The state is an organization of mere mortals who, by one dubious method or another, have been allowed to don the mantle of political legitimacy and to command obedience on pain of imprisonment even of those who never consented to the preposterous arrangement.

It should go without saying that even the most narrowly construed eminent-domain power would violate individual rights. Either a person owns his legitimately acquired property or he does not.

Those who create the wealth naturally want to keep it and devote it to their own purposes. Those who wish to expropriate it look for ever more-clever ways to acquire it without inciting resistance. One of those ways is the spreading of an elaborate ideology of statism, which teaches that the people are the state and that therefore they are only paying themselves when they pay taxes.

The housing and financial crisis could not have occurred in the absence of government housing and monetary policies.

The draft is a monstrous violation of individual liberty, and even a good motive cannot make it otherwise. In a free society no one should be compelled to take up arms, or be forced to kill or risk being killed... But who can blame prospective volunteers from doubting that there is a threat from Iraq? The Bush administration has yet to make a persuasive argument to that effect.

People with an investment in government power will torture logic like a medieval inquisitor rather than face the facts. ... There's a simple way to keep money out of politics: Keep politics out of our money.

The government's coercive taxing power necessarily creates two classes: those who create and those who consume the wealth expropriated and transferred by that power.