The point that Lew was pointing out was the fact that all government revenue’s must necessarily come through the market – it’s not the other way around. This is inescapably true; the State cannot produce wealth (or if you disagree with this you are a communist, or communist sympathetic).

And, uhh… it might be just me, but you know, if I decided to take a ton of money from people and build lots of houses (that they could live in for free!) how different would this be from me taking a ton of money from a bunch of people and building a lot of houses for me?

Or are you saying it’s ok to rob some people in order to build a buncha stuff if that stuff is ‘handy’ and people could use it according to their own ‘needs’ (holy crap! That sounds like a commie idea! My bad..)

The act of taking goods away from people without their consent is called robbery – or taxation. Who cares if some people can take the goods that have been taken from others? You’re missing the giant elephant in the room.

This is obviously not true.The govt owns half of the land west of the Mississippi and this land obviously is a form of wealth.

“All it acquires it must take from the private sector.”

Non sequitur. The source of the materials of production must logically be divorced from the goods produced. For example, a road is not less valuable because it is built by the state and not by a private concern. The argument should be made in terms of efficiency. It may be more efficient for a road to be a toll road in terms of bottom line cost to the user.

“You might believe that it is necessary and you might believe it does great good, but we must grant that it does not have the ability to produce wealth in the way the market does.”

The way? What does “way” have to do with cost accounting execept in terms of efficiency and best use of resources?

Why is a Condo or home owner association morally acceptable to Libertarians but a town government is not – as long as a person is free to leave the town and take his portable assets with him?

We were just making the distinction between “relative governmental power” and “governmental power over citizens.” The US is indeed the most powerful government on the planet, in that it would win any confrontation with another government. But it is less powerful in interfering with our lives than many foreign governments, even with the excessive amount that it does.

“What is relevant in this context is its size relative to GDP and measured that way America has a very small government compared to other western countries. Its obtrusiveness with regards to regulation is also smaller than most other governments.”

Exactly. The American government is one of the “best” of a bad lot.

Has anyone determined is ‘perrosuelto’ is an AI or not?

And we wonder why no one takes libertarians seriously? One of our supposed intellectual leaders is out there making assinine comments like this?

- Josh

What is relevant in this context is its size relative to GDP and measured that way America has a very small government compared to other western countries. Its obtrusiveness with regards to regulation is also smaller than most other governments.

Well, not compared to most other countries. It is the largest and most powerful (compared to other governments) but not particularly more powerful or intrusive than most of the other countries in the world. Certainly, it is TOO powerful and intrusive — but if the average score of national governments is a 2 of out 10, then the US deserves a 4.

It is interesting to note that economic prosperity is claimed to have been brought on by big government, and we always seem to need so many government interventions in time of economic recession. In many cases I believe this is due to the “do something” mentality of politics, something I despise. In politics, it doesn’t matter what you do (or if it helps) as long as you do “something.”

Somehow government in America has gone from “avoiding hurting the people” to “trying to help them,” despite the obvious truth that our founding laws were what the government could NOT do, as opposed to what it should do.

This calls to mind one of my many favorite quotes by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, from his great article Banking, Nation States and International Politics: A Sociological Reconstruction of the Present Economic Order, Review of Austrian Economics, (Vol. 4 Num. 1), 1990, which explains why the relatively rich, Western countries, which have relatively liberal internal economic policies, would tend to be militarily more powerful, and thus more aggressive, than developing states. The full quote is reproduced at this post.