"....(In the United Sates, poverty declined consistently..."

"....(In the United Sates, poverty declined consistently from 1950 until 1968, when supposedly antipoverty programs first began to receive significant funding.  Since then, the poverty figures have stagnated in spite of trillions of dollars spent.)

Never before in the history of the world have so many people seen such an improvement in their living standards.  And these wonderful results have come about quite in spite of official development aid programs devised in the West.  They are, instead, the natural result of the market economy.  Forget about all the propaganda, the sloganeering, the misinformation, the willful misunderstanding of how the market works, all of which characterize fashionable opinion on the subject.  These are facts- and they should not be unexpected facts, if we understand sound economics." -Page 101 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"An argument we hear even now is that a hundred years ago..."

"An argument we hear even now is that a hundred years ago, when the federal government was far smaller than it is today, people were much poorer and worked in less desirable conditions, while today, with a much larger federal government and far more regulation in place, people are much more prosperous.  This is a classic case of the post hoc, ergo proper hoc fallacy.  This fallacy is committed whenever we carelessly assume that because outcome B occurred after action A, then B was caused by A.  If people are more prosperous today, that must be because government saved them from the ravages of the free market. 

But that is nonsense.  Of course people were less prosperous a hundred years ago, but not for the reason fashionable opinion assumes.  Compared to today, the American economy was starved for capital.  The economy's productive capacity was miniscule by today's standards, and therefore very few goods per capita could be produced.  The vast bulk of the population had to make do with much less than we take for granted today because so little could be produced.  All the laws and regulations in the world cannot overcome constraints imposed by reality itself.  No matter how much we tax the rich to redistribute the wealth, in a capital-starved economy there is an extremely limited amount of wealth to redistribute. 

The only way to increase everyone's standard of living is by increasing the amount of capital per worker.  Additional capital makes workers more productive, which means they can produce more goods than before. When our economy becomes physically capable of producing vastly more goods, their abundance makes them more affordable in terms of dollars (if the Federal Reserve isn't inflating the money supply).  Soaking the rich works for only so long:  the rich eventually wise up and decide to hide their income, move away or stop working so much.  But investing in capital makes everyone better off.  It is the only way we can all become wealthier.  We are wealthier today because our economy is physically capable of producing so much more at far lower costs.  And that's why, just from a practical point of view, it is foolish to levy taxes along any step of this process, because doing so sabotages the only way wealth can be created for everyone."  -Pages 93 & 94 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"...government intervention into the economy cannot be...."

"...government intervention into the economy cannot be assumed to be good and welcome and just. 

But that is how it is portrayed in too many of our American history classrooms.  It is not unusual for American students to find their textbooks telling them that injustice was everywhere before the federal government, motivated by nothing but a deep commitment to the public good, intervened to save them from the wickedness of the free market.  Alleged "monopolies" dictated prices to hapless consumers.  Laborers were forced to accept every-lower wages.  And thanks to their superior economic position, giant corporations effortlessly parried the attempts of anyone foolish enough to try and compete with them.

Every single aspect of this story is false, though of course this version of our history continues to be peddled and believed.  I don't blame people for believing it - it's the only rendition of events they're told of, unless by some fluke they have learned where to look for the truth.  But there is an agenda behind this silly comic-book version of history: to make people terrified of the "unfettered" free market, and to condition them to accept the ever-growing burdens that the political class imposes on the private sector as an unchangeable aspect of life that exists for their own good." -Pages 92 & 93 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"Our out-of-control welfare state also helps account for..."

"Our out-of-control welfare state also helps account for the scope of our illegal immigration problem.  When you subsidize something, you get more of it, and by offering free medical care and other services, as well as the prospect of amnesty, we get more illegal immigration.  Meanwhile, hospitals have begun closing as our states and localities struggle to pay the bills.
...
When, thanks to government policy, the economy is shaky, as it is now with the housing bubble bursting and inflation on the rise, it is all the easier to hold up immigrants as the scapegoats for the people's economic woes, thereby letting the incompetents and shysters who make our economic policy off the hook." -Pages 83 & 84 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"Faster economic growth can only delay the inevitable..."

