Progressive Era History Shaping Modern-Day Ideology

[Originally published in the Front Range Voluntaryist, article by Mike Morris]

It starts in the schools

Since most of us are forcibly “educated” in the government-schools, the curriculum taught is predictably in favor of the government. From saluting flags to singing national anthems (and being punished for refusing), the public school system is essentially centered around the gloriousness of the state. Matter of fact, all of society is today, seen in the recent inability of even football players to escape condemnation by the president.

What pledging allegiance to a gang of criminals has to do with education is beyond any rational man. Thus from the thinking-man should be a resounding “no way” to the proposal that government run a school monopoly. But proof of their success is the near total sanction, without question, that government must be involved in schooling “our children.” “I want my neighbors to be smart,” is now the built-in quip of almost anyone who survived the system. As if this is what actually happens.

No one should expect the government to teach a correct economics or accurately depict history, including the interests behind public schooling, as this would refute the idea that they should be involved in education. Their schemes are successful by keeping the people ignorant to such ideas. As such, for only one example, any of the presidents that we’re told are the best are quite frankly the worst.

Abraham Lincoln, the racist-statist who’s heralded as the man who cared so much about the slaves, is one of the towering figures in political history. “Freedom Fest” on Fort Carson saw a man dressed head to toe as Lincoln. This is a man who believed in a centralization of government power, a sentiment government wishes to induce among the masses. He believed the U.S. government was a government for white people, and that blacks should be shipped back to Africa as an inferior pest.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, the man who justified detaining Japanese-Americans into internment camps, and prolonged the misery of the Great Depression by instituting unprecedented economic interventions, among other things such as taking the U.S. into wars and being Stalin’s bitch, is the hero of online social media pages like Occupy Democrats or Being Liberal who hold him to the highest of standards.

With a lack of competition in schooling, which would exist in a market for private schooling, official statist narratives are substituted for independent thought. As such, few question the need for a government whatever. It has become the default position to praise it, rather than to deride it in any way. Anyone who does question it now, its old students will assert, “should go back to high school civics class” to be reminded of the wonders of government.

Obviously, their interest in monopolizing schooling has to do with the interests of government more so than the egalitarian idea that most hold it to be. It has more to do with imposing uniformity than in allowing intellectual diversity. What has come from all this is the youth are largely indoctrinated in varying degrees of democratic socialism, seeing the state as essential and a necessary evil at worst, but even more common is its standing among them as a necessary good. They believe in a mostly incorrect history where the victors had the official say, and this supports their modern day defense of statism.

To them, there would be a shortfall in benevolence, or something like that, unless government violently redistributes property (taxation) and monopolizes various goods and services. Aggression is the height of “society”, or something like that, in their view. Participation in the state— by voting, calling “your” Congressman, protesting—is a duty and obligation of this mythical “social contract,” or something like that.

Most Americans are of some of these notions, albeit to varying emotional extents. This was necessary to obtain. Since force is insufficient in order to subjugate a population, obtaining legitimacy as well as passive resignation among the bulk of the population is needed in order to continue to commit the crimes they do in the name of the people’s own safety and wealth. And as for those who know it’s all a great scheme, like me, posing a big enough violent threat to any potential dissenters as to have them passively resign (rather than be active resisters) works quite well to silence us.

How have we come to believe all this?

I think a lot of our bias stems from the view of the Progressive Era that has been an age where government came forward and bailed the people out of their misery. And therefore, we need them again, and forevermore, to raise taxes and pass legislation to keep the economy progressing. Otherwise, freedom means decline, and coercion is supposed to be the means of civilizing man, or, forcing him to pay his “fair share” for the “society” that has invested in him. Those pesky libertarians are a “threat” for standing ideologically in the way of maximum, total government, these “progressives” believe.

But once one realizes that the government is not this benevolent institution that is saving us from the capitalists who would run wild without them, but rather the very means these bankers and industrialists use to seize control of the markets and obtain their monopolies, by state-granted monopolies, via regulations, special privileges, or even taxes, minimum wage laws, and other regulations, then will “the people” stop viewing government in such light.

If I may begin by quoting Murray Rothbard from a fabulous devil’s-advocate of anarchism interview by Penthouse in response to the typical “what about the poor,” he explains how government policy, of course sold as helpful to the poor, is of course the opposite:

“..the poor are only helped by free enterprise.
It is private-capital investment and private
entrepreneurship that have raised the
standard of living from what it was in
pre-industrial times to what we have today.
This has all been done through private
investment, not by government. The
government is a drag on the system; it is
an impoverishing devise and a parasitic
burden on the productive system, not the
opposite. Government doesn’t help the
poor; it hurts them.”

Most of the public believe the opposite view, and this fact offends them. They often don’t even realize that government is not a producer itself, but can only give by first taking; and that this taking is inevitably a tax on production while simultaneously lowering the cost of non-production, i.e., obtaining an income not by working and exchanging. This surely incentivizes non-work over increased production, i.e., punishing producers while subsidizing non-producers’ consumption. Taxation is thus a recipe for relative impoverishment.

So the state isn’t working for us?

The term is rent-seeking for when businesses go to government for protection, which to economists means that “rents” are being obtained not by voluntary payments, but by using the government to obtain these special handouts. The incentives of government have it that it must be this way, too. It isn’t that it all went wrong, and could have worked better, but that this is the nature of states. The state is not in need of “reform”, or better politicians, which is a never-ending half-measure. What is needed is to deny these people the political means of obtaining wealth, and that means abolishing the state itself.

One can apply this same scenario to any industry, from banking, agriculture, medicine, etc., as they have all come to gain a cozy relationship with the government over time. Most began this way, on behalf of those seeking power. And if any didn’t, overtime they gained control over these agencies. This term is called “regulatory capture”, where “the regulated” become the regulators. Those protected of course don’t want genuine capitalism, where the state doesn’t interfere in the market, as leftists think they desire. They took over, as you see, because of the government.

The bulk of the public are of the mindset that we need more regulations to reign in the bankers; or even that the banks are already unregulated. But there is no free market in banking, or anywhere else. So why are there big banks? The fact of the matter is that without the Federal Reserve System, and the Federal Reserve Act that created it, there is no banking cartel. That’s why the bankers needed the Act. We don’t have economic recessions because there’s a lack of government intervention, but precisely because they have intervened in epic proportions.

So while we do need “deregulation”, so to speak, this must be coupled with an abolishment of the central bank. Deregulation under a regime of central banking could indeed mean the bank cartel running wild with credit expansion, the cause of the boom-bust cycle. And equally here, what is needed is not a new and better Fed chair, but an ending to the idea of “monetary policy” all together.

What changed?

The Progressive Era, approximately between the 1890s and the 1920s, is the era that helped to usher in the centralized state, giving us the Fed and the income tax, and began to do away with America’s conviction that free-markets and liberty were the only way things should be.

So what did the big businesses have to do then to secure themselves a spot in the future? Murray N. Rothbard, the prolific economist and historian of the libertarian tradition, explains that,

“It...became clear to these big-business
interests that the only way to establish a
cartelized economy, an economy that
would ensure their continued economic
dominance and high profits, would be to
use the powers of government to establish
and maintain cartels by coercion. In other
words, to transform the economy from
roughly laissez-faire to centralized and
coordinated statism.”

As Jim Cox says in his short and sweet Concise Guide to Economics, which also gives a real account of monopoly and antitrust law:

“In effect, regulation is a teaming of business
and government to the detriment of potential
competitors—which the established businesses
prefer not to face—and to the detriment of the
consuming public.”

