Do We Need a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform? - Big Government

Raising taxes to sustain government transfer programs is not going to solve our budget crisis. Indeed, this is how we got into the problem in the first place. In 1850, Bastiat wrote in The Law that a just government is based upon our natural right to self-defense. An unjust law is one which violates this natural right, by taking the property of one person to give to another. He also argued that once a government engages in what he termed “legalized plunder” several things will happen, one of which is that people will fail to recognize an unjust law when they see it. The government will become, in his words, “that great fiction by everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” We have arrived at that time.