The more opportunities there are in a Society for some persons to live upon the toil of others, and the less those others may enjoy the fruits of their work themselves, the more is diligence killed, the former become insolent, the latter despairing, and both negligent.
Anders Chydenius (1739 – 1803) was a Swedish priest and politician born in what is now Ostrobothnian Finland. This quotation is from The National Gain, §20, 1765.
“Our wants are various, and nobody has been found able to acquire even the necessaries without the aid of other people, and there is scarcely any Nation that has not stood in need of others. The Almighty himself has made our race such that we should help one another. Should this mutual aid be checked within or without the Nation, it is contrary to Nature.”
Anders Chydenius (1739 – 1803) was a Swedish priest and politician born in what is now Ostrobothnian Finland. This quotation is from The National Gain, §2, 1765.
“Men of integrity are generally pretty obstinate in adhering to an opinion once adopted.”
William Cobbett (1763-1835), British pamphleteer, 1796.
“[E]very individual spontaneously tries to find the place and the trade in which he can best increase National gain, if laws do not prevent him from doing so.”
Anders Chydenius, The National Gain, §5, 1765.
“Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt.”
William Cobbett (1763-1835), British pamphleteer, 1804.
“The exercise of one coercion always makes another inevitable.”
Anders Chydenius (1739 – 1803) was a Swedish priest and politician born in what is now Ostrobothnian Finland. This quotation is from his “Thoughts on the Natural Rights of Servants and Peasants,” 1778.
Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts.
“Government is naturally prodigal, for it spends other people’s money.”
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
Wages are a speculation. The laborer who offers his labor to a trader or a contractor, argues thus with him: ‘I deliver to you so much labor. It is true that you run the risks of the enterprise. You are obliged to make advances of capital. You may gain or lose. That does not concern me. I do my work, I make it over to you at a certain price; you pay this to me whatever happens. Whether it redounds to your benefit or causes you loss is not my affair.’
Yves Guyot, The Tyranny of Socialism, Laissez Faire Books, 2015, LFB.org.