Politics

That the politicians, bureaucrats, and their whispering intellectual allies who so experiment and regiment tell themselves – and, I suspect, in most cases also sincerely believe – that their experimentation and regimentation are for the greater good of the lab rats the People does not, of course, change the reality that these politicians, bureaucrats, and intellectuals fancy themselves as our masters and we as, well, animals to be poked, prodded, protected, taxed, tariffed, subsidized, schooled, penalized, informed, ‘disinformed,’ and ‘nudged’ so that the social engineers might thrill to the implementation of their world-saving schemes - Source: Economic Planning and International ...

Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob.

This excessive licence, which the anarchists think is the only true freedom, provides the stock, as it were, from which a tyrant grows.

[ First published in The Reader for June 10, 1865 .] A Hindoo, who, before beginning his day’s work, salaams to a bit of plastic clay, out of which, in a few moments, he has extemporized a god in his own image, is an object of amazement to the European. We read with surprise bordering on scepticism of worship done by machinery, and of prayers which owe their supposed efficacy to the motion given by the wind to the papers they are written on. When told how certain of the Orientals, if displeased with their wooden deities, take them down ...

There is an idolatry which, instead of carving the object of its worship out of dead matter, takes humanity for its raw material, and expects, by moulding a mass of this humanity into a particular form, to give it powers or properties quite different from those it had before it was moulded. In the one case as in the other, the raw material is, as much as may be, disguised. There are decorative appliances by which the savage helps himself to think that he has something more than wood before him; and the citizen gives to the political agencies he ...

[ First published in the Edinburgh Review for October 1854 .] Believers in the intrinsic virtues of political forms, might draw an instructive lesson from the politics of our railways. If there needs a conclusive proof that the most carefully-framed constitutions are worthless, unless they be embodiments of the popular character—if there needs a conclusive proof, that governmental arrangements in advance of the time will inevitably lapse into congruity with the time; such proof may be found over and over again repeated in the current history of joint-stock enterprises. As devised by Act of Parliament, the ad­min­i­stra­tions of our public ...