All Quotes
PAGE 1 OF 1
1 - 610 / 610
Sort by: NewestOldestAuthorResults Per Page: 2050100All
Nothing wrong with communist anarchism as long as it remains voluntary. Any one that wants to go make a commune, go ahead, do it. I got nothing against it. As long as there's room to the individualist to do his or her own thing.
Source: Interview (2002) [link] #621
Well I sometimes call myself a libertarian but that's only because most people don't know what anarchist means. Most people hear you're an anarchist and they think you're getting ready to throw a bomb at a building. They don't understand the concept of voluntary association, the whole concept of replacing force with voluntary cooperation or contractual arrangements and so on. So libertarian is a clearer word that doesn't arouse any immediate anxiety upon the listener. And then again, libertarians, if they were totally consistent with their principles would be anarchists.
Source: Interview (2002) [link] #620
If there be in nature such a principle as justice, it is necessarily the only political principle there ever was, or ever will be.
Source: Natural Law (1882) [link] #619
In all history there is no war which was not hatched by a Government independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
Source: Patriotism and Christianity (1894) [link] #618
Mystification is the process by which the commonplace is elevated to the level of the divine by those who have a vested interest in its unassailability. Government is a perfect example of mystification at work. Government is a group of individuals organized for the purpose of extracting wealth and exerting power over people and resources in a given geographic area. Ordinarily people object to and resist thieves and robbers; but in the case of government, they do not because the government has created a mystique of legitimacy about its activities.
Source: Demystifying the State (1983) [link] #617
Good intentions are ubiquitous in politics; what is scarce is accurate beliefs.
Source: The Myth of the Rational Voter (2007) #616
The greatest violator of the principle of equal liberty is the State. Its functions are to control, to rule, to dictate, to regulate, and in exercising these functions it interferes with and injures individuals who have done no wrong. The objection to government is, not that it controls those who invade the liberty of others, but that it controls the non-invader. It may be necessary to govern one who will not govern himself, but that in no wise justifies governing one who is capable of and willing to govern himself. To argue that because some need restraint all must be restrained is neither consistent nor logical.
Source: Liberty and the Great Libertarians (1913) [link] #615
None of these alternative sets of rules for property allocation is self-evidently right. No ownership claim can be deduced logically from the principle of self-ownership alone, without the "'overlay' of a property system," or a system of "allocation rules." No such system, whether Lockean, Georgist, or Mutualist, can be proved correct. Any proof requires a common set of allocation rules, and a particular set of allocation rules for property can only be established by social consensus, not by deduction from the axiom of self-ownership.
Source: Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (2007) [link] #614
When anarchism in its several forms, including its theoretical statements and practical experiments, is analyzed structurally, it generally separates into three broad areas of tactics and strategy; (a) a rejection of constituted authority as the source of social dynamism and equilibrium;(b) a refusal to collaborate with the existing order anywhere through participation in any program of reformism; (c) the promotion of a variety of non-coercive alternatives of quite clearly defined nature as a substitute. Within this framework the various schools of anarchism have developed a number of sectarian variants, and some of these elaborations have created bitter doctrinal controversies. The result has been the erection of barriers fully as steep among the anarchists as those existing between them and the conventional world.
Source: Men Against the State (1953) [link] #613
As long as we employ the guns of government to force our neighbors to our will, aggression will be the instrument by which we enslave ourselves.
Source: Healing Our World: The Other Piece of the Puzzle (1993) #612
I am an Anarchist not because I believe Anarchism is the final goal, but because there is no such thing as a final goal.
Source: The London Years (1956) [link] #611
The State doesn't just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.
Source: Unknown #610
The problem isn't a lack of money food water or land. The problem is that you've given control of these things to a group of greedy psychopaths who care more about maintaining their own power than helping mankind.
Source: Unknown #609
It is vain to fight totalitarianism by adopting totalitarian methods. Freedom can only be won by men unconditionally committed to the principles of freedom. The first requisite for a better social order is the return to unrestricted freedom of thought and speech.
Source: Omnipotent Government (1944) [link] #608
Concentrated power can be always wielded in the interest of the few and at the expense of the many.
Source: The Principles of Anarchism (~1905–1910) [link] #607
The market does not require people to be good: it takes people as they are and induces them to do good by using their capabilities to provide what others want.
Source: Capitalism (1990) [link] #606
From the premise that "charity is a virtue" you cannot derive the conclusion that "charity should be compulsory."
Source: Facebook (2024) [link] #605
What is the State today but an evolution of violent parasitism? How can this parasitic organization exist without the credulity of its dupes? Slaves having been bossed about for ages--how can they conceive of a condition wherein there is no one to tell them what to do, what they may do and what they may not. Tell such a man that you do not believe in a governmental society and he will think you're crazy. Indeed, 'tis likely that he will think you're dangerous and might like to bash your head in for wanting to do away with what he believes he cannot live without--dictators and rulers.
Source: Is Credulity Sweeping the World? (1937) [link] #604
Freedom is unlikely to be lost all at once and openly. It is far more likely to be eroded away, bit by bit, amid glittering promises and expressions of noble ideals.
Source: The Quest for Cosmic Justice (1999) [link] #603
How long would authority [...] exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers and hangmen?
Source: Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) [link] #602
I, as an Anarchist, have no right to advise another to do anything involving a risk to himself; nor would I give a fillip for an action done by the advice of some one else, unless it is accompanied by a well-argued, well settled conviction on the part of the person acting, that it really is the best thing to do. Anarchism, to me, means not only the denial of authority, not only a new economy, but a revision of the principles of morality. It means the development of the individual, as well as the assertion of the individual. It means self-responsibility, and not leader-worship.
Source: In Defense of Emma Goldmann and the Right of Expropriation (1894) [link] #601
As the word "anarchy" etymologically signifies the negation of governmental authority, the absence of government, it follows that one indissoluble bond unites the anarchists. This is antagonism to all situations regulated by imposition, constraint, violence, governmental oppression, whether these are a product of all, a group, or of one person. In short, whoever denies that the intervention of government is for human relationships is an anarchist. But this definition would have only a negative value did it not possess, as a practical complement, a conscious attempt to live outside this domination and servility which are incompatible with the anarchist conception. An anarchist, therefore, is an individual who, whether he has been brought to it by a process of reasoning or by sentiment, lives to the greatest possible extent in a state of legitimate defence against authoritarian encroachments. From this it follows that anarchist individualism - the tendency which we believe contains the most profound realization of the anarchist idea - is not merely a philosophical doctrine - it is an attitude, an individual way of life.
Source: Anarchist Individualism as Life and Activity (1907) [link] #600
Even bad men are led by the market process to do good, but good men are induced by the political process to do harm.
Source: Capitalism (1990) [link] #599
Overly optimistic assumptions about human nature are baked in to any political philosophy that advocates the use of government to solve many social problems.
Source: "Abundance Progressivism" vs. Reality (2025) [link] #598
We libertarians are not the spokesmen for any ethnic or economic class; we are the spokesmen for all classes, for all of the public; we strive to see all of these groups united, hand-in-hand, in opposition to the plundering and privileged minority that constitutes the rulers of the State.
Source: Libertarians of Will, Intellect, and Action (1977) [link] #597
We should never define Libertarian positions in terms coined by liberals or conservatives — nor as some variant of their positions. We are not fiscally conservative and socially liberal. We are Libertarians, who believe in individual liberty and personal responsibility on all issues at all times.
Source: The Libertarian Stand on Abortion (1998) [link] #596
This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will. And this is definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.
Source: Relation of the State to the Individual (1890) [link] #595
Libertarianism is fundamentally about advancing human cooperation.
Source: Twitter (2022) [link] #594
They who employ force by proxy, are as much responsible for that force as though they employed it themselves.
Source: Social Statics (1851) [link] #593
Liberty should be understood as freedom from the government, specifically, freedom from the initiation of physical force by the government.
Source: The Future of Liberty (2001) [link] #592
Whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder.
Source: Quoted in Why Americans Hate Politics, by E.J. Dionne, Jr., Simon & Schuster, 2004, p. 267. [link] #591
If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.
Source: Latin America: From Colonization to Globalization (1999) [link] #590
The idea that anarchism must fail because under anarchy no one can make others obey the rules is stunningly stupid. On any given day, even in a world pervaded by states and their dictates, nearly everything that people do or refrain from doing is so not because the state threatens them with violence for acting otherwise, but because they find conformity with rules -- honesty, promise keeping, careful handling of goods, avoidance of opportunism, and so forth -- to be in their interest. The world does not run on the state's threats of violence; it runs in spite of those threats. Many sanctions besides violence and threats of violence may be -- and are even in the world in which we now live -- effective sanctions for adherence to law and order. Ostracization of dishonest dealers, for example, works wonders, and in the world of modern communications it can be more effective than ever.
Source: Facebook (2016) #588
Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?
Source: We the Living (1936) [link] #587
A political party, then, is a collective whose overriding purpose and reason for being is to seize control of the State for plunder and coercion for its cause.
Source: Invaders from the State (1976) [link] #586
Government should never be able to do anything you can't do. If you can't steal from your neighbor, you can't send the government to your neighbor to steal for you.
Source: CPAC (2011) [link] #585
If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.
Source: The Constitution of Liberty (1960) [link] #584
The nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more.
Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958) [link] #583
The greatest danger to liberty is not the tyrant but the citizen who has been taught to love his chains.
Source: Unknown #582
If you personally advocate that I be caged if I don't pay for whatever "government" things YOU want, please don't pretend to be tolerant, or non-violent, or enlightened, or compassionate. Don't pretend you believe in "live and let live," and don't pretend you want peace, freedom or harmony. It's a simple truism that the only people in the world who are willing to "live and let live" are voluntaryists. So you can either PRETEND to care about and respect your fellow man while continuing to advocate widespread authoritarian violence, or you can embrace the concepts of self-ownership and peaceful coexistence, and become an anarchist.
Source: Unknown #581
Anarchists generally make use if the word "State" to mean all the collection of institutions, political, legislative, judicial, military, financial, etc., by means of which management of their own affairs, the guidance of their personal conduct, and the care of ensuring their own safety are taken from the people and confided to certain individuals, and these, whether by usurpation or delegation, are invested with the right to make laws over and for all, and to constrain the public to respect them, making use of the collective force of the community to this end.
Source: Anarchy (1891) [link] #580
Despite the popular idea of anarchists as violent men, Anarchism is the ONE non-violent social philosophy. It is the very antithesis of Communism and Fascism which place the State as supreme. Anarchists will do away with the State entirely. The function of the Anarchist is twofold. By daily courage in non-cooperation with the tyrannical forces of the State and the Church, he helps to tear down present society; the anarchist by daily acts of cooperation with his fellows in overcoming evil with goodwill and solidarity, he builds toward the anarchistic cooperative commonwealth which is formed by voluntary action with the right of secession.
Source: Anarchism: The Solution To the World’s Problems (1940) [link] #579
There is no difference, in principle--but only in degree--between political and chattel slavery. The former, no less than the latter, denies a man's ownership of himself and the products of his labor; and asserts that other men may own him, and dispose of him and his property, for their uses, and at their pleasure.
Source: No Treason No. 1 (1867) [link] #578
Anarchy is the only logical outcome of freethought - the ripened fruit of which freethinking is the potent seed.
Source: A Lance for Anarchy (1891) [link] #577
Does Society need the State to settle its difficulties? Answer: Yes; just like a drowning man needs a glass of water.
Source: Is Credulity Sweeping the World? (1937) [link] #576
Anarchism is for liberty, and neither for nor against anything else. Anarchy is the mother of co-operation,--yes, just as liberty is the mother of order; but, as a matter of definition, liberty is not order nor is Anarchism co-operation. I define Anarchism as the belief in the greatest amount of liberty compatible with equality of liberty; or, in other words, as the belief in every liberty except the liberty to invade.
Source: Armies that Overlap (1890) [link] #575
It must be remembered that a vast majority of mankind's history has been spent living under the rule of tyrants and authoritarians. The ideas of Liberty are very new when you consider the big picture. By contrast, various forms of socialism and fascism have been adopted over and over again. Be wary of those who try to present these old and tired ideas as something new and exciting. Liberty and free markets are the way forward if we truly desire peace and prosperity.
Source: Facebook (2015) [link] #574
The total number of people killed by their own governments in the twentieth century has been estimated at 123 million. These victims, in general, were killed for belonging to the wrong groups, whether it be the wrong race, the wrong class, or the wrong ideology. The murderous regimes did not stop at the thought that their crimes against humanity would cost them a great deal of tax revenues, for they were not primarily seeking money. They were moved partly by hatred, partly by the love of power, and partly by the drive to remake the world in accordance with their ideologies. The number of people killed by their own governments in the twentieth century was more than four and a half times greater than the number killed by nongovernmental murderers - which raises the question of whether a strong government should be counted more a source of security or a source of danger.
Source: The Problem of Political Authority (2013) [link] #573
I'm not scared of the Maos and the Stalins and the Hitlers. I'm scared of the thousands or millions of people that hallucinate them to be "authority", and so do their bidding, and pay for their empires and carry out their orders. I don't care if there's one looney with a stupid moustache. He's not threat if the people do not believe in "authority".
Source: Unknown #572
Nothing is more dangerous for man’s private morality than the habit of command. The best man, the most intelligent, disinterested, generous, pure, will infallibly and always be spoiled at this trade. Two sentiments inherent in power never fail to produce this demoralisation; they are: contempt for the masses and the overestimation of one’s own merits. “The masses,” a man says to himself, “recognising their incapacity to govern on their own account, have elected me their chief. By that act they have publicly proclaimed their inferiority and my superiority. Among this crowd of men, recognising hardly any equals of myself, I am alone capable of directing public affairs. The people have need of me; they cannot do without my services, while I, on the contrary, can get along all right by myself: they, therefore, must obey me for their own security, and in condescending to command them, I am doing them a good turn.” Is not there something in all that to make a man lose his head and his heart as well, and become mad with pride? It is thus that power and the habit of command become for even the most intelligent and virtuous men, a source of aberration, both intellectual and moral.
Source: Marxism, Freedom and the State [link] #571
Government is a social machine whose function is coercion through monopoly of power... Like a bulldozer, government serves the caprice of any man or group who succeeds in seizing the controls. The purpose of anarchism is to dismantle such institutions and to prevent their reconstruction. Ten thousand years of human history demonstrate that our freedoms cannot be entrusted to those ambitious few who are drawn to power; we must learn--again--to govern ourselves. Anarchism does not mean "no rule"; it means "no rulers". Difficult, but not utopian, anarchy means and requires self-rule, self-discipline, probity, character.
Source: One Life at a Time, Please (1988) [link] #570
We are coerced by our fellow human beings. Since they have the ability to choose to do otherwise, our condition need not be thus. Coercion is immoral, inefficient, and unnecessary for human life and fulfillment.
Source: New Libertarian Manifesto (1983) [link] #569
Voluntaryism is the idea that human beings should work to maximize consent and minimize the initiation of force as among humans. Force, as used here, means touching, striking, or otherwise physically invading the body or property of another. To achieve this end, Libertarian Voluntaryists seek to understand how consent is manifested, socially and scientifically, and they attempt to respect consent as best as possible given human limitations of consciousness.
Source: The Definitive Guide to Libertarian Voluntaryism (2022) [link] #568
When a gang member steals, it is called theft. When the mafia calls a hit, it is called murder. When a politician orders the same, it is called "Public Policy".
Source: The Definitive Guide to Libertarian Voluntaryism (2022) [link] #567
If it be admitted that a man, possessing absolute power, may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should a majority not be liable to the same reproach? Men are not apt to change their characters by agglomeration; nor does their patience in the presence of obstacles increase with the consciousness of their strength. And for these reasons I can never willingly invest any number of my fellow-creatures with that unlimited authority which I should refuse to any one of them.
Source: Democracy in America (1835) [link] #566
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.
Source: Facebook (2024) [link] #565
In a formulation familiar to libertarians, Franz Oppenheimer described two ways of acquiring wealth: the economic means and the political means. The economic means involves the production of a good or service that is then sold to willing buyers seeking to improve their own well-being. Both parties benefit. The political means, on the other hand, involves the use of force to enrich one party or group at the expense of another--either to acquire someone else’s wealth directly or to give oneself an unfair advantage over his competitors through the use or threat of coercion. That is a much easier way of enriching oneself; and since people tend to prefer an easier over a more difficult path to wealth, a society that hopes to foster both justice and prosperity needs to discourage wealth acquisition via the political means and encourage it through the economic means.
Source: Plunder or Enterprise: The World's Choice (2007) [link] #564
The government and its chiefs do not have the powers of the mythical Santa Claus. They cannot spend except by taking out of the pockets of some people for the benefit of others.
Source: The Gold Problem (1965) [link] #563
He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body... he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you.
Source: Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1553) [link] #562
The battle against statism today is not a battle against any particular politician. The issue is deeper. It is a battle against a way of thinking, a way of viewing the State. The main victory of the State has been within the minds of the people who obey.
Source: Demystifying the State (1983) [link] #561
The free market, that is, the free pricing system, works automatically. How complex is it? So complex that no man on this earth has the capabilities to enforce a price for one day on one simple item without causing more harm than good.
Source: I’d Push the Button (1946) [link] #560
Libertarians are often baffled at how those who appear so sensitive to constraints on choice, and to differences in bargaining power, when these derive from market factors, become so amazingly oblivious to the constraint on choice, and differential bargaining power, represented by the armed might of the state, empowered to enforce its demands by legalized violence.
Source: Equality: The Unknown Ideal (2001) [link] #559
As long as government has the power to regulate business, business will control government by funding the candidate that legislates in their favor.
Source: Short Answers to the Tough Questions (2012) [link] #558
The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy them.
Source: Big Lies in Politics (2012) [link] #557
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Source: Politics and the English Language (1946) [link] #556
The state is not an organism capable of bringing either moral or material improvements to the populace... but merely a vehicle of power for the men and party in power.
Source: Unknown #555
Government does not produce food from this earth; Government is guns. It is one common distinction of all civilized peoples, that they give their guns to Government. Men in Government monopolize the necessary use of force; they are not using their energies productively; they are not milking cows. To get butter, they must use guns; they have nothing else to use.
Source: The Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943) [link] #554
The state is a criminal organisation that lives off a coercive source of income called taxes. In reality it is a large scale criminal organisation. Worse than the common thief. Do the maths: how many times does a common thief rob you in one year? The state steals from you every day, it steals from you every day, all the time.
Source: The Economist (2023) [link] #553
The free market IS social cooperation. Anything less is an obstacle to, if not an obliteration of, such cooperation.
Source: Facebook (2024) [link] #552
Politics is the disease; the nonaggression principle is the cure; but almost no one wants to swallow it.
Source: Facebook (2024) [link] #551
When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick".
Source: Statism and Anarchy (1873) [link] #550
Those who are capable of tyranny, are capable of perjury to sustain it.
Source: An Essay on the Trial by Jury (1852) [link] #549
There is altogether too much dependence on the State institution to act as big papa to settle our difficulties and solve our problems. That the State machine should be the effective cause of those difficulties seldom enters the heads of the populace. Indeed, take the concept of the State from the minds of nearly every reformer and revolutionist who aspires to save the world, and his thinking is checkmated immediately.
Source: The Relationship of Money to the Social Problem [link] #548
In an anarchist world, of course, there would be thousands of different communities, enough variety to accommodate everyone except someone who wanted power over others.
Source: From Far Right to Far Left -- and Farther (1970) [link] #547
Governments cannot accept liberty as their fundamental basis for justice, because governments rest upon authority and not upon liberty. To accept liberty as the fundamental basis is to discard authority; that is, to discard government itself; as this would mean the dethronement of the leaders of government, we can expect only those who have no economic compromises to make, to accept equal liberty as the basis of justice.
Source: Liberty and the Great Libertarians (1913) [link] #546
Do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution. The state is the problem itself.
Source: Address at the 54th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (2024) [link] #545
Libertarians defend each person's right to life, liberty, and property - rights that people possess naturally, before governments are created. In the libertarian view, all human relationships should voluntary; the only actions that should be forbidden by law are those that involve the initiation of force against those who have themselves used force - actions like murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, and fraud.
Source: Libertarianism: A Primer (1997) #544
To understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature; without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man. A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection.
Source: Second Treatise of Government (1689) [link] #543
Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.
Source: Rights of Man (1791) [link] #542
When we defend liberty, we are defending ourselves, our families, our land, and our property.
Source: Unknown #541
The historical pedigree of classical liberalism as an ideology that champions the average, working person is unparalleled. Whenever, wherever it has come to dominate, the ultimate result has been greater liberty, prosperity and peace.
Source: The Art of Being Free (2012) [link] #540
A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man.
Source: Unknown #539
The foundation of statism is deliberate mysticism, calculated to gain the acquiescence of the oppressed or "the sanction of the victim." In order, to obtain this "authority," or legitimization of immoral actions, it creates meaningless forms to bedazzle the masses--big juju! Such was the divine rule of kings, such was nationalism, such were the emperors and czars restoring the dead glory of Rome. Such, too, is the game of democracy. The rule is to withhold violence but jockey for the use of acceptable, legitimized violence.
Source: Invaders from the State (1976) [link] #538
Anarchism is a word without meaning, unless it includes the liberty of the individual to control his product or whatever his product has brought him through exchange in a free market--that is, private property. Whoever denies private property is of necessity an Archist. This excludes from Anarchism all believers in compulsory Communism. As for the believers in voluntary Communism (of whom there are precious few), they are of necessity believers in the liberty to hold private property, for to pool one’s possessions with those of others is nothing more or less than an exercise of proprietorship.
Source: The New Freewoman (1913) [link] #537
The idea of archism, of the state, in all its manifestations and forms, is based on the theory that a portion of society - a minority in the oligarchic form of the state, a majority in the democratic form - has the right to compel all the rest to fulfil its wishes. All forms of state organisation deny in principle the right of their constituent members to secede, individually or in groups, from such organisation. No state accepts, within its jurisdiction, the existence of any other political organisation, independent of its authority. For the supporters of government, there is nothing more dangerous than a "state within a state". Anarchism holds a view diametrically opposed to that of the oppressive state. It advocates individual election, instead of the law of majorities; freedom from the orders of authority, in short, voluntary organisation instead of authoritarian organisation.
Source: Some Misconceptions of Anarchism (1904) [link] #536
The State always has the sole purpose to limit, tame, subordinate, the individual -- to make him subject to some generality or other.
