But the apparent inconsistency vanishes when you read his book and find that by property he means simply legally privileged wealth or the power of usury, and not at all the possession by the labourer of his products.
BENJAMIN TUCKERFirst, then, State Socialism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice.
More Benjamin Tucker Quotes
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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 -
Government is the assumption of authority over a given area and all within it, exercised generally for the double purpose of more complete oppression of its subjects and extension of its boundaries.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
We are here to let in the light of Liberty upon political superstition.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
Commanded love of all men indiscriminately is an obliteration of distinction between love and hate, and therefore is not love at all.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
Aggression is simply another name for government.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
[T]he State . . . gives idle capital the power of increase, and, through interest, rent, profit, and taxes, robs industrious labor of its products.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
Is not the very beginning of privilege, monopoly and industrial slavery this erecting of the ballot-box above the individual?
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
Give woman equality with man, by all means; but do it by taking power from man, not giving it to woman.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
The shortest way to change a radical into a conservative, a liberal into a tyrant, a man into a beast, is to give him power over his fellows.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
Man’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.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
I define Anarchism as the belief in the greatest amount of liberty compatible with equality of liberty; or, in other words, as the belief in every liberty except the liberty to invade.
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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.
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It is neither more nor less than a paper representative of the bayonet, the bully, and the bullet.
BENJAMIN TUCKER