O Intermitente
(So long, farewell, auf weidersehen, good-bye)

terça-feira, julho 29, 2003

A Inevitabilidade do Estado

Um artigo de Walter Williams questiona a inevitabilidade da existência de certas politicas e organismos estatais.

"Whenever someone says that this or that government program is absolutely necessary, I always wonder, "What did people do and how did they survive before the program?"

If someone says food stamps are absolutely necessary for poor people's survival, I wonder how America's millions of poor immigrants made it. Unless I missed something, mass starvation is not a part of our history. Was there a stealth food stamp program during the 1700s and 1800s?

Then there's the question: How did we manage to build the world's greatest cities without the help of the 1965-created U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development? Did cities become worse off or better off afterward? Or, how did we manage to produce energy to fuel the world's richest economy before the 1977 creation of the Department of Energy?

(...)

In a free society, government has the responsibility of protecting us from others, but not from ourselves. Before government got into the business of protecting us from ourselves, we did have a greater measure of protection from others.

(...)

Don't you wonder how so many Americans made it without today's oppressive, caring, nanny government?"
posted by Miguel Noronha 7:35 da tarde