Source: The Ego and Its Own (1844) [link] #535
We shall not prevent the gradual advance of totalitarian control if we do not succeed in defeating the philosophy which produces it.
Source: The Prospects of Freedom (1946) [link] #534
The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates.
Source: The Annals (109) [link] #533
The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.
Source: Unknown #532
The State, therefore, is the most flagrant, the most cynical, and the most complete negation of humanity.
Source: Rousseau's Theory of the State (1873) [link] #531
Liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others.
Source: Second Treatise of Government (1689) [link] #530
Every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.
Source: Second Treatise of Government (1689) [link] #529
Special interest politics is a simple game. A hundred people sit in a circle, each with his pocket full of pennies. A politicians walks around the outside of the circle, taking a penny from each person. No one minds; who cares about a penny? When he has gotten all the way around the circle, the politician throws fifty cents down in front of one person, who is overjoyed at this unexpected windfall. The process is repeated, ending with a different person. After a hundred rounds everyone is a hundred cents poorer, fifty cents richer, and happy.
Source: The Machinery of Freedom (1973) [link] #528
Taking a man's money without his consent, is also as much robbery, when it is done by millions of men, acting in concert, and calling themselves a government, as when it is done by a single individual, acting on his own responsibility, and calling himself a highwayman. Neither the numbers engaged in the act, nor the different characters they assume as a cover for the act, alter the nature of the act itself.
Source: An Essay on the Trial by Jury (1852) [link] #527
The greatest violator of the principle of equal liberty is the State. Its functions are to control, to rule, to dictate, to regulate, and in exercising these functions it interferes with and injures individuals who have done no wrong. The objection to government is, not that it controls those who invade the liberty of others, but that it controls the non-invader. It may be necessary to govern one who will not govern himself, but that in no wise justifies governing one who is capable of and willing to govern himself. To argue that because some need restraint all must be restrained is neither consistent nor logical.
Source: Liberty and the Great Libertarians (1913) [link] #526
It is interesting to note that the advocates of government see initiated force (the legal force of government) as the only solution to social disputes. According to them, if everyone in society were not forced to use the same court system, and particularly the same final court of appeal, disputes would be insoluble. Apparently it doesn’t occur to them that disputing parties are capable of freely choosing their own arbiters, including the final arbiter, and that this final arbiter wouldn’t need to be the same agency for all disputes which occur in the society. They have not realized that disputants would, in fact, be far better off if they could choose among competing arbitration agencies so that they could reap the benefits of competition and specialization. It should be obvious that a court system which has a monopoly guaranteed by the force of statutory law will not give as good a quality of service as will free-market arbitration agencies, which must compete for their customers. Also, a multiplicity of agencies facilitates specialization, so that people with a dispute in some specialized field can hire arbitration by experts in that field ... instead of being compelled to submit to the judgment of men who have little or no background in the matter.
Source: The Market For Liberty (1970) [link] #525
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
Source: On Liberty (1859) [link] #524
No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others.
Source: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966) [link] #523
Libertarianism is the view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others.
Source: Libertarianism: A Primer (1997) #522
Libertarians should never concede the moral high ground to those who insist on coercively interfering with freedom.
Source: Freedom: Because It Works or Because It's Right? (2012) [link] #521
Central authority is bad. The bias should be for freedom. And without a central authority, there are lots of little authorities, and we learn which ones to trust.
Source: The O'Reilly Factor (2010) [link] #520
See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.
Source: Colloquy (1990) [link] #519
Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.
Source: Unknown #518
Anarchists argue that even the most minimal 'nightwatchman' State advocated by modern libertarians would be controlled by the rich and powerful and be used to defend their interests and privileges. However much it claims to protect individual rights, the government will always become 'an instrument in the hands of the ruling classes to maintain power over the people'. Rather than providing healthy stability, it prevents positive change; instead of imposing order, it creates conflict; where it tries to foster enterprise, it destroys initiative. It claims to bring about security, but it only increases anxiety.
Source: Demanding the Impossible (1992) [link] #517
Liberty is a whole, and to deny economic liberty is finally to destroy all liberty.
Source: The Literature of Freedom (1956) [link] #516
In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so?
Source: The Law (1850) [link] #515
To reject aggression is to embrace a model of social interaction rooted in peaceful, voluntary cooperation. This kind of cooperation can occur without the state; it can be fostered effectively by a variety of nonaggressive social institutions, including, in particular, institutions upholding consensual legal rules, resolving disputes, and providing protection against aggression... Unlike these institutions, the state is premised on the denial of human moral equality and is inimical to peaceful, voluntary cooperation (and the flourishing such cooperation facilitates) because of the state's nonconsensual character and its inefficiency, destructiveness, rapacity, and penchant for aggression--especially in the service of elite groups.
Source: Anarchy and Legal Order (2013) [link] #514
The undeserving maintain power by promoting hysteria.
Source: God Emperor of Dune (1981) [link] #513
When the state lays its hand on anything, it turns it into a weapon of oppression--whether it be taxes, laws, or the machinery of government itself.
Source: Unknown #512
An unfree system is to the extent of its lack of freedom a dehumanized system.
Source: Defending the Market (1988) [link] #511
The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
Source: An Economist's Protest (1975) [link] #510
We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.
Source: The Law (1850) [link] #509
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.
Source: Is It Illegal To Not Pay Taxes? (2015) [link] #508
The problem is not having the wrong person in charge of the government. The problem is having such a government - a government without the explicit, voluntary, individual consent of every adult subject to its authority - in the first place.
Source: Unknown #507
On the free market, every man gains; one man's gain, in fact, is precisely the consequence of his bringing about the gain of others. When an exchange is coerced, on the other hand--when criminals or governments intervene--one group gains at the expense of others. On the free market, everyone earns according to his productive value in satisfying consumer desires. Under statist distribution, everyone earns in proportion to the amount he can plunder from the producers. The market is an interpersonal relation of peace and harmony; statism is a relation of war and caste conflict. Not only do earnings on the free market correspond to productivity, but freedom also permits a continually enlarged market, with a wider division of labor, investment to satisfy future wants, and increased living standards.
Source: Power and Market (1970) [link] #506
Man seeks freedom as the magnet seeks the pole or water its level, and society can have no peace until every member is really free.
Source: Unknown #505
I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation. It is the slavery of other men that sets up a barrier to my freedom, or what amounts to the same thing, it is their bestiality which is the negation of my humanity. For my dignity as a man, my human right which consists of refusing to obey any other man, and to determine my own acts in conformity with my convictions is reflected by the equally free conscience of all and confirmed by the consent of all humanity. My personal freedom, confirmed by the liberty of all, extends to infinity.
Source: Man, Society, and Freedom (1871) [link] #504
People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.
Source: Unknown #503
Anarchism recognises only the relative significance of ideas, institutions and social forms. It is therefore not a fixed, self-enclosed social system, but rather a definite trend in the historic development of mankind, which, in contrast with the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life. Even freedom is only a relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends constantly to become broader and affect wider circles in more manifold ways. For the Anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account. The less this natural development of man is influenced by ecclesiastical or political guardianship, the more efficient and harmonious will human personality become, the more will it become the measure of the society in which it has grown.
Source: Anarcho-syndicalism: Theory and Practice (1938) [link] #502
Experiment lies at the heart of progress. Whether in science, technology, or economic organization, the rivalrous process of trial and, often, error -- to weed out what does not work -- constitutes the indispensable means by which the more successful (more explanatory, more productive, more profitable) displaces the less successful and thereby gives rise to genuine progress. Notice, however, that the progress so visible over the ages in science, technology, and economic organization has no counterpart in government. Today's government might as well be the government in the classic Greek tragedies of the fifth century BC. The reason is that government by its very nature punishes experiment, calls it treason and murders those who sponsor it. The state wants no experiment; it wants only to cement in place every predatory policy and project that butters the bread of its leaders, funders, and running dogs. Where other realms of human endeavor understand the necessity of competitive experimentation, the state understands only violence veiled in heavy layers of lies and propaganda. Experiment at your own peril, citizen.
Source: Facebook (2016) [link] #501
Your right to life and to liberty are not merely inalienable, they are also indivisible. A right to life means it is your due as a human being to be left in peace by others so long as you respect their equal claim. A right to liberty means you are entitled to the peaceful use of whatever is yours--your body, your labor, your property.
Source: The Art of Being Free (2012) [link] #500
Slavery is a condition in which one is not allowed to exercise his right of self-ownership but is ruled by someone else. Government--the rule of some men over others by initiated force--is a form of slavery. To advocate government is to advocate slavery. To advocate limited government is to put oneself in the ridiculous position of advocating limited slavery.
Source: The Market For Liberty (1970) [link] #499
One of the glories of the market is that, even when greatly hobbled, competition and new wealth can break through.
Source: The Libertarian Forum (1974) [link] #498
The freedom of nations is of little human value. It is only the liberty of the individual that counts.
Source: Unknown #497
All who love Liberty are enemies of the state.
Source: Unknown #496
We anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves. We do not believe in the good that comes from above and imposed by force; we want the new way of life to emerge from the body of the people and correspond to the state of their development and advance as they advance. It matters to us therefore that all interests and opinions should find their expression in a conscious organization and should influence communal life in proportion to their importance. We have undertaken the task of struggling against existing social organization, and of overcoming the obstacles to the advent of a new society in which freedom and well being would be assured to everybody. To achieve this objective we organize ourselves and seek to become as numerous and as strong as possible.
Source: Anarchism and Organization (1897) [link] #495
A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.
Source: Rights of Man (1791) [link] #494
That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.
Source: Chomsky on Anarchism (2005) [link] #493
One of the key ways in which states demonstrate the supremacy of their power is by violating their own rules.
Source: Wikileaks [link] #492
When we respect each other as individual human beings, we are happier, we are more prosperous, we are more harmonious. Obviously the more we disrespect one another, the less of those things we are. I think that the best social cohesion we can have, the best function that we can have, both individually and collectively all the way out to, at a societal level is to have and to respect each other's individual autonomy and individual liberty.
Source: Interview (2024) [link] #491
No action can be virtuous unless it is freely chosen.
Source: Frank S. Meyer: The Fusionist as Libertarian (1981) [link] #490
There is no getting away from it: at bottom, the state is nothing but organized force. Its only abiding rule is this: "Obey, or we will hurt you."
Source: Anarchy without Fear (2002) [link] #489
It is the nature of the coercive state to demand ever-increasing controls and regulations.
Source: FEE [link] #488
The individual does not owe obedience and loyalty to any person or group of persons. He is free, perfectly free, to join his efforts with those of his fellows, and for the ends and by the means which best please him, or to remain isolated and not to participate in the work and, consequently, in the benefits of any social enterprise. The principle of individual liberty is the right to secession, the right to separate oneself at any time from the constituted political organisation; the right not to do what one does not feel the need to do, the right not to conform to the decisions of the majority; it is, in short, the right to the absolute possession of one's own personality.
Source: Some Misconceptions of Anarchism (1904) [link] #487
Society is eternal motion; it does not have to be wound up; and it is not necessary to beat time for it. It carries its own pendulum and its ever-wound-up spring within it. An organized society needs laws as little as legislators. Laws are to society what cobwebs are to a beehive; they only serve to catch the bees.
Source: Nationalism and Culture (Rocker, 1933) [link] #486
All anarchists thus believe that without the artificial restrictions of the State and government, without the coercion of imposed authority, a harmony of interests amongst human beings will emerge. Even the most ardent of individualists are confident that if people follow their own interests in a clear-sighted way they would be able to form unions to minimize conflict. Anarchists, whatever their persuasion, believe in spontaneous order. Given common needs, they are confident that human beings can organize themselves and create a social order which will prove far more effective and beneficial than any imposed by authority. Liberty, as Proudhon observed, is the mother, not the daughter of order.
Source: Demanding the Impossible (1992) [link] #485
Libertarianism is a people's movement and a liberation movement. It seeks the sort of open, non-coercive society in which the people, the living, free, distinct people may voluntarily associate, dis-associate, and, as they see fit, participate in the decisions affecting their lives. This means a truly free market in everything from ideas to idiosyncrasies. It means people free collectively to organize the resources of their immediate community or individualistically to organize them; it means the freedom to have a community-based and supported judiciary where wanted, none where not, or private arbitration services where that is seen as most desirable. The same with police. The same with schools, hospitals, factories, farms, laboratories, parks, and pensions. Liberty means the right to shape your own institutions. It opposes the right of those institutions to shape you simply because of accreted power or gerontological status.
Source: Where Are the Specifics? (1969) [link] #484
People cooperate peacefully and voluntarily when they interact without aggression. A just society, a society rooted in peaceful, voluntary cooperation, is both possible and desirable. Because the state precludes and preempts this kind of cooperation, aggressing or threatening to engage in aggression against those who disobey it, a peaceful, voluntary society must be a stateless society -- an anarchist society.
Source: Anarchy and Legal Order (2013) [link] #483
In a sense there have always and ever been only two political philosophies: liberty and power. Either people should be free to live their lives as they see fit, as long as they respect the equal rights of others, or some people should be able to use force to make other people act in ways they wouldn’t choose. It’s no surprise, of course, that the philosophy of power has always been more appealing to those in power. It has gone by many names--Caesarism, Oriental despotism, theocracy, socialism, fascism, communism, monarchism, ujamaa, welfare-statism--and the arguments for each of these systems have been different enough to conceal the essential similarity. The philosophy of liberty has also gone by different names, but its defenders have always had a common thread of respect for the individual, confidence in the ability of ordinary people to make wise decisions about their own lives, and hostility to those who would use violence to get what they want.
Source: Libertarianism: A Primer (1997) [link] #482
The defining mark of the state is authority, the right to rule. The primary obligation of man is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled. It would seem, then, that there can be no resolution of the conflict between the autonomy of the individual and the putative authority of the state. Insofar as a man fulfills his obligation to make himself the author of his decisions, he will resist the state's claim to have authority over him. That is to say, he will deny that he has a duty to obey the laws of this state simply because they are the laws. In that sense, it would seem that anarchism is the only political doctrine consistent with the virtue of autonomy.
Source: In Defense of Anarchism (1970) [link] #481
The vital command posts invariably owned monopolistically by the State are: (1) police and military protection; (2) judicial protection; (3) monopoly of the mint (and monopoly of defining money); (4) rivers and coastal seas; (5) urban streets and highways, and land generally (unused land, in addition to the power of eminent domain); and (6) the post office. The defense function is the one reserved most jealously by the State. It is vital to the State's existence, for on its monopoly of force depends its ability to exact taxes from the citizens. If citizens were permitted privately owned courts and armies, then they would possess the means to defend themselves against invasive acts by the government as well as by private individuals.
Source: Power and Market (1970) [link] #480
There are some truths so completely self-evident, that demonstration is quite superfluous. This is one of that number. For who will attempt to deny, that the certainty of enjoying the fruits of one’s land, capital and labour, is the most powerful inducement to render them productive? Or who is dull enough to doubt, that no one knows so well as the proprietor how to make the best use of his property? Yet how often in practice is that inviolability of property disregarded, which, in theory, is allowed by all to be so immensely advantageous? How often is it broken in upon for the most insignificant purposes; and its violation, that should naturally excite indignation, justified upon the most flimsy pretexts? So few persons are there who have a lively sense of any but a direct injury, or, with the most lively feelings, have firmness enough to act up to their sentiments! There is no security of property, where a despotic authority can possess itself of the property of the subject against his consent. Neither is there such security, where the consent is merely nominal and delusive.
Source: A Treatise on Political Economy (1817) [link] #479
Anarchism is the negation of authoritarian organisation, but obviously not of all organisation. It does not ignore the organic character of society, nor the gradual course of its development. However, while recognising the organic character of society, it does not follow that it is seen as an organism in the absolute sense of the word, i.e. an organism in which all the component organs obey, as slaves, the will of a central authority, as the supreme brain. The political organisation of society is an entirely different conception from the biological organisation. Society is an organisation without special organs and is founded solely by virtue of the mutual relations between individuals. What is the character of these mutual relations? It is up to political science to answer. What should be, or rather, what will be the character of these mutual relations in the future? Anarchism teaches that it will be libertarian, that these mutual relations, i.e., that the social organisation must be voluntary and not authoritarian.
Source: Some Misconceptions of Anarchism (1904) [link] #478
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. The state's officers and the court intellectuals at universities and the news media go to great lengths to have people believe this fantastic story.
Source: Libertarian Class Analysis (2006) [link] #477
Libertarians are concerned, first and foremost, with that most valuable of properties, the life of each individual. That is the property most brutally and constantly abused by state systems whether they are of the right or left. Property rights pertaining to material objects are seen by libertarians as stemming from and as importantly secondary to the right to own, direct, and enjoy one's own life and those appurtenances thereto which may be acquired without coercion. Libertarians, in short, simply do not believe that theft is proper whether it is committed in the name of a state, a class, a crises, a credo, or a cliché.
Source: Where Are the Specifics? (1969) [link] #476
Fear of the people is the sickness of all those who belong to authority; the people, for those in power, are the enemy.
Source: Parliamentary Isolation (1849) [link] #475
Since the State thrives on what it expropriates, the general decline in production that it induces by its avarice foretells its own doom. Its source of income dries up. Thus, in pulling Society down it pulls itself down. Its ultimate collapse is usually occasioned by a disastrous war, but preceding that event is a history of increasing and discouraging levies on the marketplace, causing a decline in the aspirations, hopes, and self-esteem of its victims.
Source: The Rise and Fall of Society (1959) [link] #474
If men have like claims to that freedom which is needful for the exercise of their faculties, then must the freedom of each be bounded by the similar freedom of all. When, in the pursuit of their respective ends, two individuals clash, the movements of the one remain free only in so far as they do not interfere with the like movements of the other. This sphere of existence into which we are thrown not affording room for the unrestrained activity of all, and yet all possessing in virtue of their constitutions similar claims to such unrestrained activity, there is no course but to apportion out the unavoidable restraint equally. Wherefore we arrive at the general proposition, that every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberty by every other man.
Source: Social Statics (1851) [link] #473
Every State is a despotism, be the despot one or many.
Source: The Ego and Its Own (1844) [link] #472
The continued appeal of anarchism can probably be attributed to its enduring affinity with both the rational and emotional impulses lying deep within us. It is an attitude, a way of life as well as a social philosophy. It presents a telling analysis of existing institutions and practices, and at the same time offers the prospect of a radically transformed society. Above all, it holds up the bewitching ideal of personal and social freedom, both in the negative sense of being free from all external restraint and imposed authority, and in the positive sense of being free to celebrate the full harmony of being. Whatever its future success as a historical movement, anarchism will remain a fundamental part of human experience, for the drive for freedom is one of our deepest needs and the vision of a free society is one of our oldest dreams. Neither can ever be fully repressed; both will outlive all rulers and their States.
Source: Demanding the Impossible (1992) [link] #471
Can we suppress truth? Can we arrest the progress of the enquiring mind? If we can, it will only be done by the most unmitigated despotism. Mind has a perpetual tendency to rise. It cannot be held down but by a power that counteracts its genuine tendency through every moment of its existence. Tyrannical and sanguinary must be the measures employed for this purpose. Miserable and disgustful must be the scene they produce. Their result will be thick darkness of the mind, timidity, servility, hypocrisy. This is the alternative, so far as there is any alternative in their power, between the opposite measures of which the princes and governments of the earth have now to choose: they must either suppress enquiry by the most arbitrary stretches of power, or preserve a clear and tranquil field in which every man shall be at liberty to discover and vindicate his opinion.
Source: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) [link] #470
Political authority is a particular kind of authority. Refusing to grant any other authority over yourself is self-sovereignty. If you admit that morality exists at all, that morality has any validity whatsoever, then you are rationally forced to the conclusion that humans, by default, are self-owned. Self-ownership means that for any moral agent, the will (or mind) has a valid property right over the body. In classic Lockean lingo: Every man has the right of life, liberty, and property, and to pursue happiness in any way he wills, so long as he does not infringe on the like rights of others to do the same. This "law of equal freedom" as Herbert Spencer dubbed it, can be justified in many ways. Historically, it was first taken as a creation of God. Later, as enlightenment and science advanced, the supernatural justification was augmented (and eventually replaced by) natural and empirical considerations. The observation of animals, man, and societies and the scientific method led to the formulation of "natural laws" - principles and heuristics that explain or model human interaction and social patterns. The law of equal freedom was justified by saying this is the kind of creature man is, or these are the necessary conditions for the life of man qua man. Meanwhile, the contractarian theorists added that this is what men implicitly agree to when they join society; it is the rational basis for interacting with fellow men.
Source: Against Authority [link] #469
There are, accordingly, several economic schools among Anarchists; there are Anarchist Individualists, Anarchist Mutualists, Anarchist Communists and Anarchist Socialists. In times past these several schools have bitterly denounced each other and mutually refused to recognize each other as Anarchists at all. The more narrow-minded on both sides still do so; true, they do not consider it narrow-mindedness, but simply a firm and solid grasp of the truth, which does not permit of tolerance towards error. This has been the attitude of the bigot in all ages, and Anarchism no more than any other new doctrine has escaped its bigots. Each of these fanatical adherents of either collectivism or individualism believes that no Anarchism is possible without that particular economic system as its guarantee, and is of course thoroughly justified from his own standpoint.
Source: Anarchism (1901) [link] #468
All writers on the science of policy are agreed, and they agree with experience, that all governments must frequently infringe the rules of justice to support themselves; that truth must give way to dissimulation, honesty to convenience, and humanity to the reigning interest. The whole of this mystery of iniquity is called the reason of state. It is a reason which I own I cannot penetrate. What sort of a protection is this of the general right, that is maintained by infringing the rights of particulars? What sort of justice is this, which is enforced by breaches of its own laws? These paradoxes I leave to be solved by the able heads of legislators and politicians. For my part, I say what a plain man would say on such occasion. I can never believe that any institution, agreeable to nature, and proper for mankind, could find it necessary, or even expedient, in any case whatsoever, to do what the best and worthiest instincts of mankind warn us to avoid.
Source: A Vindication of Natural Society (1756) [link] #467
Mutualism--a social system based on equal freedom, reciprocity, and the sovereignty of the individual over himself, his affairs, and his products; realized through individual initiative, free contract, cooperation, competition, and voluntary association for defense against the invasive and for the protection of life, liberty and property of the non-invasive.
Source: What is Mutualism? (1927) [link] #466
Where the state exists, there will be rent-seeking, the quest for advantage that can be had only through force.
