A Proper Distrust; W. A. Wallis

lations among individuals. They promise equality, justice, toler ance, and safety, as well as peace, progress, prosperity, and purity, and even truth, goodness, beauty, and salvation. They attempt to protect us from our own follies from the folly of smoking tobacco or marij uana, from the folly of watching indecent movies, from the folly of selling too cheap or buying too high, from the folly of buying too cheap or selling too high, from the folly of wasting our money, from the folly of failing to 1974 PROPER DISTRUST 477 fasten seat-belts, from the folly of buying pills i:p. containers that can be opened by children or arthrit ics, and from the folly of setting the wrong temperature on the. laundry machine. The list is end less in number, infinite in detail, and growing exponentially. It is a striking paradox that the more people distrust the govern ment, the more powers and respon sibilities they heap upon it, many of the new powers being designed to counterbalance other powers that the government already has.

The more powers the government has, the more ruthless, corrupt, and pervasive become the efforts to control those powers, the more numerous and harmful become the failures of the government, and the smaller becomes the respect We Owe It to Ourselves and confidence that the govern ment receives or deserves. The appropriate remedy for ex cessive governmental powers, for abuses of governmental powers, for ruthlessness and corruption in gaining control of governmental powers is not to create new gov ernmental powers but to disman tle those that now exist. Return the power to the people. Give each individual the right and the re sponsibility for making his own free choices and decisions. Inevit ably, some individuals will make unwise decisions, even decisions that harm other people; but in the long run the harm done in this way is likely to be neither as great in the aggregate nor as hard to cor rect as the. harm done by over-gov ernment. f) IDEAS ON LIBERTY INDIVIDUALISM suggests the idea that if a living is owed a man, he is both the creditor and the debtor. He must collect and he must pay. All he has a right to expect from society is that it will not intervene between cause· and effect to his prejudice. To be as sured of this he must be assured against political interventions. He is entitled to all he produces, but outside himself there is no power that can ethically produce for him.

E. C. RIEGEL, Planned Prosperity JOHN A. SPARKS Those Fellowswith Dark Hats the Speculators the witch was to medieval man, the caIOn~aU~)t is to the socialists and the to most pOln~C:lar1IS and statesmen: the of eviL" Hans F. Sennholz ONCE AGAIN the guns of public criticism are trained upon specu lators. Legislative committees are hearing testimony about their ac tivities; governmental officials are denouncing them. Why are specu lators so often under attack ? Bor rowing from the old-fashioned western - why are speculators in variably portrayed as wearing black hats? One reason for the tarnished image of the speculator today is the widespread misunderstanding about who speculators are. To many people, a speculator is a crafty, cold, professional, standing against a Wall Street backdrop. Granted, a gathering of specu lators would include professionals. But, just as clearly, it would in clude many amateurs. Several years ago the occupations of perProfessor Sparks is Chairman of the Division of Economics & Business Administration, Hills dale College, Hillsdale, Michigan.