you're hungry. government steals $10 from you and gives you a block of government cheese. should you be happy? no. government took the money against your will, spent it inefficiently, and gave you something you didn't really want in the first place. free market would feed you much better with your $10.
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Just because you name a bill "Affordable Care Act" doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to end up with affordable care just like naming a bill "Everyone Gets a Fluffy Unicorn Act" won't necessarily make that a reality.
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In Bastiat's tale, a man's son breaks a pane of glass, meaning the man will have to pay to replace it. The onlookers consider the situation and decide that the boy has actually done the community a service because his father will have to pay the glazier (window repair man) to replace the broken pane. The glazier will then presumably spend the extra money on something else, jump-starting the local economy.
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"But without government, who will build the roads?" government has been doing certain services since we can remember, so they’re the only ones capable of doing those services. But private enterprises have built roads, parks, and street lights throughout history. It doesn’t take a collection of people to steal money from one group of people or take out loans they can’t pay with the money they currently steal from people to produce vital services.
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Government doesn't create anything, just moves things that already exist around, often losing efficiency. Frederic Bastiat, the great French economist (yes, there were admirable French economists, albeit all of them lived in the 1800s), is well known for many reasons, including his explanation of the “seen” and the “unseen.” If the government decides to build a “Bridge to Nowhere,” it is very easy to see the workers who are employed on that project. This is the “seen.” But what is less obvious is that the resources to build that bridge are taken from the private sector and thus are no longer available for other uses. This is the “unseen.”
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Person A: "No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge." Person B: "But my uncle Angus likes sugar with his porridge." Person A: "Ah yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge." This is used often to defend communism after its abysmal record of economic ruin and democide. Well, those weren't really communism...
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A vague notion to which no one has explicitly agreed but that supposedly authorizes a certain class of people to steal, imprison, and kill in order to benefit the greater good, however they define it. Totally Legit. Riiiight...
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Mr. Obama says that it’s government that laid the foundation for all these great things like roads and bridges and the Internet, but the government didn’t just do all those things on ITS own either. In fact, a government can’t do anything on its own since it relies on the blood, sweat, and tears of its subjects in order to do anything. Government, in its most basic form, is coercion. It is the authority to force people to do what they don’t want to do—a monopoly of violence. With regard to all these positive externalities that the president talks about, the government requires funding from people who pay involuntarily. The government couldn’t pay for teachers without stealing money through taxation of private enterprise first. The government couldn’t build roads without taking land.
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Examples of collective terms are “society,” “community,” “nation,” “class,” and “us.” The important thing to remember is that they are abstractions, figments of the imagination, not living, breathing, thinking, and acting entities. The fallacy involved here is presuming that a collective is, in fact, a living, breathing, thinking, and acting entity.
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Some people think that if you object to government action that you cannot benefit from that action at all. If you object to social security, you should reject the payout checks even though the government has stolen your money for it all your life. Wrong. I don't think the government should be in charge of the roads, but I'm not going to off-road it everywhere I go. I've been forced to pay for these government products, you better believe I'm going to get the most out of the benefit.
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The minimum wage is arbitrary. If it is set above the rate at which an employee is worth, that employee will be fired or the employer may raise prices to make up the difference. Ask a minimum wage supporter why not make the minimum wage $1 million? The same destruction that would happen then happens with a $15 minimum wage, just to a lesser degree.
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People assign the misnomer 'right' to various goods/services (like health care) and they say it's so important that government must ensure it. The problem is that once government enters the market, they squeeze out all the competition because they get their funding through theft. And when there's no competition, the incentives for producing a better service go away and we're left with a shoddy product or in Venezuela's case, no toilet paper.
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what is true for one individual will be true for all others.
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The mercantilists of the 1600s raised this error to the pinnacle of national policy. Always bent upon heaping up hoards of gold and silver, they made war on their neighbors and looted their treasures. If England was richer than France, it was, according to the mercantilists, because England had more precious metals in its possession, which usually meant in the king’s coffers.
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We produce in order that we may consume, not the other way around.
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Socialists like to complain that the economy is a fixed pie and if someone gains financially that others must necessarily lose, but that doesn't seem to be the case in reality. The world is growing in population and the average income for everyone is increasing. This means that the economy isn't a fixed pie. It's an infinite pie.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez False premise 1: (non-tax contributions) 1- Amazon purchased $11B in Federal bonds last year. Literally, Amazon put more than its total net income into "the pot". 2- Amazon collects sales tax on all US purchases - thus *every* sale in the US contributes to the tax coffers. 3- Amazon employs well over half a million persons - and is approaching the same number as the total population of Seattle. While some of those are in other countries, the majority are in the United States - and FITW applies to all of them. 4- Amazon sells to - or facilitates sales to - international customers, thus foreign wealth is transferred into the US, increasing the total wealth of the US - and thus the pot gets bigger.
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Every “something for nothing” scheme and most “get rich quick” plans have some element of this fallacy in them. Let there be no mistake about this: if economics is involved,
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Some actions seem beneficial in the short run but produce disaster in the long run: drinking excessively, driving fast, spending blindly, and printing money, to name a few.
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Humans are social beings who progress if they cooperate with one another. Cooperation implies a climate of freedom for each individual human being to peacefully pursue his own self- interest without fear of reprisal. Put a human in a zoo or in a strait jacket and his creative ener gies dissipate.
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