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Merely pointing to the fact that some people have a lot more than others is less compelling as a critique; it invites the response “So what? Those who have more aren’t hurting anybody; you’re just appealing to envy.” By contrast, being able to show that those who enjoy a higher socioeconomic status have to a considerable extent achieved and maintained that status by forcibly expropriating and oppressing the less affluent provides for a far more effective indictment.

— Roderick Long Left-libertarianism, market anarchism, class conflict and historical theories of distributive justice (2012)

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More quotes by Roderick Long

The violence of the state, to be justified, must be transubstantiated in its essence into peaceful incantation, yet at the same time, to be effective, it must retain the external accidents of violence.

Equality: the Unknown Ideal (2001)

Given the extensive involvement of state violence in the process by which the corporate elite not only achieved its wealth in the past but continues to maintain and augment it in the present, it is clear that the massive inequalities of wealth that characterise present-day “capitalist” society are radically inconsistent with any approach to justice in holdings that is even remotely Nozickian.

Left-libertarianism, market anarchism, class conflict and historical theories of distributive justice (2012)

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Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.

Mikhail Bakunin The Red Association (1870)

The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both.

Milton Friedman

It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.

Felix Frankfurter

It is not true that equality is a law of nature. nature has made nothing equal, her sovereign law is subordination and dependence.

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues Reflections and Maxims (1746)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Roderick Long (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.