Our friend Steven Greenhut explains how government bureaucrats mercilessly plunder taxpayers, making us their servants in a discussion of his new book, Plunder, on C-SPAN.
Greenhut’s book is an illustration of what John C. Calhoun described in his 1850 book, A Disquisition on Government. In it Calhoun predicted that in any democracy there would be two warring political classes, the net taxpayers (who paid more in taxes than they received in benefits from the government) and the net tax consumers (who received more in benefits than they paid in taxes). The tax consumers would inevitably outnumber and plunder the net taxpayers, which is why Calhoun believed a written constitution alone could never tame the state. Nullification, secession, or “concurrent majorities” that could veto unconstitutional legislation were needed, he wrote. He was absolutely right of course.
Here is a scholarly treatment of what is known as classical liberal or Austrian class analysis by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
2:25 pm on January 4, 2010
