There has been an explosion of satires created with mobile apps and artificial intelligence tools, linking him to movies and TV series. One such meme was displayed on a billboard in Times Square, New York, portraying him as “the Tax Human,“ a parody of the hero “the Human Torch.“ These memes have proliferated due to recent tax increases.

Aided by the press, the Brazilian government started claiming that organized groups were creating these satires. CNN journalists alleged that “there was a reduction in the tax burden percentage relative to gross domestic product, and that Haddad, although amused, does not want to take a stance at the moment.“ GloboNews went further, asserting that “the memes were clearly produced professionally. There is evidently investment behind them.“ Another journalist added: “Of course, Haddad will not bow down or get depressed because of this. It is necessary to try to identify the source to prohibit and prevent future attacks. That is my opinion.“

The national president of the PT (Workers’ Party), Gleisi Hoffmann, claims that the attacks are deceitful and originate from supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro. According to her, “the memes are proof that Brazil’s economy is improving.“ In an official video, she stated that “the opposition is terrified,“ the tax burden is decreasing, and Brazil’s revenue has been growing due to economic activity and the Ministry of Finance’s actions against tax calculation distortions. Hoffmann reiterated that “the Lula government will continue to surprise those who root against Brazil.“ Even more regrettably, the head of the Attorney General’s Office, Jorge Messias, defended Haddad. “Who finances the meme industry? Could it be the humbler citizens, benefited by tax reform? Or the wealthier ones, affected by taxation after years of advantages? It’s worth reflecting,“ Messias wrote on his X profile.

As I mentioned, humor is an ancient tool against statist follies and tax hikes. In the comedy “The Wasps“ (422 B.C.), Aristophanes satirizes the Athenian judicial system and the heavy tax burdens that sustain inefficient bureaucracy. Roman poet Juvenal, in his “Satires” (A.D. 100-127), criticized government corruption, including the heavy taxes levied on citizens.

Before the Jewish revolt of A.D. 70, Jerusalem was governed by Roman procurator Gessius Florus. He is remembered for plundering entire cities and charging “tolls“ from thieves to let them freely practice their “profession.“ Taxes continuously increased. In A.D. 66, seeking prestige and money, he stole 17 talents of gold (a little more than half a ton) from the temple of Jerusalem. The Jews mocked him by begging in the streets of Jerusalem with baskets in hand, asking for money for the “poor procurator.“ Gessius Florus was furious with the mockery.

During the harsh years of communism, people faced long lines for scarce products. Humor emerged as a shield, with jokes being shared as discreetly as possible to avoid the attention of the secret police, who saw these anecdotes as a form of “anti-communist propaganda“ and a threat to the regime. Ronald Reagan, then president of the U.S., was a collector of jokes about communism, believing in their power to challenge rigid censorship structures. He always ended his speeches with a joke, no matter where or with whom he was, even in front of the Communist Party secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev. Here is one of my favorite jokes that illustrates this point well:

“In the Soviet Union, the process to acquire a car included a 10-year wait. You paid the money up front and faced a long procedure. They tell the story of a man who, after making his payment, was informed by the attendant: ‘Okay, come back in 10 years to pick up your car.‘ To which he asked: ‘Morning or afternoon?‘ Surprised, the attendant replied: ‘In 10 years, what difference does it make?’ And the man explained: ‘It’s because the plumber is coming in the morning.‘” 

This joke, told by Reagan, becomes even funnier when heard directly from him.

Now, we are seeing the rise of AutoMemes. People are portraying themselves as if they were Haddad, associating themselves with well-known phrases from movie titles, TV series or artist names. This shows that it is a spontaneous creation, not generated by a central office or financed by a foreign agency.

The official propaganda machine, the true one, tried to promote images of the minister, calling him “the Tax Terminator.“ A video, posted on a profile of a professor from a federal university — then three months old with only 45 views — teaches how to make memes to combat the far right. All this, of course, funded with taxes.

As usual, the left makes a fundamental mistake in addressing economic issues. Instead of implementing effective measures to reduce the size of the public machine, such as dismissing unnecessary employees and privatizing state-owned companies, it prefers to focus their efforts on increasing tax collection. This approach reveals not only a lack of understanding of the country’s real economic needs but also poor economic theory. Government spending is the great enemy of economic growth. By choosing to increase the tax burden, the government not only overburdens taxpayers but also discourages investments and innovations that could boost economic growth.

