Category: Thought

A journalistic purpose could be someone with a Xerox machine in a basement.

It is one of the unhappy incidents of the federal system that a self-righteous Supreme Court, acting on its Members’ personal view of what would make a “more perfect Union” (a criterion only slightly more restrictive than a “more perfect world”) can impose its own favored social and economic dispositions nationwide.

He who rejects liberty has no faith in human nature.

The true and equitable law of humanity is the free exchange of service for service. Spoliation consists in destroying by force or by trickery the freedom of exchange, in order to receive a service without rendering one.

If the greatest philosophers have been able to deceive themselves as to the iniquity of slavery, how much easier is it for farmers and manufacturers to deceive themselves as to the nature and effects of the protective system.

Rousseau’s SOCIAL CONTRACT … appears to me well fitted to exhibit the characteristics of these artificial social organizations. The inventors of such systems set out with the idea that society is a state contrary to nature, and they seek to subject humanity to different combinations. They forget that its motive power, its spring of action, is in itself. They regard men as base materials, and aspire to impart to them movement and will, sentiment and life; placing themselves at an immeasurable height above the whole human race. These are features common to all the inventors of social organizations. The inventions are different—the inventors are alike.

Force . . . is what the organizers need who would subject humanity to their experiments. When they shall have gained over to their cause the Russian autocrat, the shah of Persia, the khan of Tartary, and all the other tyrants of the world, they will find that they still lack the power to distribute mankind into groups and classes, and to annihilate the general laws of property, exchange, inheritance, and family; for even in Russia, in Persia, and in Tartary, it is necessary to a certain extent to consult the feelings, habits, and prejudices of the people.