Source: Facebook (2024) [link] #465
If any man's money can be taken by a so-called government, without his own personal consent, all his other rights are taken with it; for with his money the government can, and will, hire soldiers to stand over him, compel him to submit to its arbitrary will, and kill him if he resists.
Source: A Letter to Grover Cleveland (1886) [link] #464
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, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, (or by any other name indicating his true character,) or by millions, calling themselves a government.
Source: No Treason No. 1 (1867) [link] #463
It is also the claim of anarchists that government and States are involuntary and invasive institutions originated and maintained for the purpose of protecting and enforcing antisocial rights. They claim that the very first act of governments, the compulsory payment of taxes, is not only a denial of the right of the individual to determine what he shall buy and how much he shall choose to offer, but is nothing more than adding insult to injury when the very money extorted from him should be used to his disadvantage. They therefore attempt to instruct people in the belief that government, whether it be the rule of the mass by a few or of the minority by the majority, is both tyrannical and unjust, that any form of ruler-ship is bound to redound to the detriment of the ruled.
Source: Anarchism Applied to Economics (1933) [link] #462
In a world where inequality of ability is inevitable, anarchists do not sanction any attempt to produce equality by artificial or authoritarian means. The only equality they posit and will strive their utmost to defend is the equality of opportunity. This necessitates the maximum amount of freedom for each individual. This will not necessarily result in equality of incomes or of wealth but will result in returns proportionate to service rendered. Free competition will see to that. To base society on the supposition "that the laborer of great capacity will content himself, in favor of the weak with half his wages, furnish his services gratuitously, and produce for that abstraction called society," in the words of Proudhon, "is to base society on a sentiment, I do not say beyond the reach of man, but one which erected systematically into principle, is only a false virtue, a dangerous hypocrisy." A hypocrisy, unfortunately, eagerly subscribed to by a weak, downtrodden, and misguided proportion of the populace.
Source: Anarchism Applied to Economics (1933) [link] #461
Any post-state society will include both individuals and communities adhering to many conflicting ideas of just what "freedom," "autonomy" and "rights" entail. Whatever "law code" communities operate by will be worked out, not as obvious logical deductions from axioms, but through constant interaction between individuals and groups asserting their different understandings of what rights and freedom entail. And it will be worked out after the fact of such conflicts, through the practical negotiations of the mediating and adjudicating bodies within communities.
Source: Anarchism Without Adjectives (2015) [link] #460
Liberty! Freedom! Right! The vital principle of happiness! The one perfect law! The soul of every thing that exalts and refines us! The one sacred sound that touches a sympathetic cord in every living breast! The watchword of every revolution in the holy cause of suffering humanity! Freedom! The last lingering word whispered from the dying martyr’s quivering lips! The one precious boon--the atmosphere of heaven. The "one mighty breath, which shall, like a whirlwind, scatter in its breeze the whole dark pile of human mockeries." When is Liberty to take up its abode on earth?
Source: Equitable Commerce (1852) [link] #459
Liberty, wherever applied, has proved a benefit to the race; furthermore, the most important steps in human progress would have been impossible without it; and if civilization is to advance, that advance can come only as a result of a broader and more complete freedom in all human relations.
Source: Liberty and the Great Libertarians (1913) [link] #458
The one facet of human nature which, because of its invariability and constancy, we can put down as a natural law is: man always seeks to satisfy his desires with the least effort. It is because of this inner compulsion that man invents labor-saving devices, and it is also because of this inner compulsion that man sometimes turns to exploiting his neighbor, which is a form of robbery. But, robbery is attended with the use of force, which might be met with a contrary and defeating force, and is therefore risky; however, when the government, which has a monopoly of coercion, exercises its power so as to favor one individual or set of individuals to the disadvantage of others, there is nothing to do but to comply with its edicts. And, because its edicts are regularized by law, mental adjustment to the exploitation takes place, while the recipients of the advantages thus gained learn to look upon their loot as a "right." The urgency for something-for-nothing is endemic to the human being; therefore, when the government exploits one group in favor of another, the cry goes up by other groups, in the name of "justice," for some of the same. Thus, a new ethic, a new complex of beliefs and conventions, takes hold of the people; all of them expect society, through the agency of government, to take care of them.
Source: Out of Step (1962) [link] #457
Liberty means to exercise human rights in any manner a person chooses so long as it does not interfere with the exercise of the rights of others. This means, above all else, keeping government out of our lives. Only this path leads to the unleashing of human energies that build civilization, provide security, generate wealth, and protect the people from systematic rights violations. In this sense, only liberty can truly ward off tyranny, the great and eternal foe of mankind.
Source: Liberty Defined (2011) [link] #456
People engage in voluntary exchanges because they anticipate improving their lot; the only individuals capable of judging the merits of an exchange are the parties to it. Voluntaryism follows naturally if no one does anything to stop it. The interplay of natural property and exchanges results in a free market price system, which conveys the necessary information needed to make intelligent economic decisions. Interventionism and collectivism make economic calculation impossible because they disrupt the free market price system. Even the smallest government intervention leads to problems which justify the call for more and more intervention. Also, "controlled" economies leave no room for new inventions, new ways of doing things, or for the "unforeseeable and unpredictable." Free market competition is a learning process which brings about results which no one can know in advance. There is no way to tell how much harm has been done and will continue to be done by political restrictions.
Source: Fundamentals of Voluntaryism (2006) [link] #455
In the mainstream conception, the development of the market economy inevitably goes hand in hand with a decline of generosity and altruism. Indifference and coldheartedness rear their ugly heads. Rugged individualism reigns supreme when the state is small or inactive. By contrast, a large and active state is bound to provide the population with the numerous and substantial gratuitous benefits of the welfare state. And, of course, such a large and active state is also likely to promote economic growth through expansionary fiscal and monetary policy... This conception is the exact opposite of the truth. It is a fairy tale of statist propaganda. The truth is that generosity and abundance flourish in a free economy. When such an economy grows, there is actually a powerful tendency for generosity to increase more than aggregate output. But government interventions, most notably expansionary monetary policies, annihilate and invert these tendencies. They create very strong incentives for people to become stingy, selfish, and indifferent. And for analogous reasons, the services provided by the welfare state in the long run never solve any of the problems they were supposed to mend. They always end up reinforcing and perpetuating homelessness, illiteracy, sickness, unemployment, violence, dependence, indifference, and despair. In other words, state-provided gratuitousness is not only sterile but positively harmful, the exact opposite of the gratuitous goods provided by free and responsible citizens.
Source: Understanding the True Meaning of Charity (2024) [link] #454
Most "economists" today are only political apologists masquerading as economists. An economist is somebody that describes the way the world works--how people go about producing, consuming, buying, selling, and living their lives. That's not, however, what most of today's PhD economists do. Instead, they prescribe the way they would like the world to work and tailor theories to help politicians demonstrate the virtue and necessity of their quest for more power... Economics has been turned into the handmaiden of government in order to give a scientistic justification for things that the government--which naturally seeks more power for itself--wants to do.
Source: International Man [link] #453
Tax-supported universities are under the sway of the party in power. The authorities try to appoint only professors who are ready to advance ideas of which they themselves approve… In their opinion, the first duty of the university is to sell the official social philosophy to the rising generation.
Source: Human Action (1949) [link] #452
The Anarchists... believe that "the best government is that which governs least," and that that which governs least is no government at all. Even the simple police function of protecting person and property they deny to governments supported by compulsory taxation. Protection they look upon as a thing to be secured, as long as it is necessary, by voluntary association and cooperation for self-defence, or as a commodity to be purchased, like any other commodity, of those who offer the best article at the lowest price. In their view it is in itself an invasion of the individual to compel him to pay for or suffer a protection against invasion that he has not asked for and does not desire. And they further claim that protection will become a drug in the market, after poverty and consequently crime have disappeared through the realization of their economic programme. Compulsory taxation is to them the life-principle of all the monopolies, and passive, but organized, resistance to the tax-collector they contemplate, when the proper time comes, as one of the most effective methods of accomplishing their purposes.
Source: State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree And Wherein They Differ (1886) [link] #451
The sole remedy for the abuse of political power is to limit it; but when politics corrupt business, modern reformers invariably demand the enlargement of the political power.
Source: God of the Machine (1943) [link] #450
An anarchist is a voluntarist. Now, beyond that, anarchists also are people and, as such, contain the billion-faceted varieties of human reference... They spring from a single seed, no matter the flowering of their ideas. The seed is liberty. And that is all it is. It is not a socialist seed. It is not a capitalist seed. It is not a mystical seed. It is not a determinist seed. It is simply a statement. We can be free. After that it’s all choice and chance. Anarchism, liberty, does not tell you a thing about how free people will behave or what arrangements they will make. It simply says that people have the capacity to make arrangements.
Source: Anarchy without Hyphens (1980) [link] #449
When the typical person encounters an advocate of anarchism, his immediate reaction is to identify a list of critical government functions--preservation of social order, maintenance of a legal system for resolving disputes and dealing with criminals, protection against foreign aggressors, enforcement of private property rights, support of the weak and defenseless, production and maintenance of economic infrastructure, and so forth. This reaction, however, shoots at the wrong target. Libertarian anarchists do not deny that such social functions must be carried out if a society is to function successfully. They do deny, however, that we must have government (as we know it) to carry them out. Libertarian anarchists prefer that these functions be carried out by private providers with whom the beneficiaries have agreed to deal.
Source: Why We Couldn't Abolish Slavery Then and Can't Abolish Government Now (2009) [link] #448
Libertarianism is a direct attack upon the mystique of the State. It recognizes that the State is only an abstraction and reduces it to the actions of individuals. It applies the same standard of morality to the State as it would to a next-door neighbor. If it is not proper for a neighbor to tax or pass laws regulating your private life, then it cannot be proper for the State to do so. Only by elevating itself above the standards of personal morality can the State make these claims on your life.
Source: Demystifying the State (1983) [link] #447
Force is an expedient, the use of which is much to be deplored. It is contrary to the nature of intellect, which cannot be improved but by conviction and persuasion. It corrupts the man that employs it, and the man upon whom it is employed.
Source: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) [link] #446
The most interesting political questions throughout history have been whether humans will be ruled or free, whether they will be responsible for their actions as individuals or left irresponsible as members of society, and whether they can live in peace by volitional agreements alone. The fundamental question of politics has always been whether there should be politics.
Source: Foreword (1984) to The Market for Liberty (1970) #445
How can an act done under compulsion have any moral element in it, seeing that what is moral is the free act of an intelligent being?
Source: A Politician in Sight of Haven (1884) [link] #444
Some of us realize the self-evident truth that no election, no constitution, no legislation, and no other pseudo-religious political ritual can bestow upon anyone the right to rule another. Nothing can make a man into a rightful master; nothing can make a man into a rightful slave.
Source: The Iron Web (2009) [link] #443
To argue that a tax-collecting government can legitimately protect its citizens against aggression is to contradict oneself, since such an entity starts off the entire process by doing the very opposite of protecting those under its control.
Source: The Myth of National Defense (2003) [link] #442
Men and women need nothing so much right now as to rediscover and reenergize their own souls. They will never be able to accomplish such purposes in the dehumanizing and dispirited state systems that insist upon controlling their lives and property. In the sentiments underlying anarchistic thinking, men and women may be able to find the individualized sense of being and self-direction that they long ago abandoned in marbled halls and citadels.
Source: What Is Anarchy? (2004) [link] #441
To believe in liberty is not to believe in any particular social and economic outcome. It is to trust the spontaneous order that emerges when the state does not intervene in human volition and human cooperation. It permits people to work out their problems for themselves, build lives for themselves, take risks and accept responsibility for the results, and make their own decisions.
Source: Liberty Defined (2011) [link] #440
Those who give a free hand to the government in its foreign and defense policy-making will ultimately discover that they have handed their rulers the key that opens all doors, including the doors that obstruct the government's invasion of our most cherished rights to life, liberty, and property. The war-making key is, so to speak, the master key for any government, because when critical tradeoffs must be made, war will override all other concerns and, as an ancient maxim aptly informs us, inter armas silent leges.
Source: Can a Libertarian Be Pro-War? (2006) [link] #439
Most men today can hardly imagine living without the parasitic force-systems we call states. However bad the state may be, they assume that anarchy would be somehow even worse, even after a century of world war, mass murder, and general waste and destruction claiming hundreds of millions of lives and creating poverty where there might have been plenty. By now, if men learned from experience, they would talk about the state in the same tones in which Jews talk about Nazis. Instead, they continue to imagine the state as their savior and protector, and as the natural solution to all their problems. Yet it’s self-evident that the bigger the state, the larger the ratio of force in human life, and the smaller the scope of free action.
Source: Anarchy without Fear (2002) [link] #438
There can be no such things as "fairness in taxation." Taxation is nothing but organized theft, and the concept of a "fair tax" is therefore every bit as absurd as that of "fair theft."
Source: Libertarian Forum (1982) [link] #437
There is no greater moral government than a man’s self-ownership and there is no greater injustice than denying that very thing to a man.
Source: ZeroGov [link] #436
The good cannot seize power, nor retain it; to do this men must love power. And love of power is inconsistent with goodness; but quite consistent with the very opposite qualities--pride, cunning, cruelty.
Source: The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1893) [link] #435
The great delusion of political activity is the belief that you can have the government do exactly what you want – that, somehow, you can get it to perform some function for some good purpose, with nothing bad thrown into the bargain – and that the program you envision will be carried out dutifully by thousands of bureaucrats in just the way you think it should be handled.
Source: The Wit and Wisdom of Harry Browne [link] #434
Anybody is an Anarchist who will agree not to do my person violence, not to take my property without my knowledge and consent, and not to prevent me from doing whatever I choose, unless I choose to do him personal violence, or take his property without his knowledge and consent, or prevent him from doing whatever he chooses. And I ask the assistance of every such person to abolish every law and custom, and, where there is a fair probability of success, to resist every person, that stands in the way of the accomplishment of these aims.
Source: Liberty, and Why We Want It (1896) [link] #433
A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being for any reason whatever; nor will a libertarian advocate the initiation of force, or delegate it to anyone else. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim.
Source: Who is a libertarian? [link] #432
Should it be said, that, by living under the dominion of a prince, which one might leave, every individual has given a tacit consent to his authority, and promised him obedience; it may be answered, that such an implied consent can only have place, where a man imagines, that the matter depends on his choice. But where he thinks (as all mankind do who are born under established governments) that by his birth he owes allegiance to a certain prince or certain form of government; it would be absurd to infer a consent or choice, which he expressly, in this case, renounces and disclaims. Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artizan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires? We may as well assert, that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her.
Source: Of the Original Contract (1748) [link] #431
The true debate is not between left and right. It is, rather, between voluntarism (whether of left or right) and coercivism (whether of left or right). The sooner this lesson is learned, the sooner can we make sense of our otherwise paradoxical political debates.
Source: The Case for Discrimination (2010) [link] #430
We must, therefore, emphasize that "we" are not the government; the government is not "us." The government does not in any accurate sense "represent" the majority of the people. But, even if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority. No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that "we are all part of one another," must be permitted to obscure this basic fact.
Source: Anatomy of the State (1974) [link] #429
When someone removes a cancer, what do you replace it with?
Source: Interview (2010) [link] #428
Those who seek to control our lives must first gain control of our minds. If one of your neighbors went through the neighborhood with a gun, informing you that he was the sovereign authority therein, and that you were required to obey his orders, how would you respond? When, as a child, I visited my aunt and uncle on their farm, there was a retarded man in the neighborhood who informed us that he was the local sheriff and we had to do as he directed. Since he was completely harmless and pleasant, the neighbors tended to humor him and treat him with respect. But when you listen to the gaggle of Democratic Party presidential candidates with essentially the same baseless claim to run your life with policies that would be far more disruptive of your interests, you become aware that you are not hearing the voices of good-natured chuckleheads; but of men and women who fully intend to make their delusions enforceable through the coercive powers of the state.
Source: When the Mind Goes Into Default Mode (2019) [link] #427
It is not the particular man in power that I oppose but the power itself, which is unjust.
Source: Reason Magazine (2004) [link] #426
A businessman's success depends on his intelligence, his knowledge, his productive ability, his economic judgment--and on the voluntary agreement of all those he deals with: his customers, his suppliers, his employees, his creditors or investors. A bureaucrat's success depends on his political pull. A businessman cannot force you to buy his product; if he makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences; if he fails, he takes the loss. A bureaucrat forces you to obey his decisions, whether you agree with him or not--and the more advanced the stage of a country’s statism, the wider and more discretionary the powers wielded by a bureaucrat. If he makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences; if he fails, he passes the loss on to you, in the form of heavier taxes.
Source: The Ayn Rand Letter, III, 26, 5 [link] #425
The most succinct formulation of libertarianism I can think of is this: Other people are not your property. In other words: They are not yours to boss around. Their lives are not yours to micromanage. The fruits of their labour are not yours to dispose of. It doesn’t matter how wise or marvelous or useful it would be for other people to do whatever it is you’d like them to do. It is none of your business whether they wear their seatbelts, worship the right god, have sex with the wrong people, or engage in market transactions that irritate you. Their choices are not yours to direct. They are human beings like yourself, your equals under Natural Law. You possess no legitimate authority over them. As long as they do not themselves step over the line and start treating other people as their property, you have no moral basis for initiating violence against them – nor for authorising anyone else to do so on your behalf.
Source: Libertarianism in One Sentence (2004) [link] #424
All the word "anarchy" means is no rulers. So, if you say you are not an anarchist it means you want a ruler. If you want a ruler, you are a slave. I’m surprised how many people are comfortable publicly identifying themselves as "slaves".
Source: Unknown #423
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
Source: Le Diner Du Comte De Boulainvilliers (1769) #422
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum--even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
Source: The Common Good (1998) [link] #421
An individualist is a man who says: "I'll not run anyone's life -- nor let anyone run mine. I will not rule nor be ruled. I will not be a master nor a slave. I will not sacrifice myself to anyone -- nor sacrifice anyone to myself."
Source: Textbook of Americanism (1946) [link] #420
Anarchy is the radical notion that other people are not your property.
Source: Austro-Athenian Empire (2007) [link] #419
The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not.
Source: Anarchy without Fear (2002) [link] #418
The real triumph of the state occurs when its subjects refer to it as "we," like football fans talking about the home team.
Source: What Do We Owe the State? (2002) [link] #417
Taxes are not the price we pay for civilization nor is the “rule of law” the absence of barbarism. Both are hallmarks of the quaintly named politician who is merely a thinly disguised violence broker.
Source: Worst Best Time: Whistling Past the Graveyard (2020) [link] #416
No man has received from nature the right to command his fellow human beings.
Source: L'Encyclopédie (1751) [link] #415
The solution to our problems is not more paternalism, laws, decrees or controls, but the restoration of liberty and free enterprise.
Source: Man vs. The Welfare State (1969) [link] #413
Depressions and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market but by government interference in the economy.
Source: Unknown #412
Mystical references to "society" and its programs to "help" may warm the hearts of the gullible, but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.
Source: Unknown #411
Capitalism means the ideology (ism) of capital or capitalists. Before Marx came along, the pure free-marketeer Thomas Hodgskin had already used the term capitalism as a pejorative; capitalists were trying to use coercion--the State--to restrict the market. Capitalism, then, does not describe a free market but a form of statism, like communism.
Source: An Agorist Primer (1986) [link] #410
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the State, from the top of the hierarchy to its foot, which is not an abuse to be reformed, a parasite to be exterminated, an instrument of tyranny to be destroyed.
Source: The State: Its Nature, Object, and Destiny (1849) [link] #409
The central thrust of libertarian thought, then, is to oppose any and all aggression against the property rights of individuals in their own persons and in the material objects they have voluntarily acquired. While individual and gangs of criminals are of course opposed, there is nothing unique here to the libertarian creed, since almost all persons and schools of thought oppose the exercise of random violence against persons and property... But the critical difference between libertarians and other people is not in the area of private crime; the critical difference is their view of the role of the State--the government. For libertarians regard the State as the supreme, the eternal, the best organized aggressor against the persons and property of the mass of the public.
Source: For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (1973) [link] #408
Anarchy is not the chaos that media portrays showing riots and looting. Those are things that happen under every government in history, usually as a reaction to some act of bureaucracy. Anarchy is actually peaceful people being left alone to rule their own lives while leaving others alone to do the same.
Source: Facebook (2016) [link] #407
Two quite amazing discoveries await the budding student of polycentric law. The first comes when he realizes that polycentric law has flourished throughout history and across the globe. Once he learns how to recognize it, he sees polycentric law virtually everywhere--in churches, clubs, trades, and countless other settings where people associate freely and regularly. State law begins to look less and less significant. Our student's next shock comes when he observes legal scholars and political philosophers routinely ignoring polycentric alternatives to statist law.
Source: The Jurisprudence Of Polycentric Law (1992) [link] #406
Freedom means not only that our economic activity ought to be free and voluntary, but that government should stay out of our personal affairs as well. In fact, freedom means that we understand liberty as an indivisible whole. Economic freedom and personal liberty are not divisible. How do you plan to exercise your right to free speech if you're not allowed the economic freedom to acquire the supplies necessary to disseminate your views? Likewise, how can we expect to enjoy privacy rights if our property rights are insecure?
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto (2008) [link] #405
Undisguised criminals and malefactors do less harm than those who live by legalized violence, disguised by hypocrisy.
Source: The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1893) [link] #404
When we ask for the abolition of the State and its organs we are always told that we dream of a society composed of men better than they are in reality. But no; a thousand times, no. All we ask is that men should not be made worse than they are, by such institutions!
Source: Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal (1896) [link] #403
The progress of civilization has meant the reduction of employment, not its increase. It is because we have becoming increasingly wealthy as a nation that we have been able virtually to eliminate child labor, to remove the necessity of work for many of the aged and to make it unnecessary for millions of women to take jobs.
Source: Economics in One Lesson (1946) [link] #402
Though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire.
Source: The Crisis (1776) [link] #401
Statists still worship the great god Government, sacrificing themselves upon the altar of Bureaucracy. It begs the question, "How can people believe so strongly in that which has performed so miserably throughout history?"
Source: Facebook (2015) [link] #400
When people are ready, change will happen. Right now, most people want liberty for themselves, but not for their neighbor. Obviously, that won’t work. We must be caring enough to allow others to be free if we want freedom for ourselves.
Source: Facebook (2015) [link] #399
Someone asked me the other day if I believe in conspiracies. Well, sure. Here’s one. It is called the political system. It is nothing if not a giant conspiracy to rob, trick and subjugate the population.
