I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual.
Murray Rothbard

Anarchism may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished.
Benjamin Tucker

The state is an organization of mere mortals who, by one dubious method or another, have been allowed to don the mantle of political legitimacy and to command obedience on pain of imprisonment even of those who never consented to the preposterous arrangement.
Sheldon Richman

Governments do not come into existence as social service organizations or as private firms seeking to please consumers in a competitive market. Instead, they are born in conquest and nourished by plunder. They are, in short, well-armed gangs intent on organized crime.
Robert Higgs

The greatest achievement of the statist intellectuals is the fact that they have cultivated the masses' natural intellectual laziness (or incapacity) and never allowed for the subject to come up for serious discussion. The state is considered as an unquestionable part of the social fabric.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe

A man's natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, or by millions, calling themselves a government.
Lysander Spooner

Set men up to rule their fellow-men, to treat them as mere soulless material with which they may deal as they please, and the consequence is that you sweep away every moral landmark and turn this world into a place of selfish striving, hopeless confusion, trickery and violence, a mere scrambling ground for the strongest or the most cunning or the most numerous.
Auberon Herbert

Although resting on violence, the State in the final analysis, exists by virtue of a state of mind which prevails toward it, a peculiar ignorance, delusion, and moral debility which, in the face of its unbroken record of doing nothing honestly and efficiently, tends to call on it to ameliorate any social predicament.
Laurance Labadie

The idea of creating systems designed to threaten, coerce, and kill, and to imbue such agencies with principled legitimacy, and not expect them to lead to wars, genocides, and other tyrannical practices, expresses an innocence we can no longer afford to indulge.
Butler Shaffer

Why don't we have libertarian anarchy? Why does government exist? The answer is that government as a whole exists because most people believe it is necessary.
David Friedman

Liberty is not a box into which people are forced. Liberty is a space in which people may live. It does not tell you how they will live. It says, eternally, only that we can.
Karl Hess

A free society is the only one in which each and every one of us can satisfy his or her subjective values without crushing others' values by violence and coercion.
Samuel Edward Konkin III

If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is important, but he really punishes me because his argument is weak.
William Godwin

Once you understand the economics of the Austrian School and the philosophy of liberty in the tradition of Rothbard, you never look at anything—not the state, the media, the central bank, the political class, nothing—the same way again.
Lew Rockwell

Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark.
F. A. Hayek

Voters, activists, and political leaders of the present day are in the position of medieval doctors. They hold simple, prescientific theories about the workings of society and the causes of social problems, from which they derive a variety of remedies—almost all of which prove either ineffectual or harmful.
Michael Huemer

Voluntary communism, together with laissez-faire capitalism, has nothing to be ashamed of on moral and economic grounds. They can each hold up their heads, high. Far from enemies, they are merely opposite sides of the same voluntaristic coin.
Walter Block

If most people truly consent to taxes let's make them voluntary. We'll find out real quick what people consent to.
Dave Smith

Telling strangers that they do in fact consent despite them explicitly stating otherwise is a mockery of the concepts of consent and of contract, and one of the more incoherent ways used to justify state oppression.
Michael Malice

A man’s liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited. In thus imposing by force their wills upon his will, they are breaking the law of equal freedom in his person; and what the motive may be matters not.
Herbert Spencer

I don’t like the use of force. I like voluntarism. That’s what a free society is supposed to be all about.
Ron Paul

The voluntary arrangements of a private property society would be far more conducive to peace and the rule of law, than the coercive setup of a parasitical monopoly government.
Robert Murphy

Because the state necessarily commits aggression, the consistent libertarian, in opposing aggression, is also an anarchist.
Stephan Kinsella

Anyone who actually believes in the principle of non-aggression - the underlying premise of libertarianism - must be an anarchist, as it is logically impossible to oppose the initiation of violence while supporting any form of "government," which is nothing but violence.
Larken Rose

Human beings have a major cognitive dissonance problem when it comes to taxes. For some reason they don't see it as an armed extortion racket.
Jeff Berwick

Statism is the very paradoxical idea that people are inherently greedy and self-interested and therefore we should pick a handful of them and give them all the power.
Spike Cohen

The State turns every contingency into a resource for accumulating power in itself, always at the expense of social power; and with this it develops a habit of acquiescence in the people.
Albert Jay Nock

Market anarchism is the doctrine that the legislative, adjudicative, and protective functions unjustly and inefficiently monopolised by the coercive State should be entirely turned over to the voluntary, consensual forces of market society.
Roderick T. Long

History shows that the masses are always improved in mental, moral, and material conditions as the powers of the state over the individuals are reduced. As man becomes more enlightened regarding his interests, individual and collective, he insists that forcible authority over him and his conduct shall be abolished.
Joseph A. Labadie

Authors > Sheldon Richman

Sheldon Richman Quotes

To argue that the free market is the only road to peace, prosperity and freedom ought to be a recognized truism. What could be a more obvious statement? It's like saying peace is peaceful or free people are free. That this is not grasped by most people illustrates how far our culture has departed from the liberal thought that characterized the late 18th and 19th centuries.