It is not capitalism that isn’t for the masses, “the common good”, but crony statist economies that are for the few. So contrary to what the non-thinking public believe, regulations are not for “them.” This sort of thinking comes about only under the belief that “the state is us”, which they’ve worked into us, complimented by a lack of understanding of how markets work, which they never taught. If they knew the real history or theory, as Cox summarizes,

“The word regulation, properly understood,
[would] evoke thoughts such as protection
of businesses from competitors, special
privileges for established firms, and
government efforts to exploit consumers.”

It sounds ironic to the ears of these people to say something like “privatize the banks.” Because, to them, the banks are already private. But, at best, they’re “private” in name only. The central bank is not a market institution, but ultimately the system is propped up by the government, with various nonsensical economic rationale given for why it’s needed: from “stable prices”, “full employment”, and supposedly putting an end to the business cycle.

Those who decry the corporations who have taken over sometimes realize that the government is assisting them, but no less do they think “reform” is all that’s needed. Ending campaign donations is all that’s needed to fix it. Or, getting Bernie in there will do the trick. But “reform” just shows that government schemes didn’t work out the first time, and surely don’t by doubling up on them.

Free market economics

Previously in time, in the late 19th century, economists didn’t think of fierce competition as bad, but a great thing, and it was generally accepted that governments created monopolies. That some industries were capital-intensive, and might thus make natural barriers to entry, was not seen as an issue. Different capital combinations were seen as a good thing. Such thinking has changed greatly today, where many essentially assert that the free market economy cannot be allowed, and government must play a role, to whatever arbitrary extent their emotions say so.

Far from being needed to assure competition, however, the government is used to stifle it. As it is what’s taught, most people believe in the myth of a “free market monopoly.” The theory is that some business will buy up all the resources, cut production levels, and go on to raise prices and dominate the market.

But if you look into it you realize that the reasons given for breaking up a company are never even what’s cited in the act of doing so. For instance, Standard Oil, with many competitors, was lowering prices and offering better services as a way of obtaining market share, not hiking prices as it might be assumed. In fact, by the time the case was over for breaking up the company, they had already lost a great deal of market share from newer competition. Furthermore, as economist and historian Tom DiLorenzo points out, there is no historical precedent for their theory of monopoly, and the economic justifications for government intervention came after they were already establishing monopolies.

If any company were to unduly raise prices, i.e., not out of factors such as falling supply or rising demand, they would invite potential competitors into the market. In the market economy, market share is gained not by coercion, but by offering the best product. Businesses are not holding a gun to anyone’s head, as is the government, in order to get them to buy products. The boycott means consumer supremacy.

Moreover, the reality is that the state is a monopoly itself, which goes on to secure protections and special privileges and favors for companies and industries that they otherwise wouldn’t have in a market of free-entry. No one is free to opt-out of policing services; they are compulsory. There is no free-entry in the market of protection. The state runs a protection racket. This is this simple explanation for why police treat us as their subordinates instead of their customers, though the government does have the audacity to refer to us as their “customers” and their stolen tax-loot as “revenue,” in a total slap in the face to honest businessmen. There must be a clear distinction between the voluntary market economy and the coercive state.

What most people believe, that a company would just raise prices if government didn’t stand in the way, then, is precisely what they do with the government. If anyone excessively raised prices in a free-market, they wouldn’t make any sales as consumers would go elsewhere. If a guitar manufacturer raised the price to $100,000, prospective musicians might turn to other substitutes, like keyboard, or make guitars themselves. When they have no choice but to go through one company the government protects, as everyone else is legally excluded from producing X good, they’re able to get away with this.

Indeed there is protectionism going on with the government: it’s just for the special-interests and lobbyists and not for “the people.” Those crony corporations agree with the public that the government should engage in protection: because they’re the ones who benefit from it while the public at large are too stupid to realize it. Some companies, like those in the military-industry, are created wholly out of government contracts.

Leftists will often accuse those for liberty as “shilling for the rich,” without realizing those protected (and enriched) by government do not want to give up such a cozy status. Those who earn an income via the state do not want an economy where the means of earning an income is by satisfying others, hence why none of these people are anarchists, but favor and fund the political duopoly.

