Law not served by power is an illusion; but power not ruled by law is a menace which our nuclear age cannot afford.
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Category: Thought
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Gustave de Molinari
War has ceased to be productive of security, but the masses, whose existence depends upon the industries of production, are compelled to pay its costs and suffer its losses without either receiving compensation or possessing means to end the contradiction. Governments do possess this power, but if the interests of governments ultimately coincide with the interests of the governed they are, in the first instance, opposed to them.
Governments are enterprises — in commercial language, “concerns” — which produce certain services, the chief of which are internal and external security. The directors of these enterprises — the civil and military chiefs and their staffs — are naturally interested in their aggrandizement on account of the material and moral benefits which such aggrandizement secures to themselves. Their home policy is therefore to augment their own functions within the State by arrogating ground properly belonging to other enterprises; abroad they enlarge their domination by a policy of territorial expansion. It is nothing to them if these undertakings do not prove remunerative, since all costs, whether of their services or of their conquests, are borne by the nations which they direct.
Gustave de Molinari, The Society of To-morrow (1899)
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Edmund Burke, 1775
In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole: and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies probably than in any other people of the earth. . . .
[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.
Every man seeks his own gain. This inclination is so natural and necessary that all Communities in the world are founded upon it. Otherwise Laws, punishments and rewards would not exist and mankind would soon perish altogether. The work that has the greatest value is always best paid, and what is best paid is most sought after.
As long as I can produce 6 Daler worth of goods a day in one trade, I do not willingly change to another that brings in 4. In the former case the Nation’s gain and mine was one-third more than in the latter.
It is thus undoubtedly a loss to the Nation when somebody is forced or is encouraged by public rewards to work in a trade other than the one in which he earns the highest profit; for this does not happen without such inducements, just as a merchant does not sell his Wares for less than what is offered him.
If he whose work someone has been forced to do gains as much as the worker has lost, it is not National gain; but if he gains more, only the difference is the gain of the Nation, but obtained through the oppression of its citizens.
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Margaret Thatcher
The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.
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F.A. Hayek, 1956
[T]he most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration of the character of the people. This is necessarily a slow affair, a process which extends not over a few years but perhaps one or two generations. The important point is that the political ideals of a people and its attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives. This means that . . . even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit.
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Herbert Spencer, The Data of Ethics
The essential trait in the moral consciousness, is the control of some feeling or feelings by some other feeling or feelings.
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H.L. Mencken, Minority Report (1956)
The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling. Probably the worst thing that has happened in America in my time is the decay of confidence in the courts. No one can be sure any more that in a given case they will uphold the plainest mandate of the Constitution. On the contrary, everyone begins to be more or less convinced in advance that they won’t. Judges are chosen not because they know the Constitution and are in favor of it, but precisely because they appear to be against it.
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Ludwig von Mises, Profit and Loss
In the capitalist system of society’s economic organization the entrepreneurs determine the course of production. In the performance of this function they are unconditionally and totally subject to the sovereignty of the buying public, the consumers. If they fail to produce in the cheapest and best possible way those commodities which the consumers are asking for most urgently, they suffer losses and are finally eliminated from their entrepreneurial position. Other men who know better how to serve the consumers replace them.
Those animals which are incapable of making binding agreements with one another not to inflict nor suffer harm are without either justice or injustice; and likewise for those peoples who either could not or would not form binding agreements not to inflict nor suffer harm.