security State Power
The reach and coercive capacity of the state
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"Modern government is a black hole for gratuitous goods. It does not operate gratuitously, but in all its activities is deeply interested in its own survival and flourishing. The main beneficiaries of the state are its own servants, especially its bureaucratic and political leadership, whereas it systematically destroys the true sources of gratuitous goods: families, friendship, private associations, businesses, and the market process."
menu_book Abundance, Generosity, and the State
View Full QuoteView Full Quote"It is a sharing of plunder, not a gift, the state is not the legitimate owner of what it has taken from the taxpayer."
"For the present I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him."
menu_book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
View Full Quote"Be resolved to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces."
menu_book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
View Full Quote"This single tyrant need not be combated, need not be defeated; he is automatically defeated if the country refuses to consent to its own enslavement. It is not necessary to deprive him of anything; simply give him nothing. There is no need for the country to do anything for itself, provided it does nothing against itself."
menu_book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
View Full Quote"He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. From where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves?"
menu_book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
View Full Quote"The State has no moral or scientific justification; it is the pure product of the emergence of violence in human societies."
menu_book Libéralisme
View Full Quote"Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
menu_book Democracy in America
View Full Quoteauto_stories Books
Abundance, Generosity, and the State
An Austrian economics analysis of generosity and giving, arguing that free markets foster genuine charity through wealth creation, while state redi...
Read MoreDiscourse on Voluntary Servitude
Written around 1549 by the young French magistrate Étienne de La Boétie and first published posthumously in 1576, this founding text of libertarian...
Read MoreLa Tyrannie fiscale
Exposes the French tax system as arbitrary, economically destructive, and morally indefensible, showing that high taxation is not a neutral technic...
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