From a pamphlet by Daniel Defoe, written in the year 1704:

I humbly crave leave to lay these heads down as fundamental maxims, which I am ready at any time to defend and make out.

1. There is in England more labor than hands to perform it, and consequently a want of people, not of employment.

2. No man in England, of sound limbs and senses, can be poor merely for want of work.

3. All our workhouses, corporations and charities for employing the poor, and setting them to work, as now they are employed, or any Acts of Parliament, to empower overseers of parishes, or parishes themselves, to employ the poor, except as shall be hereafter excepted, are, and will be public nuisances, mischiefs to the nation which serve to the ruin of families and the increase of the poor.

4. That it is a regulation of the poor that is wanted in England, not a setting them to work.

The poverty and exigence of the poor in England is plainly derived from one of these two particular causes — casualty or crime. By casualty, I mean sickness of families, loss of limbs or sight, and any, either natural or accidental, impotence as to labor. The crimes of our people, and from whence their poverty derives, as the visible and direct fountains are

1. Luxury

2. Sloth

3. Pride

By Prof. Hartley L. Lutz

When one puts together the bugaboo of the mature economy, the seduction of the government guarantee and the bludgeon of destructive taxation, their cumulative effect upon the spirit of enterprise is tremendous. That there should be any spark of vitality left would be amazing, were it not for the reflection that people have lived for long periods in the catacombs.

Instead of all the talking and planning that is now heard about how to save or to restore and stimulate the enterprise system after the war, a short and simple formula is offered here as being all that is necessary.

This formula, addressed to every citizen, is as follows:

If you want to make a dollar by any honest means you are free to try, and if you succeed you may keep it.

A blast from the (recent) past:

“We’ve put together this healthcare reader as a means of providing a deeper understanding of cause and effect. This market is like all other sectors of society: it functions best under conditions of freedom rather than state control.”

The human donkey requires either a carrot in front or a stick behind to goad it into activity. It is fashionable at the moment to argue that the carrot is the more important of the two: ‘incentive’ is the watchword, and all classes of the community are busy arguing that if only they are given a little bit more in the way of incentive (at the expense of the rest of the community) they will respond with more activity.

From miners to company promoters, the basic argument is the same. And no doubt, within limits, it is quite correct: a bigger carrot would make the donkey move a bit faster. But it is probably more realistic (though it has that touch of brutal cynicism that is so much frowned upon these days) to hold that the stick is likely to be more effective than the carrot.

It may be true that one reason why people will not work hard is that they can buy so little with their wages. But it is much more true that they will not work because the fear of the sack has vanished from the land and because the bankruptcy court is a depressed area.

However, it is not necessary for the present purpose to argue the respective potencies of the carrot and the stick; it is enough to agree that, if an active and progressive economy is to be founded on the frailties of human nature, both are needed.

But the whole drift of British society for two generations past has been to whittle away both at the carrot and the stick, until now very little of either is left. It is the passion for equality — excellent in itself — that has removed the carrot. The rewards of success have not merely been shriveled; they have been poisoned, since commercial success itself has been turned, in the eyes of wide circles of society, into a positive disgrace.

There is a conspiracy of labor, capital and the state to deny enterprise its reward. The state takes it away in high taxation. All economic progress is, by definition, labor saving; yet the attitude of the trade unions, successfully maintained, is that they will permit labor-saving devices only provided that they do not in fact save labor.

Nor is the attitude of organized capital any better. The embattled trade association movement has had great success in building up a code of industrial good manners which puts any attempt to reduce costs and prices by greater skill or enterprise under the ban of ‘destructive competition.’ The industrialist who discovers a way of making better things more cheaply (which is what he is sent on earth to do) is deprived by the state of all pecuniary return and by his own colleagues of any social reward. Instead of a carrot he gets a raspberry.

Very seldom do the proponents of public housing say frankly that they believe in the socialization of property. They talk of there being a place for public housing. They talk of just a little public housing. There may be those who believe honestly that it is possible to have just a little public housing. It is no more possible to have just a little public housing, than it is possible to have just a little cancer.

He who advocates public housing as a permanent national policy advocates the permanent nationalization of all property. Let us stand on this issue and on this base make our decision.

The question is properly asked, ‘What is the alternative? How may a good house be provided for every American family in the shortest length of time?’

The answer to this question lies in the second, third, fourth, and fifth-hand house.

I believe it to be completely absurd to reverse the whole normal process of distribution by supplying new houses on the lowest level of consuming power.

We could never have achieved the miracles of distribution which have been achieved in this country by this inverted process. Always we have distributed the new article, the most advanced article, to the man who is best able to buy it. By the simple process of depreciation, this new product has then passed from hand to hand until the very poorest man in the whole community had a product many times as good as the one which he originally had, before the first purchaser started the thing off at the top.

It is obvious that only a minute percentage of our whole population can ever have new houses. One only has to consider the fact that a very small percent, perhaps 1 percent or 2 percent, of the total houses in the country can at any one time be new, so that most of us, no matter what our incomes may be, or our standard in the community may be, occupy used houses throughout the majority or all of our lifetimes.

Just for fun, I made a search in my own family not long ago and I find that on neither side of my parents has there been a new house in the family for over three generations.

If we are sincere, therefore, in desiring to provide a good home for every American family, in the shortest possible length of time and if we are not seeking, in disguise, to sell national socialism under the cloak of housing, the thing to do is to pour into the top the greatest number of new houses for those who are in the market for them.

When our builders succeed in providing 100,000 new homes for people who can afford them, for perhaps seven, eight, or ten thousand dollars’ purchase price, they automatically provide 100,000 new homes for people less able to pay — homes, not new in construction, but new to the family who will occupy them.

Housing, you see, is like a taut chain — when you lift the top link, you lift every link in the chain.

[From chapter 12 of The Rise and Fall of Society by Frank Chodorov.]

Approximately forty centuries later the farmers of America were faced with an economic disability of proportions. In this case the hurt was not caused by nature but by the law of the land. There was a great disparity between their income and their cost of living, caused by the fact that while they were compelled to accept for their product the price set in the competitive world market they were concurrently compelled to pay tariff-laden prices for their manufactured needs. Equity demanded the abolition of tariffs, but this would have weakened the power of the State, which would not do at all. So, some reformer came up with the idea that the farmer’s income be augmented with taxes levied on the rest of the population (even as the income of protected manufacturers is improved by tariffs) to the indefinable point where farm income would equal farm outgo. This was called “parity.” The politicians took to it not because they either understood the terms of the proposed law or foresaw its effects, but because advocacy of it promised them the preferment to which their lives were dedicated.

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The bonanza promised the farmers turned out to be largely promise; since most of the farms of the country are owned on mortgage or are operated on a tenancy arrangement, a considerable portion of the subsidy goes to the mortgagees or real owners; more important, the artificial price which the State sets on crops puts them out of the world market while the domestic market is constricted by the tax-reduced purchasing power of consumers. As with all subsidies, some people do get something for nothing out of “farm relief” the rest of Society pay the bill, and the net profit is an augmentation of State power. For the reform measure, in operation, produced a multitude of unforeseen problems, each of which called for a remedial law and more enforcement agents, until at long last the farmer of America finds himself controlled, regulated, and otherwise harassed by the authorities. The dream of reform always portends a profit for Pharaoh.

Frank Chodorov was an advocate of the free market, individualism, and peace. He began as a supporter of Henry George and edited the Georgist paper the Freeman before founding his own journal which became the influential Human Events. He later founded another version of the Freeman for the Foundation for Economic Education and lectured at the Freedom School in Colorado.