Source: A Beautiful Anarchy: How to Create Your Own Civilization in the Digital Age (2012) #398
Politicians play cruel jokes on us. They talk of plans to bring peace to the world, when their real interest is in subsidizing military contractors. They speak of “empowering” minorities, when their real interest is in empowering the leaders of special-interest groups. They talk of helping the poor, but eagerly put them out of work with minimum wage laws. Whatever they proclaim publicly, there always seems to be someone in the background with extraordinary political influence who benefits far more than those the politicians claim to help.
Source: The Wit and Wisdom of Harry Browne [link] #397
Now, I’m not saying that we don’t need rules in society. But the question of who makes the rules and on what basis becomes supremely important. Will the rule-making flow from the matrix of voluntary exchange based on the ethic of serving others through private enterprise? Or will the rules be made and enforced by people wearing guns and bulletproof vests with a license to shock or kill based on minor annoyances?
Source: Stop Signs and Liberty (2009) [link] #396
Anarchy is self-government, the smallest government there is of individuals ruling themselves. This is a piece of common ground shared by libertarians and anarchists. Anarchy is not about having no rules, it is about not having rulers.
Source: Facebook (2015) #395
To say that solving a perceived social or economic problem requires political action is tantamount to saying that it has no real solution, only fake solutions that usually make it even worse. A hammer is not a suitable tool for negotiating an agreement; a government is not a suitable institution for solving a social or economic problem. Indeed, government is itself the greatest of all social and economic problems, the dark storm cloud in whose shadow such problems arise, worsen, and provoke social decay, deteriorating economic performance, internal and external turmoil, violence, and war. Of all the false gods ever touted, government is the falsest of all.
Source: Facebook (2015) [link] #394
The primary contribution of government to this world is to elicit, entrench, enable, and finally to codify the most destructive aspects of the human personality.
Source: Facebook (2016) #393
In the system of criminal punishment in the libertarian world, the emphasis would never be, as it is now, on "society's" jailing the criminal; the emphasis would necessarily be on compelling the criminal to make restitution to the victim of his crime. The present system, in which the victim is not recompensed but instead has to pay taxes to support the incarceration of his own attacker--would be evident nonsense in a world that focuses on the defense of property rights and therefore on the victim of crime.
Source: For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (1973) [link] #392
A free, unregulated laissez-faire market should, and can, take care of everything government claims to do, only better, cheaper, and without wrecking individual lives in the process: national defense, adjudication, pollution control, fire protection, and police.
Source: The Probability Broach (1979) [link] #391
Propertarians believe that all human rights are property rights, beginning with absolute ownership of your own life.
Source: The Probability Broach (1979) [link] #390
I don’t like the use of force. I like voluntarism. That’s what a free society is supposed to be all about.
Source: Interview (2011) [link] #389
The incentive structure inherent in the institution of government is not a recipe for the protection of life and property, but instead a recipe for maltreatment, oppression, and exploitation. This is what the history of states illustrates. It is first and foremost the history of countless millions of ruined human lives.
Source: The Idea of a Private Law Society (2006) [link] #388
Someone asked me the other day if I believe in conspiracies. Well, sure. Here’s one. It is called the political system. It is nothing if not a giant conspiracy to rob, trick and subjugate the population.
Source: Conspiracies and How to Defeat Them (2012) [link] #387
Liberty works automatically. Tyranny ever has to bolster itself up with elaborate machinery, which is always getting out of order and producing the most unlooked for and grotesque results.
Source: Voluntary Socialism (1896) [link] #386
Now, I’m not saying that we don’t need rules in society. But the question of who makes the rules and on what basis becomes supremely important. Will the rule-making flow from the matrix of voluntary exchange based on the ethic of serving others through private enterprise? Or will the rules be made and enforced by people wearing guns and bulletproof vests with a license to shock or kill based on minor annoyances?
Source: Bourbon for Breakfast (2010) [link] #385
All men are equal and free: society, by nature and destination, is therefore autonomous, as it were, ungovernable. The sphere of activity of each citizen being determined by the natural division of labor and the choice he makes of a profession, social functions combined in a manner to produce a harmonious effect, order is the result of the free action of all: there is no government. Whoever puts his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant: I declare him my enemy.
Source: Confessions of a Revolutionary (1849) [link] #384
Be it or be it not true that Man is shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that Government is begotten of aggression, and by aggression.
Source: The Man Versus the State (1884) [link] #383
People differ so widely in their notions as to what it would result were we to have universal liberty that Anarchists must, to win people to their principles, be able to show "clearly and indubitably" that it would not result in anything positively bad or injurious to society, and that it would be much better than under authority. This must be done to successfully overcome the contention that liberty would lead to murder, rape, robbery, and general retrogression. But there is not this contention between the individualist and Communist wings of Anarchism. There is nothing in either that aggresses the rights of the other... if the Communists convert a considerable number to Anarchism, and the individualists convert another goodly number to Anarchism, I can see nothing standing in the way of "pooling their issues" on Anarchism pure and simple, and let the economic results to each side take care of themselves.
Source: Liberty, and Why We Want It (1896) [link] #382
The polemics between individualists and communists have often absorbed much of our energy. They have prevented, even when it was possible, the development of a frank and fraternal collaboration between all anarchists and have held at bay many who, had we been united, would have been attracted by our passion for liberty... for real freedom, that is Anarchy, to exist, there has to be the possibility of choice, and that everyone can arrange their lives to suit themselves, whether on communist or individualist lines, or some mixture of both.
Source: Communism and Individualism (1926) [link] #381
State corporatism forcibly reshapes the world of work and business on the model of a commercial strip mall: sanitized, centralized, regimented, officious, and dominated by a few powerful proprietors and their short list of favored partners, to whom everyone else relates as either an employee or a consumer. A truly free market, without the pervasive control of state licensure requirements, regulation, inspections, paperwork, taxes, "fees," and the rest, has much more to do with the traditional image of a bazaar: messy, decentralized, diverse, informal, flexible, pervaded by haggling, and kept together by the spontaneous order of countless small-time independent operators, who quickly and easily shift between the roles of customer, merchant, contract laborer, and more.
Source: Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It (2007) [link] #380
In a free market--a truly free market, where individual poor people are just as free as established formal-economy players to use their own property, their own labor, their own know-how, and the resources that are available to them--the informal, enterprising actions by poor people themselves would do far more to systematically undermine, or completely eliminate, each of the stereotypical conditions that welfare statists deplore. Every day and in every culture from time out of mind, poor people have repeatedly shown remarkable intelligence, courage, persistence, and creativity in finding ways to put food on the table, save money, keep safe, raise families, live full lives, learn, enjoy themselves, and experience beauty, whenever, wherever, and to whatever degree they have been free to do so.
Source: Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It (2007) [link] #379
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.
Source: Anarchism: What It Is and What It Is Not (1904) [link] #378
How can justice be present in an institution which, by necessity, violates the rights of at least some of those over whom it rules? So long as at least one libertarian exists on the face of the earth the idea that the state and justice can co-exist in the same political container must be a false proposition. And even after the state has killed off the last libertarian can it be said to be a just institution if all those who accept it do so because they fear for their lives and the confiscation of their property? What kind of justice is it that says "Your money or your life," and whichever way you answer, your antagonist wins the game?
Source: The Territorial Assumption: Rationale for Conquest (2007) [link] #377
Granting the proposition that men are selfish, we cannot avoid the corollary, that those who possess authority will, if permitted, use it for selfish purposes.
Source: Social Statics (1851) [link] #376
Governments, whose pupils we are, have naturally found nothing better to devise than to school us in fear and horror of their destruction. But as governments in turn are the negations of individuals or of the people, it is reasonable that the latter, waking up to essential truths, should gradually come to feel a greater horror at its own annihilation than that of its masters.
Source: The World's First Anarchist Manifesto (1850) [link] #375
The face of the earth is continually changing, by the increase of small kingdoms into great empires, by the dissolution of great empires into smaller kingdoms, by the planting of colonies, by the migration of tribes. Is there anything discoverable in all these events but force and violence? Where is the mutual agreement or voluntary association so much talked of?
Source: Of the Original Contract (1748) [link] #374
In order for states to exist they must legitimize themselves in the eyes of those they conquer. The exercise of brute force is too expensive and too demonstrative of the true nature of the state. One of the primary aims of the state propaganda apparatus (from schools to the media) is to inculcate the idea that territoriality is the essence of the state. "My country: Love it or leave it!" The modern territorial state so pervades our lives that we can hardly think of existing without it.
Source: The Territorial Assumption: Rationale for Conquest (2007) [link] #373
One of the crucial factors that permits governments to do the monstrous things they habitually do is the sense of legitimacy on the part of the stupefied public. The average citizen may not like--may even strongly object to--the policies and exactions of his government. But he has been imbued with the idea--carefully indoctrinated by centuries of governmental propaganda--that the government is his legitimate sovereign, and that it would be wicked or mad to refuse to obey its dictates. It is this sense of legitimacy that the State’s intellectuals have fostered over the ages, aided and abetted by all the trappings of legitimacy: flags, rituals, ceremonies, awards, constitutions, etc.
Source: For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (1973) [link] #372
Political theory--and, I suggest, most political practice--is dominated by a myth to the effect that the state is necessary, for many things, perhaps, but primarily for the provision of peace and security; without the state (the state being that group of people which wields a territorial monopoly of alleged legitimate force financed by a compulsory levy of the inhabitants of that territory) there would be anarchy--anarchy being understood to be widespread disorder, violence, and chaos… the important rhetorical point of the historical examples of functioning anarchic societies and the contemporary evidence of functionally anarchic elements in Statist societies is, among other things, to emphasize the sheer contingency of what seems like a necessity--to show that it wasn’t always like this, that it isn’t like this everywhere or in every respect even now, and that it doesn’t have to be like this.
Source: Reflections on Legal Polycentrism (2010) [link] #371
The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called "market" economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline.
Source: The Iron Fist Behind The Invisible Hand (2001) [link] #370
In the economic field, therefore, which is where the split between communists and individualists apparently lies, conciliation should rapidly be brought about by common struggle for the conditions of true liberty and then by leaving it to experience to resolve the practical problems of life. Discussions, studies, theories, even conflicts between different tendencies, would then all be grist to the mill as we prepare ourselves for our future tasks.
Source: Communism and Individualism (1926) [link] #369
I feel myself that neither Communism nor Individualism, if it became the sole economic form, would realize freedom, which always demands a choice of ways, a plurality of possibilities. I know that Communists, when asked pointedly, will say that they should have no objection to Individualists who wished to live in their own way without creating new monopolies or authority, and vice versa. But this is seldom said in a really open and friendly way; both sections are far too much convinced that freedom is only possible if their particular scheme is carried out.
Source: Anarchism: Communist or Individualist? Both (1914) [link] #368
The strongest point to me about Anarchism is that it permits every kind of experiment, not only in the field of "economics," but of every branch of social science. It invites competition in all things. It gives a fair field to all, and permits the best to win. I cannot say that the establishment of liberty will necessarily be followed by the universal application of mutual banks, competition, and private enterprise. And he is rash indeed who dogmatically insists that Communism will be universally applied under Anarchy. I believe the society of the future will be composed of every imaginable kind of associations for the betterment of mankind, and that the competition among them will lead to the survival of the fittest. Given equal freedom, the true need have no fear of being overcome by the false. Indeed, I believe the false contains the elements of its own correction. And this is especially so in "economics."
Source: Liberty, and Why We Want It (1896) [link] #367
Anarchism is, in truth, a sort of Protestantism, whose adherents are a unit in the great essential belief that all forms of external authority must disappear to be replaced by self-control only, but variously divided in our conception of the form of future society. Individualism supposes private property to be the cornerstone of personal freedom; asserts that such property should consist in the absolute possession of one’s own product and of such share of the natural heritage of all as one may actually use. Communist-Anarchism, on the other hand, declares that such property is both unrealizable and undesirable; that the common possession and use of all the natural sources and means of social production can alone guarantee the individual against a recurrence of inequality and its attendants, government and slavery. My personal conviction is that both forms of society, as well as many intermediations, would, in the absence of government, be tried in various localities, according to the instincts and material condition of the people, but that well founded objections may be offered to both. Liberty and experiment alone can determine the best forms of society. Therefore I no longer label myself otherwise than as "Anarchist" simply.
Source: The Making of an Anarchist (1903) [link] #366
Clarity, definiteness, and specificity are desired for the enhancement of understanding. But anarchism as a social philosophy suffers from the handicap of not being an affirmative theory about the activities of humans. It is rather a negative philosophy in the sense that it tries to ascertain what is invasive of the maximum amount of liberty for each individual, as such, and to proscribe such behavior. Moreover, anarchism contemplates and embraces the largest variety of individual and social behavior. And further, it is mutable, pertains to change and development; it is a philosophy of movement as distinguished from a condition, a conception of society which is dynamic and “open” as distinguished from a static system of social relations--a road and not a place.
Source: Anarchy and Law (1967) [link] #365
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.
Source: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966) #364
Anarchy means no ruler, no government. That is to say, no one--minority or majority--shall have the right to make me do what I do not want to do, so long as I do not injure him, so long as I do not trespass on his just rights.
Source: The Meaning of Anarchy (1896) [link] #363
Up to now you have believed in the existence of tyrants. Well, you were mistaken. There are only slaves. Where none obeys, none commands.
Source: The World's First Anarchist Manifesto (1850) [link] #362
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.
Source: Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1553) [link] #361
Once the public experiences tyranny for a long time, it becomes inured, and heedless of the possibility of an alternative society. But this means that should State despotism ever be removed, it would be extremely difficult to reimpose statism. The bulwark of habit would be gone, and statism would be seen by all for the tyranny that it is. If a free society were ever to be established, then, the chances for its maintaining itself would be excellent.
Source: The Political Thought of Étienne de la Boétie (1975) [link] #360
History has described as “anarchic” the condition of a people wherein there are several governments in contention one with another, but the condition of a people desirous of being governed but bereft of government precisely because it has too many is one thing and the condition of a people desirous of governing itself and bereft of government precisely because it wishes none quite another.
Source: The World's First Anarchist Manifesto (1850) [link] #359
It is a mistake often made, even by some Anarchists, to say that Anarchism aims to establish absolute freedom. Anarchism is a practical philosophy, and is not striving to do the impossible. What Anarchism aims to do, however, is to make equal freedom applicable to every human creature. The majority under this rule has no more rights than the minority, the millions no greater rights than one.
Source: Anarchism: What It Is and What It Is Not (1904) [link] #358
Anarchism aims at the utmost possible freedom compatible with social life, in the belief that voluntary cooperation by responsible individuals is not merely more just and equitable but is also, in the long run, more harmonious and ordered in its effects than authoritarian government. Anarchist philosophy has taken many forms, none of which can be defined as an orthodoxy, and its exponents have deliberately cultivated the idea that it is an open and mutable doctrine. However, all its variants combine a criticism of existing governmental societies, a vision of a future libertarian society that might replace them, and a projected way of attaining this society by means outside normal political practice.
Source: Anarchism - Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967) [link] #357
Distrust the obvious, suspect the traditional... for in the past mankind has not done well when saddling itself with governments… Whatever you do, do not let the past be a straitjacket!
Source: The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (1966) #356
So I hear that liberty without brakes is menacing. Who is she menacing? Who shall fear the untamed horse, but one who would tame it? Who shall fear an avalanche, but one who would stop it? Who trembles in front of liberty, but tyranny? A menacing liberty... one ought to say it's the opposite. What is frightening in her is the sound of her irons. Once those are shattered, she is no more tumultuous; but calm and wise.
Source: Unknown #355
Anarchy is order, government is civil war.
Source: The World's First Anarchist Manifesto (1850) [link] #354
Power only possesses what it takes from the people, and for the citizens to believe that they have to give what they have in order to get welfare, their common sense must have been deeply distorted.
Source: Unknown #353
Freedom is not a gift received from a State or a leader but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.
Source: Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1960) [link] #352
Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
Source: The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1893) [link] #351
The government doesn't care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety. It simply doesn't give a fuck about you. It's interested in it's own power. That's the only thing... keeping it, and expanding wherever possible.
Source: It's Bad for Ya (2008) [link] #350
The State must be destroyed not by killing those in power, but by destroying the political myth in the minds of people. Then the State would be laughed away as an absurdity. Meanwhile we must not only discover the nature of liberty, its possibilities and promise, but must also combat the thousand and one spurious nostrums which now tempt the human race.
Source: Liberty and the State (1934) [link] #349
The anarchistic solution of the money problem is so simple as to cause amazement. It is to permit anyone and everyone to go into the banking system. Why not? No one objects to anyone going into the hat business or building business or any other non-invasive enterprise. Naturally those who furnish the soundest and cheapest money will crowd others out of existence. To facilitate recognizability there would probably be cooperation or mergers between the banks. The public at large would be the "rulers" of this type of institution because they would patronize it or not, at will, and it must maintain its efficiency and reputability because of the pressure of competition.
Source: Liberty and the State (1934) [link] #348
Anarchy is all around us. Without it, our world would fall apart. All progress is due to it. All order extends from it. All blessed things that rise above the state of nature are owned to it. The human race thrives only because of the lack of control, not because of it. I’m saying that we need ever more absence of control to make the world a more beautiful place. It is a paradox that we must forever explain.
Source: Unknown #347
No one wants their stuff stolen. No one wants their physical person harmed. If you understand the implications of those two truths, you can come to see the egregious moral and practical problems of a state-managed society.
Source: Unknown #346
If the State would be on a voluntary taxation basis as any other business it would have to give something else than abuse and the misappropriation of funds else no one would support it. But this would mean that it would cease to be a state in the anarchistic sense. Of course this is only the economic objection to the State; there are many other ways that it restricts and hampers the non-invasive life of a nation. The State is the cancer in the social life of a people. That is why those in political life are looked upon as criminals by anarchists, not because they so much actually intend to do wrong, even though political life does corrupt a man, but because the effects of their actions are to provoke what is more obviously criminal.
Source: Liberty and the State (1934) [link] #345
Through taxation, pacifists are forced at gunpoint to pay for killing machines; vegetarians are forced at gunpoint to subsidize grazing land for cattle; nonsmokers are forced at gunpoint to support both the production of tobacco and the research to counter its impact on health. These minorities are the victims, not the initiators of aggression. Their only crime is not agreeing with the priorities of the majority. Taxation appears to be more than theft; it is intolerance for the preferences and even the moral viewpoints of our neighbors. Through taxation we forcibly impose our will on others in an attempt to control their choices.
Source: Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression (2003) #344
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
Source: The Day Before the Revolution (1974) [link] #343
Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.
Source: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) [link] #342
"But what would you replace the state with?" The question reveals an inability to imagine human society without the state. Yet it would seem that an institution that can take 200,000,000 lives within a century hardly needs to be "replaced."
Source: The Reluctant Anarchist (2002) [link] #341
If it moves, privatize it; if it doesn’t move, privatize it. Since everything either moves or doesn’t move, privatize everything.
Source: The Case for Privatization - of Everything (2016) [link] #340
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
Source: Is Reality Optional? (1993) [link] #339
Politicians want office, power, and applause - period. And most sell their souls, without the slightest hesitation, in order to increase their prospects of receiving such tacky and ego-bloating 'rewards.' So politicians are neither courageous nor leaders. Instead, they are cowards who pander to crowds and then pretend that their typically idiotic orations to the crowds are evidence of their genius, humanity, and courage. All in all, politicians are a loathsome and disgusting lot.
Source: Facebook - Robert Higgs (2014) [link] #338
In an age of mass-murder-devices, kept ready as a matter of policy by the most powerful governments, with considerable popular support, it is high time to ritualize and institutionalize their direct opposite, namely quite tolerant, voluntary, non-coercive institutions, each doing its own things only for its own members, as best as it can, while leaving all others to their own and individually chosen actions and relationships among themselves.
Source: Anarchy, Panarchy and Statism (1986) [link] #337
The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order and in the assertion that, without Authority there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that anarchy can be instituted by a violent revolution. But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require the protection of governmental power and by there being more and more people who will be ashamed of applying this power.
Source: On Anarchy (1900) [link] #336
States have always needed opinion-moulding intellectuals to con the public into believing that its rule is wise, good, and inevitable.
Source: For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (1973) [link] #335
It is a sound interpretive rule, however, that anything that cannot be accomplished except with the aid of threats or the actual exercise of violence against unoffending persons cannot be beneficial to one and all.
Source: The Song That Is Irresistible: How the State Leads People to Their Own Destruction (2007) [link] #334
Violence is the whole essence of authoritarianism, just as the repudiation of violence is the whole essence of anarchism.
Source: Anarchism, Socialism, and Communism (1923) [link] #333
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.
Source: Twitter (2020) [link] #332
There are two ways you can provide people with what you think is best for them: the humble approach is entrepreneurship, in which you ask them if you're right; the hubristic approach is politics, in which you give it to them no matter what and make them pay for it.
Source: Twitter (2020) [link] #331
Being absolute, and maintained by police force, a Government monopoly need not please its customers.
Source: The Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943) [link] #330
No State, no Government, exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.
Source: Give Me Liberty (1936) [link] #329
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.
Source: Unknown #328
A person is as free as his ability to say "no."
Source: Non-Cooperation as a One-on-One Strategy (2013) [link] #327
The freedom of individuals to choose, without intrusive state regulation, is the prerequisite of morality. A coerced "choice" does not reflect virtue, only compliance. In other words, you cannot force a person to be moral; you can only make them conform. True morality requires freedom and cannot exist without it.
Source: There Ought Not to Be a Law (2003) [link] #326
War has been the necessary and inevitable consequence of the establishment of a monopoly on security.
Source: The Production of Security (1849) [link] #325
If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.
Source: Speech at Trafalgar Square (2011) [link] #324
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.
Source: Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1960) [link] #323
Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.
Source: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1990) #322
Almost all the anti-social behavior which makes us think it’s necessary to have armies, police, prisons, and governments to control our lives, is actually caused by the systematic inequalities and injustice those armies, police, prisons and governments make possible.
Source: Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! (2000) [link] #321
Governments not only are not necessary, but are harmful and most highly immoral institutions.
