Tea at Trianon: No More Free Money: The Conservative Case for Taxpayer Capitalism

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, August 10, 2026

No More Free Money: The Conservative Case for Taxpayer Capitalism

From The Enterprise:

It is worth being precise about what socialism actually is, because the word is doing an enormous amount of unearned work in this debate. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy identifies capitalism by three features. The bulk of productive property is privately owned, workers own their own labor, and markets allocate inputs, outputs, consumption, and investment. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts the contrast plainly: an economy becomes socialist when it rejects private ownership of the means of production in favor of public or social ownership. Notice what these definitions do not say. Neither says that an economy becomes socialist when the government holds a financial asset. Socialism is a claim about who owns and directs production, not a claim about whether a public entity appears anywhere on a cap table.
Ludwig von Mises, who was hardly soft on the subject, drew the line with characteristic bluntness. Publicly owned enterprises operating inside a larger structure of private firms, market prices, and economic calculation remain subject to the laws of the market. “The system remains a market society,” he wrote. Real socialism arrives when the state decides what factories produce, whom they hire, what wages they pay, where they buy their inputs, and where they sell their output. Apply that test to the transactions actually in front of us and the accusation collapses. Not one of these agreements transfers a single one of those decisions to a government office. (Read more.)