Carl Mathiesen

re: MediCare and Social Security

"The notion that the alleged incompetence of the individual is a basis for turning responsibility over to the collective reduces to the absurdity that those who are incompetent to run their own lives  are thereby qualified to run the lives of others."

"From its inception in 1935 to the present day, the Social Security system has served both to undercut people's motivation to provide for old age and retirement by means of saving and also their sheer ability to do so."

"Hopefully, there is a special place in Hell reserved for all the political con men and intellectual shysters of the last generations who endlessly dismissed the significance of national debts with such glib phrases as 'we owe it to ourselves' …"

These shysters diverted literally trillions of dollars of what people were led to believe were their savings, set aside for their future benefit, into current government spending."

Fundamentally, rights to entitlements of any kind, that must be paid for involuntarily by other people, are no more legitimate than the alleged property rights of slave owners in their slaves."

Ludwig von Mises: "Despots and democratic majorities are drunk with power. They must reluctantly admit that they are subject to the laws of nature. But they reject the very notion of economic law . . . economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics." - Austrian Economics: An Anthology