The thesis of etatism that the members of the government and its assistants are more intelligent than the people, and that they know better what is good for the individual than he himself knows, is pure nonsense. The Führers and the Duces are neither God nor God’s vicars.
Ludwig von Mises explaining “statism” in Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (1944).
Despite the heated disagreements between economists on just about every issue under the sun, there is probably one point that they are all actually unanimous on. That is the fact that every policy has winners and losers. Given that human wants are infinite but our means towards attaining those wants are limited, policies, by their nature, advantage some groups at the expense of others.
Antony Sammeroff, “Universal Basic Income: A Dream Come True for Despots,” Mises Wire (January 11, 2020).
Individualism . . . means neither egotism nor isolation. It means voluntary beneficence and public spirit, as against all attempts to enforce these by penal laws. It means voluntary cooperation as contrasted with the forced cooperation of the State.
When time and labor had developed riches, cupidity restrained by the laws, became more artful, but not less active. Under the mask of union and civil peace, it fomented in the bosom of every state an intestine war, in which the citizens, divided into contending corps of orders, classes, families, unremittingly struggled to appropriate to themselves, under the name of supreme power, the ability to plunder every thing, and render every thing subservient to the dictates of their passions; and this spirit of encroachment, disguised under all possible forms, but always the same in its object and motives, has never ceased to torment the nations.
The most important event in the history of the last hundred years is the displacement of liberalism by etatism. Etatism appears in two forms: socialism and interventionism. Both have in common the goal of subordinating the individual unconditionally to the state, the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion. . . .
Ludwig von Mises defining “statism” in Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (1944).
Etatism assigns to the state the task of guiding the citizens and of holding them in tutelage. It aims at restricting the individual’s freedom to act. It seeks to mold his destiny and to vest all initiative in the government alone.
Far from creating a futuristic utopia where — once our security needs are met — we are all liberated to pursue our dreams, become great scientists, scholars, artists, and entrepreneurs, the universal basic income threatens a totalitarian horror the likes of which we are used to seeing imagined only on The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.
Certainly the poor, who depend solely on their handouts to survive, will quickly become very cautious of what they say and do, but even reasonably affluent people will think twice before risking a sum that is high enough to live on. The UBI will institutionalise the state as each of our patrons — and us as wards of the state. Once this relationship is established we will enter into a frightening era where the government is our provider and the UBI can easily be weaponized by our rulers to shape us into compliance.
Antony Sammeroff, “Universal Basic Income: A Dream Come True for Despots,” Mises Wire (January 11, 2020).
The separation of state and church must be complemented by the separation of state and science, that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution.
Paul Karl Feyerabend, Against Method (1975), p. 295.
The persecuting spirit has its origins morally in the disposition of man to domineer over his fellow-creatures, intellectually in the assumption that one’s own opinions are infallibly correct.
John Fiske, “The Philosophy of Persecution,” North American Review (D. Appleton & Co., January 1881), No. CXXXII, p. 12.
The tongue is the only tool that gets sharper with use.
Here the free spirit of mankind, at length,
William Cullen Bryant, The Ages, XXXIII.
Throws its last fetters off; and who shall place
A limit to the giant’s unchained strength,
Or curb his swiftness in the forward race?