Libertarian Party of North Carolina - Articles

Gifts from Your Government
by Richard O. Hammer

Black Markets

Black markets are bad, right?

But try asking one of the traders, someone buying or selling in a black market, if the market is bad. It turns out that a black market, like any free market, helps the people who trade in it. Traders want to advance their own ends. So trade happens, markets form.

Now some of those markets become "black," by definition, when government outlaws that kind of trade. None of the people involved are complaining, but good fortune has given us legislators who are evidently wiser than normal humans. Aren't we lucky?

Keogh Plans

Keogh plans exist only because of tax law. The same applies to IRAs. Working people distinguish some income, which they set aside for retirement, only because government taxes that income differently.

Yes, tax law complicates our lives. But government, we should try to understand, finds itself in a bind. It would like to take everything we own today, but if it did that, then we would not produce anything for it to take tomorrow. So, dividing out income into complex categories, it leaves us enough to keep on working to feed it.

If we could expunge a big and ugly word like "government" from our language, we could also drop little nuisances like "Keogh" and "IRA".

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