Common Sense with Paul Jacob

When the first fire-engine appeared in Japan the carpenters asked to have it removed because it robbed workmen of the employment provided by fires. Bastiat himself never invented anything better.

Yves Guyot, The Comedy of Protection, 1906, viii, referring to Frédéric Bastiat’s infamous satires on protectionism, such as “The Candle-makers’ Petition” and the “Negative Railroad.”

Socialism is simply the ultimate of government taxation and control. It has a false but definitive philosophy, and likewise, a false religion with glowing promises of utopian freedom under political change. Capitalism, until of late, has been relatively inarticulate. It practices the golden rule of each serving others as he would be served, yet has little conscious knowledge of the sound philosophy and vital religion that it constantly puts into practical effect six days of the week.

Spencer Heath, presumably from Citadel, Market and Altar (1957), as quoted in Spencer Heath MacCallum and Alvin Lowi, “A Summary of the Philosophy of Spencer Heath,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2018).

Men are like handsome race horses who first bite the bit and later like it, and rearing under the saddle a while soon learn to enjoy displaying their harness and prance proudly beneath their trappings. Men will grow accustomed to the idea that they have always been in subjection, that their fathers lived in the same way; they will think they are obliged to suffer this evil, and will persuade themselves by example and imitation of others, finally investing those who order them around with proprietary rights, based on the idea that it has always been that way. 
There are always a few, better endowed than others, who feel the weight of the yoke and cannot restrain themselves from attempting to shake it off: these are the men who never become tamed under subjection and who always, like Ulysses on land and sea constantly seeking the smoke of his chimney, cannot prevent themselves from peering about for their natural privileges and from remembering their ancestors and their former ways. These are in fact the men who, possessed of clear minds and far-sighted spirit, are not satisfied, like the brutish mass, to see only what is at their feet, but rather look about them, behind and before, and even recall the things of the past in order to judge those of the future, and compare both with their present condition. These are the ones who, having good minds of their own, have further trained them by study and learning. Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it. For them slavery has no satisfactions, no matter how well disguised.

Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548).