Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

In an economy, an act, a habit, an institution, or a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause - it is seen. The others unfold in succession - they are not seen. Now this difference is enormous, for it is often true that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the ultimate consequences are fatal, and the converse.

But we assure the socialists that we repudiate only forced organization, not natural organization. We repudiate the forms of association that are forced upon us, not free association. We repudiate forced fraternity, not true fraternity. We repudiate the artificial unity that does nothing more than deprive persons of individual responsibility. We do not repudiate the natural unity of mankind under Providence.

People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them.

Each of us has a natural right, from God, to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.

Legal plunder has two roots: One, as we have just seen, is in human selfishness; the other is in false philanthropy.

The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.