Your government will be expanded. To tell you what will happen from this expansion "To give you an illustration using another country, England, in 1803 created a new civil service position. It called for a man to stand on the cliffs of Dover with a spy glass and ring a bell if he saw Napoleon coming. They didn’t eliminate that job until 1945. In our own country, there are only two government programs that we have totally wiped out and abolished: the government stopped making rum on the Virgin Islands, and we’ve stopped breeding horses for the cavalry. We bear a greater tax burden to support that permanent structure than any of us would have believed possible just a few decades ago. When I was where you are, in college, governments federal, state and local, were taking a dime out of every dollar earned and less than a third of that paid for the federal establishment. Today, governments, federal, state, and local, are taking 44 cents out of every dollar earned, and two-thirds of that supports Washington. It is the fastest growing item in the average family budget, and yet it is not one of the factors used in computing the cost of living index. It is the biggest single cost item in the family budget; it is bigger than food, shelter, and clothing all put together. When government tells us, as it did a few weeks ago, that in the last year the people of America have increased their earnings 9 percent, and since the inflation was 6 percent, well we’re still 3 percentage points better off – richer than we were the year before – government is being deceitful. That was before taxes. After taxes, the people of America are 3 percentage points worse off, poorer than they were before they got the 9 percent raise. Government profits by inflation. At the economic conference in London several months ago, one of our American representatives there was talking to the press. And he said, “You have to recognize that inflation doesn’t have any single cause. It’s caused by a number of things, and therefore there is no single answer.” Well, if he believed that, he had no business being at an economic conference. Inflation is caused by one thing, and it has one answer. It’s caused by government spending more than government takes in, and it will go away when government stops doing that, and not before. I could give a figure that I think would explain it because government has been trying to make all of us believe that somehow inflation is like a plague, or the drought, or the locusts coming, that no one has any control over it and we just have to bear it when it comes along and hope it will go away. No, it’s simpler than that. From 1933 until the now, our country has doubled the amount of goods and purchases that are available for purchase – goods and services. In that same period we have multiplied the money supply by 23 times. So eleven and a half dollars are now chasing what one dollar used to chase. And that’s all that inflation is: a depreciation of the value of money. I know that his is called the Ludwig von Mises series. But do you know that before I knew that I had a line that I intended to give you. It’s a quote of his if you haven’t heard it. Ludwig von Mises said that, “Government is the only agency that can take a perfectly useful commodity like paper, smear it with some ink, and render it absolutely useless.” Sometimes I think that government fits that old-fashioned definition of a baby: An alimentary canal with an appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other. There are 73 million of us working and earning in the private sector. We support ourselves and our dependents. We support, in addition, 81 million other Americans totally dependent on tax dollars for their year-round living. Now it’s true that 15 million of those are public employees and they also pay taxes, but their taxes are simply a return to government of dollars that first had to be taken from the 73 million. I say this to emphasize that the people working and earning in the private sector are the only resource that government "has.