Category: Thought

We seem to have come upon a time of utter infidelity to general principles, except that most vicious one that there are no general principles.

Taxation must be, potentially at least, co-extensive with government. The way to reduce it is to severely limit the function of government to the maximising of liberty, to abolish privilege, and to exercise due vigilance over the expenditure of the State revenue.

The ethical basis of Individualism is . . . the necessity of such coercion in order that freedom may be at the maximum — in order that personal rights, and the proprietary rights which arise out of them, may be, so far as practicable, sustained.

The flowing tide is with Socialism. But tides ebb as well as flow.

[H]ow impossible is democracy save when the sphere of government is very limited.

[H]ow impossible is democracy save when the sphere of government is very limited.

Cowper’s Mahometans ate up the hog while denouncing it as an unclean thing, by judging each piece — as the phrase of the empirical Socialist goes — ‘on its merits.’ So you are being made to swallow Socialism bit by bit.

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

Reform will only be established in the long term to the degree that it passes into the ideas and habits of the majority.