When businesses survive, not by continuing to satisfy consumers, but by getting the protection of the government, there’s necessarily a waste of resources occurring since they would otherwise suffer losses and go into other, more valued lines of production. The state makes it possible to produce that which otherwise wouldn’t be profitable, and can only do so by taking away from what consumers would have otherwise preferred.

Politicians like Bernie Sanders are caught in this dilemma, though his supporters don’t know it: they acknowledge at times how crony the system has become, yet their solution is more of the cause: more government! If Bernie whines that the banks are too big and should be broken up, his solution definitely isn’t to allow free-market competition, i.e., capitalism, but precisely more interventionism. Perhaps the Treasury, rather than the supposedly “private” and “independent” Fed, should operate the scheme. Even people that are more on the side of liberty, like Bill Still, advocate this failed fix: to have the government print “U.S. Notes” rather than have a free-market in banking and a return to sound money. These are the “Greenbackers” who come up quite short identifying the problem: fiat, paper money.

How do they do it?

As for an economic example, Rothbard describes the history of the impossibility of cartels in the free-market, and why this indeed wasn’t the case as the public had made it out to be. While the U.S. economy had fewer restrictions in the way between the period of post-Civil War and the early 20th century than today, which was also a great boom period for the U.S.,

“...business became increasingly competitive
during the late nineteenth century, and that
various big-business interests, led by the
powerful financial house of J.P. Morgan and
Company, had tried desperately to establish
successful cartels on the free market. The first
wave of such cartels was in the first large-scale
business, railroads, and in every case, the
attempt to increase profits, by cutting sales
with a quota system and thereby to raise prices
or rates, collapsed quickly from internal
competition within the cartel and from external
competition by new competitors eager to
undercut the cartel.”

If a bank on the free market attempted to inflate its notes in excess of its gold deposits, i.e. engage in fractional reserve banking, the counterfeiting which has been legalized by the central bank, then this would be checked by natural forces. Competing banks and holders of the notes would go to redeem them for commodity money, and if they didn’t have it, the bank would be seen as an disreputable fraud. Unlike today, where the whole banking system is insolvent yet propped up by the central bank, they would be left to fail. There would be no “bank bailouts” as we saw in the Great Recession, but profit and loss would apply to them too. Again, the bankers do not want capitalism.

If they tried to form a cartel, i.e., to inflate notes in concert as to be successful, then they would invite the potential competition of a yet-formed bank that was honest, or an existing cartelist that was more efficient would be naturally encouraged to cheat on the agreement rather than to be weighed down by less efficient banks in the cartel.

What we have now is a monopolist central bank (the Federal Reserve) that has a paper-money monopoly (paper currency that is irredeemable in gold) that engages in fractional reserve banking and credit expansion that causes the now-normalized business cycle and is used to finance the expansion of the government and the banking system to their own advantage. Inflation creates a fraudulent way to obtain resources, not by production and exchange, but by exchanging real resources for nothing.

What anyone who wishes for prosperity must advocate for instead is a natural money (gold, silver), one-hundred percent reserve banking (all notes are redeemable for money deposited on demand), and free competition between banks (and to end the central bank).

How wealth comes about

Most people who conveniently ignore (or don’t know) government’s liabilities already exceed the ability to pay, or that they must first take in order to give, believe that it must have some magical, inexhaustible fund somewhere in which to tap for more programs. They couldn’t begin to explain how wealth is created. For them, everything we have isn’t in spite of government, but because of, and thanks to, them. Printing money is equivalent to creating new goods and services, rather than it being an illicit appropriation of existing resources.

Wealth necessarily comes about when people (entrepreneurs with ideas) of a lower time-preference abstain from consuming in the present, and use their savings to invest in capital goods which are used to produce more things in the future which are expected to be of value then. Capitalists perform this function of bearing risk and anticipating future prices and consumer demands, in the hopes of making a profit. Most any program against this (taxation, etc.) is to encourage the opposite process: capital consumption and a heightening of the social rate of time-preference.

