“Package-dealing” is the fallacy of failing to discriminate crucial differences. It consists of treating together, as parts of a single conceptual whole or “package,” elements which differ essentially in nature, truth-status, importance or value.
Package-dealing' employs the shabby old gimmick of equating opposites by substituting nonessentials for their essential characteristics, obliterating differences. A disastrous intellectual package-deal, put over on us by the theoreticians of statism, is the equation of economic power with political power.
You have heard it expressed in such bromides as : “A hungry man is not free,” or “It makes no difference to a worker whether he takes orders from a businessman or from a bureaucrat.”
Most people accept these equivocations and yet they know that the poorest laborer in America is freer and more secure than the richest commissar in Soviet Russia.
What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.
The difference between political power and any other kind of social “power,” between a government and any private organization, is the fact that a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of force.
