By what right does the law force me to conform to the social plans of Mr. Mimerel...If the law has a moral right to do this, why does it not, then, force these gentlemen to submit to my plans? Is it logical to suppose that nature has not given me sufficient imagination to dream up a utopia also? Should the law choose one fantasy among many, and put the organized force of government at its service only?

[T]he tendency of the human race toward liberty is largely thwarted...This is greatly due to a fatal desire - learned from the teachings of antiquity - that our writers on public affairs have in common: They desire to set themselves above mankind in order to arrange, organize, and regulate it according to their fancy.

If most people are not willing to see the difficulty, this is mainly because, consciously or unconsciously, they assume that it will be they who will settle these questions for the others, and because they are convinced of their own capacity to do this justly and equitably.

No man has ever ruled other men for their own good.

I am not an economist. I do not have the resources of economic research or any significant ability to be able to craft a remedy of my own devising.

A government might be established on the principle of benevolence towards the people...Under such a paternal government (imperium paternale), the subjects...would be obliged to behave purely passively and to rely upon the judgement of the head of state as to how they ought to be happy...Such a government is the greatest conceivable despotism, i.e. a constitution which suspends the entire freedom of its subjects, who thenceforth have no rights whatsoever.

The problems involved are purely intellectual and must be dealt with as such. It is disastrous to shift them to the moral sphere and to dispose of supporters of opposite ideologies by calling them villains. It is vain to insist that what we are aiming at is good and what our adversaries want is bad. The question to be solved is precisely what is to be considered as good and what as bad. The rigid dogmatism peculiar to religious groups and Marxism results only in irreconcilable conflict. It condemns beforehand all dissenters as evildoers, it calls into question their good faith, it asks them to surrender unconditionally. No social cooperation is possible where such an attitude prevails.

The ultimate end of human action is always the satisfaction of some desires of the acting man. Since nobody is in a position to substitute his own value judgments for those of the acting individual, it is vain to pass judgment on other people’s aims and volitions. No man is qualified to declare what would make another man happier or less discontented. The critic either tells us what he believes he would aim at if he were in the place of his fellow; or, in dictatorial arrogance...declares what condition of this other man would better suit himself, the critic.

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, longer persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.

[N]ote the millions of individuals who actually believe that the rest of us would fare better were we a reflection of themselves. Each of these millions would have us live in the kind of housing he has in mind, work the hours he prescribes, receive the wages he thinks appropriate, exchange with whom he decrees and on terms he proposes, but, more particularly, he wants us to be educated as he thinks proper!

The thoroughly evil persons among us are not numerous enough to account for all the racial and national hatreds and prejudices, for labor violence, for the growing belief that the honest fruits of one’s labor no longer belong to the earner, for restrictions on the exchange of goods and services, and for the many other collectivistic inanities and horrors. These things are not the doings of criminals. They originate mostly with the well-intentioned, those who wish to do good to others but who, lacking personal means, thoughtlessly see no harm in employing police establishments to impose their brand of good on the rest of us, to use the fruits of other persons’ labor to satisfy their own charitable instincts.

It's time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, "We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government." This idea that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power, is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

Call them what you will—utopian socialists, radical interventionists, collectivists, or statists—history is littered with their presumptuous plans for rearranging society to fit their vision of "the common good," plans that always fail as they kill or impoverish other people in the process. If socialism ever earns a final epitaph, it will be this: "Here lies a contrivance engineered by know-it-alls and busybodies who broke eggs with abandon but never, ever, created an omelette."

It's unseemly for people who have never created wealth to tell those who have how to spend it.

The notion of a self-equilibrating system--the market economy--meant a reduced role for intellectuals and politicians, [Thomas Sowell] says. "And even today many still haven't accepted that their superior wisdom might be superfluous, if not damaging."

RILEY, JASON L., Classy Economist, WSJ.COM Opinion Journal, March 25, 2006

Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what has worked with what sounded good. In area after area crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.

Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind-in-the-mass through some pet formula of their own...The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional "do-gooders," who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others -- with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means.

Don't ever think you know what's right for the other person. He might start thinking he knows what's right for you.