A relevant fact for those promoting free-market ideas is that the immediate trigger for the meme factory was the so-called blusinhas tax. This tax adds 20% on international purchases up to $50, in addition to the state tax of 17%. It was driven by Brazilian retailers who claimed to face unfair competition, especially from Chinese e-commerce sites like Shopee, Shein and AliExpress. As noted by Murray Rothbard: “When a big businessman enthusiastically embraces the partnership between government and businesses, it is good to keep an eye on your wallets because you are about to be plundered.“

Brazilian merchants prefer the classic protectionist approach, appealing to politicians with a Keynesian view, to implement laws that insulate the domestic market from the global market. Tariffs raise the internal cost of goods above international prices, facilitating cartel formation by local producers. Ludwig von Mises explains that the state itself creates conditions for the emergence of these cartels through its interventionism, only to combat them later with anticartel laws. This leads to a tangle of laws, regulatory agencies and more public servants being hired to “protect“ the national industry.

Once state interventions in the economy begin, they seem to never end and often produce the opposite effect of what was intended. Interventionists consider themselves infallible, even in the face of evident mistakes. The initially taken measures are not revoked; on the contrary, the distortions caused by interventions justify new interventions, creating a continuous cycle of state expansion.

Professor Fabio Barbieri adds an interesting point: As society sinks into interventionism, its ability to imagine solutions outside the state diminishes. Problems that could be opportunities for the private sector end up being treated as political issues. When politicians assume roles traditionally occupied by entrepreneurs, manifestations of dissatisfaction increase — hence, the memes.

In a true free-market economy, companies develop or fail based on their efficiency and ability to compete, including with foreign competitors. Instead of blocking cheaper products, like those from China, we should reduce taxes on national products to make them competitive both locally and globally. Henry Hazlitt argues that for new industries to flourish quickly, it is essential to allow some of the old ones to shrink or disappear. This frees up capital and labor for new ventures. If we had insisted on preserving the horse-drawn carriage industry, we would have hindered the growth of the automobile industry. Therefore, although it may seem paradoxical, it is vital for a dynamic economy to allow outdated industries to disappear to foster the emergence of new ones.

Therefore, the ultimate solution to Brazil’s economic dilemmas lies in creating a more business-friendly environment, which involves reducing the high tax burden, cutting public spending, minimizing state intervention and ending protectionism — opening the consequent market.

And, of course, we need more memes. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe aptly said, one of the greatest threats to the state is humor and laughter. The government wants us to respect it, to take it seriously. But the truth is that they know how dangerous it is when people start laughing at the government. So, always remember: Laugh and mock the government as much as you can.

Originally Posted at https://mises.org/

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by Tara Smith, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024, xi + 246 pp.

Tara Smith, who teaches philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, is a distinguished exponent of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist ethics, about which she has written several previous volumes. In Egoism Without Permission, she challenges a misconception about Rand’s ethics, namely that, because of its stress on reason, it has no place for emotion.

This is not so, Smith avers, and she cites in support what she calls the “Many Musts” passage from Rand’s essay, “Causality versus Duty.” I will not quote the passage, but the gist of it is that, “Reality confronts man with a great many ‘musts,’ but all of them are conditional.”

Smith draws the following conclusion from the passage:

Part of what this means is that personal desire is necessary to identify what a particular person’s interest is—indeed, it is necessary for the existence of his interest. Without such desire, any purported interest does not matter; it is of no value to him. (emphasis in original)

It does not follow in her view that desiring something is sufficient to make it in your interest to pursue it: you can be wrong about what is in your interest. It cannot actually become your interest, though, unless you want it and choose it.

Smith has many insightful things to say about various character traits that an ethical egoist will find useful to have, including independence of mind—Rand is vigorous in criticism of the “second hander”—and self-esteem. These traits or virtues are of great assistance to the ethical egoist, who takes his own life to be the standard of value.

She explains the point about the standard of value in this way:

The reason that life occupies this role as the standard is that life poses the most fundamental, inescapable of all alternatives that human beings face, namely, existence or nonexistence. Human beings’ survival—their continued existence as living organisms—depends on their acting in ways that fulfill certain needs. . . It is the fact that a person’s facing the alternative of existence or nonexistence that makes the phenomenon of value both possible and necessary. A person must make choices, if he is to live. (emphasis in original)

She writes that a “deep-seated selfishness of soul underwrites the kind of vigorous, unqualified exertion of egoism that is necessary for an individual’s flourishing.”

No doubt she is right that an ethical egoist will so regard things, but I entirely fail to see the force of her contention that the concept of value rests on the fact that an individual must make choices in order to live. He must indeed, but how does it follow that this fact makes the individual’s life the standard of value? Disputes about this are well-trodden ground, and I do not propose going over them here. Rather, in what follows, I will raise questions about some of Smith’s arguments against the view that the demands of morality have force independent of an individual’s self-interest.

