The first step in analyzing intervention is to contrast the direct effect on the utilities of the participants, with the effect of a free society. When people are free to act, they will always act in a way that they believe will maximize their utility, i.e., will raise them to the highest possible position on their value scale. Their utility ex ante will be maximized, provided we take care to interpret “utility” in an ordinal rather than a cardinal manner. Any action, any exchange that takes place on the free market or more broadly in the free society, occurs because of the expected benefit to each party concerned. If we allow ourselves to use the term “society” to depict the pattern of all individual exchanges, then we may say that the free market “maximizes” social utility, since everyone gains in utility. We must be careful, however, not to hypostatize “society” into a real entity that means something else than an array of all individuals.

Coercive intervention, on the other hand, signifies per se that the individual or individuals coerced would not have done what they are now doing were it not for the intervention. The individual who is coerced into saying or not saying something or into making or not making an exchange with the intervener or with someone else is having his actions changed by a threat of violence. The coerced individual loses in utility as a result of the intervention, for his action has been changed by its impact. Any intervention, whether it be autistic, binary, or triangular, causes the subjects to lose in utility. In autistic and binary intervention, each individual loses in utility; in triangular intervention, at least one, and sometimes both, of the pair of would-be exchangers lose in utility.

Who, in contrast, gains in utility ex ante? Clearly, the intervener; otherwise he would not have intervened. Either he gains in exchangeable goods at the expense of his subject, as in binary intervention, or, as in autistic and triangular intervention, he gains in a sense of well-being from enforcing regulations upon others.

All instances of intervention, then, in contrast to the free market, are cases in which one set of men gains at the expense of other men. In binary intervention, the gains and losses are “tangible” in the form of exchangeable goods and services; in other types of intervention, the gains are nonexchangeable satisfactions, and the loss consists in being coerced into less satisfying types of activity (if not positively painful ones).

Before the development of economic science, people thought of exchange and the market as always benefiting one party at the expense of the other. This was the root of the mercantilist view of the market. Economics has shown that this is a fallacy, for on the market both parties to any exchange benefit. On the market, therefore, there can be no such thing as exploitation. But the thesis of a conflict of interest is true whenever the State or any other agency intervenes on the market. For then the intervener gains only at the expense of subjects who lose in utility. On the market all is harmony. But as soon as intervention appears and is established, conflict is created, for each may participate in a scramble to be a net gainer rather than a net loser—to be part of the invading team, instead of one of the victims.

It has become fashionable to assert that “Conservatives” like John C. Calhoun “anticipated” the Marxian doctrine of class exploitation. But the Marxian doctrine holds, erroneously, that there are “classes” on the free market whose interests clash and conflict. Calhoun’s insight was almost the reverse. Calhoun saw that it was the intervention of the State that in itself created the “classes” and the conflict.5 He particularly perceived this in the case of the binary intervention of taxes. For he saw that the proceeds of taxes are used and spent, and that some people in the community must be net payers of tax funds, while the others are net recipients. Calhoun defined the latter as the “ruling class” of the exploiters, and the former as the “ruled” or exploited, and the distinction is quite a cogent one. Calhoun set forth his analysis brilliantly:

Few, comparatively, as they are, the agents and employees of the government constitute that portion of the community who are the exclusive recipients of the proceeds of the taxes. Whatever amount is taken from the community in the form of taxes, if not lost, goes to them in the shape of expenditures or disbursements. The two—disbursement and taxation—constitute the fiscal action of the government. They are correlatives. What the one takes from the community under the name of taxes is transferred to the portion of the community who are the recipients under that of disbursements. But as the recipients constitute only a portion of the community, it follows, taking the two parts of the fiscal process together, that its action must be unequal between the payers of the taxes and the recipients of their proceeds. Nor can it be otherwise; unless what is collected from each individual in the shape of taxes shall be returned to him in that of disbursements, which would make the process nugatory and absurd. ...

