The institution of the State is not normal or natural. We will pay for making this error. There are not different and unequal laws applying to masters and individuals. Once you accept, incorrectly, unilateral taxation and ultimate jurisdiction in the hands of the state you are stuck. Instead of protecting us, our government has made us more helpless and impoverished while they become richer and more powerful. Yet, the state owes its existence entirely to ideas and can be brought down quickly when the majority withdraws its consent from those ideas. Intellectuals are overwhelmingly statist. Thus, arguments against statists need to be ethical and moral arguments. Taxation is either just or unjust. Friedman and Hayek’s ideas contributed to the growth of the state, so the fact that those two men supported an issue does not make it ethical. Politicians are not only thieves, but generally mass murderers. Hayek gave us an uninspired vision of the Swedish welfare state; Rothbard gave us inspired visions of a destatized society. Instead, as intermediate goals, we can aspire to a world of tens of thousands of Singapores and San Marinos – small unities engaging in open free trade policies. Perhaps even a Mises Institute reservation! Democracy will not abolish itself; the masses will not give up their right to other people’s money. But most will agree that social issues should be solved on the smallest possible level. Lecture 10 of 10 from Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Economy, Society, and History.

Murray N. Rothbard (Mises.org/Rothbard) lectures at the Mises Institute's "First Annual Advanced Instructional Conference in Austrian Economics" at Stanford University; June 21-27, 1987. Mises.org/MisesU87

As with all government intervention, price controls do not achieve what their originators think they will. Trying to maintain a supply of milk by putting a price control on it will cause shortages, which are the very situations the price manipulators said they wanted to avoid. Rent control seems great to the snug renter, but it will assure that no new building or renovations will be undertaken by entrepreneurs. Shortages follow. Agricultural subsidies, quotas and price support loans function as regressive taxes upon the poor. Sugar cane price controls are among long-standing interventions in the market. The fourth in a series of ten lectures, from "Fundamentals of Economic Analysis: A Causal-Realist Approach".

Lecture presented by Peter G. Klein at the Ludwig von Mises Institute's 2010 Mises University conference, held at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama; July 25-31, 2010. Since 1985, this annual conference has been the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics and is an essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream. http://mises.org