In her view:

What it is most essential for us to appreciate is that objective values are those things that are rationally understood as beneficial to a person’s overall well-being (be they objects, abilities, qualities, relationships, etc.) The effect might be minor or major, but it must be net positive.

What happens if you deny this? Then, she contends, you are saying that an individual must justify his existence by his altruistic sacrifices to others. As she puts it:

It is striking that those who advocate the ‘ends in themselves’ idea as a social principle frequently believe that while we should treat others as ends, we should treat ourselves as subservient. My virtue, they assume, rests in serving others. Rand rejects such double standards and maintains that a person should treat himself as an end, too. By denying any need for permission to pursue one’s happiness, she is embracing the full flower and more consistent form of the “end in himself” principle. The fact that a person wishes to flourish is all the “permission” he needs.

Smith’s argument does not work. You can consistently hold that duties to other people exert a moral force independent of self-interest and also hold that you need no one’s permission to pursue your own interest. Why can’t both be objective values? They cannot be, on the ethical egoist view, but, contrary to Rand’s suggestion, that is not the only contender in the field.

Further, someone who believes in objective values distinct from self-interest need not contend that these values consist entirely of altruistic sacrifice to others. One position, often associated with G.E. Moore, is that there are intrinsically good impersonal states of affairs. And someone who accepts this view need not hold that an individual’s pursuit of his own happiness is justified by his seeking to attain impersonal values.

A related argument by Smith is equally fallacious. She writes:

The larger point, again, is that singularity of mission is crucial to rational egoism. A person cannot serve two masters. Any attempt to honor rival moral authorities is doomed to sabotage the ends of both. Flourishing requires a person’s unequivocal commitment to his life as an end in itself and to his well-being as his ruling concern.

Perhaps I have missed some deep truth that only prolonged study of the works of Rand and Leonard Peikoff can elicit from this passage, but on its face, it is either an utter banality or a falsehood, depending on how you understand “unequivocal.” If unequivocal just means “exclusive,” then you cannot be devoted to two different ends. If, though, “unequivocal” means “wholehearted,” the passage is false. You can be fully committed to both your career and your family, while recognizing that choices sometimes must be made between them. If the response to this is that if you choose one over the other in a given situation, that shows that your commitment to the unchosen alternative is less than full, we need to consider the significance of “the given situation.” In other situations, the unchosen alternative might win out.

There are values that cannot be consistently pursued in full. “You cannot serve both God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24). If you remember that “mammon” is a reference to money, you can be sure which of these alternatives Rand, Peikoff, and Tara Smith would choose.

Originally Posted at https://mises.org/

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[The following is derived from a speech in my novel, “The Flight of the Barbarous Relic.”]

Wars must be funded, and for this, governments functioning as states call upon the banking system for assistance.

Central Bank counterfeiting, which is another name for inflation, is the fuel that energizes the forces of war. Inflation, or counterfeiting, amounts to issuing receipts for something that doesn’t exist, which legally is the prerogative of the central bank. Calling such receipts money allows them to be created in massive amounts quickly. When the U.S. Congress votes to send billions of fiat money to Ukraine, Israel or anywhere else, no one questions the nature of what is being sent because legal tender laws make it all copasetic.

Yet, we should know better:

“As to the assumed authority of any assembly in making paper money, or paper of any kind, a legal tender, or in other language, a compulsive payment [Thomas Paine wrote in 1786], it is a most presumptuous attempt at arbitrary power. There can be no such power in a republican government: the people have no freedom, and property no security where this practice can be acted …

If anything had, or could have, a value equal to gold and silver, it would require no tender law: and if it had not that value it ought not to have such a law; and, therefore, all tender laws are tyrannical and unjust, and calculated to support fraud and oppression.

Banks belonging to the Federal Reserve central banking cartel can issue credit based on the Federal Reserve Board’s Regulation D, which specifies “a set of uniform reserve requirements for all depository institutions with transaction accounts,” so that, for instance, if the reserve ratio is 1:10, a bank with $10 million in reserve can issue $100 million in credit. Could you loan $100 to a friend if you only had $10 to spare?

The Fed dropped the reserve ratio to near zero in March 2020 during the covid pandemic. I’m tempted to say the Fed would react in a similar manner to a Congressional declaration of war, as required by the Constitution, but the war power of Congress has been neglected since WWII.

We need to keep in mind that lending as such is crucial to our well-being. As one commentator astutely observed, without an international banking system most of us wouldn’t be alive today. Money and banking make possible the division of labor, which has drastically reduced child mortality and raised living standards wherever free markets flourished.

But it’s also true that throughout most of banking history, the banks’practice of generating unbacked money substitutes prevailed. Invariably, some would go too far, and depositors would start showing up at teller windows wanting their notes exchanged for gold. Without enough gold to redeem, many of the banks had to shut their doors. But only temporarily.

