A Man With A Scant Vocabulary Will

Government Relief Tends Constantly To Get Out Of Hand. And Even When It Is Kept Within Reasonable Bounds It Tends To Reduce The Incentives To Work And To Save Both Of Those Who Receive It And Of Those Who Are Forced To Pay It. It May Be Said, In Fact, That Practically Every Measure That Governments Take With The Ostensible Object Of 'helping The Poor' Has The Long-run Effect Of Doing The Opposite.

We Are So Accustomed To The Miracle Of Private Enterprise That We Habitually Take It For Granted. But How Does Private Industry Solve The Incredibly Complex Problem Of Turning Out Tens Of Thousands Of Different Goods And Services In The Proportions In Which They Are Wanted By The Public? ... It Solves These Problems Through The Institutions Of Private Property, Competition, The Free Market, And The Existence Of Money - Through The Interrelations Of Supply And Demand, Costs And Prices, Profits And Losses.

All Subsidy Measures, All Schemes To Redistribute Income Or To Force Peter To Support Paul, Are One-eyed As Well As Shortsighted. They Get Their Immediate Appeal By Focusing Attention On The Alleged Needs Of Some Particular Group Of Intended Beneficiaries. But The Inevitable Victims - Those Who Are Going To Be Asked To Pay For The New Handout In Increased Taxes (which Directly Or Indirectly Means Almost Everybody Else) - Are Left Out Of Account. Only One-half Of The Problem Has Been Seen. The Cost Of The Proposed Solution Has Been Overlooked.

Government Welfarism, With Its Ever-increasing Army Of Pensioners And Other Beneficiaries, Is Fatally Easy To Launch And Fatally Easy To Extend, But Almost Impossible To Bring To A Halt - And Quite Impossible Politically To Reverse, No Matter How Obvious And Catastrophic Its Consequences Become.

The Way To Maximize Production Is To Maximize The Incentives To Production. And The Way To Do That, As The Modern World Has Discovered, Is Through The System Known As Capitalism - The System Of Private Property, Free Markets, And Free Enterprise.