The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that ‘the best government is that which governs least,’ and that which governs least is no government at all.
BENJAMIN TUCKERMan’s only right to land is his might over it. If his neighbor is mightier than he and takes the land from him, then the land is his neighbor’s, until the latter is dispossessed by one mightier still.
More Benjamin Tucker Quotes
-
-
The student of Liberty must constantly endeavor to disassociate his imagination from sanguinary dramas of assassination and revolt.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
An Anarchist is anyone who denies the necessity and legitimacy of government; the question of his methods of attacking it is foreign to the definition.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
The Anarchists answer that the abolition of the State will leave in existence a defensive association, resting no longer on a compulsory but on a voluntary basis, which will restrain invaders by any means that may prove necessary.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
The cost of justice can be justly paid only by the invader.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
Capital will be set free, business will flourish, new enterprises will start, labor will be in demand, and gradually the wages of labor will rise to a level with its product.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
Voting is merely a labor-saving device for ascertaining on which side force lies and bowing to the inevitable…
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
In times past…it was my habit to talk glibly of the right of man to land. It was a bad habit, and I long ago sloughed it off.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
One thing, however, is sure, – that in all cases the effort should be to impose all the cost of repairing the wrong upon the doer of the wrong. This alone is real justice, and of course such justice is necessarily free.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
Therefore coercion of the non-invasive, when justifiable at all, is to be justified on the ground that it secures, not a minimum of ‘ invasion, but a minimum of pain.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
If I can go through life free and rich, I shall not cry because my neighbor, equally free, is richer. Liberty will ultimately make all men rich; it will not make all men equally rich.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
Thus, the same blow that strikes interest down will send wages up.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
And this is the Anarchistic definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
After the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.
BENJAMIN TUCKER