WEALTH OF NATIONS: On Milton Friedman's Unfinished Work (12/08/2006)

WEALTH OF NATIONS: On Milton Friedman's Unfinished Work (12/08/2006): "[A] tax increase (a confiscation of private property), or an import quota (a prohibition to spend your money as you wish), or a mandated company benefit, or any number of other economic directives and interventions, whether justified on balance or not, are infringements of liberty too.

Even to point this out (which one must be careful to do only now and then) stains you as a libertarian zealot, somebody quite beyond the normal realm of political discourse. A tax increase might be bad if it harms incentives to work, or if it unduly burdens the poor; an import quota might be costly and inefficient; and so forth. But how often does it occur to anybody to object to such policies as simple infringements of one's freedom -- not all that different, in some ways, from the infringements of civil liberty that respectable opinion finds so scandalous?"