Governments are skillful...They study men and their passions. If they perceive, for instance, that they have warlike instincts, they incite and inflame this propensity. They surround the nation with dangers...If the nation is generous, the government proposes to cure all the ills of humanity. It promises to increase commerce, to make agriculture prosperous, to develop manufactures, to encourage letters and arts, to banish misery, etc. All that is necessary is to create office and to pay public functionaries.

Governments assuming gigantic proportions end by absorbing half of all the revenues...This happens because, while the government manifests so much ability, the people show so little. Thus, when they are called upon to choose their agents, those who are to determine the sphere of, and compensation for, governmental action, whom do they choose? The agents of the government.

The right to relief...is the poor man’s plunder.

When plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to enter - by peaceful or revolutionary means - into the making of laws.

[S]ince an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force - for the same reason - cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

Usually, however, these gentlemen - the reformers, the legislators, and the writers on public affairs do not desire to impose direct despotism upon mankind...Instead, they turn to the law for this despotism...They desire only to make the laws.

[T]hings go from bad to worse, and at last the people open their eyes, not to the remedy...but to the evil. Governing is so pleasant a trade that everybody desires to engage in it.

Can the law...rationally be used for anything except protecting the rights of everyone? I defy anyone to extend it beyond this purpose without perverting it...This is the most fatal and most illogical social perversion that can possibly be imagined.

[O]nce the law is on the side of socialism, how can it be used against socialism? For when plunder is abetted by the law, it does not fear your courts, your gendarmes, and your prisons. Rather, it may call upon them for help.

[L]egal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and son on, and so on. All these plans as a whole - with their common aim of legal plunder - constitute socialism.

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the State. They forget that the State lives at the expense of everyone.

Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it...Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons, and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim - when he defends himself - as a criminal. In short, there is legal plunder.

Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other peoples' money, except when it comes to questions of national survival when they prefer to be generous with other people's freedom and security.

...we are living in a sick society filled with people who would not directly steal from their neighbor but who are willing to demand that the government do it for them.

Coercion cannot but result in chaos in the end.

One who uses coercion is guilty of deliberate violence. Coercion is inhuman.

The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.

Under the Welfare State, this process of theft has spread from its use in alleviating catastrophe, to anticipating catastrophe, to conjuring up catastrophe, to the "need" for luxuries for those who have them not.

Once a right to collective looting has been substituted for the right of each person to have whatever he has produced, it is not at all surprising to find the official dispensers deciding that it is right for them to loot the loot - for a "worthy" purpose, of course. Then we have the loot used by the insiders to buy votes so that they may stay in power; we have political pork barrels and lobbying for the contents; we have political patronage for political loyalty - even for loyalty to immoral conduct[.]

Thievery and covetousness will persist and grow, and the basic morals of ourselves, our children, and our children’s children will continue to deteriorate unless we destroy the virus of immorality that is embedded in the concept of the Welfare State; unless we come to understand how the moral code of individual conduct must apply also to collective conduct, because the collective is composed solely of individuals.

The 'private sector' of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and...the 'public sector' is, in fact, the coercive sector.

The government never lends or gives anything to business that it does not take away from business...When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.

"May I ask this? Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a member of that group to do alone?" "Uh...that’s a trick question." "It is the key question, dear Wyoming. A radical question that strikes to the root of the whole dilemma of government. Anyone who answers honestly and abides by all consequences know where he stands–and what he will die for."

I'm not against the police; I'm just afraid of them.

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.

All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man.

When a private citizen is robbed a worthy man is deprived of the fruits of his industry and thrift; when the government is robbed the worst that happens is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before.

It is the characteristic mark of state and government that they apply violent coercion or the threat of it against those not prepared to yield voluntarily.

Not that there’s anything wrong with our limiting growth. If we Blatherboro residents don’t want a golf course and condominium complex, we can go buy that land and not build them... Better to build a golf course right through the middle of Redwood National Park and condominiums on top of the Lincoln Memorial than to sit in council gorging on the liberties of others; gobbling their material substance, eating freedom.

O’ROURKE, P.J., Parliament of Whores

The right of a nation to determine its own form of government does not include the right to establish a slave society (that is, to legalize the enslavement of some men by others). There is no such thing as 'the right to enslave.' A nation can do it, just as a man can become a criminal- but neither can do it by right.

A rational mind does not work under compulsion...a gun is not an argument.

Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?

Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.

Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.

Take stock of what you would prohibit others from doing and you will accurately find your own position in the ideological line-up.

While there are many who will agree that they, personally, should not kill, steal, enslave, it is only the individual with an elevated moral nature who will have no hand in encouraging any agency–even government–to do these things on behalf of himself or others.

The difference between the socialist and the student of liberty is a difference of opinion as to what others should be prohibited from doing.

[W]hen government prohibits peaceful actions, such prohibitions themselves are, prima facie unpeaceful. How much of a statist a person is can be judged by how far he would go in prohibiting peaceful actions.

The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose.

Crime is crime, aggression against rights is aggression, no matter how many citizens agree to the oppression.

The essence of government is an exploitative rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul process, and the jockeying of factions is to become as much of the Paul and as little of the Peter as possible.

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence - it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

How is this legal plunder to be identified? See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance.