Republic America: The Nature of Republican Government

-Presidents-
•John Adams•
•John Quincy Adams•
•Jimmy Carter•
•Grover Cleveland•
•William Clinton•
•Calvin Coolidge•
•Dwight Eisenhower•
•Gerald Ford•
•James Garfield•
•James Madison•
•Ronald Reagan•
•George Washington•

-Other-
•Samuel Adams•
•Aristotle•
•Dick Armey•
•Marcus Aurelius•
•Edmund Burke•
•Hillary Clinton•
•Mario Cuomo•
•Clarence Darrow•
•Charles Darwin•
•John Dewey•
•Diogenes•
•Benjamin Disraeli•
•John Foster Dulles•
•Albert Einstein•
•Sigmund Freud•
•Newt Gingrich•
•Mikhail Gorbachev•

A QUIZ

  "See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.
Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law- which may be an isolated case- is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.
  The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly, defending his acquired rights. He will claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage his particular industry; that this procedure enriches the state because the protected industry is thus able to spend more and pay higher wages to the poor workingmen.
Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests. The acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder into a whole system. In fact this has already occurred. The present day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretense of organizing it.
Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on and so on. All these plans as a whole- with their common aim of legal plunder- constitute Socialism.
   Here I encounter the most popular fallacy of our times. It is not considered sufficient that the law should be just; it must be philanthropic. Nor is it sufficient that the law should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intellectual, and moral self-improvement. Instead, it is demanded that the law should directly extend welfare, education and morality throughout the nation.
  This is the seductive lure of socialism. And I repeat again: These two uses of the law are in direct contradiction to each other. A citizen cannot at the same time be free and not free."

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