To find my happy place, I usually pick up an Ayn Rand book. (No jokes please).  So, yesterday, I was in a really bad mood and picked up Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

The book is a collection of essays by Ayn and a number of her followers (including the great Greenspan who, ironically, wrote about the need for a gold standard so that our nation didn’t go about printing money willy nilly). There are over 20 essays in this book with at least 18 of them pertinent to today’s discussion of expanding governmental powers.  This book alone will provide me with loads of blog content.  Lucky you!

In this post, I wanted to highlight her essay entitled “Let Us Alone” which starts with this:

“Since ‘economic growth’ is today’s great problem, and our present Administration is promising to ‘stimulate’ it – to achieve general prosperity by ever wider government controls, while spending an unproduced wealth – I wonder how many people know of the term laissez-faire?”

Interesting, no?  She could have written this yesterday (if she was alive, of course).  She opens the essay describing seventeenth century France under the rule of Louis XIV and then goes on with the following.

“Colbert, chief advisor of Louis XIV, was one of the early modern statists.  He believed that government regulations can create national prosperity and that higher tax revenues can be obtained only from the country’s ‘economic growth’; so he devoted himself to seeking ‘a general increase of wealth by the encouragement of industry.’  The encouragement consisted of imposing countless government controls and minute regulations that choked business activity; the result was dismal failure.

“Colbert was not an enemy of business; no more than is our present Administration.  Colbert was eager to help fatten the sacrificial victims – and on one historic occasion, he asked a group of manufacturers what he could do for industry.  A manufacturer named Legendre answered:  ‘Laissez-nous faire!’  (‘Let us alone!’)

“Apparently, the French businessmen of the seventeenth century had more courage than their American counterparts of the twentieth, and a better understanding of economics.  They knew that government ‘help’ to business is just as disasterous as government persecution, and that the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.”

Timeless observations.  Do you think the banks and auto companies are rethinking their pleas for help?

We don’t need to confine this to the past 6-9 months’ financial crisis we are currently experiencing.  It has been a trend of this country and its government for the past century.  I believe the current breaking of our banking system is the evidence of excess/improper/corrupt/whatever regulation and does not serve as an example of our need for more.  And yet we find ourselves asking for more.  Global Climate Regulation.  Universal Health Care.  More Social Security.  No Child Left Behind.  Prescription Drug Plans.  The list goes on and on.  I’m afraid it only stops when, as many have stated many times before, no one will take our promissory notes and we will be sitting there with “great ideas” and “great needs” and no money or skills to execute them.

But there may be a happy ending…  Refer back to the last paragraph of Ayn Rand’s that I presented above where she mentions government help is no better than government persecution.  The two are attached at the hip as we see in the current environment.  Bonuses for bailouts show how government help can quickly move to persecution, mostly of the innocent as the corrupt sit hand in hand with the politicians doing the persecution.  That, my friends, is what gives me hope that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.  The faster we can have individuals realize that the helping hand of government quickly turns into the heavy hand of coercion, the faster we will see individuals strive for self sustaining private solutions.

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