The spectacle of the Olympics cannot cover up genocide. It’s hard to understand why anyone feels it’s even possible to celebrate international friendship and ‘Olympic values’ in Beijing this year.
Omer Kanat, in “Beijing Olympics Begin Amid Atrocity Crimes” (January 27, 2022), a joint statement of the Uyghur Human Rights Project.
A community of interests and needs is the foundation of human friendship, while the opposition of needs and interests is not only capable of provoking antipathy, but it is notorious that nothing on earth has the same power of moving a man to violent and implacable hatred as a member of his own species.
Gustave de Molinari, The Society of To-morrow: A Forecast of Its Political and Economic Organisation (1899-1904), I.1.1.
We can group socialists and protectionists under the name of restrictionists, whilst those who want to base the distribution of wealth solely on free competition can be called liberationists….
Thus restrictionists are divided into two types: socialists, who through the intervention of the state, wish to change the distribution of wealth in favour of the less rich; and the others, who, even if they are sometimes not completely conscious of what they are doing, favour the rich — these are the supporters of commercial protectionism and social organisation of a military type.
Vilfredo Pareto, “Socialism and Freedom,” 1891.
Social movements usually follow the line of least resistance. While the direct production of economic goods is often very hard, taking possession of those goods produced by others is very easy. This facility has greatly increased from the moment when deprivation became possible through the law and not contrary to it.
Vilfredo Pareto, “Socialism and Freedom,” 1891.
Liberty is not to be enjoyed, indeed it cannot exist, without the habits of just subordination; it consists, not so much in removing all restraint from the orderly, as in imposing it on the violent.
Confidence games are an ancient social phenomenon, an opportunistic exploitation of judgment errors to advance voluntary exchanges that are not mutually beneficial. The game has many varieties and is here to stay. Society cannot eradicate confidence games, but laws, policies, and ethical norms may reduce their social costs.
Barak Orbach and Lindsey Huang, “Con Men and Their Enablers: The Anatomy of Confidence Games” (Social Research: An International Quarterly, Volume 85, Number 4, Winter 2018),
The rulers wanted to fool people, since they saw that people have a kinship with what is truly good. They took the names of the good and assigned them to what is not good, to fool people with names and link the names to what is not good. So, as if they were doing people a favor, they took names from what is not good and transferred them to the good, in their own way of thinking. For they wished to take free people and enslave them forever.
“The Gospel of Philip,” as translated by M. Meyer, in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (2007), p. 163.
Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
Henry David Thoreau, Journals (November 11, 1854).
Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. Thus in France the emetic was once forbidden as a medicine, and the potatoe as an article of food.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781-1783), Query XVII, pp. 169–170.
“The subjects of every state,” says Dr. Smith, “ought to contribute [490] towards the support of the government as nearly as possible in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.”
This maxim, though it sounds fairly, will not bear examination. What mean those last words, “under the protection of the state”? They are either irrelevant, or else they mean that the protection enjoyed affords the measure of the duty to contribute. But the doctrine that the members of the community ought to contribute in proportion to the benefits they derive from the protection of the state, or according as the services performed in their behalf cost less or cost more to the state, involves the grossest practical absurdities. Those who derive the greatest benefit from the protection of the state are the poor and the weak—women and children and the aged; the infirm, the ignorant, the indigent.
Even as among the well-to-do and wealthy classes of the community, does the protection enjoyed furnish a measure of the duty to contribute? If so, the richer the subject or citizen is, the less, proportionally, should he pay. A man who buys protection in large quantities should get it at wholesale prices, like the man who buys flour and meat by the car-load. Moreover, it costs the state less to collect a given amount from one taxpayer than from many.
Returning to the maxim of Dr. Smith, I ask, does it put forward ability to contribute, or protection enjoyed, as affording the true basis of taxation? Which? If both, on what principles and by what means are the two to be combined in practice?
Francis Amasa Walker, “The Social Dividend Theory of Taxation,” in Political Economy (Third Edition, Revised and Enlarged: 1888), pp. 489-490.