The Question Of Who Is Right And

It Is Easy To Prescribe Improvement For Others; It Is Easy To Organize Something, To Institutionalize This Or That, To Pass Laws, Multiply Bureaucratic Agencies, Form Pressure Groups, Start Revolutions, Change Forms Of Government, Tinker At Political Theory. The Fact That These Expedients Have Been Tried Unsuccessfully In Every Conceivable Combination For 6,000 Years Has Not Noticeably Impaired A Credulous Unintelligent Willingness To Keep On Trying Them Again And Again.

Americans Have A Strange Notion That The Ordinary Laws Of Economics Do Not Apply To Them. So Doubtless They Will Think They Are Prosperous If The Boom Starts, And That Deficits And Indebtedness Are Merely Signs Of How Prosperous They Are.

The Superficial Distinctions Of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism, Are The Concern Of Journalists And Publicists; The Serious Student Sees In Them Only One Root-idea Of A Complete Conversion Of Social Power Into State Power.

The State, On The Other Hand, Both In Its Genesis And By Its Primary Intention, Is Purely Anti-social. It Is Not Based On The Idea Of Natural Rights, But On The Idea That The Individual Has No Rights Except Those That The State May Provisionally Grant Him. It Has Always Made Justice Costly And Difficult Of Access, And Has Invariably Held Itself Above Justice And Common Morality Whenever It Could Advantage Itself By So Doing.

It Is Unfortunately None Too Well Understood That, Just As The State Has No Money Of Its Own, So It Has No Power Of Its Own. All The Power It Has Is What Society Gives It, Plus What It Confiscates From Time To Time On One Pretext Or Another, There Is No Other Source From Which State Power Can Be Drawn. Therefore Every Assumption Of State Power, Whether By Gift Or Seizure Leaves Society With So Much Less Power; There Is Never, Nor Can Be, Any Strengthening Of State Power Without A Corresponding And Roughly Equivalent Depletion Of Social Power.