Our libertarian writers paint a drab picture of the decline of private enterprise and the rise of political enterprise. The political means of attainment is seductively turning the minds of the people from the economic means.

Education is futile to overcome this trend. The cause of the trend must be displaced by a mechanism whereby the trend will be in a wholesome direction.

The Welfare State is one that robs Peter to pay Paul, and its success lies in the fact that Paul is fully aware and grateful for the benefit received while Peter is bewildered over the identity of the robber. He is apt to blame the tradesmen over whose counter he pays his shrunken dollars, and thus private enterprise is doubly punished.

The whole deception operates through a perversion of the monetary system. Many of us suspect this, but our remedy is the usual stereotype education and a return to sound money. But to attain sound money we must advance, not return, because we never had sound money.

What we had in the "good old days" was unsound money only partly developed. The power to degrade the monetary system and thus sabotage private enterprise existed before Roosevelt, but he was the first to release it beyond the power to arrest. The egg has been hatched, and the chicken grows rapidly. "Sound money" advocates propose to put the chicken back into the egg.

The power of government to make paternalism seem practical, and thus insidiously to socialize the economy, lies entirely in the fallacious belief that government can and does issue money. An understanding of the essence of money shows that no government ever has issued or ever can issue genuine money. Their professed monetary issues have precisely the same effect upon the money supply as a farmer produces by taking the milk pail to the pump—not a larger supply of money or milk, but a mere dilution.

We bewail the ignorance of the people on economic and political matters, but the real cause for dejection is that our businessmen do not know the difference between real money and counterfeit. Because they and the would-be educators of the people accept the fallacy of political money power, they are unconscious socialists. This unconscious socialism is universal; so the task of restraining the onward march of the Welfare State is more gigantic than we have realized, if undertaken through popular education.

However, we need not educate the people on money or economics. We need not tear down the present political monetary system. No governmental or political action is called for. If we realize that only private enterprise can organize and conduct a true monetary system, one that will be stable and sound and inflation-proof, we need but to set it up, and the people will not be slow to secede from the false and join the true.