Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
'Rights' are granted; 'duties' are enforced. To speak of rights and duties is to think in terms of authority.
Governments and the military purport to protect the public from enemies, and if there were no enemies they would have to invent some, for the simple purpose of rationalizing their existence.
From the Anarchist standpoint, these artificial hindrances which are the cause of three main forms of usury-interest, profit, and rent, are, in the order of their importance, monopoly in the control of the circulating medium-money and credit, private property in land not based on occupancy and use, patent rights and copyrights, and tariffs.
Some people are averse to competition and allow the words 'co-operation' and 'humanism' to drool from their mouths, apparently meaning thereby a large blob of protoplasmic homogeneity that lacks all individuality. It is not individuals and their liberty that concerns them, but rather some sort of well greased squirming mass that would seem to be analogous to the brains from which such amorphous 'ideas' emanate.
In a world where inequality of ability is inevitable, anarchists do not sanction any attempt to produce equality by artificial or authoritarian means. The only equality they posit and will strive their utmost to defend is the equality of opportunity. This necessitates the maximum amount of freedom for each individual. This will not necessarily result in equality of incomes or wealth but will result in returns proportionate to service rendered.
The "health, education, and welfare" section of government is another boondoggle. First we manufacture indigent and superfluous people by legal monopolies in land, money and idea patents, erecting tariff barriers to protect monopolies from foreign competition, and taxing laborers to subsidize rich farmers and privileged manufacturers. Then we create "social workers, " etc., to care for them and thereby establish a self-aggravating and permanent institutionalized phenomenon.