Such being the case, it must necessarily follow that some one portion of the community must pay in taxes more than it receives back in disbursements, while another receives in disbursements more than it pays in taxes. It is, then, manifest, taking the whole process together, that taxes must be, in effect, bounties to that portion of the community which receives more in disbursements than it pays in taxes, while to the other which pays in taxes more than it receives in disbursements they are taxes in reality—burdens instead of bounties. This consequence is unavoidable. It results from the nature of the process, be the taxes ever so equally laid. ...

The necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government is to divide the community into two great classes: one consisting of those who, in reality, pay the taxes and, of course, bear exclusively the burden of supporting the government; and the other, of those who are the recipients of their proceeds through disbursements, and who are, in fact, supported by the government; or, in fewer words, to divide it into tax-payers and tax-consumers.

But the effect of this is to place them in antagonistic relations in reference to the fiscal action of the government and the entire course of policy therewith connected. For the greater the taxes and disbursements, the greater the gain of the one and the loss of the other, and vice versa. ...6

“Ruling” and “ruled” apply also to the forms of government intervention, but Calhoun was quite right in focusing on taxes and fiscal policy as the keystone, for it is taxes that supply the resources and payment for the State in performing its myriad other acts of intervention.

All State intervention rests on the binary intervention of taxes at its base; even if the State intervened nowhere else, its taxation would remain. Since the term “social” can be applied only to every single individual concerned, it is clear that, while the free market maximizes social utility, no act of the State can ever increase social utility. Indeed, the picture of the free market is necessarily one of harmony and mutual benefit; the picture of State intervention is one of caste conflict, coercion, and exploitation.

• 5“Castes” would be a better term than “classes” here. Classes are any collection of units with a certain property in common. There is no reason for them to conflict. Does the class of men named Jones necessarily conflict with the class of men named Smith? On the other hand, castes are State-made groups, each with its own set of violence-established privileges and tasks. Castes necessarily conflict because some are instituted to rule over the others.
• 6John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953), pp. 16–18. Calhoun, however, did not understand the harmony of interests on the free market.

It might be objected that all these forms of intervention are really not coercive but “voluntary,” for in a democracy they are supported by the majority of the people. But this support is usually passive, resigned, and apathetic, rather than eager—whether the State is a democracy or not.7

In a democracy, the nonvoters can hardly be said to support the rulers, and neither can the voters for the losing side. But even those who voted for the winners may well have voted merely for the “lesser of the two evils.” The interesting question is: Why do they have to vote for any evil at all? Such terms are never used by people when they act freely for themselves, or when they purchase goods on the free market. No one thinks of his new suit or refrigerator as an “evil”—lesser or greater. In such cases, people think of themselves as buying positive “goods,” not as resignedly supporting a lesser bad. The point is that the public never has the opportunity of voting on the State system itself; they are caught up in a system in which coercion over them is inevitable.8

Be that as it may, as we have said, all States are supported by a majority—whether a voting democracy or not; otherwise, they could not long continue to wield force against the determined resistance of the majority. However, the support may simply reflect apathy—perhaps from the resigned belief that the State is a permanent if unwelcome fixture of nature. Witness the motto: “Nothing is as permanent as death and taxes.” Setting all these matters aside, however, and even granting that a State might be enthusiastically supported by a majority, we still do not establish its voluntary nature. For the majority is not society, is not everyone. Majority coercion over the minority is still coercion.

