The End of Gun Control: 5.4 Diminishing Security Returns On Investment
When people need to devote more energy to “making a living”, their capacity to contribute to “the security of a free state” diminishes. Political spending, by taxes, debt & inflation undermines order.
It is useful to remember that all government spending transpires at the expense of the citizenry. Governments have no resources of their own. All that they spend must come from one of three ways:
1. Taxation.
2. Inflation.
3. Debt
All three sources of government revenue impose liabilities on the constituent citizen. Because most people do not like being taxed, government actors frequently resort to more subtle ways of accessing other people’s wealth.
Taxes, excises, imposts, levies, and fees can readily be seen reflected in the prices of everyday goods and services. Inflating the money supply and spending the newly created currency units before market prices adjust to the new monetary reality is not as noticeable to the average person. Similarly, spending borrowed money in the present, with a promissory note to pay back at some future point, is also something most people don’t pay attention to.
In the United States, the national debt is just some impossibly large number that people might hear bandied about on the news yet don’t think of as a matter for their concern. In a sense they are correct, there is little that the average person can do to rectify the national debt or Federal Reserve policy as an individual, yet the implications of debt and inflation impact every tax-payer and US Dollar user today and into the future.
Funding government activity is something every citizen should be concerned with because it comes at their own expense. Every citizen’s income decreases through taxation. Ultimately, all taxes cut away at the available resources a person has to use for their own purposes and detracts from their livelihood. The less resources they have at their disposal means they have less bandwidth to satisfy their needs and desires, leading to the need to work harder or longer, or go unfilled.
When people need to devote more time, attention, and energy to “making a living” their capacity to train and contribute to “the security of a free state” is diminished. In this way, political spending, through taxation, debt, or inflation, undermines the common defense and constitutional order.
One can argue about the proportion of benefit the average citizen receives in return for the amount of taxes they pay. For some it may appear like a net gain. They might feel that they are getting more in benefits than what they pay in to “the system”. Yet there is much more to the story.
I will set this aside for now simply by asking that if the returns on investment for these programs are so great, why is participation in them imposed at gunpoint?
Further, the costs of provisioning all this government spending is difficult to calculate, particularly for most citizens because taxes are only what is seen. The real skill of economics, to paraphrase Henry Hazlitt, consists of not merely looking at the immediate effects of a policy but tracing the longer consequences for everyone impacted by it.
While some people see the benefits of a government program in excess of what they pay in taxes, in most cases, they do not comprehend the decrease in purchasing power that comes through monetary inflation and debt fueled government spending that leads to price inflation. Monetary inflation is an increase in the money supply, effectively reducing the value of every other existing monetary unit (dollars, euro, yen, etc), leading to price inflation on the goods and services people want to buy using the newly diluted money.
This is why inflation is so insidious. It is a stealth tax, a deceptive method for politicians and bureaucrats to sap resources from the population before the harmful effects of currency debasement fully manifest. Inflation is a war on the commoner’s wealth. Like every other form of warfare, monetary “policy” is the ground of survival or extinction. One cannot but consider it.