Sheldon Richman

Source: What the Interventionist Overlooks (1978) [link] #135

Sheldon Richman

Source: TGIF: We Can Oppose Bigotry without the Politicians (2014) [link] #152

The government's coercive taxing power necessarily creates two classes: those who create and those who consume the wealth expropriated and transferred by that power. Those who create the wealth naturally want to keep it and devote it to their own purposes. Those who wish to expropriate it look for ever more-clever ways to acquire it without inciting resistance. One of those ways is the spreading of an elaborate ideology of statism, which teaches that the people are the state and that therefore they are only paying themselves when they pay taxes.

Sheldon Richman

Source: Libertarian Class Analysis (2006) [link] #160

People with an investment in government power will torture logic like a medieval inquisitor rather than face the facts.

Sheldon Richman

Source: Campaign-Finance Reform Will End Corruption? (2000) [link] #170

No matter how much the government controls the economic system, any problem will be blamed on whatever small zone of freedom that remains.

Sheldon Richman

Source: Unknown #189

Freedom is never more in peril than when politicians feel the pressure to "do something."

Sheldon Richman

Source: Unknown #193

Any argument against a totally free society that depends on the dark side of human nature inevitably circles around to hit the one making the argument smack in the back of the head. Hence, it is a boomerang argument. The reason is that if people are so bad that we can't trust them with total freedom, then how can we possibly trust anyone with monopoly political power? The answer is we can't. Statelessness is the ultimate in checks and balances, which liberal devotees of the limited state claim to value.

Sheldon Richman

Source: Boomerang Argument (2022) [link] #305

Where the state exists, there will be rent-seeking, the quest for advantage that can be had only through force.

Sheldon Richman

Source: Facebook (2024) [link] #465

Sheldon Richman

Source: Libertarian Class Analysis (2006) [link] #477

The free market IS social cooperation. Anything less is an obstacle to, if not an obliteration of, such cooperation.

Sheldon Richman

Source: Facebook (2024) [link] #552

The crucial social divide is not between classes, racial and ethnic groups, or the sexes. It's between those who renounce aggressive force and those who do not.

Sheldon Richman

Source: Facebook (2024) [link] #565

From the premise that "charity is a virtue" you cannot derive the conclusion that "charity should be compulsory."

Sheldon Richman

Source: Facebook (2024) [link] #605

The market, absent of force and fraud, is a shorthand term for a group of individuals cooperating in the pursuit of various goals. Striving after different values, working to realize divergent plans, possessed of diverse stores of knowledge, these individuals go their chosen ways, trading only when it is to mutual advantage. Without intending it, such actions by individuals—their acceptance and non-acceptance of goods and services at market prices—generate a complex system in which all the diverse knowledge of the separate individuals is put into a form that is usable by all the market’s participants. It is a system in which all people are left free to pursue their plans without constraint; where the wealth of information contained in market prices offers all the opportunity to rationally adjust those plans when appropriate. In short, the system that spins out of the actions of free human beings offers them the only peaceful, efficient way to deal with an uncertain future.

Sheldon Richman

Source: What the Interventionist Overlooks (1978) [link] #639

About Sheldon Richman

(From The Independent Institute)

Sheldon Richman is a Research Fellow at The Independent Institute. For 15 years he was editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education. Former Vice President at the Future of Freedom Foundation, he is the author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, Separating School & State: How to Liberate America's Families, Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax, and Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State.

Mr. Richman's articles on economics, foreign policy, population issues, federal disaster assistance, international trade, education, the environment, American history, privacy, computers, and the Middle East have appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, American Scholar, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Washington Times, Christian Science Monitor, The Independent Review, Insight, Cato Policy Report, Journal of Economic Development, The World & I, Reason, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Middle East Policy, Liberty, and other publications. He is a contributor to the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. A former newspaper reporter and senior editor at the Cato Institute and Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, Mr. Richman is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia.