33 quotes
Taxation is nothing but organized robbery, and there the subject should be dropped.
The Economics of Society, Government, and State (1946)
There cannot be a good tax nor a just one; every tax rests its case on compulsion.
All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates.
Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov (1980)
The State acquires power at the expense of freedom, and because of its insatiable lust for power it is incapable of giving up any of it. The State never abdicates.
Neither thieves nor officials produce a marketable good to offset what they take; they contribute nothing to the purchasing power because they contribute nothing to the general fund of wealth.
Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov (1980)
Economics is not politics. One is a science, concerned with the immutable and constant laws of nature that determine the production and distribution of wealth; the other is the art of ruling.
The Rise & Fall of Society (1959)
Dependence on the State became a virtue; dependence on oneself was derided as ‘rugged individualism.’
Out of Step: The Autobiography of an Individualist (1962)
Popular suffrage is in itself no guarantee of freedom. People can vote themselves into slavery.
The Income Tax: Root of All Evil (1954)
No sooner do men settle down to a given set of ideas, a pat-tern of living and of thinking, than fault-finding begins, and fault-finding is the tap-root of revolutions.
One is A Crowd: Reflections of An Individualist (1952)
Perhaps the removal of trade restrictions throughout the world would do more for the cause of universal peace than can any political union of peoples separated by trade barriers.
The Rise & Fall of Society (1959)
The State is that group of people who having got hold of the machinery of compulsion, legally or otherwise, use it to better their circumstances; that is, by use of the political means.
Out of Step: The Autobiography of an Individualist (1962)
When the privacy of property is denied the privacy of conscience cannot be tolerated. Ideals which do not conform with the prescribed "social good" are obviously a threat to it and must be obliterated.
One is A Crowd: Reflections of An Individualist (1952)
The freedoms won by Americans in 1776 were lost in the revolution of 1913.
The Income Tax: Root of All Evil (1954)
There is no such thing as free schooling; it must be paid for and, taking the school system as a whole, its cost is defrayed by the toil of those who are under the delusion of ‘free’ education.
Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov (1980)
[E]very soak-the-rich tax must become in time a soak-the-poor tax.
Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov (1980)
[When people] say ‘let's do something about it’, they mean ‘let's get hold of the political machinery so that we can do something to somebody else.’ And that somebody is invariably you.
Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov (1980)
The folks who get their rent cheap, at the expense of other taxpayers, acquire the notion that society is obligated to take care of them—good Freudianism and that these rooms are a down payment on that obligation.
Out of Step: The Autobiography of an Individualist (1962)
Society thrives on trade simply because trade makes specialization possible, and specialization increases output, and increased output reduces the cost in toil for the satisfactions men live by. That being so, the market place is a most humane institution.
The Rise & Fall of Society (1959)
Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man — in temperament, character, and capacity — and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so.
Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov (1980)
The right to own is the mark of a free man. The slave is a slave simply because he is denied that right. And because the free man is secure in the possession and enjoyment of what he produces, and the slave is not, the spur to production is in one and not in the other.
One is A Crowd: Reflections of An Individualist (1952)