Monday, May 4, 2009

Murray N. Rothbard - The Ethics of Liberty

All other persons and groups in society (except for acknowledged and sporadic criminals such as thieves and bank robbers) obtain their income voluntarily: either by selling goods and services to the consuming public, or by voluntary gift (e.g., membership in a club or association, bequest, or inheritance). Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as "taxation," although in less regularized epochs it was often known as “tribute." Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State's inhabitants, or subjects.

Murray N. Rothbard - For A New Liberty

... libertarians and other Americans must guard against a priori history: in this case, against the assumption that, in any conflict, the State which is more democratic or allows more internal freedom is necessarily or even presumptively the victim of aggression by the more dictatorial or totalitarian State. There is simply no historical evidence whatever for such a presumption. In deciding on relative rights and wrongs, on relative degrees of aggression in any dispute in foreign affairs, there is no substitute for a detailed empirical, historical investigation of the dispute itself. It should occasion no great surprise, then, if such an investiga tion concludes that a democratic and relatively far freer United States has been more aggressive and imperialistic in foreign affairs than a relatively totalitarian Russia or China.

Noam Chomsky - Syntactic Structures

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.