"Faster economic growth can only delay the inevitable hard choices.  To close the long-term entitlement gap, the U.S. economy would have to grow by double digits every year for the next 75 years.
...
The fact is, we do not have the resources to sustain these programs in the long run.  There is no way around this simple fact, a fact politicians consistently ignore or conceal in order to tell Americans what they think their fellow countrymen want to hear." -Page 83 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"The kind of spending cuts we obviously need..."

"The kind of spending cuts we obviously need will not be easy, since our government has encouraged so many Americans to become dependent on federal programs.  These programs cannot survive much longer without a financial collapse.  Our national debt, now nine trillion dollars, does not include the unfunded liabilities to programs like Social Security and Medicare that will come due in the coming decades to the tune of another $50 trillion.  It is simply impossible to fulfill those promises.  The level of taxation necessary to fund a figure like that would destroy the American economy and dramatically shrink the productive base from which those funds could be drawn."  -Page 82 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"Now, plenty of politicians talk a good game..."

"Now, plenty of politicians talk a good game about low taxes, and some even claim to want to decrease spending as well.  Few seem to mean it, if their voting records are any indication.  But if we want more economic freedom and a healthy and robust economy, serious inroads need to be made into federal spending.  Otherwise, tax cuts will simply lead to more borrowing, more inflation, and the continued decline of the dollar.  As I write [2008], we are paying about $1.4 billion every day just for the interest on the national debt.  Because our government refuses to live within its means, every single day we spend $1.4 billion and receive absolutely nothing in return." -Pages 80 & 81 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"What we should work toward, however, is abolishing...."

"What we should work toward, however, is abolishing the income tax and replacing it not with a national sales tax, but with nothing.  Right now the federal government is funded by excise taxes, corporate income tax, payroll taxes, the individual income tax, and miscellaneous other sources.  Abolishing the income tax on individuals would cut government revenue by about 40 percent.  I have heard the breathless claims about how radical that is - and compared to the trivial changes we are accustomed to seeing in the government, I suppose it is.  But in absolute terms, is it really so radical?  In order to imagine what it would be like to live in a country with a federal budget 40% lower than the federal budget of 2007, it would be necessary to go all the way back to.... 1997.

Would it really be so hard to imagine living in 1997 again?  In return, we would have an economy so robust and dynamic that it would doubtless shatter even my own optimistic expectations.  And we would once and for all have repudiated the totalitarian assumptions at the heart of the income tax." -Pages 79 & 80 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"Alexis de Tocqueville was very impressed..."

"Alexis de Tocqueville was very impressed, when he visited our country in the nineteenth century, to see how many voluntary associations Americans had formed in order to achieve common goals.   "The political associations which exist in the United States are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country," he wrote.  "Wherever, at the head of some new undertaking, you see the Government in France, or man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association." De Tocqueville admired "the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeed in proposing a common object to the exertions of a great many men, and in getting them voluntarily to pursue it."

That may be all well and good for the arts and the like, some may say, but private efforts could never substitute for gigantic government budgets for various forms of welfare.  But private assistance would not need to match these budgets dollar for dollar.  As much as 70 percent of welfare budgets has been eaten up by bureaucracy.  Moreover, government programs are far more easily abused, and the money they dispense more readily becomes a destructive habit, than with more local or private forms of assistance. 

Why would we expect a system based on legal plunder, as ours is, to be a net benefit to the poor or middle class, in whose name so many government schemes are enacted?  Every one of the special benefits, on behalf of which hundreds of millions of dollars are expended on lobbyists every year, makes goods more expensive, companies less efficient and competitive, and the economy more sluggish.  Given that the politically influential and well connected- neither of which includes the middle class or the poor- are the ones who tend to win privileges and loot from government, I do not understand why we take for granted that the net result of all this looting is good for those who are lower on the economic ladder.  And when the loot is paid for by printing more money and causing inflation, which (as I show in the chapter on money) disproportionately harms the most vulnerable, the suggestions that the least prosperous are helped by all this intervention collapses into outright farce." -Pages 75 & 76 of The Revolution, A Manifesto