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For tens of thousands of years, humankind has inhabited the earth.
Humans have lived under every form of authoritarian government imaginable – from god-kings to emperors, dictators, presidents, and czars – yet for all of that time, very few peoples could ever consistently get enough food to feed themselves.
Famines, disease and pestilence have always killed multitudes, and still do in most places on the globe.
Yet suddenly in the space of a few generations, a relatively few people have used their energies so effectively that they have created a completely new world, where floors, toilets, electricity, telephones, computers and a thousand other things unimagined just a generation ago, are commonplace.
Why?
The physical earth has not changed significantly in remembered history. The raw materials were always there, as were the people.
The plain fact is that human energy and creativity has operated more effectively in these United States than it has operated ever before, and still more effectively than it continues to operate anywhere else on the planet.
Again, why?
Individual human energy, constantly generated and constantly acting, creates all the physical necessities of human existence, and of human society. There is no other source for human energy. Only an individual can create it. Only the individual can control their own human energy.
Human beings of course must combine their energy and their efforts in order to survive against the combined forces of nature.
The fundamental question is, what shall control this human energy?
In the old world, the world where men and women scratched and scrabbled and rarely if ever have had enough to eat, the answer has been Authority – the authority of the king, the ruler, the czar.
In theory, statism in all its variants is the total self-surrender of the individual to the will and wisdom of some imposed Authority – the State, God, or Allah.
In practice, no effort to make this theory work has ever permitted human energy to work effectively, because the theory does not take into account the fact that individuals – and only individuals – control their own energy.
The great majority of human beings on earth believe today that a super-human Authority controls human beings and their actions. This Authority goes by many names – many today call it “Society”, or the “Greater Good”.
Anyone who believes that an intangible Authority controls human beings, also usually believes that it resides in a few living men whose nature is superior to all others. They believe that some men, by their birth, race, color, election, appointment, anointment, or divine calling – posses a superior nature and a right to control their fellow men.
We today call these men and women, “Government”.
When anyone talks about a “planned economy”, he is referring to a presumed control of human energy being used in the production and distribution of material goods, by an Authority consisting of a few men or women, and according to a plan made by them, and enforced by the police.
In communism, the men who establish the commune plan its economy.
They can plan it however, only to the level of the living conditions that have already been created in that place at that time.
Additionally, they always establish “economic equality”, and an economy in which “every individual has his share of provisions and business set out”. No man can be permitted to live after his own goals and desires. That would not be communism – that would be individualism.
No one living in communism can use his energy in a new way. Everyone in the commune or the socialist state must act only in obedience to the Authority that decrees his share of business and provisions. Life is static and unchanging.
At whatever level of living conditions the commune is established, they will remain at a level no higher as long as the commune exists.
Since in fact it is individuals and only individuals who actually control their own human energy, any change in its uses can only come from the individual’s efforts, experiments, and attempt to create things that do not yet exist.
Human energy cannot get to work at its natural job of providing for human needs, if whenever men begin to develop new ways to provide for those needs, the Government (Authority) stops them.
Men in Government have no more power to control others than any man has. What they have is the use of force – command of the police and the army. Government is always a use of force, permitted by the general consent of the governed.
In fact, consent to Government is consent to a use of force to hinder, restrain, or stop individuals and minorities who act in ways that a majority does not approve or does not act to defend.
A planned economy is an absolute monopoly of agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce – held by men in Government and maintained by police and military force. The effect is to prevent economic progress.
Civilizations rise by escaping – for a time – the prison of planned economies.
They end some time after establishing a firm, good Government – an Authority many suppose to control them, albeit with their consent.
This Government invariably eventually enforces a planned economy of increasing weight, restricting the natural human use of energy until the citizens can no longer produce enough to support the Government, which then falls under its own weight, to rebellion, or to invasion.
Yet Government, as Thomas Jefferson once wrote, is a “necessary evil”.
It is necessary because -- to date, and perhaps forever – a few men will continue to use force to injure others and to take from them their property, and nothing but force will stop them.
It is evil because it itself is a use of force, and force has no morality and no moral effect.
As George Washington famously wrote, “Government is not reason, nor eloquence. It is force. And like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearsome master."
The planned economy’s eventual destruction of the Government that tries to enforce it is the invariable and often fatal result.
Government is necessary, because the human race has not yet advanced to the point where all men will work together with no use of force to protect them from each other.
The sole function of Government is to stop the few robbers and killers who hinder the others from productively employing their human energies.
Yet when Government turns its use of force upon the governed in the delusion that government force can more effectively control human energy, it not only hinders and prevents men from working for themselves, but it also ultimately cuts off its own source of sustenance and support.
A “planned economy” destroys both the social order and Government itself and prevents human progress, because when men use force in an attempt to control productive human energies, they have no means of determining or knowing the real costs, and thus these costs increase at an increasing rate until the people can no longer pay them.
Government monopoly does not need to make a profit – it can run indefinitely (it thinks) on a deficit. Taxes make up the deficit, and Government collects them, through force if necessary.
Being maintained by force, the Government monopoly does not depend upon satisfying its customers. Thus their desires have no direct effect upon it.
The inevitable disaster of socialism occurs from the fact that, when men in Government try to control the natural uses of human energy in producing and distributing goods and services, the amount of produced wealth that they must take and subtract from productive use in order to support their mis-guided efforts must constantly increase, until it no longer can be sustained. ------------------------------------------------ Compiled from portions of The Discovery of Freedom, by Rose Wilder Lane |