Since States exist, and they are accepted for generations and centuries, we must conclude that a majority are at least passive supporters of all States—for no minority can for long rule an actively hostile majority. In a certain sense, therefore, all tyranny is majority tyranny, regardless of the formalities of the government structure.9 ,10 But this does not change our analytic conclusion of conflict and coercion as a corollary of the State. The conflict and coercion exist no matter how many people coerce how many others.11

• 7As Professor Lindsay Rogers has trenchantly written on the subject of public opinion:
  Before Great Britain adopted conscription in 1939, only thirty-nine percent of the voters were for it; a week after the conscription bill became law, a poll showed that fifty-eight percent approved. Many polls in the United States have shown a similar inflation of support for a policy as soon as it is translated to the statute books or into a Presidential order. (Lindsay Rogers, “‘The Mind of America’ to the Fourth Decimal Place,” The Reporter, June 30, 1955, p. 44)
• 8This coercion would exist even in the most direct democracies. It is doubly compounded in representative republics, where the people never have a chance of voting on issues, but only on the men who rule them. They can only reject men—and this at very long intervals—and if the candidates have the same views on issues, the public cannot effect any sort of fundamental change.
• 9It is often stated that under “modern” conditions of destructive weapons, etc., a minority can tyrannize permanently over a majority. But this ignores the fact that these weapons can be held by the majority, or that agents of the minority can mutiny. The sheer absurdity, for example, of the current belief that a few million could really tyrannize over a few hundred million active resistants is not often realized. As David Hume profoundly stated:
  Nothing appears more surprising . . . than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that because Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments. (David Hume, Essays, Literary, Moral and Political [London, n.d.], p. 23)See also Etienne de La Boétie, Anti-Dictator (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), pp. 8–9. For an analysis of the types of opinion fostered by the State in order to obtain public support, see Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power (New York: Viking Press, 1949).
• 10This analysis of majority support applies to any intervention of rather long standing, carried on frankly and openly, whether or not the groups are labeled “States.”
• 11See Calhoun, Disquisition on Government, pp. 14, 18–19, 23–33.

To our comparative “welfare-economic” analysis of the free market and the State, it might be objected that when defense agencies restrain an invader from attacking someone’s property, they are benefiting the property owner at the expense of a loss of utility by the would-be invader. Since defense agencies enforce rights on the free market, does not the free market also involve a gain by some at the expense of the utility of others (even if these others are invaders)?

In answer, we may state first that the free market is a society in which all exchange voluntarily. It may most easily be conceived as a situation in which no one aggresses against person or property. In that case, it is obvious that the utility of all is maximized on the free market. Defense agencies become necessary only as a defense against invasions of that market. It is the invader, not the existence of the defense agency, that inflicts losses on his fellowmen. A defense agency existing without an invader would simply be a voluntarily established insurance against attack. The existence of a defense agency does not violate the principle of maximum utility, and it still reflects mutual benefit to all concerned. Conflict enters only with the invader. The invader, let us say, is in the process of committing an aggressive act against Smith, thereby injuring Smith for his gain. The defense agency, rushing to the aid of Smith, of course, injures the invader’s utility; but it does so only to counteract the injury to Smith. It does help to maximize the utility of the non-criminals. The principle of conflict and loss of utility was introduced, not by the existence of the defense agency, but by the existence of the invader. It is still true, therefore, that utility is maximized for all on the free market; whereas to the extent that there is invasive interference in society, it is infected with conflict and exploitation of man by man.

Another objection holds that the free market does not really increase the utility of all individuals, because some may be so smitten with envy at the success of others that they really lose in utility as a result. We cannot, however, deal with hypothetical utilities divorced from concrete action. We may, as praxeologists, deal only with utilities that we can deduce from the concrete behavior of human beings.12 A person’s “envy,” unembodied in action, becomes pure moonshine from the praxeological point of view. All that we know is that he has participated in the free market and to that extent benefits by it. How he feels about the exchanges made by others cannot be demonstrated to us unless he commits an invasive act. Even if he publishes a pamphlet denouncing these exchanges, we have no ironclad proof that this is not a joke or a deliberate lie.

• 12Elsewhere, we have named this concept “demonstrated preference,” have traced its history, and have directed a critique against competing concepts. See Murray N. Rothbard, “Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics” in Mary Sennholz, ed., On Freedom and Free Enterprise (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1956), pp. 224 ff.