Central banks help to undermine this too. In the primary way, they cause the business cycle by an artificial lowering of the rate of interest which makes it appear to investors that more savings exists than really does. There is a mismatch between true time-preferences and the distorted rate; the real savings to consumption ratio in the economy does not match what the central bank skews it to be. Eventually, this scheme goes bust when the economic system makes a correction, and the bad investments fall apart. People are thrown out of work, homeowners can’t pay their mortgages, and life savings is wrecked.

In other incorrect views, Marxists accuse the market economy itself of being inherently cyclical, when there’s no reason even on the surface a free and growing market would systematically experience bad business decisions and fall into recession.

Keynesians believe the economy is consumer demand-driven, and when the people aren’t spending enough money a recession can develop, in which the government should step in and deficit-spend and inflate. The whole scheme is an excuse for an inflationist doctrine. They’re right that if the Fed stopped inflating the economy would fall apart. But not for the reasons that they state, that the economy cannot be free. Rather, it would collapse simply because the ongoing scheme of kicking the can down the road would finally be revealed. What is needed nonetheless is to have the recession and stop intervening in the future.

The mindset

Thus, when it’s believed that legislation, inflation, minimum wage laws, unions, etc., are the source of raising wages, shortening the workweek, ending the need for children to labor, or furnishing all of the products we have today rather than the market economy being the source of that prosperity, people will increasingly engage in wealth-destroying actions like taxation, regulations, lowering the interest rate, and other barriers to competition, investment, and free exchange. The very things that are needed the most (more economic freedom) will come to be despised and feared by the voting public.

Anti-capitalists, then, which likely will admit to their disdain of consumption or the increased standards of living capital investment has brought about, will cause a reversal in the progress of mankind. Far from “progressive” they will be; economic activity will regress the less free any economy becomes.

Ideas of “anarcho-communists” for the abolition of property, money, exchange, prices, profits, the division of labor, etc., (Kropotkin) will absolutely return man to a more primitive state of affairs, and some probably wouldn’t deny their desire for this. They’re completely ignorant to the sound economic ideas that are necessary to maintain civilization itself, and thus we correspondingly witness social disintegration. Leftists like Antifa, who demonstrate this the most, oppose Western ideas part and parcel, and in their own words, are “committed to the complete destruction of the white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.”

But it’s likely they only hate these things because the government has perverted them all. Otherwise, profits are proof of value creation, money is necessary as a medium of exchange, banks as a warehouse for money and intermediary between savers and investors, etc. When people hate money, they don’t know it that what they really hate is government’s paper money, or for banking, government’s banking cartel. There are no problems with money and banking as such.

Will they learn?

A forthcoming and posthumous book by Murray N. Rothbard, The Progressive Era, will detail the times in his view, and as he was known for, will turn the tables completely upside down on the mainstream view. Rothbard saw historical revisionism as necessary since the state has dominated our thinking. As I’ve quoted, he’s already said a lot in published works, notably The Case Against the Fed which describes how the bankers conspired for the legislation.

In other ways, while companies like Mylan have exclusive privileges granted to them by the FDA to sell drugs like the EpiPen, in which they subsequently jack up the price by many hundreds of percentage points, those out there calling for socialized health care believe that this is due to “capitalism” or the greedy guys in the pharmaceutical industry. The company Marathon is another example, having received a monopoly on the sales of a muscular dystrophy drug from the government. They went on to hike the medication exorbitantly too.

It’s believed that a company could endlessly raise prices while still attracting customers, when the opposite is the case: businesses compete with others for customers by increasing quality and lowering prices. Thus, this is how they obtain the selling prices they desire: by having government exclude competitors who could sell it for less. The cases are numerous, from Big Pharma to Big Banking, and yet somehow Big Government escapes the blame.

