The Maker of Shortages
back his natural heritage. The State jealously guards the power over Society which it has acquired during a climate of fear. To prove the point, we need not review the history of ancient Rome, where a succession of protective wars ended up in the servitude of the people to the emperors; we need only list and add up the interventionary powers acquired by the American State during the wars it conducted; the sum total is a monstrous tax load, a monstrous bureaucracy, a monstrous statute book, and a popular conviction that the State (which was feared and despised in 1789) is the giver of all things good. So, then, the "protective" service rendered by the State is paid for not only with taxes but also with subservience. Society is much poorer for it.
It is when the State undertakes to manage, regulate, or control the market place, or presumes to enter it as an entrepreneur, that its capacity for causing shortages is best displayed. Necessarily, the State brings to bear in such ventures the only tool in its kit—force. It has no other equipment. Not that the bureaucracy, if they applied themselves as individuals to production, could not do as well as other individuals of equal capacity, but that as bureaucrats they feel no call to meet the conditions of the market place; they have force at their command and their business is to use that force. And force, in the political sense, is to the market place as sand is to a machine.
Let us look to a few of the State's forays into the market place which it undertakes in the interest of the "general welfare."
The encouragement of home industry by limiting or excluding competitive importations has been standard procedure with the State since time immemorial. The foreigner's 128
