Against the Central Planners of Left and Right by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Professor Thomas E. Woods, Jr. writes:

"Forget going after government armed with public-policy studies showing that federal farm policy has been an expensive boondoggle or that federal poverty policy has only entrenched social pathologies that have rendered our cities unlivable. True and valuable as these statements are, they do not penetrate to the fundamental immorality of a system that is based on fleecing ordinary citizens in order to bestow special privileges on sectors of the population that did nothing to earn them...

"this supposedly 'failed' government program hasn’t failed at all. It has done just what its architects wanted it to do: it enriched well-connected big farmers as well as a huge class of bureaucrats in the Department of Agriculture. These people... are ripping us off...

"Rather than agitating for this or that reform, the entire system must be demystified and delegitimized. Superstitious reverence for Washington, D.C., must yield to the conviction that society, like the market itself, can order its affairs without the central direction of an imperial capital. Property owners, families, voluntary organizations, churches – in other words, all the institutions that the central state consistently seeks to marginalize or displace – can maintain a livable and decent social order far better than the would-be central planners of left and right."

Against the Central Planners of Left and Right by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.