http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dc2m8p62_294shk7njcx http://www.haloscan.com/comments/ezralevant/532/#177749 The Law of Total Destruction The government's First Lie is that its violence is only directed against "others", that its "benefits" come with no price attached, impose no burden on you. But there is no such thing as a free lunch. Not only does this ignore the precedent it sets and the utter naivete of believing that the powerful, given the excuse, will only go after "the others", it also ignores the competition for the spoils of government violence. Apply equilibrium theory to government intervention and you will have to conclude that, for every resource seized by government, the equivalent will have been spent in efforts aimed at having them take it or at preventing them from doing so. And those efforts are entirely lost for real production, i.e. for the service of actual human needs. As a consequence, the equivalent of all property taken by government tends to be wasted through the efforts necessary to gain control over it. This law of economics is called the "Law of Total Destruction", or "Loi de Bitur-Camember" because it was formulated by two Frenchmen a few years ago. http://fare.livejournal.com/32611.html