This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 16, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

The growth of government has come at the price of property rights from breaking up contracts between Chrysler and

bondholders, the looming liabilities in entitlement programs, the price of

grasping government is the breakdown of civil arrangements, contracts among consenting parties.

So says Cato Institute Academic Vice President and Cato Journal editor Jim Dorne.

In his article, The Rise of Government and the

purpose of the law should be to protect property rights not to take from some to give to others

and what Bastia meant by legal plunder is the use of the

law not to protect property, but to redistribute property from one interest group to another. And that undermines, of course, the rule of law, it undermines

economic freedom and individual freedom because private property is indispensable if you want

to have individual freedom and a wide range of choice

and be able to trade with other people without the interference of the state. So

when the state basically takes a role of redistributing property rather than protecting it,

it creates a lot of uncertainty, it creates a chaotic situation, and it creates a huge distrust of the government.

Which can cause people to sit on their hands and make whatever problem that has occurred worse,

at least economically.

Exactly, there's lots of unintended consequences from that type of behavior.

So in this essay that I wrote on the rise of government decline in morality, what I mean here

by morality is individual responsibility. When the people look to the state for benefits

rather than to their own hard work or when their own hard work is taxed away by

high marginal tax rates on income and savings.

Then people become more dependent upon the state for things like their retirement income,

...