Benjamin Tucker Quotes

Socialism requires that government becomes your god.

Socialism is when government's taking care of you, you send all your money to the government, the government decides how to spend it instead of letting the people spend it and make all those decisions.

State Socialism … may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice. Marx, its founder, concluded that the only way to abolish the class monopolies was to centralize and consolidate all industrial and commercial interests, all productive and distributive agencies, in one vast monopoly in the hands of the State. The government must become banker, manufacturer, farmer, carrier, and merchant, and in these capacities must suffer no competition.

If you want government to take everything, if you want government to take more and more over with the banks, more of the industries, all of a sudden you're going to have a government auto czar, right there, right down the line, that's socialism.

Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.

Americans are sick of the idea of the government taking over everything and trying to run it. We don't know how to run a bank, a car company.

Capitalism means free enterprise, sovereignty of the consumers in economic matters, and sovereignty of the voters in political matters. Socialism means full government control of every sphere of the individuals life and the unrestricted supremacy of the government in its capacity as central board of production management.

There isn't much in the way of pure communist spirit, because the whole nation seems to be engaged in capitalistic enterprises. Much of the country still operates under government control.

No company fails in communist China, because they're all partly owned by the government.

We will do whatever the government tells us to do, which is a critically important principle of the Chinese market economy, and there is nothing more for discussion about it.

Socialism is communism without the firing squad.

Don’t look down over here Clement. Whenever you see something large, private and working well, you want to nationalize it.

No less than 50 percent of the means of production must be in the hands of the state.

Socialism means government dependency, rationed resources, and exorbitant taxation. It means the destruction of every incentive to achieve.

The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars and revolutions is its anticapitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties were eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise.

Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual ... who ... can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government.

The real case against socialism is not its economic inefficiency, though on all sides there is evidence of that. Much more fundamental is its basic immorality.

All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man's working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it's a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay....He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.

The socialist system, however, forbids this fundamental freedom to choose one's own career. Under socialist conditions, there is only one economic authority, and it has the right to determine all matters concerning production.

The economic disasters of socialism and communism come from assuming a blanket superiority of those who want to run a whole economy.

Along this road of spending, the government either takes over, which is Socialism, or dictates institutional and economic life, which is Fascism.

You know the critical thing with the Communist countries is Communism, which by definition consists of control by the government.

It doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property?

Economic planning is nothing more than the forcible superseding of other people's plans by the powerful elite backed up by the brute force of government.

All socialism involves slavery.