For reasons of its own, government took a strong interest in the bankers’ plight and usually issued moratoriums on note redemption. For a period sometimes lasting years, banks were permitted to default on their liabilities to note holders while being allowed to conduct all other banking activities.

Helpful as this privilege was, it wasn’t enough. Banks weren’t always allowed to renege on their promises; their easy credit policies created bankruptcies and recessions, and besides, bank runs were embarrassing. No banker liked seeing crowds swarming at his door demanding what was theirs, even if the law was on his side.

Enter the central bank

Fortunately for American bankers and their political allies, Germany provided an example of an ingenious solution to the dilemma of bank counterfeiting. During the early years of the 20th century, U.S. bankers imported some of their ideas, and meeting at Jekyll Island, Georgia, with a few powerful politicians, devised a plan for a banking cartel.

Americans didn’t like cartels or centralized power, the planners realized, so they called their creature a “reserve system” and dressed it up with regional branches to avoid the appearance of a concentration of power. Since no cartel will work without government guns, it was decided to attach the name “federal” to it as well. Thus, the American central bank became known as the Federal Reserve System, or the Fed, signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on Dec. 23, 1913.

The Fed became an indispensable instrument of profit and power. Beginning in 1914, it cut reserve requirements approximately in half, dropping the ratio from 21% to 11%, roughly doubling the money supply and permitting both financial aid to the Allies and eventual American entry into the European war in April 1917.

Government, meanwhile, used the war as an excuse to create what one economic historian has aptly called a “garrison economy.” Among other things government took over railroads and communications industries, seized hundreds of manufacturing plants, fixed prices, intervened in hundreds of labor disputes, raised taxes, and conscripted over a million men for military service so they could join the bloodbath over there, in the European trenches. The Supreme Court, the alleged guardian of the Constitution — which itself is our alleged guardian against an aggressive government — ruled most of the war interventions constitutional, including the draft. Merely questioning the constitutionality of the draft could get you thrown in jail.

Thus, the Federal Reserve — a government-protected, government-serving, elaborately cloaked counterfeiting cartel — played a crucial role in converting a peaceful America into a bellicose, interventionist state.

We hear voices calling for patriotism during war. But who exactly were the patriots during the war to end all wars?

Was it J.P. Morgan who repeatedly said, “Nobody could hate war more than I do,” as he was amassing commissions totaling $30 million as a purchasing agent of war supplies for England and France?

Was it Morgan’s steel, shipbuilding and powder enterprises that bought controlling interest in, and editorial control over, the country’s 25 most influential newspapers?

Was it President Woodrow Wilson who had won reelection with the slogan “He kept us out of war,” then five months later asked Congress to join a war that had already killed 5 million people?

Was it Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin who rose in the Senate to dissect Wilson’s call for war point by point, arguing that Wilson and his advisors had been colluding with Britain for two years trying to find a pretext for American entry into the fray against England’s enemies?

Was it the senators who spoke after La Follette and for five hours hotly denounced him as “pro-German” and “anti-American”?

Was it the majority of Americans who, in spite of a well-orchestrated media campaign against Germany, still opposed joining the war?

Was it the men who were conscripted and sent overseas, over 100,000 of whom lost their lives?

Was it the industrial firms back home, thousands of miles from the slaughter on the Western Front, whose income tax records showed huge profits during the war years?

Was it the millions here who kept their mouths shut about the war because the Espionage Act of 1917 and its successor, the Sedition Act of 1918, hung a 20-year prison sentence over the heads of Wilson’s critics?

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Quincy Adams are generally considered patriotic, yet they counseled strongly against American entanglement in foreign affairs.

The Fed and its partner in theft the income tax enabled politicians and their financial backers to ignore their warnings.

Have you noticed we’ve been at war almost constantly since the Fed was forced upon us? We had World War I, the Great Depression — which was likened to war by the rulers — World War II, then the umbrella of the Cold War under which two hot wars and various skirmishes were fought.

For a president eager to go to war, the Fed has been a godsend.

The Federal Reserve makes war seem affordable. The media makes war seem patriotic. And in the background, waiting to be fattened, are the politicians’ corporate supporters who profit hugely from foreign invasions.

Have you noticed the economic trends since the Fed took over the money supply? The “elastic currency” today is approaching collapse and economic calamities live on — the very opposite of the Fed’s alleged raison d’être. Should we be surprised at these outcomes? Of course not. The Fed is fulfilling its mission.

If we truly desire peace and prosperity, we will wipe every trace of central banking and fiat money from the face of the earth. Fiat currencies always bring out the worst in government as it inflates us into war, economic ruin and autocratic rule.

Originally Posted at https://mises.org/

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