Courtesy of Mish.
Here’s an interesting video courtesy of a reader from the Republic of Slovenia who sent the link.
Link if video does not play: State is an Institution of Theft
Transcript – Godfrey Bloom – Member of European Parliament
Mr. President, I am minded to quote the great American philosopher Murray Rothbard here. The state is an institution of theft. Tax is just about a system of politicians and bureaucrats who steal money from their citizens to squander in the most disgraceful manner. This place is no exception.
Fascinatingly, and I really don’t know how you manage to keep a straight face when you are talking about tax evasion. The whole commission and the commission bureaucracy avoid their taxes. You don’t pay taxes like citizens pay taxes. You have all sorts of special deals: tax rates, high tax thresholds, non-contributing pension schemes. You are the biggest tax avoiders in Europe. And here you sit pontificating, well the message is getting home to the people of the European Union.
You are going to find that eurosceptics are coming back in June, in ever greater numbers. And I can tell you worse, as the people get your number, it won’t be long before they storm this chamber and hang you. And they’ll be right.
Who is Murray Rothbard?
Three cheers for a great speech on the hypocrite nannycrats. And as many Mish readers know Murray Rothbard is far beyond a “great American philosopher“.
As Wikipedia explains, Murray Rothbard …
“was an American economist of the Austrian School, a historian, and a political theorist whose writings and personal influence played a seminal role in the development of modern libertarianism. Rothbard was the founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism, a staunch advocate of historical revisionism, and a central figure in the twentieth-century American libertarian movement. He wrote over twenty books on anarchist theory, history, economics, and other subjects. Rothbard asserted that all services provided by the “monopoly system of the corporate state” could be provided more efficiently by the private sector and wrote that the state is “the organization of robbery systematized and writ large. He called fractional reserve banking a form of fraud and opposed central banking. He categorically opposed all military, political, and economic interventionism in the affairs of other nations. In the words of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “There would be no anarcho-capitalist movement to speak of without Rothbard.”
Case Against the Fed
I highly recommend two easy-to-read book by Rothbard, both available as free eBooks courtesy of the Ludwig von Mises Institute….
