"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

"Economic freedom is based on a simple moral rule..."

"Economic freedom is based on a simple moral rule: everyone has a right to his or her life and property, and no one has the right to deprive anyone of these things.

To some extent, everyone accepts this principle. For instance, anyone going to his neighbor's home an taking his money at gunpoint, regardless of all the wonderful, selfless things he promised to do with it, would be promptly arrested as a thief.

But for some reason it is considered morally acceptable when government does that very thing. We have allowed government to operate according to its own set of moral rules. Frederic Bastiat, one of the great political and economic writers of all time, called this "legal plunder."

Bastiat identified three approaches we could take to such plunder:

1) The few plunder the many.
2) Everybody plunders everybody.
3) Nobody plunders anybody.

We presently follow option number two: everyone seeks to use government to enrich himself at his neighbor's expense. That's why Bastiat called the state "the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

Now here's a radical idea: what if we pursued option number three and decided to stop robbing one another? What if we decided that there was a better, more humane way for people to interact with each other? What if we stopped doing things we would consider morally outrageous if done by private individuals but that we consider perfectly all right when carried out by government in the name of "public policy"? -Page 69 & 70 of The Revolution, A Manifesto