The spending
of other people's money is one of the great problems of modern life.
Money and property are the fruit of one's labor, and the ownership
rights attendant therein is the root of freedom and prosperity.
As such the ownership rights of money are a perpetual battleground
between man and the state.

Money is a
form of capital, a concentrated form of previously performed labor.
Who owns it and who dispenses of it are an issue of contention between
man and the state. If the owner of money dispenses of it, in whatever
fashion, spending, burying, saving, or trusting it to a proxy it
is consonant with natural property rights. A proxy example would
be a savings account in a savings and loan, or buying a stock or
a bond. The capital ownership has been retained, but the usage right
has been transferred on a temporary and contractually agreed upon
basis. In this sense it is not the spending of other's people money
since this right has been transferred knowledgeably and with permission
of the owner.

Taxation is
a forcible taking of private property, usually money, by the state.
It is covered under the legalistic façade of societal law,
but is not a natural property right since the state has no natural
rights as it is not an individual.

Inflation is
unlegislated taxation by the state central bank (all countries have
a fiat currency and a central bank that inflates and thus benefit
from this unlegislated tax). The money supply increases arbitrarily
while the goods and services produced by the economy (private individuals)
have not, and thus prices must increase. The benefit accrues to
the state through its central bank since they have taken ownership
of the private capital with this dilution. A secondary benefit accrues
to the first-order friends of the government through which this
money flows: bankers, military suppliers and all sorts of federal
supplicants that get at the head of this line where priority is
determined politically and not by the market. Thus they spend dollars
that depreciate less than those held by the public at large. This
is the reason all central banks inflate, albeit some worse than
others (compare Switzerland and the United States).

Taxation and
inflation represent the dysfunctional spending of Other People's
Money since it is a violation of property rights by those charged
with securing them, the state. Private disposition is functional
spending since no property rights have been violated since the exchanges
are voluntary.

The perceptive
reader might argue that taxation is an approved form of spending
since it is a direct result of a plebiscite and actions by our elected
officials. However, it is my own opinion that our bi-partisan political
process is really just a rhetorical battle between the two factions
of the ruling party the socialists/democrats and the fascists/republicans.
They only disagree on how the lucre is to be disposed of, not on
the hows and why with which it is obtained is. This all covered
in a legalistic façade. It is legalistic in that it is covered
in a blizzard of laws and regulation that no single human being
has any hope of penetrating, understanding and opposing, purely
on the volume involved and the limited lifespan of people thus imposing
a cost barrier too high while maintaining the illusion of the rule
of law. It is a faade because it obscures what is really going
on, the usurpation of individual and states rights as guaranteed
by the Constitution.

Ultimately
this is what the War of Northern Aggression (a.k.a. Civil War and
slavery was a peripheral issue in the dialog) was fought over. Sociologist
Charles Murray has put this very eloquently: "Law that is sufficiently
complex is indistinguishable from no law at all." The Federal
Register grows by thousands of pages each and every day Congress
is in session, and we are clearly at the point of complexity he
delineates.

Contemporary
law is fungible at the hands of the wealthy and well connected,
and no longer locked in the moral canons of the electorate as the
original laws circa the 18th century were.

The evils perpetrated
on mankind in the twentieth century can all be traced to forcible
property taking; the dysfunctional spending of Other People's Money
led to World War I and II, the Korean War and Vietnam Wars, the
War in Iraq, all of which popular opinion in opinion poles and the
electoral plebiscite opposed. Wilson was elected on a pledge for
the US to remain neutral. Stalin and Mao's purges, the famines,
and all the local civil wars have been funded by forcible property
taking by taxation, inflation, war bonds, and outright confiscation
at gunpoint. This has all been a violation of the natural property
rights of man. The greatest good attendant upon mankind would be
to put this to an end once and for all time, as Ludwig von Mises
has demonstrated with his unassailable deductive logic in multiple
books.

I find it
very educational to read the words of President George Washington
in his farewell address.
He is speaking not to 1796, but to us, here, today. Warning of the
dangers we now face daily. He was prescient.

The world will
return to its natural state of peace and harmony between people
and nations once this tyranny of the modern world by state-controlled
media, banking and strong central government ends. The result of
this will be acceleration in the spread of material prosperity and
in upwelling of rate of human progress.

July
11, 2006

George
Giles [send him mail] is
an independent thinker and writer in Nashville, Tennessee.