The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.

We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society.

[T]he "forced by poverty" argument can be reversed: the more someone is "forced by poverty" to sell a kidney, the more important it is that organ trade is not prohibited. In the most extreme poverty, when the choice is between selling a kidney and starving to death, it is most in the interest of the poor that organ trade is legal.

CROUGHS, BART, A Man’s Body, A Man’s Right, Liberty, June 2005

The whole idea that actions that are risky should be forbidden is ridiculous anyway. It would eman that working as a taxi driver in New York should be prohibited, just like Formula 1 racing, taming lions...etc.

CROUGHS, BART, A Man’s Body, A Man’s Right, Liberty, June 2005

Mankind? It is an abstraction. There are, have been, and always will be, men and only men.

Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarian regimes which horrify us follow of necessity. From the collectivist standpoint intolerance and brutal suppression of dissent, the complete disregard of the life and happiness of the individual, are essential and unavoidable consequences of this basic premise.

The pursuit of the common end of society can know no limits in any rights or values of any individual.

Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws - always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: "Please pass this so that I won’t be able to do something I know I should stop." Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them "for their own good" - not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it.

So long as a concept such as ‘the public interest’ (or the ‘social’ or ‘national’ or ‘international’ interest) is regarded as a valid principle to guide legislation- lobbies and pressure groups will necessarily continue to exist. Since there is no such entity as ‘the public,’ since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that ‘the public interest’ supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others. If so, then all men and all private groups have to fight to the death for the privilege of being regarded as ‘the public.’

You may observe the practical results of altruism and statism all around us...the slave-labor camps of Soviet Russia...the gas chambers and mass slaughter of Nazi Germany...the terror and starvation of Red China...the wall of East Berlin, where...guards shoot at fleeing children. Observe these atrocities, then ask yourself whether any of it would be possible if men had not accepted the idea that man is a sacrificial animal to be immolated for the sake of the ‘public good.’ read the speeches of those countries’ political leaders and ask yourself what arguments would be left to them if the word ‘sacrifice’ were regarded not as amoral ideal, but as the anti-human evil which it is.

Abundance was created not by public sacrifices to "the common good," but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.

Freedom is the first requirement of ‘the public interest’...achievements rest on that foundation - and cannot exist without it.

A government empowered to maximize health is not a government under which anyone who values liberty would want to live.

SULLUM, JACOB, An Epidemic of Meddling: The Totalitarian Implications of Public Health, Reason, May 2007

"Self-esteem" devalues achievement and responsibility, which are the sources of genuine self-respect.

TARANTO, JAMES, OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today - April 6, 2007

Hitherto no one, in the United States, has dared to advance the maxim, that everything is permissible with a view to the interests of society; an impious adage, which seems to have been invented in an age of freedom to shelter all the tyrants of future ages.