Source: The Slavery of Our Times (1900) [link] #320
Not only does the State do the work badly on a domain not its own, bunglingly, at greater cost, and with less fruit than spontaneous organizations, but, again, through the legal monopoly which it deems its prerogative, or through the overwhelming competition which it exercises, it kills or paralyzes these natural organizations or prevents their birth; and hence so many precious organs, which, absorbed, atrophic or abortive, are lost to the great social body.--And still worse, if this system lasts, and continues to crush them out, the human community loses the faculty of reproducing them; entirely extirpated, they do not grow again; even their germ has perished. Individuals no longer know how to form associations, how to co-operate under their own impulses, through their own initiative, free of outside and superior constraint, all together and for a long time in view of a definite purpose, according to regular forms under freely-chosen chiefs, frankly accepted and faithfully followed. Mutual confidence, respect for the law, loyalty, voluntary subordination, foresight, moderation, patience, perseverance, practical good sense, every disposition of head and heart, without which no association of any kind is efficacious or even viable, have died out for lack of exercise. Henceforth spontaneous, pacific, and fruitful co-operation, as practiced by a free people, is unattainable.
Source: The Origins of Contemporary France (1890) [link] #319
The State always moves slowly and grudgingly towards any purpose that accrues to society's advantage, but moves rapidly and with alacrity towards one that accrues to its own advantage; nor does it ever move towards social purposes on its own initiative, but only under heavy pressure, while its motion towards anti-social purposes is self-sprung.
Source: Our Enemy, the State (1935) [link] #318
I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself... but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral virtue, civilization, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity.
Source: Conceived in Liberty (1979) [link] #317
Perhaps the most perplexing objection to genuine self-government that I've seen is the one that goes, Human nature is such that some people will always be vicious and antisocial; hence anarchy cannot work. Instead, such objectors argue, we must have a government in which the manifestly (by virtue of self-selection) most vicious and antisocial persons in society are endowed with a monopoly of great violent power over the rest of us. Yes, that's certainly a knockdown argument -- unless one gives it a few moments of thought or knows even a tiny bit about history.
Source: Facebook (2013) #316
Voluntaryism is the doctrine that relations among people should be by mutual consent, or not at all. It represents a means, an end, and an insight. Voluntaryism does not argue for the specific form that voluntary arrangements will take; only that force be abandoned so that individuals in society may flourish. As it is the means which determine the end, the goal of an all voluntary society must be sought voluntarily. People cannot be coerced into freedom. Hence, the use of the free market, education, persuasion, and non-violent resistance as the primary ways to change people's ideas about the State.
Source: Fundamentals of Voluntaryism (2006) [link] #315
These so-called governments are in reality only great bands of robbers and murderers, organized, disciplined, and constantly on the alert.
Source: No Treason No. 6: The Constitution of No Authority (1870) [link] #314
Throughout history government has served as a vehicle for the organization of hatred and oppression, benefiting no one except those who are ambitious and ruthless enough to gain control of it.
Source: The Essence of Government (2001) [link] #313
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.
Source: A Plea For Voluntaryism (1906) [link] #312
When plunder has become a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
Source: Economic Sophisms, Second Series (1848) [link] #311
Any time you listen to or read anything about government, remember it is all stolen money that is being dealt with. Nothing good can ever come from stolen money.
Source: Voluntaryist.com [link] #310
Government programs didn’t arise because the people demanded them or because the free market was unable to provide needed services. They arose because the politicians found them to be a convenient way to buy votes with other people’s money, a convenient way to enlarge their own power, a convenient way to reward their political cronies, and a convenient way to keep people dependent on government.
Source: Unknown #309
The supreme law of the State is self-preservation at any cost. And since all States, ever since they came to exist upon the earth, have been condemned to perpetual struggle -- a struggle against their own populations, whom they oppress and ruin, a struggle against all foreign States, every one of which can be strong only if the others are weak -- and since the States cannot hold their own in this struggle unless they constantly keep on augmenting their power against their own subjects as well as against the neighborhood States -- it follows that the supreme law of the State is the augmentation of its power to the detriment of internal liberty and external justice.
Source: The Political Philosophy of Bakunin (1953) [link] #308
Government is a gang, but not merely as meritorious as a private gang because it claims legal legitimacy. It pillages and uses violence but under the cover of law, and seeks legitimacy not through competition but through the myth of the social contract.
Source: Unknown #307
Producing laws is not an easier job than producing cars and food, so if the government is incompetent to produce cars or food, why do you expect it to do a good job producing the legal system within which you are then going to produce the cars and the food?
Source: Unknown #306
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.
Source: Boomerang Argument (2022) [link] #305
The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence. All initiation of force is a violation of someone else's rights, whether initiated by an individual or the state, for the benefit of an individual or group of individuals, even if it's supposed to be for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals. Legitimate use of violence can only be that which is required in self-defense.
Source: Freedom Under Siege (1987) [link] #304
A system of Anarchy in actual operation implies a previous education of the people in the principles of Anarchy, and that in turn implies such a distrust and hatred of interference that the only band of voluntary co-operators which could gain support sufficient to enforce its will would be that which either entirely refrained from interference or reduced it to a minimum.
Source: Voluntary Co-Operation (1890) [link] #303
It is undeniable that human beings have killed other human beings for as long as human beings have lived on this planet, but to kill other human beings efficiently and in large numbers takes a state.
Source: Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State (2012) #302
In medieval times, the relations of men were fixed; their opinions, calling, places of residence, earnings, in short, their social and economic life, was more or less static - established by custom and authority. The great progress made since those days is due to the increase of individual freedom in the various spheres of human activity. Mutualism proposes a further extension of liberty, in conformity with this historic development. Thus the immediate program of Mutualism is presented: In the social sphere, it is the creation and support of such voluntary associations as will be able to supersede the present coercive system, and, in the economic field, the creation and support of such voluntary agencies as will sharpen individual initiative and responsibility, and free economic life from the oppressive hand of authority and privilege.
Source: What is Mutualism? (1927) [link] #301
Human beings are not laboratory rats to be controlled and conditioned by some elite of their number who, somehow and without explanation, manage to become higher-order creatures simply by working for government and professing deep concern for the welfare of their lab animals.
Source: A Conditioned Response? (2013) [link] #300
The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites.
Source: Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (1997) #299
To those who say Libertarianism is a fringe ideology: There is nothing fringe about wanting control over your own lives and money.
Source: Twitter (2020) [link] #298
Anarchists get accused of being utopian, but there is nothing more utopian than a minarchist. The idea that a state will stay restrained because it just decides that it doesn't want more power.
Source: The Monopoly On Violence (2020) [link] #297
They tell you that Anarchy, the dream of social order without government, is a wild fancy. The wildest dream that ever entered the heart of man is the dream that mankind can ever help itself through an appeal to law, or to come to any order that will not result in slavery wherein there is any excuse for government.
Source: The Eleventh of November, 1887 (1901) [link] #296
Worker ownership and consumer co-ops are part of the market; grassroots mutual aid associations and community free clinics are part of the market; so are voluntary labor unions, consensual communes, narrower or broader experiments with gift economies, and countless other alternatives to the prevailing corporate-capitalist status quo… The question, then, is whether, when people are free to experiment with any and every peaceful means of making a living, the sort of mutualistic alternatives mentioned might take on an increased role in the economy, or whether the prevailing capitalistic forms would continue to predominate as they currently do.
Source: Markets Freed From Capitalism (2010) [link] #295
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.
Source: An Agorist Primer (1986) [link] #294
You and I can bring civilization back into order neither by seizing political power, nor by attacking it, but by moving away from it, by diverting our focus from marbled temples and legislative halls to the conduct of our daily lives. The “order” of a creative civilization will emerge in much the same way that order manifests itself throughout the rest of nature: not from those who fashion themselves leaders of others, but from the interconnectedness of individuals pursuing their respective self-interests.
Source: The Wizards of Ozymandias (2012) [link] #293
The most important part of the case for economic freedom is not its vaunted efficiency as a system for organizing resources, not its dramatic success in promoting economic growth, but rather its consistency with certain fundamental moral principles of life itself... If economic freedom survives in the years ahead, it will be only because a majority of the people accept its basic morality.
Source: The Case for Economic Freedom (1963) [link] #292
Man, no doubt, owes many other moral duties to his fellow men; such as to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, protect the defenseless, assist the weak, and enlighten the ignorant. But these are simply moral duties, of which each man must be his own judge, in each particular case, as to whether, and how, and how far, he can, or will, perform them.
Source: Natural Law (1882) [link] #291
War is caused by the ancient pagan belief that Authority controls individuals, and must and should control them. This belief is in individual minds, and no force whatever can change any man's mind. War will end when a majority of men on this earth know that every man is free. Each person must see for himself that everyone is self-controlling and responsible. So long as any large group of persons, anywhere on this earth, believe the ancient superstition that some Authority is responsible for their welfare, they will set up some image of that Authority and try to obey it. And the result will be poverty and war.
Source: The Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943) [link] #290
States, by their very nature, are perpetually at war -- not always against foreign foes, of course, but always against their own subjects. The state's most fundamental purpose, the activity without which it cannot even exist, is robbery. The state gains its very sustenance from robbery, which it pretties up ideologically by giving it a different name (taxation) and by striving to sanctify its intrinsic crime as permissible and socially necessary. State propaganda, statist ideologies, and long-established routine combine to convince many people that they have a legitimate obligation, even a moral duty to pay taxes to the state that rules their society.
Source: The Song That Is Irresistible: How the State Leads People to Their Own Destruction (2007) [link] #289
As a choice of blessings, liberty is the greater; as a choice of evils, liberty is the smaller. Then liberty always, say the Anarchists. No use of force, except against the invader; and in those cases where it is difficult to tell whether the alleged offender is an invader or not, still no use of force except where the necessity of immediate solution is so imperative that we must use it to save ourselves. And in these few cases where we must use it, let us do so frankly and squarely, acknowledging it as a matter of necessity, without seeking to harmonize our action with any political ideal or constructing any far-fetched theory of a State or collectivity having prerogatives and rights superior to those of individuals and aggregations of individuals and exempted from the operation of the ethical principles which individuals are expected to observe.
Source: Individual Liberty (1926) [link] #288
I doubt if anybody in his right mind would favor unlimited govern­ment. But when you favor government, that's what you're doing. Because government, by its very nature, is unlimited. You favor tyranny when you favor government; though you don't know it. This is why I am constantly staggered by those who say they are libertarian and are trying to set up their own particular way of providing a "good government." It is a contradiction in terms. To say "unlimited government" is a redundancy and to say "limited government" is a contradiction. All you have to say is "government." And that takes care of the whole thing.
Source: Good Government: Hope or Illusion? (1977) [link] #287
What keeps a truly civil society together isn’t laws, regulations, and police. It’s peer pressure, social opprobrium, moral approbation, and your reputation. These are the four elements that keep things together. Western Civilization is built on voluntarism. But, as the State grows, that’s being replaced by coercion in every aspect of society.
Source: Doug Casey on the End of Western Civilization [link] #286
The anarchist does not believe that any considerable proportion of human beings will promptly turn into rogues and adventuresses, sots and strumpets, as soon as they find themselves free to do so; but quite the contrary. It seems to be a fond notion with the legalists and authoritarians that the vast majority of mankind would at once begin to thieve and murder and generally misconduct itself if the restraints of law and authority were removed. The anarchist, whose opportunities to view mankind in its natural state are perhaps as good as the legalist’s, regards this belief as devoid of foundation.
Source: On Doing the Right Thing (1928) [link] #285
Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole. Common interest regulates their concerns, and forms their law; and the laws which common usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government. In fine, society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government.
Source: Rights of Man (1791) [link] #284
The State is an inherently illegitimate institution of organized aggression, of organized and regularized crime against the persons and properties of its subjects. Rather than necessary to society, it is a profoundly antisocial institution which lives parasitically off of the productive activities of private citizens.
Source: The Ethics of Liberty (1982) [link] #283
It is impossible for us to make any real advance until we take to heart this great truth, that without freedom of choice, without freedom of action, there are not such things as true moral qualities; there can only be submissive wearing of the cords that others have tied round our hands.
Source: The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State (1885) [link] #282
"Left" and "right" politicians all engage in wealth redistribution, war-mongering, centralized control of commerce, and numerous coercive restrictions upon the behavior of their subjects. As "right-wing" and "left-wing" states approach complete power, they become utterly indistinguishable from each other.
Source: The Most Dangerous Superstition (2011) [link] #281
What form voluntary associations which anarchists contemplate will take, remains for the future to evince. Anarchism primarily, is not an economic arrangement but a social philosophy based upon the conclusion that man is happy and independent in proportion to the freedom he experiences and can maintain.
Source: Anarchism Applied to Economics (1933) [link] #280
I believe we are free to bind ourselves by entering into informal and contractual relations with others, even relations in which we voluntarily subordinate ourselves to others. I do not accept the common claim of anarchists from the left side of the political spectrum that such relations are necessarily anti-anarchic. If we are not free to bind ourselves then we are not really free, our liberty is compromised. The form of anarchism that accepts this radical notion of freedom, our freedom to bind ourselves, I call libertarian anarchism.
Source: Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State (2012) [link] #279
Anarchism, the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government - harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being. In a society developed on these lines, the voluntary associations which already now begin to cover all the fields of human activity would take a still greater extension so as to substitute themselves for the state in all its functions. They would represent an interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees, local, regional, national and international temporary or more or less permanent - for all possible purposes: production, consumption and exchange, communications, sanitary arrangements, education, mutual protection, defence of the territory, and so on; and, on the other side, for the satisfaction of an ever-increasing number of scientific, artistic, literary and sociable needs. Moreover, such a society would represent nothing immutable. On the contrary - as is seen in organic life at large - harmony would (it is contended) result from an ever-changing adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium between the multitudes of forces and influences, and this adjustment would be the easier to obtain as none of the forces would enjoy a special protection from the state.
Source: "Anarchism", The Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910) [link] #278
The practical reason for freedom, then, is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fibre can be developed. Everything else has been tried, world without end. Going dead against reason and experience, we have tried law, compulsion and authoritarianism of various kinds, and the result is nothing to be proud of.
Source: On Doing the Right Thing (1928) [link] #277
Statism is but socialized dishonesty; it is feathering the nests of some with feathers coercively plucked from others--on the grand scale. There is no moral--only a legal--distinction between petty thievery and political Robin Hoodism, which is to say, there is no moral difference between the act of a pickpocket and the progressive income tax or any other piece of socialization.
Source: Anything That's Peaceful (1964) [link] #276
I protest against every order which it may please some power, from pretended necessity, to impose upon my free will. Laws! We know what they are, and what they are worth! Spider webs for the rich and powerful, steel chains for the weak and poor, fishing nets in the hands of the Government.
Source: General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851) [link] #275
When the state actively intervenes in society--for example, by issuing commands and coercively harming those who disobey its commands--the state then becomes responsible for any resulting harms, in a way that the state would not be responsible for harms that it merely (through lack of knowledge) fails to prevent. Imagine that I see a woman at a bus stop opening a bottle of pills, obviously about to take one. Before I decide to snatch the pills away from her and throw them into the sewer drain, I had better be very certain that the pills are actually something harmful. If it turns out that I have taken away a medication that the woman needed to forestall a heart attack, I will be responsible for the results. On the other hand, if, due to uncertainty as to the nature of the drugs, I decide to leave the woman alone, and it later turns out that she was swallowing poison, I will not thereby be responsible for her death. For this reason, intervention faces a higher burden of proof than nonintervention.
Source: In Praise of Passivity (2012) [link] #274
Every man who puts money into the hands of a "government" (so called), puts into its hands a sword which will be used against him, to extort more money from him, and also to keep him in subjection to its arbitrary will.
Source: No Treason No. 6: The Constitution of No Authority (1870) [link] #273
Anarchism proposes to rescue the self-respect and independence of the individual from all restraint and invasion by authority. Only in freedom can man grow to his full stature. Only in freedom will he learn to think and move, and give the very best in him. Only in freedom will he realize the true force of the social bonds which knit men together, and which are the true foundation of a normal social life.
Source: Anarchism: What it Really Stands For (1911) [link] #272
In every State the government is nothing but a permanent conspiracy on the part of the minority against the majority, which it enslaves and fleeces.
Source: Science and the Urgent Revolutionary Task (1870) [link] #271
We don't oppose the state's wars because they'll be counterproductive or overextend the state's forces. We oppose them because mass murder based on lies can never be morally acceptable.
Source: Ron Paul and the Future (2012) [link] #270
I believe in complete freedom of thought and speech, alike for the humblest man and the mightiest, and in the utmost freedom of conduct that is consistent with living in organized society.
Source: What I Believe (1930) [link] #269
I don't have all the answers. I may not have any of them. But I am convinced that if people are free, rather than constrained and kicked around as they are under government as we know it, they will find better, more genuine and workable answers than any that the government's bureaucrats, kept intellectuals, and running dogs can devise. Freedom is not a blueprint for society; it's a process by which people alter society for the better without using force to do so.
Source: Facebook (2019) #268
Libertarianism does not offer a way of life; it offers liberty, so that each person is free to adopt and act upon his own values and moral principles.
Source: Myth and Truth About Libertarianism (1979) [link] #267
The essence of an individual's freedom is the opportunity to deviate from traditional ways of thinking and of doing things.
Source: Theory and History (1957) [link] #266
Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping toward destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interest of everyone hangs on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.
Source: Socialism (1951, original German 1922) [link] #265
None of us is yet on the torture rack; we are not yet in jail; we're getting various harassments and annoyances, but what we mainly risk is merely our popularity, the danger that we will be called nasty names... This is the duty that is laid upon us. We have a duty to speak even more clearly and courageously, to work harder, and to keep fighting this battle while the strength is still in us... The times call for courage. The times call for hard work. But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher. They are nothing less than the future of human liberty, which means the future of civilization.
Source: Hazlitt's Reflections at 70 (1964) [link] #264
From the moment you possess power, you are but its slave, fast bound by its many tyrant necessities.
Source: A Plea for Voluntaryism (1906) [link] #263
Progress depends upon a great number of small changes and adaptations and experiments constantly taking place, each carried out by those who have strong beliefs and clear perceptions of their own in the matter.
Source: Mr. Spencer and the Great Machine (1906) [link] #262
Equality if we can get it, but Liberty at any rate!
Source: Individual Liberty (1926) [link] #261
The first essentials of freedom are, of course, the freedom to live unmolested and the freedom of the producer to retain unrestricted the full product of his toil. While there may be serious differences of opinion in regard to the definitions of "producer" and "product," I think no one will deny that crimes against person and property – murder, assault, theft, etc. – are violations of Equal Freedom.
Source: Voluntary Socialism (1896) [link] #260
Since the State is founded in aggression, and is inimical to individual liberty, it is but natural to suppose that its very existence is threatened by the principle of Equal Freedom. This is actually the case. If all forms of compulsion are tyrannical, the enforced payments of taxes is no less so... To compel a man to buy that which he does not want is the grossest tyranny. If he finds that it is necessary to his happiness, he will buy it without compulsion. If he does not find it necessary, by what right can anyone compel him to pay for it? But taxes are the source from which the State derives its life’s blood. So it is, as its history would lead us to believe, essentially a tyrannical institution. The ways in which this tyranny is exercised are too numerous to mention.
Source: Voluntary Socialism (1896) [link] #259
Property is a central economic institution of any society, and private property is the central institution of a free society.
Source: The Machinery of Freedom (1973) [link] #258
The State is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.
Source: The State (1848) [link] #257
In proportion as you give the State power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you.
Source: Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943) [link] #256
If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state--to relinquish its protection and to refuse paying toward its support. It is self-evident that in so behaving he in no way trenches upon the liberty of others, for his position is a passive one, and while passive he cannot become an aggressor. It is equally self-evident that he cannot be compelled to continue one of a political corporation, without a breach of the moral law, seeing that citizenship involves payment of taxes; and the taking away of a man's property against his will is an infringement of his rights.
Source: The Right to Ignore the State (1851) [link] #255
Coercion is evil precisely because it thus eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another.
Source: The Constitution of Liberty (1960) #254
Given the existence of government, the people who are most likely to wind up in control of that government are those who (a) have the greatest drive for power, (b) have the skills needed for seizing it (for example, the ability to intimidate or manipulate others), and (c) are unperturbed by moral compunctions about doing what is required to seize power. These individuals are not in the game for the money. They are in it for the pleasure of exercising power. The way one feels the exercise of power is, all too often, by abusing those under one’s power while observing their helplessness to resist.
Source: The Problem of Political Authority (2013) #253
If anarchy had to be achieved through a sudden abolition of all government, it would be a remote prospect. Such a rapidly achieving anarchy would also likely have disappointing results--if government were to suddenly disappear, without any prior development of such alternative institutions as private security and arbitration firms, chaos would likely ensue. Perhaps alternative institutions would arise spontaneously in due time, but it is also likely that chaos would give rise to immediate demands for a new government. For these reasons, it is desirable to develop a gradualist model of the abolition of government in which alternative institutions grow at the same time that government shrinks.
Source: The Problem of Political Authority (2013) #252
Such terms as communism, socialism, Fabianism, the welfare state, Nazism, fascism, state interventionism, egalitarianism, the planned economy, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Republicanism, the New Frontier are simply different labels for much the same thing.
Source: Elements of Libertarian Leadership (1962) [link] #251
Liberty is precious, rare, never guaranteed, and always threatened. It can be lost in a single generation if it's not advanced and defended.
Source: Why Is Liberty So Important? (2015) [link] #250
Violence is the tool of the state. Knowledge and the mind are the tools of free people.
Source: The Libertarian Paradox (2013) [link] #249
As exploited peoples all over the world are beginning to realize, their true enemy is always within their midst -- the coercive violence of the State -- and it must be fought constantly in the very heart of its dominions. Every libertarian must fight the State from where he is: in his home, his place of business, in the schools, community and the world at large. His task is to resist the State and to dismantle it by whatever means are at hand.
Source: Stateless Societies: Ancient Ireland (1971) [link] #248
The Libertarians say: Let those who believe in religion have religion; let those who believe in government, have government; but also let those who believe in liberty, have liberty, and do not compel them to accept a religion or a government they do not want. It is as unjust to force one's government upon another, as it is unjust to force one's religion upon another. This was done in the past; but we have won religious freedom, and must now work toward political freedom.
Source: Liberty and the Great Libertarians (1913) [link] #247
The history of civilized man is the history of the incessant conflict between liberty and authority. Each victory for liberty marked a new step in the world's progress; so we can measure the advance of civilization by the amount of freedom acquired by human institutions. The first great struggle for liberty was in the realm of thought. The Libertarians reasoned that freedom of thought would be good for mankind; it would promote knowledge, and increased knowledge would advance civilization. But the Authoritarians protested that freedom of thought would be dangerous; that people would think wrong; that a few were divinely appointed to think for the people, that these had books which contained the whole truth, and that further search was unnecessary and forbidden. The powers of Church and State were arrayed against the Libertarians; but, after the sacrifice of many great men, freedom in thought was won.
