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.
Man’s concern is not with government; he should look on government as no more than a very secondary thing — we might almost say a very minor thing. His goal is industry, labour and the production of everything needed for his happiness. In a well-ordered state, the government must only be an adjunct of production, an agency charged by the producers, who pay for it, with protecting their persons and their goods while they work. In a well-ordered state, the largest number of persons must work, and the smallest number must govern. The work of perfection would be reached if all the world worked and no one governed.
In whatever manner one participates in a harmful action, one is not a “man of industry” if one takes part. I am not saying that there is always virtue in producing. What I do say is that crime is never productive. I say that as a result of a bad action there is destruction or displacement of wealth but never an increase in the world’s total wealth. In one word I say that brigandage, by whatever instruments it employs or whatever way it uses them, ought always to be distinguished very carefully from industry.