Many people in America don’t understand how an economy works. Economics is not difficult to understand. It takes PhDs and other “experts” to confuse us. But these guys could not get away with their economic confusion if so many people didn’t want to fall for their false claims that if we only give up some of our freedoms and tax and redistribute other people’s money we’ll all be better off. Too many want to believe that something can come from nothing, lunches are free, and we’re owed a living.

In the film The Flim-Flam Man (1967) Mordecai Jones, played by George C. Scott, told his young apprentice, “You can’t cheat an honest man.” Flim-flam only works on people who believe they can get something for little or nothing at the expense of others who owe their wages to people who did not hand in making the profit. But when we elect government officials to engage in economic flim-flam, we call what they do “democracy in action.”

Getting 51 percent of the people to vote for politicians to take money from the other 49 percent so it can be redistributed to the 51 percent is theft.

Take a look at Make Mine Freedom, a nine-minute animated feature that was produced in 1948:

“This is one of a series of films produced by the Extension Department of Harding College to create a deeper understanding of what has made America the finest place in the world to live.”

Here’s how a communist website describes the film:

“The film relies on straw man portrayals of critics and a sympathetic lead character that peer-pressures the audience to ‘jump on the bandwagon,’ along with other propaganda techniques. . . It attacks criticism of hierarchical management, utopian vision, nationalism (in other countries, naturally, as US nationalism is portrayed as patriotic) and capitalism in general. It sets up its targets to be ‘proven’ wrong by heavy-handed metaphors.” (Communpedia)

And Communism is working so well in Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea.

This communist sounds like today’s politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle. We don’t have a real free market today. There is no such  thing as “crony capitalism.” It’s an oxymoron. Favoring one industry over another is not capitalism. Subsidizing an industry is not capitalism. Murray Rothbard defines what we are living under today in his The Logic of Action (1997):

“Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at. State capitalism consists of one or more groups making use of the coercive apparatus of the government … for themselves by expropriating the production of others by force and violence.”

There is a difference between market and political entrepreneurs.