Abetted by misguided or co-opted intellectuals, the rulers weave a cloak of legitimacy to disguise their theft and hence to ease their extraction of wealth from the rightful owners.

The beginning of political wisdom is the realization that despite everything you’ve always been taught, the government is not really on your side; indeed, it is out to get you.

In U.S. history, war has served as an important diversionary tactic, causing the people at large to shift their attention away from the state's own criminality and toward real or fictitious devils abroad. Wars have therefore proved to be extremely useful in propping up the political class and preserving it from the public resistance and rebellion that might otherwise have arisen.

If anarchists are idealists, they may simply be likened to someone who finds himself swimming in a cesspool and, rather than paddling about looking for the area with the least amount of floating faeces, seeks to climb out of the pool completely.

For members of the political class, the crucial question is always: how can we push out the frontier, how can we augment the government's dominion and plunder, with net gain to ourselves the exploiters who live not by honest production and voluntary exchange, but by fleecing those who do so?

Any society that entails the strengthening of the state apparatus by giving it unchecked control over the economy, and re-unites the polity and the economy, is an historical regression. In it there is no more future for the public, or for the freedoms it supported, than there was under feudalism.

Ironically, in the full-fledged transfer society, where governments busy themselves redistributing income by means of hundreds of distinct programs, hardly anyone is better off as a result.