In the free market economy, any producer is subjected to the price system as much as the other. ABC Co. cannot simply raise prices drastically above the market rate as a means of earning more revenue or profit. Indeed, if they did, they would lose money and market share to XYZ Co. In the market, with competition, no company could sell $800 pills; this would put them promptly out of business.

The assumption again is that what we have is a market free of state intervention. Social democrats still blame the “free market” which doesn’t exist, while simultaneously thanking the government for making sure there isn’t a free-market, though usually being quite upset with them too. Go figure. They absurdly call for more regulations, when “regulations” is what got us here in the first place. Since it’s statists who give legitimacy to the state, the institution which corporatists work through to secure power, this means that social democrats are essentially the “crony capitalists” they despise. It sure isn’t libertarians, who would do away with the whole system should we have it our way.

If there were free trade, and not a state to block trade across borders, then we could all buy generic drugs for much cheaper online, perhaps coming from Asia or other parts of the world. Prohibiting free international trade though protects domestic industries who can’t otherwise compete while hurting the consumers who wished for more favorable prices. Tariffs, too, are a form of protectionism. And in this way, Trump has brought many conservatives to economic fallacies such as “border taxes” (tariffs) as he’s draped them in nationalistic American exceptionalism. But again, protecting domestic companies via restrictions on trade may indeed help that company, who receives great benefits from the policy. But on the whole, though spread out, the consumers at large will pay in higher prices.

The monopolists for monopoly

Thus, we see a story of what the public is sold on that differs from what the true intentions that were behind the act. Since the state operates by obtaining legitimacy, it cannot just do anything to the public. It must get some mild or tacit form of approval in order to do things.

The way they achieved this, as Rothbard emphatically put it, was that, “Monopoly could be put over in the name of opposition to monopoly!” Everyone hates monopolies right? So make them believe the government is not a monopoly, and that they’d all take over without the government.

While the public is made to believe that the central bank (the Fed) is necessary to prevent deflation (which mainstream economists have turned into a phobia), to maintain “stable prices” and “full employment”, etc., this was only the ostensible reasoning. In fact, it was bankers that were behind the act, as we’ve briefly mentioned. Specifically, it was Morgan and Rockefeller interests behind the push, as Rothbard details in what might be considered power elite analysis in his The Case Against the Fed. Rothbard states in this book, which is a who’s who of early central banking interests, that,

“Until the 1960s, historians had established the
myth that Progressivism was a virtual uprising of
workers and farmers who, guided by a new
generation of altruistic experts and intellectuals,
surmounted fierce big business opposition in order
to curb, regulate, and control what had been a
system of accelerating monopoly in the late
nineteenth century. A generation of research
and scholarship, however, has now exploded
that myth for all parts of the American polity,
and it has become all too clear that the truth is
the reverse of this well-worn fable.”

I feel like once all this is realized, everything sort of comes together. You realize the state is not that entity of “the people” which protects us from evil that would exist without it, if it didn’t come to our defense and keep us safe. But it is actually the very means cronyists use to circumvent the market and gain a special economic status above the rest of us who are subjected to natural economic forces of supply and demand, profit and loss, and the entrepreneurial need to keep gaining knowledge of the market and your customers to adapt to change.

The market is an ever-changing process of human actors whose preferences change. It is not in a static state. Because a newspaper company exists today does not mean it will tomorrow. Because XYZ Corp. was dominant a decade ago doesn’t mean its power hasn’t waned today. No one is qualified to say that market share is “too high” (or to define monopoly in terms of market share), and all such accusations are arbitrary.

How we’ve come so far

The modern, sprawling, abusively overreaching state we have today is the outcome of giving concessions to government over the decades and allowing their incremental encroachment into our private lives, beginning in large part with the progressive era and programs like the New Deal which are still thought of as a benefit for the masses. The Constitution which allegedly defined limitations to the state was an ineffective document not worth the paper it was written on.