Source: Liberty and the Great Libertarians (1913) [link] #246
When people begin to understand that the State originated for predatory purposes and for conquest, and realize that its underlying aim ever since has been to camouflage what in reality is its essential feature of controlling people so that it can arbitrarily rob some for the benefit of others, they will begin to understand the motives and effects of State activity in every quarter of the globe. They will begin to ponder on other alternatives for solving their problems than resort to the State machine. Such a recourse is today almost completely absent from the minds of reformers and revolutionists. In fact, subtract the idea of the State as an implementor of social policy from the minds of nearly all those bent on reform and their thinking processes would be immediately halted.
Source: Reflections on Socio-economic Evolution (~mid-1940s) [link] #245
Like any ideology that has attracted a substantial following, libertarianism has splintered into a variety of sects. ... Unfortunately, many libertarians devote substantial energy to quarreling with other libertarians. To some extent, such quarreling helps to refine people's thinking, but for the most part it is a waste of time and does nothing to move us closer to the goal that all libertarians share--the shrinkage of the state as it now exists.
Source: Against Libertarian Infighting (2014) [link] #244
In Western Europe, as in many other civilizations, the typical model of the origin of the State was not via a voluntary "social contract" but by the conquest of one tribe by another. The original liberty of the tribe or the peasantry thus falls victim to the conquerors. At first, the conquering tribe killed and looted the victims and rode on. But at some time the conquerors decided that it would be more profitable to settle down among the conquered peasantry and rule and loot them on a permanent and systematic basis. The periodic tribute exacted from the conquered subjects eventually came to be called "taxation."
Source: For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (1973) [link] #243
In the 20th century alone, war has murdered more than all previous deaths; taxes and inflation have stolen more than all wealth previously produced; and the political lies, propaganda, and above all, "Education," have twisted more minds than all the superstition prior: yet through all the deliberate confusion and obfuscation, the thread of reason has developed fibers of resistance to be woven into the rope of execution for the State: Libertarianism.
Source: New Libertarian Manifesto (1983) [link] #242
The great illusion of the current paradigm of statism is that governments achieve a worthwhile reduction of violence. Governments are the greatest cause of violence in the world today. They are coercive monopolies with only an illusion of public support. Everything they do is based on a presumed right to point guns at people who are acting peacefully.
Source: Freedom! (2014) [link] #241
Libertarianism is the view that each man is the absolute owner of his life, to use and dispose of as he sees fit: that all man's social actions should be voluntary: and that respect for every other man's similar and equal ownership of life and, by extension, the property and fruits of that life is the ethical basis of a humane and open society.
Source: The Death of Politics (1969) [link] #240
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.
Source: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) [link] #239
If most people truly consent to taxes let's make them voluntary. We'll find out real quick what people consent to.
Source: Twitter (April 2019) [link] #238
In a private law society the production of law and order -- of security -- would be undertaken by freely financed individuals and agencies competing for a voluntarily paying (or not-paying) clientele -- just as the production of all other goods and services. How this system would work can be best understood in contrast to the workings of the present, all-too-familiar statist system. If one wanted to summarize in one word the decisive difference -- and advantage -- of a competitive security industry as compared to the current statist practice, it would be: contract. The state operates in a legal vacuum. There exists no contract between the state and its citizens. It is not contractually fixed, what is actually owned by whom, and what, accordingly, is to be protected. It is not fixed, what service the state is to provide, what is to happen if the state fails in its duty, nor what the price is that the "customer" of such "service" must pay. Rather, the state unilaterally fixes the rules of the game and can change them, per legislation, during the game.
Source: Interview (2011) [link] #237
The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised -- a fire that, at best, can be controlled for only a short time before it o'erleaps its improvised confinements and spreads its flames far and wide.
Source: The Song That Is Irresistible: How the State Leads People to Their Own Destruction (2007) [link] #236
Our goals can only be achieved with a society that respects and equally protects the rights of every human being, old and young, rich and poor, regardless of gender, color, race, or creed. We must reject the initiation of violence by individuals or governments as morally repugnant.
Source: End The Fed (2009) [link] #235
It is no wonder that the contemporary libertarian, seeing the world going socialist and Communist, and believing himself virtually isolated and cut off from any prospect of united mass action, tends to be steeped in long-run pessimism. But the scene immediately brightens when we realize that that indispensable requisite of modern civilization: the overthrow of the Old Order, was accomplished by mass libertarian action erupting in such great revolutions of the West as the French and American Revolutions, and bringing about the glories of the Industrial Revolution and the advances of liberty, mobility, and rising living standards that we still retain today. Despite the reactionary swings backward to statism, the modern world stands towering above the world of the past. When we consider also that, in one form or another, the Old Order of despotism, feudalism, theocracy and militarism dominated every human civilization until the West of the 18th century, optimism over what man has and can achieve must mount still higher.
Source: Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty (1965) [link] #234
Rothbard is surely right in thinking that what we now call free-market libertarianism was originally a left-wing position. The great liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat sat on the left side of the French national assembly, with the anarcho-socialist Proudhon. Many of the causes we now think of as paradigmatically left-wing -- feminism, antiracism, antimilitarism, the defense of laborers and consumers against big business -- were traditionally embraced and promoted specifically by free-market radicals.
Source: Rothbard's "Left and Right": Forty Years Later (2006) [link] #233
Libertarians are not "against" tradition. But we make certain elementary distinctions ... starting with the distinction between the traditions that mankind has voluntarily generated and preserved, and those stemming from coercion, violence, and force ... it is time they stopped talking as if all the good and great traditions that are our rightful inheritance were somehow to be credited to the state, and to themselves as the state's apologists, rather than to their true source -- the women and men who, with what freedom they had, created, sifted, refined, and transmitted those traditions through the generations.
Source: The Trouble With Conservatives (1980) [link] #232
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
Source: Walden (1854) [link] #231
Like all predatory or parasitic institutions, [the State's] first instinct is that of self-preservation. All its enterprises are directed first towards preserving its own life, and, second, towards increasing its own power and enlarging the scope of its own activity. For the sake of this it will, and regularly does, commit any crime which circumstances make expedient.
Source: The Criminality of the State (1939) [link] #230
"Anarchy" is an expression of social behavior that reflects the individualized nature of life. Only as living beings are free to pursue their particular interests in the unique circumstances in which they find themselves, can conditions for the well-being of all be attained. Anarchy presumes decentralized and cooperative systems that serve the mutual interests of the individuals comprising them, without the systems ever becoming their own reasons for being. It is this thinking, and the practices that result therefrom, that is alone responsible for whatever peace and order exists in society. Political thinking, by contrast, presumes the supremacy of the systems (i.e., the state) and reduces individuals to the status of resources for the accomplishment of their ends. Such systems are grounded in the mass-minded conditioning and behavior that has produced the deadly wars, economic dislocations, genocides, and police-state oppressions that comprise the essence of political history.
Source: What Is Anarchy? (2004) [link] #229
I am often asked if anarchy has ever existed in our world, to which I answer: almost all of your daily behavior is an anarchistic expression. How you deal with your neighbors, coworkers, fellow customers in shopping malls or grocery stores, is often determined by subtle processes of negotiation and cooperation. Social pressures, unrelated to statutory enactments, influence our behavior on crowded freeways or grocery checkout lines. If we dealt with our colleagues at work in the same coercive and threatening manner by which the state insists on dealing with us, our employment would be immediately terminated. We would soon be without friends were we to demand that they adhere to specific behavioral standards that we had mandated for their lives. Should you come over to our home for a visit, you will not be taxed, searched, required to show a passport or driver’s license, fined, jailed, threatened, handcuffed, or prohibited from leaving. I suspect that your relationships with your friends are conducted on the same basis of mutual respect. In short, virtually all of our dealings with friends and strangers alike are grounded in practices that are peaceful, voluntary, and devoid of coercion.
Source: What Is Anarchy? (2004) [link] #228
No government, so called, can reasonably be trusted for a moment, or reasonably be supposed to have honest purposes in view, any longer than it depends wholly upon voluntary support.
Source: No Treason No. 6: The Constitution of No Authority (1870) [link] #227
To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so... To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.
Source: General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851) [link] #226
Libertarianism is neither of the left nor of the right. It is unique. It is sui generis. It is apart from left and right. The left right political spectrum simply has no room for libertarianism. Think of an equilateral triangle, with libertarianism at one corner, the left at a second corner and the right at the third corner. We are equally distant from both of those misbegotten political economic philosophies. No, better yet, think in terms of an isosceles triangle, with us at the top and the two of them at the bottom, indicating they have more in common with each other than with us.
Source: Left and Right; And Libertarianism (2013) [link] #225
Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at. State capitalism consists of one or more groups making use of the coercive apparatus of the government -- the State -- to accumulate capital for themselves by expropriating the production of others by force and violence.
Source: Capitalism versus Statism (1972) [link] #224
The rich, the owners of the already operating plants, have no particular class interest in the maintenance of free competition. They are opposed to confiscation and expropriation of their fortunes, but their vested interests are rather in favor of measures preventing newcomers from challenging their position. Those fighting for free enterprise and free competition do not defend the interests of those rich today. They want a free hand left to unknown men who will be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow and whose ingenuity will make the life of coming generations more agreeable. They want the way left open to further economic improvements. They are the spokesmen of material progress.
Source: Human Action (1949) [link] #223
If there is one well-established truth in political economy, it is this: That in all cases, for all commodities that serve to provide for the tangible or intangible needs of the consumer, it is in the consumer’s best interest that labor and trade remain free, because the freedom of labor and of trade have as their necessary and permanent result the maximum reduction of price. And this: That the interests of the consumer of any commodity whatsoever should always prevail over the interests of the producer. Now in pursuing these principles, one arrives at this rigorous conclusion: That the production of security should, in the interests of the consumers of this intangible commodity, remain subject to the law of free competition. Whence it follows: That no government should have the right to prevent another government from going into competition with it, or to require consumers of security to come exclusively to it for this commodity.
Source: The Production of Security (1849) [link] #222
Since money or other resources must be withdrawn from possible alternative uses to finance the supposedly desirable public goods, the only relevant and appropriate question is whether or not these alternative uses to which the money could be put (that is, the private goods which could have been acquired but now cannot be bought because the money is being spent on public goods instead) are more valuable--more urgent--than the public goods. And the answer to this question is perfectly clear. In terms of consumer evaluations, however high its absolute level might be, the value of the public goods is relatively lower than that of the competing private goods because if one had left the choice to the consumers (and had not forced one alternative upon them), they evidently would have preferred spending their money differently (otherwise no force would have been necessary). This proves beyond any doubt that the resources used for the provision of public goods are wasted because they provide consumers with goods or services that at best are only of secondary importance.
Source: Fallacies of the Public Goods Theory and the Production of Security (1989) [link] #221
Libertarian opponents of anarchy are attacking a straw man. Their arguments are usually utilitarian in nature and amount to "but anarchy won’t work" or "we need the (things provided by the) state." But these attacks are confused at best, if not disingenuous. To be an anarchist does not mean you think anarchy will "work" (whatever that means); nor that you predict it will or "can" be achieved. It is possible to be a pessimistic anarchist, after all. To be an anarchist only means that you believe that aggression is not justified, and that states necessarily employ aggression. And, therefore, that states, and the aggression they necessarily employ, are unjustified. It’s quite simple, really. It’s an ethical view, so no surprise it confuses utilitarians. Accordingly, anyone who is not an anarchist must maintain either: (a) aggression is justified; or (b) states (in particular, minimal states) do not necessarily employ aggression.
Source: What It Means To Be an Anarcho-Capitalist (2004) [link] #220
If we as a society want to cure unemployment, raise real wages, and in other such ways improve this sector of our economy, we will base public policy on private property rights, the non-aggression principle and the law of free association. In the free and prosperous society, everyone may do precisely as he pleases, provided only that he does not initiate violence against non-aggressors.
Source: Labor Economics from a Free Market Perspective (2008) [link] #219
Market anarchists are radical advocates of individual liberty and mutual consent in every aspect of social life -- thus rejecting all forms of domination and government as invasions against liberty and violations of human dignity.
Source: Markets Not Capitalism (2011) [link] #218
In a laissez-faire society, there could exist no public institution with the power to forcefully protect people from themselves. From other people (criminals), yes. From one's own self, no.
Source: The Death of Politics (1969) [link] #217
When one gets in bed with government, one must expect the diseases it spreads.
Source: Unknown #216
In the ideal socialist state power will not attract power freaks. People who make decisions will show no slightest bias toward their own interests. There will be no way for a clever man to bend the institutions to serve his own ends. And the rivers will run uphill.
Source: The Machinery of Freedom (1973) [link] #215
Social power is the power over nature, the living standards achieved by men in mutual exchange. State power, as we have seen, is the coercive and parasitic seizure of this production--a draining of the fruits of society for the benefit of nonproductive (actually antiproductive) rulers.
Source: Anatomy of the State (1974) [link] #214
Whatever its future success as a historical movement, anarchism will remain a fundamental part of human experience, for the drive for freedom is one of our deepest needs and the vision of a free society is one of our oldest dreams. Neither can ever be fully repressed; both will outlive all rulers and their States.
Source: Demanding the Impossible (1992) [link] #213
There are many common visceral arguments against anarchism: Anarchism is a bad idea because it would lead to a government. Anarchism would mean authoritarian warlords being in charge of the society. Anarchism is utopian and hasn't worked anywhere on earth--except when it has, in which case it doesn't count because a government exists somewhere and therefore made it work. Anarchism cannot work on a large scale, and anarchism cannot work on a small scale either because those areas would immediately be invaded. Inherent in this argument is that governments are, by their nature, invasive and predatory--this being the anarchist view of the nature of government.
Source: The Anarchist Handbook (2021) #212
The state is the mafia pretending to be a human rights organization.
Source: Part Of The Problem Podcast [link] #211
What is true, just, and beautiful is not determined by popular vote. The masses everywhere are ignorant, short-sighted, motivated by envy, and easy to fool. Democratic politicians must appeal to these masses in order to be elected. Whoever is the best demagogue will win. Almost by necessity, then, democracy will lead to the perversion of truth, justice and beauty.
Source: Interview with Hans-Hermann Hoppe, an Anti-Intellectual Intellectual (2008) #210
We live in anti-liberal times, when individual choice is highly suspect. The driving legislative ethos is toward making all actions required or forbidden, with less and less room for human volition. Simply put, we no longer trust the idea of freedom. We can’t even imagine how it would work. What a distance we have travelled from the Age of Reason to our own times.
Source: The Freedom of Association (2010) [link] #209
A necessary prerequisite to establishing a free and prosperous society is a free-market monetary system, one in which there is a total separation of money and the state.
Source: The Socialism of the Federal Reserve (2019) [link] #208
A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as "state" and "society" and "government" have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame … as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world … aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure.
Source: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966) #207
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. Society is a complex mechanism whose repair, if possible at all, would require a precise and detailed understanding of a kind that no one today possesses. Unsatisfying as it may seem, the wisest course for political agents is often simply to stop trying to solve society’s problems.
Source: In Praise of Passivity (2012) [link] #206
The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.
Source: Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (1944) [link] #205
If the state loses its grip over your mind, it loses the key to its very survival.
Source: Ron Paul and the Future (2012) [link] #204
People get the bulk of their food, clothing, housing, consumer durables, and other essential goods and services from private competitive suppliers. Only a hardcore Marxist would want to switch to monopoly government suppliers of these things. Yet across the political spectrum, almost everyone regards reliance on private competitive suppliers of personal and community security as an insane idea. It would appear that the brainwashing has had the desired effect.
Source: Facebook (2019) #203
Because the market rewards individuals according to services rendered, the result is that some persons earn and own more property than do others. Strictly by serving the masses of mankind, some individuals have been made extremely wealthy. They have been given stewardship over vast amounts of property because of their proven capacity to use such scarce resources efficiently in providing the goods and services most sought and most valued by others. But if, for some reason, any present owner of scarce resources loses his touch, fails to serve efficiently, the open competition of the ongoing market process soon will bid the property into the hands of some new owner who serves better.
Source: He Gains Most Who Serves Best (1975) [link] #202
It is so tiresome to see people reacting to the idea of anarchism by confidently proclaiming that anarchy would certainly result in terrible conditions X, Y, and Z, when X, Y, and Z are exactly what lie at the heart of the current statist system of rule, so deeply embedded there that people no longer even recognize the state's institutionalized criminality, oppression, and plunder.

Equally tiresome is the claim that anarchy presupposes that people are angels, when it is precisely because anarchists fully recognize people's capacity for evil that they oppose a system that gives monopoly power over life and death to a cabal of evil politicians and their self-serving financial backers.
Source: Facebook (2020) #201
The State is not ... a social institution administered in an anti-social way. It is an anti-social institution, administered in the only way an anti-social institution can be administered, and by the kind of person who, in the nature of things, is best adapted to such service.
Source: Our Enemy, the State (1935) #200
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.
Source: Labadie Reviews Nock (1936) [link] #199
A man is free precisely to the extent that his property rights are intact, because the condition of freedom and the condition of slavery are distinguished on the basis of the right of private property. A freeman owns himself and whatever he came by lawfully. A slave owns nothing. Ownership, however, means more than the possession of formal legal title to things. It means control. Control means authority over use, and over disposition as well. It means the condition in which one has the authority to follow his own preferences.
Source: Unknown #198
The concept of property is fundamental to our society, probably to any workable society. Operationally, it is understood by every child above the age of three. Intellectually, it is understood by almost no one.
Source: The Machinery of Freedom (1973) [link] #197
Today, we have an enlightened perspective on slavery, just as one day we will have an enlightened perspective on taxes and other forms of aggression we now think of as 'the only way.'
Source: Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression (2003) #196
Government is force, pure and simple. There's no way to sugar-coat that. And because government is force, it will attract the worst elements of society - people who want to use government to avoid having to earn their living and to avoid having to persuade others to accept their ideas voluntarily.
Source: Unknown #195
Our lack of constant awareness has also permitted us to accept definitions of freedom that are not necessarily consistent with the actuality of being free. Because we have learned to confuse the word with the reality the word seeks to describe, our vocabulary has become riddled with distorted and contradictory meanings smuggled into the language.
Source: Calculated Chaos (1985) #194
Freedom is never more in peril than when politicians feel the pressure to "do something."
Source: Unknown #193
People who insist that the government take charge of a certain task are confessing that the only tool in their toolbox is a gun.
Source: Facebook (2019) #192
On the free market, it is a happy fact that the maximization of the wealth of one person or group redounds to the benefit of all; but in the political realm, the realm of the State, a maximization of income and wealth can only accrue parasitically to the State and its rulers at the expense of the rest of society.
Source: The Ethics of Liberty (1982) [link] #191
Government intervention in the economy - through taxes, regulation and, most importantly, currency inflation - causes distortions and misallocations of capital that must eventually be unwound. The distortions degrade the general standard of living, and the economy goes into a recession (call that an incomplete cleansing). Or it goes into a depression - wherein the entire sickly structure comes unglued.
Source: The Greater Depression and What You Should Do About It (2008) [link] #190
No matter how much the government controls the economic system, any problem will be blamed on whatever small zone of freedom that remains.
Source: Unknown #189
The essential activities of the State necessarily constitute criminal aggression and depredation of the just rights of private property of its subjects (including self-ownership).
Source: The Ethics of Liberty (1982) [link] #188
The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.
Source: Our Enemy, the State (1935) [link] #187
Deny human rights, and however little you may wish to do so, you will find yourself abjectly kneeling at the feet of that old-world god, Force - that grimmest and ugliest of gods that men have ever created for themselves out of the lusts of their hearts. You will find yourself hating and dreading all other men who differ from you; you will find yourself obligated by the law of the conflict into which you have plunged, to use every means in your power to crush them before they are able to crush you; you will find yourself day by day growing more unscrupulous and intolerant, more and more compelled by the fear of those opposed to you, to commit harsh and violent actions. You will find yourselves clinging to and welcoming Force, as the one and only form of protection left to you, when you have once destroyed the rule of the great principles.
Source: A Plea for Voluntaryism (1906) [link] #186
Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.
Source: The Principles of Ethics, Part IV (1891) [link] #185
Statists are the utopian dreamers who imagine that individuals acting under the magical banner of government can plan, coerce, and coordinate millions of lives.
Source: Steve Bannon Dismisses Austrian Economics (2017) [link] #184
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. Together, they must battle state coercion, whether called State Capitalism or State Socialism. The point is, "left" vs. "right" is a red herring. The reddest and perhaps most misleading red herring in all political-economic theory.
Source: The Case for Discrimination (2010) [link] #183
Libertarianism is "cultish," say the sophisticates. Of course, there's nothing cultish at all about allegiance to the state, with its flags, its songs, its mass murders, its little children saluting and paying homage to pictures of their dear leaders on the wall, etc.
Source: Unknown #182
It isn't a coincidence that governments everywhere want to educate children. Government education, in turn, is supposed to be evidence of the state's goodness and its concern for our well-being. The real explanation is less flattering. If the government's propaganda can take root as children grow up, those kids will be no threat to the state apparatus. They'll fasten the chains to their own ankles.
Source: Ron Paul and the Future (2012) [link] #181
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.
Source: The Role of Intellectuals and Anti-Intellectuals (2008) [link] #180
Notwithstanding what some regard as the institutionalization of compassion, the transfer society quashes genuine virtue. Redistribution of income by means of government coercion is a form of theft. Its supporters attempt to disguise its essential character by claiming that democratic procedures give it legitimacy, but this justification is specious. Theft is theft, whether it be carried out by one thief or by a hundred million thieves acting in concert. And it is impossible to found a good society on the institutionalization of theft.
Source: Nineteen Neglected Consequences of Income Redistribution (1994) [link] #179
Government sponsors untold waste, criminality and inequality in every sphere of life it touches, giving little or nothing in return.
Source: The Essence of Government (2001) [link] #178
Ask not what the government can do for you. Ask what the government is doing to you.
Source: The Machinery of Freedom (1973) [link] #177
Just as slavery has been abolished most everywhere, I believe violence, coercion and all forms of force by one person over another can come to an end.
Source: LinkedIn [link] #176
One of the market's virtues, and the reason it enables so much peaceful interaction and cooperation among such a great variety of peoples, is that it demands of its participants only that they observe a relatively few basic principles, among them honesty, the sanctity of contracts, and respect for private property.
