Introduction Garden-variety Corruption of Officials Legal Corruption of Officials Absence of Proper Accounting Invites Theft

PAC Contributions Are Bribes Figure 1 How Government Corrupts Business Can Anything Be Done? References

Military-supply firms exemplify a fundamentally corrupt type of organization. Their income comes to them only after it has first been extorted from the taxpayers at gunpoint — hence their compensation amounts to receiving stolen property. They are hardly unwitting or unwilling recipients, however, because they are not drafted to do what they do. No wallflowers at this dance of death, they eagerly devote strenuous efforts to encouraging government officials to wring ever-greater amounts from the taxpayers and to distribute the loot in ways that enrich the contractors, their suppliers, and their employees. FULL ARTICLE

---

You may also be interested in this email exchange from the early days of my blog:

• bkmarcus.com/blog/2004/09/defense-contrators.html
• bkmarcus.com/blog/2004/09/more-on-defense-contractors.html

First, I quote a recent post at blog.Mises:

Mises at Madison Square Garden

Mises.org Updates

When Mises was 81 years old, he was invited to address a student rally at Madison Square Garden that was sponsored by the Young Americans for Freedom. He readily accepted. He prepared an address that those in attendance would never forget.

He looked out over the sea of young people who had rejected the socialistic propaganda then common on college campuses, and with a smile on his face and determination in his voice, he said:

“The spell of the dreadful conformity that threatened to convert our country into a spiritual desert is broken. There are again young men and women eager to think over the fundamental problems of life and action. This is a genuine moral and intellectual resurrection, a movement that will prevents us from falling prey to the arbitrary tyranny of dictators. As an old man I am greeting the young generation of liberators.”

The audience roared in applause. Here was the world’s greatest economist, a legend in his time, telling them that the future of freedom was in their hands. Clearly the rally brought joy to his heart.

Where can you find this remarkable speech? In this thrilling collection of essays newly published as Economic Freedom and Interventionism. This volume publishes 47 of the most difficult to find speeches, small essays, and reviews by Mises, all written for a popular audience during his American years. Here we see Mises bringing the results of a lifetime of teaching and research to engage the ideas of his time, during the height of the great battle of the 20th century between freedom and collectivism.

Then I quote Murray Rothbard addressing the same audience 7 years later:

This open letter is addressed to the libertarians attending the YAF national convention in St. Louis this Labor Day weekend. Notice I said the libertarians in YAF; I have nothing to say to the so-called “traditionalists” (a misnomer, by the way, for we libertarians have our traditions too, and they are glorious ones. It all depends on which traditions: the libertarian ones of Paine and Price, of Cobden and Thoreau, or the authoritarian ones of Torquemada and Burke and Metternich.) Let us leave the authoritarians to their Edmund Burkes and their Crowns of St. Something-or-other. We have more serious matters to discuss.

In the famous words of Jimmy Durante: “Have ya ever had the feelin’ that ya wanted to go, and yet ya had the feelin’ that ya wanted to stay?” This letter is a plea that you use the occasion of the public forum of the YAF convention to go, to split, to leave the conservative movement where it belongs: in the hands of the St. Something-or-others, and where it is going to stay regardless of what action you take. Leave the house of your false friends, for they are your enemies.

That’s from “Listen, YAF!” August 1969. You can read the rest of it here:

bkmarcus.com/cache/Rothbard/ListenYAF/

This one reminds me of an exchange I had with a coworker at my last corporate gig:

I told him I’d once had a date go very wrong because the young woman couldn’t believe I didn’t have any ketchup in my fridge.

He said: “Why, where do you keep it?”

A friend of mine forwarded me this: