In this Freeman column, Professor Steven Horwitz expounds on one of the most common excuses for coercive political intervention, namely the “we had to…” argument. The trouble with that, of course, is that politicians always have choices. They could choose to act differently than they do, but prefer certain courses of action (almost always involving an expansion of government power and spending) and thus attempt to justify them by saying, “we had to…”
by George Leef