bonhomme