Source: Plunder or Enterprise: The World's Choice (2007) [link] #175
There is nothing the state can do, which society needs done, that cannot be done far better by the market.
Source: The Myth of Good Government (2008) [link] #174
Why should you desire to compel others; why should you seek to have power--that evil, bitter, mocking thing, which has been from of old, as it is today, the sorrow and curse of the world--over your fellow-men and fellow-women? Why should you desire to take from any man or woman their own will and intelligence, their free choice, their own self-guidance, their inalienable rights over themselves; why should you desire to make of them mere tools and instruments for your own advantage and interest; why should you desire to compel them to serve and follow your opinions instead of their own; why should you deny in them the soul--that suffers so deeply from all constraint--and treat them as a sheet of blank paper upon which you may write your own will and desires, of whatever kind they may happen to be?
Source: A Plea for Voluntaryism (1906) [link] #173
Actually, in its essence, democracy is a totalitarian ideology, though not as extreme as Nazism, fascism or communism. In principle, no freedom is safe in a democracy, every aspect of the individual's life is potentially subject to government control. At the end of the day, the minority is completely at the mercy of the whims of the majority. Even if a democracy has a constitution limiting the powers of the government, this constitution too can be amended by the majority. The only fundamental right you have in a democracy, besides running for office, is the right to vote for a political party. With that solitary vote you hand over your independence and your freedom to the will of the majority.
Source: Beyond Democracy (2012) [link] #172
As for the moral status of majority rule, it must be pointed out that it allows for A and B to band together to rip off C, C and A in turn joining to rip off B, and then B and C conspiring against A, and so on. This is not justice but a moral outrage.
Source: Democracy: The God That Failed (2001) #171
People with an investment in government power will torture logic like a medieval inquisitor rather than face the facts.
Source: Campaign-Finance Reform Will End Corruption? (2000) [link] #170
Placing the state in charge of moral principles is equivalent to putting the proverbial fox in charge of the chicken coop.
Source: Myth and Truth About Libertarianism (1979) [link] #169
The State's criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation--that is to say, in crime.
Source: The Criminality of the State (1939) [link] #168
Once people accept the claim that taxation is legitimate, all hope of their society's becoming or remaining free has been thrown out the window, and a necessary -- and perhaps sufficient -- condition has been established for their perpetual subjugation by the ruling oligarchy.
Source: Facebook (2018) #167
It does not follow from the fact that the state provides roads and schools that only the state can provide such goods. People have little difficulty recognizing that this is a fallacy. From the fact that monkeys can ride bikes it does not follow that only monkeys can ride bikes. ... It must be recalled that the state is an institution that can legislate and tax; and hence, that state agents have little incentive to produce efficiently. State roads and schools will only be more costly and their quality lower. For there is always a tendency for state agents to use up as many resources as possible doing whatever they do but actually work as little as possible doing it.
Source: The Great Fiction (2012) [link] #166
In spite of popular myths about capitalism oppressing the poor, the poor are worse off in those things provided by government, such as schooling, police protection, and justice. There are more good cars in the ghettos than good schools.
Source: The Machinery of Freedom (1973) [link] #165
There are two and only two ways that any economy can be organized. One is by freedom and voluntary choice--the way of the market. The other is by force and dictation--the way of the State.
Source: Man, Economy, and State (1962) [link] #164
Ultimately we need to take control over the money supply out of the hands of our governments and make the production of money again subject to the principle of free association. The first step to endorsing and promoting this strategy is to realize that governments do not--indeed cannot--fulfill any positive role whatever through the control of our money.
Source: Deflation and Liberty (2008) [link] #163
Money is not an invention of the state. It is not the product of a legislative act. Even the sanction of political authority is not necessary for its existence. Certain commodities came to be money quite naturally, as the result of economic relationships that were independent of the power of the state.
Source: The Nature and Origin of Money (1892) [link] #162
Trusting the government with money creation is like trusting a drunk with a whiskey factory.
Source: Unknown #161
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.
Source: Libertarian Class Analysis (2006) [link] #160
Perhaps the most tiresome of all objections to (my type of) anarchy is that human beings are too inclined towards violence and mayhem against their fellows to be set free of government as we know it. The thoughtlessness of this objection is stunning. After all, the state invariably falls under control of the most vicious, violent, and rapacious individuals in society – it's a matter of comparative advantage. So all that one accomplishes by retention of the state is to ensure that such creeps and sociopaths will possess monopoly control of the powerful institutions that constitute the state, and thereby possess a far more effective means of wreaking death and destruction than they ever could have acquired absent the state. In short, in regard to mankind's innate inclination toward evil, the state is much less the cure than it is an acute strain of the disease.
Source: Facebook (2016) #159
The thought of how far the human race would have advanced without government simply staggers the imagination.
Source: Unknown #158
Civilizations are not mandated by authorities, nor are they the products of systemic planning. People did not get together and say to one another "hey, let's start a civilization!" Such cultures have been, rather, the unintended consequences arising from the interplay of creative forces that sustain and enhance life. The variability and cross-fertilization of ideas and techniques that can arise in pluralistic settings conducive to diversity and spontaneity, have been indispensable to the life of modern civilization. In much the same way that "brainstorming" sessions provide synergistic opportunities for individuals to come together to produce solutions to problems that none could have brought about on their own, a culture supportive of individuality can generate values and systems at exponential levels of creativity.
Source: The Wizards of Ozymandias (2012) [link] #157
A government is a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction) and, implied in this, a compulsory territorial monopolist of taxation. That is, a government is the ultimate arbiter, for the inhabitants of a given territory, regarding what is just and what is not, and it can determine unilaterally, i.e., without requiring the consent of those seeking justice or arbitration, the price that justice-seekers must pay to the government for providing this service.
Source: Government, Money, and International Politics (2003) [link] #156
It is evidently desirable that men should associate, so far as they freely and voluntarily can do so, for the maintenance of justice among themselves, and for mutual protection against other wrongdoers. It is also in the highest degree desirable that they should agree upon some plan or system of judicial proceedings, which, in the trial of causes, should secure caution, deliberation, thorough investigation, and, as far as possible, freedom from every influence but the simple desire to do justice. Yet such associations can be rightful and desirable only in so far as they are purely voluntary. No man can rightfully be coerced into joining one, or supporting one against his will.
Source: Natural Law (1882) [link] #155
In a truly free society, a society where individual rights of person and property are maintained, the State, then, would necessarily cease to exist. Its myriad of invasive and aggressive activities, its vast depredations on the rights of person and property, would then disappear. At the same time, those genuine services which it does manage badly to perform would be thrown open to free competition, and to voluntarily chosen payments by individual consumers.
Source: The Ethics of Liberty (1982) [link] #154
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.
Source: Can a Libertarian Be Pro-War? (2006) [link] #153
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.
Source: TGIF: We Can Oppose Bigotry without the Politicians (2014) [link] #152
I found most of my friends quite content to be used as tax material, even though the sums of money taken from them were employed against their own beliefs and interests. They had lived so long under the system of using others, and then in their turn being used by them, that they were like hypnotized subjects, and looked on this subjecting and using of each other as a part of the necessary and even providential order of things. The great machine had taken possession of their souls; and they only yawned and looked bored, or slightly scornful at any idea of rebelling against it.
Source: Mr. Spencer and the Great Machine (1906) [link] #151
Politics is a dirty business, a ruse, an ideological cul-de-sac, a vast looter of intellectual and financial resources, a lie that corrupts, a deceiver, a means of unleashing vast evil in the world ... and the greatest diverter of human productivity ever concocted.
Source: Interview (2012) [link] #150
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am -- not stuck in the middle, but hovering above the entire farcical spectrum, weeping as I behold my fellow man's devotion to political illusion and self-destruction.
Source: Facebook (2015) #149
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.
Source: The Menace of Egalitarianism (2015) [link] #148
Libertarians make no exceptions to the golden rule and provide no moral loophole, no double standard, for government.
Source: Myth and Truth About Libertarianism (1979) [link] #147
Private property and free trade stand on exactly the same footing, both being essential and indivisible parts of liberty, both depending upon rights, which no body of men, whether called governments or anything else, can justly take from the individual.
Source: The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State (1885) [link] #146
Negative rights are independent of time, space, location, and condition. They apply right now, but they were just as appropriate and pertinent ten thousand years ago. They are completely independent of circumstances. It was a rights violation for one caveman to club another over the head in prehistoric times; this will hold true for spacemen ten thousand years in the future.
Source: Neglect of the Marketplace (1987) [link] #145
To create a free society is not to accomplish the impossible task of convincing all people to abandon aggression, but to accomplish the essential task of convincing enough people to abandon the belief that aggression is ever legitimate.
Source: Unknown #144
Ideology has always been vital to the continued existence of the State, as attested by the systematic use of ideology since the ancient Oriental empires. The specific content of the ideology has, of course, changed over time, in accordance with changing conditions and cultures. In the Oriental despotisms, the Emperor was often held by the Church to be himself divine; in our more secular age, the argument runs more to "the public good" and the "general welfare." But the purpose is always the same: to convince the public that what the State does is not, as one might think, crime on a gigantic scale, but something necessary and vital that must be supported and obeyed.
Source: The Ethics of Liberty (1982) #143
Governments commit more crimes upon persons and property and contribute more to their insecurity than all criminals put together.
Source: The Peaceful Revolutionist (1833) [link] #142
The government enforces a monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged "services" and brings violence to bear against would-be competitors. In so doing, it reveals the fraud at the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket.
Source: The Siren Song of the State (2007) [link] #141
The idea that the state is necessary is the biggest scam that has ever been perpetrated on the average person.
Source: Unknown #140
A necessary condition for the existence of the system of competing private protective agencies advocated by free market anarchism would be the existence of a society in which a predominant number of inhabitants highly value freedom and justice ... This would also be a necessary condition for the existence of limited government (a necessary, but not a sufficient condition).
Source: The Personalist [link] #139
In short, private crime is, at best, sporadic and uncertain; the parasitism is ephemeral, and the coercive, parasitic lifeline can be cut at any time by the resistance of the victims. The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for predation on the property of the the producers; it makes certain, secure, and relatively "peaceful" the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society. The great libertarian writer Albert Jay Nock wrote vividly that "the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime.... It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien."
Source: Anatomy of the State (1974) [link] #138
When Tucker inaugurated his journal, his starting point was the absolute sovereignty of the individual. He and his readers were the sternest enemies of invasion of person and property, making war upon the State as the chief invader. Tucker realized that criminals would remain even after governments disappeared, but his position was that, "of the really serious and important acts of invasion of individual sovereignty, at least nine-tenths are committed by organized State governments or through privileges granted by them, and that the governmental idea, with the State as its principal embodiment is the efficient cause of almost all of our social evils."
Source: Benjamin Tucker's Liberty (1979) [link] #137
Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government are interchangeable terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it be made of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.
Source: Relation of the State to the Individual (1890) [link] #136
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.
Source: What the Interventionist Overlooks (1978) [link] #135
Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.
Source: Nation, State, and Economy (1919) [link] #134
Under the rule of free competition, war between the producers of security entirely loses its justification. Why would they make war? To conquer consumers? But the consumers would not allow themselves to be conquered. They would be careful not to allow themselves to be protected by men who would unscrupulously attack the persons and property of their rivals. If some audacious conqueror tried to become dictator, they would immediately call to their aid all the free consumers menaced by this aggression, and they would treat him as he deserved. Just as war is the natural consequence of monopoly, peace is the natural consequence of liberty.
Source: The Production of Security (1849) [link] #133
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.
Source: Your Papers, Please (2003) [link] #132
Laissez faire capitalism means "hands-off" in terms of economic life. Anarchy means "hands-off" in legal and political life.
Source: Laissez Faire Law (2007) [link] #131
If a regime of complete economic freedom be established, social and political freedom will follow automatically; and until it is established neither social nor political freedom can exist. Here one comes in sight of the reason why the State will never tolerate the establishment of economic freedom. In a spirit of sheer conscious fraud, the State will at any time offer its people 'four freedoms,' or six, or any number; but it will never let them have economic freedom. If it did, it would be signing its own death-warrant, for as Lenin pointed out, 'it is nonsense to make any pretence of reconciling the State and liberty.' Our economic system being what it is, and the State being what it is, all the mass verbiage about 'the free peoples' and 'the free democracies' is merely so much obscene buffoonery.
Source: Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943) [link] #130
It is no accident that many abstract rules, such as those treating individual responsibility and several property, are associated with economics. Economics has from its origins been concerned with how an extended order of human interactions comes into existence through a process of variation, winnowing and sifting far surpassing our vision or our capacity to design. Adam Smith was the first to perceive that we have stumbled upon a method of ordering human economic cooperation that exceeds the limits of our knowledge and perception. His 'invisible hand' had perhaps better have been described as an invisible or unsurveyable pattern. We are led - for example by the pricing system in market exchange - to do things by circumstances of which we are largely unaware and which produce results that we do not intend. In our economic activities we do not know the needs, which we satisfy, nor the sources of the things, which we get. Almost all of us serve people whom we do not know, and even of whose existence we are ignorant; and we in turn constantly live on the services of other people of whom we know nothing. All this is possible because we stand in a great framework of institutions and traditions - economic, legal, and moral - into which we fit ourselves by obeying certain rules of conduct that we never made, and which we have never understood in the sense in which we understand how the things that we manufacture function. - Modern economics explains how such an extended order can come into being, and how it itself constitutes an information-gathering process, able to call up, and to put to use, widely dispersed information that no central planning agency, let alone an individual, could know as a whole, possess or control. Man's knowledge, as Smith knew, is dispersed.
Source: The Fatal Conceit (1988) #129
The belief that order must be intentionally generated and imposed upon society by institutional authorities continues to prevail. This centrally-directed model is premised upon what F.A. Hayek called "the fatal conceit," namely, the proposition "that man is able to shape the world according to his wishes," or what David Ehrenfeld labeled "the arrogance of humanism." That such practices have usually failed to produce their anticipated results has generally led not to a questioning of the model itself, but to the conclusion that failed policies have suffered only from inadequate leadership, or a lack of sufficient information, or a failure to better articulate rules. Once such deficiencies have been remedied, it has been supposed, new programs can be implemented which, reflective of this mechanistic outlook, will permit government officials to "fine tune" or "jump start" the economy, or "grow" jobs, or produce a "quick fix" for the ailing government school system. Even as modern society manifests its collapse in the form of violent crime, economic dislocation, seemingly endless warfare, inter-group hostilities, the decay of cities, a growing disaffection with institutions, and a general sense that nothing "works right" anymore, faith in the traditional model continues to drive the pyramidal systems. Most people still cling to the belief that there is something that can be done by political institutions to change such conditions: a new piece of legislation can be enacted, a judicial ruling can be ordered, or a new agency regulation can be promulgated. When a government-run program ends in disaster, the mechanistic mantra is invariably invoked: "we will find out what went wrong and fix it so that this doesn’t happen again." That the traditional model itself, which is grounded in the state’s power to control the lives and property of individuals to desired ends, may be the principal contributor to such social disorder goes largely unexplored.
Source: Boundaries of Order: Private Property as a Social System (2009) [link] #128
Anarchism advocates the dissolution of the state into social and market arrangements, and these arrangements are far more flexible and less predictable than political institutions. The most that we can do, then, is to offer broad guidelines and perspectives on the shape of a projected anarchist society.
Source: Society without a State (1975) [link] #127
According to the pronouncements of our state rulers and their intellectual bodyguards (of whom there are more than ever before), we are better protected and more secure than ever. We are supposedly protected from global warming and cooling, from the extinction of animals and plants, from the abuses of husbands and wives, parents and employers, from poverty, disease, disaster, ignorance, prejudice, racism, sexism, homophobia, and countless other public enemies and dangers. In fact, however, matters are strikingly different. In order to provide us with all this protection, the state managers expropriate more than 40 percent of the incomes of private producers year in and year out. Government debt and liabilities have increased without interruption, thus increasing the need for future expropriations. Owing to the substitution of government paper money for gold, financial insecurity has increased sharply, and we are continually robbed through currency depreciation. Every detail of private life, property, trade, and contract is regulated by ever higher mountains of laws (legislation), thereby creating permanent legal uncertainty and moral hazard. In particular, we have been gradually stripped of the right to exclusion implied in the very concept of private property. ... In short, the more the state has increased its expenditures on social security and public safety, the more our private property rights have been eroded, the more our property has been expropriated, confiscated, destroyed, or depreciated, and the more we have been deprived of the very foundation of all protection: economic independence, financial strength, and personal wealth.
Source: The Private Production of Defense (1999) [link] #126
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.
Source: The Principles of Ethics, Part IV (1891) [link] #125
Anarchism is not an ideological movement. It is an ideological statement. It says that all people have the capacity for liberty. It says that all anarchists want liberty. And then it is silent. After the pause of that silence, anarchists then mount the stages of their own communities and history and proclaim their, not anarchism’s ideologies - they say how they, how they as anarchists, will make arrangements, describe events, celebrate life and work.

Anarchism is the hammer-idea, smashing the chains. Liberty is what results and, in liberty, everything else is up to the people and their ideologies.
Source: Anarchy without Hyphens (1980) [link] #124
It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.
Source: War, Peace, and the State (1963) [link] #123
Liberalism is, in fact, the ideology of the capitalist revolution that prodigiously raised the living standards of the mass of people; a doctrine gradually elaborated over several centuries, which offered a new concept of social order, encompassing freedom in the only form suited to the modern world. Step by step, in practice and theory, the various sectors of human activity were withdrawn from the jurisdiction of coercive authority and given over to the voluntary action of self-regulating society.
Source: Eugen Richter and the End of German Liberalism (1990) [link] #122
Both bad driving and bad voting are dangerous not merely to the individual who practices them, but to innocent bystanders.
Source: The Myth of the Rational Voter (2007) #121
Are stable and consistent law codes possible, with only competing judges to develop and apply them, and without government or legislature? Not only are they possible, but over the years the best and most successful parts of our legal system were developed precisely in this manner. Legislatures, as well as kings, have been capricious, invasive, and inconsistent. They have only introduced anomalies and despotism into the legal system. In fact, the government is no more qualified to develop and apply law than it is to provide any other service; and just as religion has been separated from the State, and the economy can be separated from the State, so can every other State function, including police, courts, and the law itself!
Source: Free Market Police, Courts and Law (1973) [link] #120
Most particular government activities, beyond the most fundamental, exist because they benefit some special interest at the cost of the rest of us. Each special interest will fight, in most cases successfully, to protect its private racket. Yet the individuals who make up the special interest are on the receiving end of everyone else's racket. Most of them lose, on net, by the whole transaction. To the extent that they realize this, they will support general reductions in government power. So the fundamental task is one of education.
Source: The Machinery of Freedom (1973) [link] #119
If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State.
Source: State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree And Wherein They Differ (1886) [link] #118
Liberty means refusing to allow some men to use the State to compel other men to serve their interests or opinions.
Source: A Plea for Voluntaryism (1906) [link] #117
What is the State anyway but organized banditry? What is taxation but theft on a gigantic, unchecked, scale? What is war but mass murder on a scale impossible by private police forces? What is conscription but mass enslavement? Can anyone envision a private police force getting away with a tiny fraction of what States get away with, and do habitually, year after year, century after century?
Source: For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (1973) [link] #116
It is self-evident that no number of men, by conspiring, and calling themselves a government, can acquire any rights whatever over other men, or other men's property, which they had not before, as individuals. And whenever any number of men, calling themselves a government, do anything to another man, or to his property, which they had no right to do as individuals, they thereby declare themselves trespassers, robbers, or murderers, according to the nature of their acts.
Source: A Letter to Grover Cleveland (1886) [link] #115
My philosophy is based on the principle of self-ownership. You own your life. To deny this is to imply that another person has a higher claim on your life than you do. No other person, or group of persons, owns your life nor do you own the lives of others ... Since you own your life, you are responsible for your life. You do not rent your life from others who demand your obedience. Nor are you a slave to others who demand your sacrifice. You choose your own goals based on your own values. Success and failure are both the necessary incentives to learn and to grow.
Source: The Philosophy of Liberty #113
It is not our job to convince people to vote for one candidate or reject another. Our job is to encourage them to question why the political class has any legitimacy at all.
Source: The Austrian Vol. 2, No. 1 (2016) [link] #112
Having confidence in a free society is to focus on the process of discovery in the marketplace of values rather than to focus on some imposed vision or goal. Using governmental force to impose a vision on others is intellectual sloth and typically results in unintended, perverse consequences. Achieving a free society requires courage to think, to talk, and to act - especially when it is easier to do nothing.
Source: The Philosophy of Liberty #111
In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty; and the libertarians must combat them. But few of us individually have the time, energy, and special knowledge in more than a handful of subjects to be able to do this.
Source: The Task Confronting Libertarians (1968) [link] #110
It constantly amazes me that defenders of the free market are expected to offer certainty and perfection while government has only to make promises and express good intentions.
Source: Unknown #109
Let’s examine this. If you believe the state is harmful rather than benevolent; if you believe that the state threatens individual rights and property rights, rather than protects them; if you believe that the state decreases our chances for peace and prosperity; if you believe, in sum, that the state is an overwhelming force for ill in our society, a force that makes all of us far worse off, why in the world is it unrealistic to work toward its elimination?
Source: The Case for Optimism (2014) [link] #108
Everyone can see the immense harm the state causes day in and day out, not to mention its periodic orgies of mass death and destruction. In the past century alone, states caused hundreds of millions of deaths, not to the combatants on both sides of the many wars they launched, but to “their own” populations, whom they have chosen to shoot, bomb, shell, hack, stab, beat, gas, starve, work to death, and otherwise obliterate in ways to grotesque to contemplate calmly ... People are vile and corruptible, the state, which holds by far the greatest potential for harm and tends to be captured by the worst of the worst, is much too risky for anyone to justify its continuation. To tolerate it is not simply to play with fire, but to chance the total destruction of the human race.
