Each year, he proceeds to new capital calls, increases the number of his employees, and the works do not evolve.
Frédéric Bastiat
Complete Works, Volume 7, page 289 (in French)
Undated
Here is an extremely short fragment of an essay from which I extract today’s quote. Frédéric Bastiat exposes here as an allegory the Ponzi scheme put in place by government. The case is that of a fictive enterprise constructing a canal into which shareholders would be constantly requested to inject money without the works to evolve.
It is not unlike the increase of government debt nowadays, of which everybody wonders what it could have been used for while interests are paid by new debt each year. In the dialogue imagined by Frédéric Bastiat, the worrying shareholder informs him that, in order to reassure themselves, the shareholders will institute a commission in charge of checking the accounts. Frédéric Bastiat retorts that the said commission will be in bed with the entrepreneur who is obviously a crook. This is similar to the democratic system in place nowadays, when the voters worrying about the situation will elect new representatives who will perpetuate the system in the hope that they will fix it, which is “some nonsense [that] occurs more than a hundred times a year”.