Tews News

“A government trying to step in and improve the workings of a free market is exactly like a man who takes a lighted lantern at noon of a bright June day to show you the sun. But a government’s answer to any criticism as to the inadequacy of the lantern is always to bring more lanterns and then more lanterns – until eventually the smoke and glare of the lanterns so seriously interfere with and shut off the light of the sun that everybody actually has to work mainly by lantern light.
It is interesting to note, too, that in any society the government, and its allies who want to use the lanterns, always claim the justification that the society’s economy is more complex than those which have preceded it. They insist that therefore the lanterns of planning and control are necessary and helpful now, no matter how futile and harmful they have been shown to be in the past. Of course exactly the opposite is true. The more complex the economic life of a nation becomes; the more nearly infinite the shades and grades of impulse which determine the proper interchanges and relationships between its components become; then the more impossible and ridiculous is any undertaking to plan and control these relationships, and the more the automatic working of a completely free market is needed.”

— Robert Welch, The Blue Book, pages 122-123, Copyright 1959. From the 23rd printing.