Our focus, when we speak of rights, has shifted from liberty to equality --again from a negative right to a positive right. To secure our liberty and provide us with the opportunity for basic representation, the government does not need to know very much about us, only that we are citizens who live in a certain place. The census form should have a single check box and no questions. But if the government is to provide equality of outcome, rather than just equality before the law, then it must know who we are and what we are. It must ask us what race, gender, and ethnicity we are, and all the rest.

LEVIN, YUVAL, Reflections on the Census, Liberzine, May 31, 2000

You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred.

LINCOLN, ABRAHAM (Attributed), also attributed to BOETCKER, REV. WILLIAM J.H.

People have substituted an ideology of irreconcilable class conflict and international conflict for the "orthodox" ideology of the harmony of the rightly understood, i.e., long-run, interests of all individuals, social groups, and nations. Men are fighting one another because they are convinced that the extermination and liquidation of adversaries is the only means of promoting their own well-being.

MISES, LUDWIG VON, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Human Society

[N]o matter how small the power of government, no matter how low the tax burden or how equal its distribution, the very nature of government creates two unequal and inherently conflicting classes in society; those who, on net, pay the taxes (the "tax-payers"), and those who, on net, live off taxes (the "tax-consumers").

ROTHBARD, MURRAY, For a New Liberty

It is only through and by state action that "class" conflicts can ever arise.

ROTHBARD, MURRAY, Conceived in Liberty, Preface

[B]ecause of (a) the harmony of interests of different groups on the free market (for example, merchants and farmers) and (b) the lack of homogeneity among the interests of members of any one social class, it is fallacious to employ such terms as "class interests" or "class conflict" in discussing the market economy. It is only in relation to state action that the interests of different men become welded into "classes," for state action must always privilege one or more groups and discriminate against others.

ROTHBARD, MURRAY, Conceived in Liberty, Vol. 1, Mercantilism, Merchants, and "Class Conflict"

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