No longer is government even talked about as essential in some minimalist form, either, but defenders of the idea of a state usually take it for whatever it is at the moment. Few defend it as a need to uphold a “common defense” and assure liberty, but do little else; the state is more often deemed essential on grounds of redistributing property and erecting evermore programs.

We might say this is why Ludwig von Mises said that there is no such thing as a “third way” or “middle-of-the-road policy” between capitalism and socialism. The true utopian idea, that giving the government a little power and expecting them to constrain themselves, of “limited government”, inevitably leads to the pervasive and sweeping statism we have today. The government, to correct its last failures, continues to implement more failed policies until the whole scheme is eventually found-out by the public that ultimately give their sanction to it.

Even some leftist anarchists (Antifa/Anarcho-communist types) appear to see the state not always as the entity which “protects capitalism” (as they wrongfully think), but as the institution which has sometimes won them concessions for the workers against the otherwise extremely exploitative capitalists who would run wild without being checked. You can hear many of them talk about labor laws as a positive for “the workers”, or even be supportive of state-ran health care and other property redistribution. Somehow they reconcile their anarchism with these views.

What are the real solutions?

Unemployment is not a problem of the market economy, which could readily absorb into its price system anyone who wanted to work, but this issue is precisely caused by government policies such as the minimum wage, unions, taxation, regulations, etc. It is said that we must force employers to pay for “unemployment insurance” as a “safety net” for “the workers” rather than to get rid of policies which cause unemployment. So we don’t need any of these “jobs bills” to “create jobs”, nor a central bank for “full employment” either; that’s what the free market for labor achieves. State policies, like minimum wage laws and endless regulations, cause unemployment. There is no involuntary unemployment in a market free of restrictions.

Rising prices, which means falling wages, is a problem of the central bank expanding the supply of money (inflating). Today, rather than look to the cause and call for an end of inflationism (which the whole Keynesian program is built around), the solution is provided that minimum wage laws ought to keep up with rising prices. These people ought to attack the source.

A stagnant economy is due to government initiating policies that plunder the existing capital stock. Government is not a producer, but is parasitic upon production, deriving its tax income by punishing productive people. If anyone wants the rising standard of living that comes out competition, economic freedom is needed.

There exists a tendency over time for genuine capitalism (e.g. no state) to be equitable to all the consumers in the economy, unlike this protectionism which favors a class of people at our expense. The wealth inequalities we see today are the result of actions like that of the central bank, whose inflation benefits the primary recipients of the inflated money (banks, government contractors, asset holders, the government itself), who spend the money at present prices while diluting the value of money for, and stealing from, everyone else down the line. What is needed here is a return to sound money and banking.

Conclusion

Basically anywhere one looks in this economy, state intervention is the cause of our problems, and increased freedom, defined as the freedom from coercion, is what’s needed to restore the ability of those actors involved in the economy to provide goods and services to each other without anyone standing in the way.

In other words, the true progressivism should be considered the free market economy while what is called Progressivism must be considered regressive, stagnation, and decline. Only free markets can bring about the wealth these people claim to support; states work to destroy this process. The opposite—freedom—can only be seen as decline if the state is regarded as progress. And so this is what they have done: created senseless fears about what would happen in the market economy should government step out of the way.

I believe socialist ideas are so popular out of the desperation of humans to believe there is some shortcut to riches; and socialism promises essentially a get-rich quick scheme. When social democrats offer something for free, their supporters truly believe it will be ready to consume in abundance after passing a law. Keynes the man, for example, who is far from a capitalist in wanting to “socialize investment”, promised a post-scarcity in a generation via government and central bank policy.

Of course this is all not possible. There are no ways around what it takes to create wealth. The people who call themselves “government”, who pretend to scribble words on paper supposedly representing “the public’s” behalf, cannot legislate prosperity. Wages don’t rise because government said so, and printing money is not the equivalent of producing new goods and services. And the taker from this article, the market isn’t made more efficient by government, but monopolies and inefficiencies come about due to its existence.