Quotes & Notes

Socialists think supply and demand means the people demand and the government supplies.

The state is essentially an apparatus of compulsion and coercion. The characteristic feature of its activities is to compel people through the application or the threat of force.

The most important event in the history of the last hundred years is the displacement of liberalism by statism. Statism appears in two forms: socialism and interventionism. Both have in common the goal of subordinating the individual unconditionally to the state, the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion.

Statism assigns to the state the task of guiding the citizens and of holding them in tutelage. It aims at restricting the individual’s freedom to act. It seeks to mold his destiny and to vest all initiative in the government alone.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

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 Order.