老与年轻、富与穷：政府如何制造阶级冲突

While there exists the beautiful and productive possibility of cooperation between individuals and groups, there is also the opportunity for and reality of conflict. Interpersonal conflict is intensified when hegemony and intervention, especially via the political state, disrupt peaceful cooperation and instead create a caste system—stratifying those“privileged or burdened by the state.”

Distinguished from dishonest Marxian “class” analysis, which suffers from the ideological fallacy,caste analysis—which has a rich tradition in libertarianism—coherently examines how certain castes are privileged or burdened by the state, namely, by dividing them into the net tax-paying caste and the net tax-consuming caste. One of the most evident—though not only—ways to determine the societal castes is the net transfer of revenue or production between groups achieved via the state. In other words, on net, who pays the taxes and who consumes the taxes?

Rather than the mutual benefit of the peaceful and cooperative production-and-exchange mechanism, which enriches everyone, state involvement requires people to benefit at the expense of others. This not only further empowers the political caste, but it teaches people to attempt to seize control of the state apparatus in order to gain at the expense of others rather than gain through production and exchange. Especially in democracies, this destructive tendency encourages a strategy of racing for short-term, temporary gains by impoverishing others before they can impoverish you. Concerning caste conflict, Rothbard writes,

Inflation: Taker and Giver

Guido Hülsmann, in discussing the cultural impacts of inflation, mentions how inflation has different impacts on different generations and hints at the discontent between them as a result,

“Affordability” and Intergenerational Conflict

Conclusion