We have thus seen that individuals maximize their utility ex ante on the free market and that the direct result of an invasion is that the invader’s utility gains at the expense of a loss in utility by his victim. But what about utilities ex post? People may expect to benefit when they make a decision, but do they actually benefit from its results? The remainder of this volume will largely consist of analysis of what we may call the “indirect” consequences of the market or of intervention, supplementing the above direct analysis. It will deal with chains of consequences that can be grasped only by study and are not immediately visible to the naked eye.

Error can always occur in the path from ante to post, but the free market is so constructed that this error is reduced to a minimum. In the first place, there is a fast-working, easily understandable test that tells the entrepreneur, as well as the income-receiver, whether he is succeeding or failing at the task of satisfying the desires of the consumer. For the entrepreneur, who carries the main burden of adjustment to uncertain consumer desires, the test is swift and sure—profits or losses. Large profits are a signal that he has been on the right track; losses, that he has been on a wrong one. Profits and losses thus spur rapid adjustments to consumer demands; at the same time, they perform the function of getting money out of the hands of the bad entrepreneurs and into the hands of the good ones. The fact that good entrepreneurs prosper and add to their capital, and poor ones are driven out, insures an ever smoother market adjustment to changes in conditions. Similarly, to a lesser extent, land and labor factors move in accordance with the desire of their owners for higher incomes, and more value-productive factors are rewarded accordingly.

Consumers also take entrepreneurial risks on the market. Many critics of the market, while willing to concede the expertise of the capitalist-entrepreneurs, bewail the prevailing ignorance of consumers, which prevents them from gaining the utility ex post that they expected to have ex ante. Typically, Wesley C. Mitchell entitled one of his famous essays: “The Backward Art of Spending Money.” Professor Ludwig von Mises has keenly pointed out the paradoxical position of so many “progressives” who insist that consumers are too ignorant or incompetent to buy products intelligently, while at the same time touting the virtues of democracy, where the same people vote for politicians whom they do not know and for policies that they hardly understand.

In fact, the truth is precisely the reverse of the popular ideology. Consumers are not omniscient, but they do have direct tests by which to acquire their knowledge. They buy a certain brand of breakfast food and they don’t like it; so they don’t buy it again. They buy a certain type of automobile and they do like its performance; so they buy another one. In both cases, they tell their friends of this newly won knowledge. Other consumers patronize consumers’ research organizations, which can warn or advise them in advance. But, in all cases, the consumers have the direct test of results to guide them. And the firm that satisfies the consumers expands and prospers, while the firm that fails to satisfy them goes out of business.

On the other hand, voting for politicians and public policies is a completely different matter. Here there are no direct tests of success or failure whatever, neither profits and losses nor enjoyable or unsatisfying consumption. In order to grasp consequences, especially the indirect consequences of governmental decisions, it is necessary to comprehend a complex chain of praxeological reasoning, such as will be developed in this volume. Very few voters have the ability or the interest to follow such reasoning, particularly, as Schumpeter points out, in political situations. For in political situations, the minute influence that any one person has on the results, as well as the seeming remoteness of the actions, induces people to lose interest in political problems or argumentation.13 Lacking the direct test of success or failure, the voter tends to turn, not to those politicians whose measures have the best chance of success, but to those with the ability to “sell” their propaganda. Without grasping logical chains of deduction, the average voter will never be able to discover the error that the ruler makes. Thus, suppose that the government inflates the money supply, thereby causing an inevitable rise in prices. The government can blame the price rise on wicked speculators or alien black marketeers, and, unless the public knows economics, it will not be able to see the fallacies in the ruler’s arguments.

