| 1. |
government cheese
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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| 2. |
government creates jobs
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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| 3. |
the social contract
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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| 4. |
ayn took social security
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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| 5. |
minimum wage helps the poor
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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| 6. |
it's important so government must control it
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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| 7. |
economy is a fixed pie
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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| 8. |
corporations don't contribute anything
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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