A Sobering Comparison

I repeat, our federal, state, and local governments are now taking over one-fourth of our earned income. And if we were to suffer the unemployment we experienced in 1939, reducing our level of production and thus our earned in come, this figure would automatically jump to more than one-third. No government has ever taken that much of any country's earned income without the rapid disappear ance of individual liberty and private ownership of property. An instance in point is France. She began a program of "social welfare" - one form of society by violence in 1915. * These programs, there or here, beyond the temporary expedient of confiscatory taxation, have no manner of "financing" except by inflationary processes that is, by increasing the quantity of the medium of ex change. This quantity cannot be increased without re sulting in a depreciation of the value of the money. In the brief span of 35 years (1915 - 1950) the franc has lost 991A % of its purchasing value! Talk about the "secu rity" of such a program! Think only of a young Frenchman in 1915 preparing himself for retirement in 1950, say at 1000 francs per month - a handsome income in the France of 1915. Today the 1000 francs would buy one good meal, but not at the best restaurants.

*Some will offer the excuse: "France was at war." But the French people were being coddled by a government which hoped to spare them the burden of war's waste. It couldn't be done; it never can. 21 If I were to draw a conclusion from these observations, it would be simply this: We in America have debauched our currency to such an extent, and advanced parasitical socialism to such a degree, that we are no longer priv ileged merely to "drop an anchor," to add no more to our evil ways, to remain in safety. We are now over the brink! And, unless we engage in the difficult and almost unprecedented political antic of cancelling out a great number of our so-called "social gains," private property and freedom to compete in enterprise as institutions are doomed to wither away and to disappear here as they are disappearing in other countries of the world. Violence Breeds Violence Another conclusion: The cause of our ills is a reliance on the principle of violence. Violence breeds violence.