Source: If Men Were Angels (2007) [link] #107
They flood, restrict and impoverish us with their territorial statism, governmentalism, Warfare & Welfare States, their taxes or wrongful tribute levies, their public debt, legislation and regulation and monopolistic impositions, protection rackets restricting or taxing free trade, their all too flawed and incomplete bills of rights, their compulsory collectives, monopoly monies and all too flawed "value standards", imposed by legal tender laws, their suppression of individual secessions and of groups of like-minded volunteers. They provide us with useless leadership struggles, all between largely ignorant and prejudiced power addicts, all without knowledge and appreciation or interest in all individual rights and liberties, which, if generally known and appreciated, would do away with their "leadership" over whole populations, i.e. who of them is to furthermore mislead us. Declaration, recognition and realization of all individual rights and liberties would confine these misleaders to their remaining voluntary victims. They do not allow us to secede from them and make personal law or social contract or constitution choices for ourselves and our own affairs, largely only in network form and between like-minded volunteers, for all kinds of public service systems, competitively provided, just like presently family relationships, consumer sovereignty for ordinary consumer goods and services are provided, subscribed to and bought and used. When it comes to ordinary consumer goods and services we do take free choice in them already for granted, just like we do with our sports, fashion, arts, tourism, drinking, smoking, non-drinking and non-smoking and recreation choices and our tolerance for the different choices of others in these spheres.
Source: Facebook (2017) #105
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.
Source: Our Enemy, the State (1935) [link] #104
Government is in reality established by the few; and these few assume the consent of all the rest, without any such consent being actually given.
Source: The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1847) [link] #103
If we look at the black record of mass murder, exploitation, and tyranny levied on society by governments over the ages, we need not be loath to abandon the Leviathan State and …try freedom.
Source: Free Market Police, Courts and Law (1973) [link] #102
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.
Source: Anarchy without Hyphens (1980) [link] #101
If anarchists are idealists, they may simply be likened to someone who finds himself swimming in a cesspool and, rather than paddling about looking for the area with the least amount of floating feces, seeks to climb out of the pool completely.
Source: Facebook (2014) #100
Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping, and unintelligent.
Source: Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956) [link] #99
There is no peace now, and there never will be peace, so long as man rules over man.
Source: Our Present Attitude (1908) [link] #98
What basis for war could there still be, once all peoples had been set free?
Source: Nation, State, and Economy (1919) [link] #97
To be an anarchist and assume responsibility for yourself, I think this is a great idea.
Source: Interview (2014) [link] #96
In regard to the so-called social contract, I have often had occasion to protest that I haven't even seen the contract, much less been asked to consent to it. A valid contract requires voluntary offer, acceptance, and consideration. I've never received an offer from my rulers, so I certainly have not accepted one; and rather than consideration, I have received nothing but contempt from the rulers, who, notwithstanding the absence of any agreement, have indubitably threatened me with grave harm in the event that I fail to comply with their edicts.
Source: Consent of the Governed? (2010) [link] #95
The basic reason why a person should be a Libertarian: not as an intellectual parlor game, not from the utilitarian weighing of costs and benefits, and not because there will be X percent more bathtubs produced in the free society. The basic reason for one’s libertarianism should be a passion for justice, for sweeping away as quickly as possible the tyranny, the thievery, the mass murder, and enslavement, which statism has, for too long, imposed upon mankind.
Source: Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays (1974) [link] #94
The only security men can have for their political liberty, consists in their keeping their money in their own pockets.
Source: No Treason No. 6: The Constitution of No Authority (1870) [link] #93
Private enterprise creates; government destroys. That is the great economic lesson of our times and all times.
Source: Illusions of Power (2003) [link] #92
I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air -- that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
Source: Why Liberty? (Chicago Tribune, 30 January 1927) #91
The man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says "Limit yourself"; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian.
Source: For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (1973) [link] #89
If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
Source: Unknown #88
Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote-begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.
Source: The Principles of Anarchism (~1905–1910) [link] #87
Ideas are very important to the shaping of society. In fact, they are more powerful than bombings or armies or guns. And this is because ideas are capable of spreading without limit. They are behind all the choices we make. They can transform the world in a way that governments and armies cannot. Fighting for liberty with ideas makes more sense to me than fighting with guns or politics or political power. With ideas, we can make real change that lasts.
Source: Liberty Defined (2011) #86
Therefore, the subject is not whether we accomplish anarchism today, tomorrow, or within ten centuries, but that we walk towards anarchism today, tomorrow, and always.
Source: Towards Anarchism (1899) [link] #85
"Who would build the roads?" is the question that belongs at the top of every libertarian drinking game. If we didn't have state coercion, the argument runs, there would be no roads. There'd be a Sears store over there, and your house over here, and everyone involved would just be standing there scratching their heads.
Source: Unknown #84
It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. Slavery has so frightful an aspect to men accustomed to freedom that it must steal in upon them by degrees and must disguise itself in a thousand shapes in order to be received.
Source: Of the Liberty of the Press (1742) [link] #83
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.
Source: But Wouldn't Warlords Take Over? (2005) [link] #82
We do not want to lead or be led. We want to be free.
Source: Unknown #81
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Source: A Little Book in C major (1916) [link] #80
It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.
Source: Unknown #79
Opponents of anarchism cannot bring themselves to believe that any possible stateless society could provide security, justice, and social peace through market transactions, yet they apparently believe that government as we know it -- government without explicit, voluntary, individual consent -- does, or at least might, provide these goods. Go figure.
Source: Facebook (2015) #78
For most people, "anarchy" is a disturbing word, suggesting chaos, violence, antinomianism - things they hope the state can control or prevent. The term "state," despite its bloody history, doesn’t disturb them. Yet it's the state that is truly chaotic, because it means the rule of the strong and cunning. They imagine that anarchy would naturally terminate in the rule of thugs. But mere thugs can't assert a plausible right to rule. Only the state, with its propaganda apparatus, can do that. This is what 'legitimacy' means. Anarchists obviously need a more seductive label.
Source: The Reluctant Anarchist (2002) [link] #77
Libertarians believe that murder is murder and does not become sanctified by reasons of state if committed by the government. We believe that theft is theft and does not become legitimated because organized robbers call their theft "taxation." We believe that enslavement is enslavement even if the institution committing that act calls it "conscription." In short, the key to libertarian theory is that it makes no exceptions in its universal ethic for government.
Source: Myth and Truth About Libertarianism (1979) [link] #76
Let me begin with the definition of a state. What must an agent be able to do to qualify as a state? This agent must be able to insist that all conflicts among the inhabitants of a given territory be brought to him for ultimate decision-making or be subject to his final review. In particular, this agent must be able to insist that all conflicts involving him be adjudicated by him or his agent. And implied in the power to exclude all others from acting as ultimate judge, as the second defining characteristic of a state, is the agent’s power to tax: to unilaterally determine the price that justice seekers must pay for his services. Based on this definition of a state, it is easy to understand why a desire to control a state might exist. For whoever is a monopolist of final arbitration within a given territory can make laws. And he who can legislate can also tax. Surely, this is an enviable position.
Source: To Battle the State (2008) [link] #75
The belief in "authority," which includes all belief in "government," is irrational and self-contradictory; it is contrary to civilization and morality, and constitutes the most dangerous, destructive superstition that has ever existed. Rather than being a force for order and justice, the belief in "authority" is the arch-enemy of humanity.
Source: The Most Dangerous Superstition (2011) [link] #74
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person.
Source: What is Authority (1870) [link] #73
The State is, and always has been, the great single enemy of the human race, its liberty, happiness and progress.
Source: Unknown #72
Liberty, then, is the sovereignty of the individual, and never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her person, time, and property, each living and acting at his own cost.
Source: Equitable Commerce (1852) [link] #71
The core of libertarianism is respect for the life, liberty and property rights of each individual. This means that no one may initiate force against another, as that violates those natural rights. While many claim adherence to this principle, only libertarians apply the non-aggression axiom to the state.
Source: Unknown #70
In past history popularly elected governments have been no better and sometimes far worse than overt tyrannies.
Source: The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (1966) #69
A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.
Source: No Treason No. 6: The Constitution of No Authority (1870) [link] #67
If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?
Source: The Law (1850) [link] #66
The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbour and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work.
Source: The Road to Serfdom (1944) #65
The state spends much time and effort persuading the public that it is not really what it is and that the consequences of its actions are positive rather than negative.
Source: A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (1989) [link] #64
Political theory deals with what is proper or improper for government to do, and government is distinguished from every other group in society as being the institution of organized violence. Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive, unjust, and criminal. Libertarianism, therefore, is a theory which states that everyone should be free of violent invasion, should be free to do as he sees fit, except invade the person or property of another. What a person does with his or her life is vital and important, but is simply irrelevant to libertarianism.
Source: Myth and Truth About Libertarianism (1979) [link] #63
Libertarianism is a political philosophy. It is concerned solely with the proper use of force. Its core premise is that it should be illegal to threaten or initiate violence against a person or his property without his permission; force is justified only in defense or retaliation.That is it, in a nutshell. The rest is mere explanation, elaboration, and qualification.
Source: Libertarianism and Libertinism (1994) [link] #62
The State is founded in aggression. Its main function is the suppression of individual liberty. It claims absolute jurisdiction over all within its borders. It derives its power from the superstitious veneration of its subjects, and governs and coerces them in proportion to the depth of that superstition. But gradually superstitions decay. A few members of the community demand more liberty, and they obtain it when they become sufficiently strong to enforce their demands.
Source: Voluntary Socialism (1896) [link] #61
Modern tyrants and their enforcers are always outnumbered (and often outgunned) by their victims by a factor of hundreds or thousands. Yet tyrants still maintain power, not because people lack the physical ability to resist, but because, as a result of their deeply inculcated belief in "authority," they lack the mental ability to resist.
Source: Unknown #60
If states have everywhere been run by an oligarchic group of predators, how have they been able to maintain their rule over the mass of the population? The answer, as the philosopher David Hume pointed out over two centuries ago, is that in the long run every government, no matter how dictatorial, rests on the support of the majority of its subjects.
Source: For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (1973) [link] #59
Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as FORCE is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.
Source: Of the First Principles of Government (1741) [link] #58
Printing up extra money - with no backing - used to be the sort of thing only counterfeiters did. Now it is done by the central bankers and Treasury Secretaries themselves. They don't apologize for it. They don't hang their heads and contemplate blowing their brains out. Instead, they're proud of it... announcing that they 'saved civilization,' or some such claptrap.
Source: Money Printing: How Counterfeiters Saved the World (2010) [link] #57
Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people's savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments.
Source: Who Will Protect Us From Our Protectors? (1962) [link] #56
The monopolization of money and banking is the ultimate pillar on which the modern state rests. In fact, it has probably become the most cherished instrument for increasing state income. For nowhere else can the state make the connection between redistribution-expenditure and exploitation-return more directly, quickly and securely than by monopolizing money and banking. And nowhere else are the state's schemes less clearly understood than here.
Source: Banking, Nation States, and International Politics: A Sociological Reconstruction of the Present Economic Order (1990) [link] #55
We must ask, not whether an anarcho-capitalist society would be safe from a power grab by the men with the guns (safety is not an available option), but whether it would be safer than our society is from a comparable seizure of power by the men with the guns. I think the answer is yes. In our society, the men who must engineer such a coup are politicians, military officers, and policemen, men selected precisely for the characteristic of desiring power and being good at using it. They are men who already believe that they have a right to push other men around--that is their job. They are particularly well qualified for the job of seizing power. Under anarcho-capitalism the men in control of protection agencies are selected for their ability to run an efficient business and please their customers. It is always possible that some will turn out to be secret power freaks as well, but it is surely less likely than under our system where the corresponding jobs are labeled 'non-power freaks need not apply.'
Source: The Machinery of Freedom (1973) [link] #54
The basic axiom of libertarian political theory holds that every man is a selfowner, having absolute jurisdiction over his own body. In effect, this means that no one else may justly invade, or aggress against, another's person. It follows then that each person justly owns whatever previously unowned resources he appropriates or "mixes his labor with." From these twin axioms - self-ownership and "homesteading" - stem the justification for the entire system of property rights titles in a free-market society. This system establishes the right of every man to his own person, the right of donation, of bequest (and, concomitantly, the right to receive the bequest or inheritance), and the right of contractual exchange of property titles.
Source: Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution (1982) [link] #53
The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are ultimately asking for more compulsion and less freedom.
Source: Human Action (1949) [link] #52
Statists tend to treat governmental edicts as though they were incantations, passing directly from decree to result, without the inconvenience of means; since in the real world the chief means employed by government is violence, threatened and actual, cloaking state decrees and their violent implementation in the garb of incantation disguises both the immorality and the inefficiency of statism by ignoring the messy path from decree to result.
Source: Equality: The Unknown Ideal (2001) [link] #51
I don't think I am obligated to find an answer to every question in the world. That being said, all I can do is take care of the means and live as close to my conscience as possible: educate myself and help educate others, and not contribute to the problem of coercive government.
Source: Voluntaryist.com [link] #50
Whatever the issue, let freedom offer us a hundred choices, instead of having government force one answer on everyone.
Source: Unknown #49
We need to become more tolerant of the imperfections that come with freedom, and we need to give up the illusion that somehow putting government in charge of anything is going to improve its workings, much less bring on utopia.
Source: Unknown #48
Just as the right-wing hawks embrace the Orwellian notion that War is Peace, left-wing egalitarians believe that Slavery is Freedom. The hawks wage endless war to end war, while the social democrats engage in massive theft - or "taxation" as they call it - to eliminate crime. It is high time to abandon such monstrous paradoxes. It took no king to produce language, money, or science, and it takes no government to produce a just legal system.
Source: Chaos Theory (2002) [link] #47
The point is that the advocate of a free market in anything cannot provide a "constructive" blueprint of such a market in advance. The essence and the glory of the free market is that individual firms and businesses, competing on the market, provide and ever-changing orchestration of efficient and progressive goods and services.
Source: For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (1973) [link] #46
Let me state this as plainly as possible. The enemy is the state. There are other enemies too, but none so fearsome, destructive, dangerous, or culturally and economically debilitating. No matter what other proximate enemy you can name - big business, unions, victim lobbies, foreign lobbies, medical cartels, religious groups, classes, city dwellers, farmers, left-wing professors, right-wing blue-collar workers, or even bankers and arms merchants - none are as horrible as the hydra known as the leviathan state. If you understand this point - and only this point - you can understand the core of libertarian strategy.
Source: The Enemy Is Always the State (2008) [link] #43
The whole world is awash in statism.
Source: Voluntaryist.com [link] #41
The central idea of libertarianism is that people should be permitted to run their own lives as they wish.
Source: The Machinery of Freedom (1973) [link] #40
I heartily accept the motto, - "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, - "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
Source: Resistance to Civil Government (1849) [link] #39
In this century, the human race faces, once again, the virulent reign of the State--of the State now armed with the fruits of man's creative powers, confiscated and perverted to its own aims. The last few centuries were times when men tried to place constitutional and other limits on the State, only to find that such limits, as with all other attempts, have failed. Of all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in check. The problem of the State is evidently as far from solution as ever. Perhaps new paths of inquiry must be explored, if the successful, final solution of the State question is ever to be attained.
Source: Anatomy of the State (1974) [link] #38
History is ultimately determined by ideas, and ideas can, at least in principle, change almost instantly.
Source: The Rise and Fall of the City (2005) [link] #37
The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.
Source: Anatomy of the State (1974) [link] #36
The true remedy for most evils is none other than liberty, unlimited and complete liberty, liberty in every field of human endeavour.
Source: Journal des Économistes 21 (1848) #35
People and their values are almost infinitely diverse, and people will never agree on many elements of social arrangements that might be subjected to uniform rules of governance. Hence, the greater the scope of strictly individual self-determination, the lesser the scope of governance, and the greater the tolerance with which people live and let live among their fellows, the more peaceful and flourishing society will be.
Source: Against Libertarian Infighting (2014) [link] #34
Anarchists, whose mission in the world is the abolition of aggression and all the evils that result therefrom, perceived that, to be understood, they must attach some definite and avowed significance to the terms which they are obliged to employ, and especially to the words "State" and "government." Seeking, then, the elements common to all the institutions to which the name "State" has been applied, they have found them two in number: first, aggression; second, the assumption of sole authority over a given area and all within it, exercised generally for the double purpose of more complete oppression of its subjects and extension of its boundaries.
Source: Relation of the State to the Individual (1890) [link] #33
The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.
Source: The Machinery of Freedom (1973) [link] #32
Historically, States do not dismantle willingly or easily. While they can disintegrate with startling speed, as in Russia in 1917 or France in 1968, almost always new States arise to take their place. The reason for this, I believe, is that men cannot bring themselves to believe in the practical feasibility of a society in which perfect liberty, security of life and property, and law and justice can be attained without the coercive violence of the State. Men have for so long been enslaved by the State that they cannot rid themselves of a Statist mentality. The myth of the State as a necessary part of social reality constitutes the greatest single obstacle to the achievement of a libertarian voluntarist society.
Source: Stateless Societies: Ancient Ireland (1971) [link] #31
It is necessary to recognize that the ultimate power of every government--whether of kings or caretakers--rests solely on opinion and not on physical force. The agents of government are never more than a small proportion of the total population under their control. This implies that no government can possibly enforce its will upon the entire population unless it finds widespread support and voluntary cooperation within the nongovernmental public. It implies likewise that every government can be brought down by a mere change in public opinion, i.e., by the withdrawal of the public's consent and cooperation.
Source: On the Impossibility of Limited Government and the Prospects for a Second American Revolution (2001) [link] #30
For the libertarian, the main task of the present epoch is to cast off his needless and debilitating pessimism, to set his sights on long-run victory and to set about the road to its attainment ... Let him proceed in the spirit of radical long-run optimism.
Source: Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty (1965) [link] #27
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.
Source: The Intellectuals and Socialism (1949) [link] #26
The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: "Your money, or your life." And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat. The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the roadside, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful. The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a "protector," and that he takes men's money against their will, merely to enable him to "protect" those infatuated travellers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful "sovereign," on account of the "protection" he affords you. He does not keep "protecting" you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy, if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villainies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.
Source: No Treason No. 6: The Constitution of No Authority (1870) [link] #25
The state is anything but the result of a contract! No one with even just an ounce of common sense would agree to such a contract. I have a lot of contracts in my files, but nowhere is there one like this. The state is the result of aggressive force and subjugation. It has evolved without contractual foundation, just like a gang of protection racketeers.
Source: Obsessed by Megalomania (2012) [link] #24
There is one crucially important power inherent in the nature of the State apparatus. All other persons and groups in society (except for acknowledged and sporadic criminals such as thieves and bank robbers) obtain their income voluntarily: either by selling goods and services to the consuming public, or by voluntary gift (e.g., membership in a club or association, bequest, or inheritance). Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as "taxation," although in less regularized epochs it was often known as "tribute." Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State's inhabitants, or subjects.
Source: The Ethics of Liberty (1982) [link] #23
Why, the very first act of the State, the compulsory assessment and collection of taxes, is itself an aggression, a violation of equal liberty ... How is it possible to sanction, under the law of equal liberty, the confiscation of a man's earnings to pay for protection which he has not sought and does not desire? And, if this is an outrage, what name shall we give to such confiscation when the victim is given, instead of bread, a stone, instead of protection, oppression? To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury. But that is exactly what the State is doing.
Source: Relation of the State to the Individual (1890) [link] #22
Liberty is not about class war, income war, race war, national war, a war between the sexes, or any other conflict apart from the core conflict between individuals and those who would seek power and control over the human spirit. Liberty is the dream that we can all work together, in ways of our choosing and of our own human volition, to realize a better life.
Source: Unknown #21
No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems - of which which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.
Source: Solving Whose Problem? (2009) [link] #20
The great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer pointed out that there are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth; one, the ... way of production and exchange, he called the "economic means." The other way is simpler in that it does not require productivity; it is the way of seizure of another's goods or services by the use of force and violence. This is the method of one-sided confiscation, of theft of the property of others. This is the method which Oppenheimer termed "the political means" to wealth.
Source: Anatomy of the State (1974) [link] #19
What is the purpose of norms? The avoidance of conflict regarding the use of scarce physical things. Conflict-generating norms contradict the very purpose of norms. Yet with regard to the purpose of conflict avoidance, no alternative to private property and original appropriation exists. In the absence of prestabilized harmony among actors, conflict can only be prevented if all goods are always in the private ownership of specific individuals and it is always clear who owns what and who does not. Also, conflicts can only be avoided from the very beginning of mankind if private property is acquired by acts of original appropriation (instead of by mere declarations or words of latecomers).
Source: The Ethics and Economics of Private Property (2004) [link] #18
Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defence is itself aggressive, unjust and criminal.
Source: Myth and Truth About Libertarianism (1979) [link] #17
The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, "See if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk".
Source: A Solution for the Middle East (April 2002) [link] #16
The Anarchists never have claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow authority.
Source: Individual Liberty (1926) [link] #15
Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a Great Leap Forward that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy's mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state's mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.
Source: Facebook (2012) #14
A consistent peace activist must be an anarchist.
Source: An Open Letter to the Peace Movement (March 2003) [link] #13
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.
Source: The Most Dangerous Superstition (2011) [link] #12
The "private sector" of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the "public sector" is, in fact, the coercive sector.
Source: Planning vs. The Free Market (1962) [link] #11
Libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but... in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which is now called private. Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold people in a roughly serf-master relationship to political-economic power concentrations.
Source: Where Are the Specifics? (1969) [link] #10
Private property is redundant. "Public property" is an oxymoron. All legit property is private. If property isn't private it's stolen.
Source: Unknown #9
Such an institution of coercion, centralizing immorality, directing theft and murder, and coordinating oppression on a scale inconceivable by random criminality exists. It is the Mob of mobs, Gang of gangs, Conspiracy of conspiracies. It has murdered more people in a few recent years than all the deaths in history before that time; it has stolen in a few recent years more than all the wealth produced in history to that time; it has deluded - for its survival - more minds in a few recent years than all the irrationality of history to that time. Our Enemy, The State.
Source: New Libertarian Manifesto (1983) [link] #8
Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.
Source: Covert Operations (2010) [link] #7
Laissez-faire capitalism, or anarchocapitalism, is simply the economic form of the libertarian ethic. Laissez-faire capitalism encompasses the notion that men should exchange goods and services, without regulation, solely on the basis of value for value. It recognizes charity and communal enterprises as voluntary versions of this same ethic. Such a system would be straight barter, except for the widely felt need for a division of labor in which men, voluntarily, accept value tokens such as cash and credit. Economically, this system is anarchy, and proudly so.
Source: The Death of Politics (1969) [link] #6
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.
Source: The Machinery of Freedom (1973) [link] #5
Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion.
Source: Anatomy of the State (1974) [link] #4
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.
Source: About Market Anarchism [link] #3
Because the state necessarily commits aggression, the consistent libertarian, in opposing aggression, is also an anarchist.
Source: What Libertarianism Is (2009) [link] #2
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.
Source: State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree And Wherein They Differ (1886) [link] #1
TOP