Assume that a surgeon has discovered how to do brain surgery, that he can do only one a month, that 1,000 persons a year need such an operation if they are to survive. How is the surgeon's scarce resource to be allocated? Charge whatever price is necessary to adjust supply and demand, say $50,000! 'For shame,' some will cry. 'Your market system will save only wealthy people.' For the moment, yes. But soon there will be hundreds of surgeons who will acquire the same skill; and, as in the case of the once scarce and expensive 'miracle drugs,' the price then will be within reach of all.

The welfare state destroys the market mechanisms - lessens free choice and willing exchange. Simultaneously creating unnatural specializations, it must, granted statism's premise, resort to welfarism; that is, it must assume the responsibility for the people's welfare: their employment, their old age, their income, and the like. As this is done, man loses his wholeness; he is dispossessed of responsibility for self, the very essence of his manhood. The more dependent he becomes, the less dependable!

Such terms as communism, socialism, Fabianism, the welfare state, Nazism, fascism, state interventionism, egalitarianism, the planned economy, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier are simply different labels for much the same thing.

The libertarian can have no truck with 'left' or 'right' because he regrets any form of authoritarianism - the use of police force to control the creative life of man.

The proper and limited use of government is to invoke a common justice and keep the peace - and that is all.

I would have government defend the life and property of all citizens equally; protect all willing exchange; suppress and penalize all fraud, all misrepresentation, all violence, all predatory practices; invoke a common justice under law; and keep the records incidental to these functions. Even this is a bigger assignment than governments, generally, have proven capable of. Let governments do these things and do them well. Leave all else to men in free and creative effort.

The system of plunder derives much of its support from individuals who do not subscribe to socialism but who say, 'We're paying for it, so we might as well get our share'