The intelligent man, when he pays taxes, certainly does not believe that he is making a prudent and productive investment of his money; on the contrary, he feels that he is being mulcted in an excessive amount for services that, in the main, are useless to him, and that, in substantial part, are downright inimical to him.
H. L. Mencken, in A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949).
Under Socialism the efficient man would have a price upon his head.
H. L. Mencken, in Robert Rives La Monte and Mencken, Men versus The Man (1910).
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?
Thomas Jefferson, First Innaugural Address, March 4, 1801.
This is the nature of human energy; individuals generate it, and control it. Each person is self-controlling, and therefore responsible for his acts. Every human being, by his nature, is free.
Rose Wilder Lane, Discovery of Freedom (1943).
[T]he average workingman has before him two practicable methods for satisfying his will to power. By the first method he enters into a conspiracy with other workingmen . . . endeavor[ing] to raise the market value of their skill without offering any corresponding improvement in its quality. By the second method, the individual workman seeks so to improve his own skill that it shall bring more than the average price.
H. L. Mencken, in Robert Rives La Monte and Mencken, Men versus The Man (1910).
When Government has a monopoly of all production and all distribution, as many Governments have, it can not permit any economic activity that competes with it. This means that it can not permit any new use of productive energy, for the new always competes with the old and destroys it. Men who build railroads destroy stage coach lines.
Rose Wilder Lane, Discovery of Freedom (1943).
Progress . . . is to be measured by the accuracy of man’s knowledge of nature’s forces. If you examine this sentence carefully you will observe that I conceive progress as a sort of process of disillusion. Man gets ahead, in other words, by discarding the theory of to-day for the fact of to-morrow.
H. L. Mencken, in Robert Rives La Monte and Mencken, Men versus The Man (1910).
I am a contributing creator of American civilization; it does not create me. I control the stem of this civilization that is within my reach; it does not control me. It can not even make me read Spengler, if I’d rather read a pulp magazine.
Rose Wilder Lane, Discovery of Freedom (1943).
Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.
Václav Havel, Open letter to Dr. Gustáv Husák, Communist President (April 8, 1975).
Men are born free, that since they begin with no government, they must therefore institute government by voluntary agreement, and thus government must be their agent, not their superior. Since volition is a function of the individual, the individual has the precedent right. Then even if it was presumed that government did equate roughly with the moral shorcomings of humanity, it should still be limited and subsidiary. If everyone were invariably honest, able, wise, and kind, there should be no occasion for government. Everyone would readily understand what is desirable and what is possible in given circumstances, all would concur upon the best means toward their purpose and for equitable participation in the ensuing benefits, and would act without compulsion or default. The maximum production was certainly obtained from such voluntary action arising from personal initiative. But since human beings will sometimes lie, shirk, break promises, fail to improve their faculties, act imprudently, seize by violence the goods of others, and even kill one another in anger or greed, the government might be defined as the police organization. In that case, it must be described as a necessary evil. It would have no existence as a separate entity, and no intrinsic authority; it could not be justly empowered to act excepting as individuals infringed one another’s rights, when it should enforce prescribed penalties. Generally, it would stand in the relation of a witness to contract, holding a forfeit for the parties. As such, the least practicable measure of government must be the best. Anything beyond the minimum must be oppression.
Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943.