It is ironic that those writers who complain of the wiles and lures of advertising do not direct their criticism at the advertising of political campaigns, where their charges would be relevant. As Schumpeter states:

The picture of the prettiest girl that ever lived will in the long run prove powerless to maintain the sales of a bad cigarette. There is no equally effective safeguard in the case of political decisions. Many decisions of fateful importance are of a nature that makes it impossible for the public to experiment with them at its leisure and at moderate cost. Even if that is possible, however, judgment is as a rule not so easy to arrive at as it is in the case of the cigarette, because effects are less easy to interpret.14

It might be objected that, while the average voter may not be competent to decide on policies that require for his decision chains of praxeological reasoning, he is competent to pick the experts—the politicians and bureaucrats—who will decide on the issues, just as the individual may select his own private expert adviser in any one of numerous fields. But the point is precisely that in government the individual does not have the direct, personal test of success or failure for his hired expert that he does on the market. On the market, individuals tend to patronize those experts whose advice proves most successful. Good doctors or lawyers reap rewards on the free market, while the poor ones fail; the privately hired expert tends to flourish in proportion to his demonstrated ability. In government, on the other hand, there is no concrete test of the expert’s success. In the absence of such a test, there is no way by which the voter can gauge the true expertise of the man he must vote for. This difficulty is aggravated in modern-style elections, where the candidates agree on all the fundamental issues. For issues, after all, are susceptible to reasoning; the voter can, if he so wishes and he has the ability, learn about and decide on the issues. But what can any voter, even the most intelligent, know about the true expertise or competence of individual candidates, especially when elections are shorn of virtually all important issues? The voter can then fall back only on the purely external, packaged “personalities” or images of the candidates. The result is that voting purely on candidates makes the result even less rational than mass voting on the issues themselves.

Furthermore, the government itself contains inherent mechanisms that lead to poor choices of experts and officials. For one thing, the politician and the government expert receive their revenues, not from service voluntarily purchased on the market, but from a compulsory levy on the populace. These officials, therefore, wholly lack the pecuniary incentive to care about serving the public properly and competently. And, what is more, the vital criterion of “fitness” is very different in the government and on the market. In the market, the fittest are those most able to serve the consumers; in government, the fittest are those most adept at wielding coercion and/or those most adroit at making demagogic appeals to the voting public.

Another critical divergence between market action and democratic voting is this: the voter has, for example, only a 1/50 millionth power to choose among his would-be rulers, who in turn will make vital decisions affecting him, unchecked and unhampered until the next election. In the market, on the other hand, the individual has the absolute sovereign power to make the decisions concerning his person and property, not merely a distant, 1/50 millionth power. On the market the individual is continually demonstrating his choice of buying or not buying, selling or not selling, in the course of making absolute decisions regarding his property. The voter, by voting for some particular candidate, is demonstrating only a relative preference over one or two other potential rulers; he must do this within the framework of the coercive rule that, whether or not he votes at all, one of these men will rule over him for the next several years.15

Thus, we see that the free market contains a smooth, efficient mechanism for bringing anticipated, ex ante utility into the realization of ex post. The free market always maximizes ex ante social utility as well. In political action, on the contrary, there is no such mechanism; indeed, the political process inherently tends to delay and thwart the realization of any expected gains. Furthermore, the divergence between ex post gains through government and through the market is even greater than this; for we shall find that in every instance of government intervention, the indirect consequences will be such as to make the intervention appear worse in the eyes of many of its original supporters.

In sum, the free market always benefits every participant, and it maximizes social utility ex ante; it also tends to do so ex post, since it works for the rapid conversion of anticipations into realizations. With intervention, one group gains directly at the expense of another, and therefore social utility cannot be increased; the attainment of goals is blocked rather than facilitated; and, as we shall see, the indirect consequences are such that many interveners themselves will lose utility ex post. The remainder of this work is largely devoted to tracing the indirect consequences of various forms of governmental intervention.

• 13Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper & Bros., 1942), pp. 258–60. See also Anthony Downs, “An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy,” Journal of Political Economy, April, 1957, pp. 135–50.
• 14Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 263.
• 15For a further discussion of these points, see Man, Economy, and State, pp. 886–91.