Harry Browne Quotes

The politicians' stirring phrases are meant to keep our eyes averted from the reality of war — to make us imagine heroic young men marching in parades, winning glorious battles, and bringing peace and democracy to the world. But war is something quite different from that. It is your children or your grandchildren dying before they're even fully adults, or being maimed or mentally scarred for life. It is your brothers and sisters being taught to kill other people — and to hate people who are just like themselves and who don't want to kill anyone either. It is your children seeing their buddies' limbs blown off their bodies. It is hundreds of thousands of human beings dying years before their time. It is millions of people separated forever from the ones they love. It is the destruction of homes for which people worked for decades. It is the end of careers that meant as much to others as your career means to you. It is the imposition of heavy taxes on you and on other Americans and on people in other countries — taxes that remain long after the war is over. It is the suppression of free speech and the jailing of people who criticize the government. It is the imposition of slavery by forcing young men to serve in the military. It is goading the public to hate foreign people and races — whether Arabs or Japanese or Cubans or Serbs. It is numbing our sensibilities to cruelties inflicted on foreigners. It is cheering at the news of enemy pilots killed in their planes, of young men blown to bits while trapped inside tanks, of sailors drowned at sea. Other tragedies inevitably trail in the wake of war. Politicians lie even more than usual. Secrecy and cover-ups become the rule rather than the exception. The press becomes even less reliable. War is genocide, torture, cruelty, propaganda, and slavery. War is the worst cruelty government can inflict upon its subjects. It makes every other political crime — corruption, bribery, favoritism, vote-buying, graft, dishonesty — seem petty.

Gun-control laws don't reduce crime, but passing them gives politicians another soap-box opportunity to pose as crime-fighters. Conservative politicians act tough by repealing the Bill of Rights, while liberal politicians act tough by outlawing weapons. Neither action reduces the crime rate. But both allow politicians to feel self-righteous, and both undermine our freedom.

Gun-control laws don't inhibit criminals, who rarely buy their guns in stores. But the laws do prevent you from defending yourself.

You can't limit government's coercion to just those transfers you believe are fair, because you can't give government the power to force good on the country without also giving it the power to force enormous evil on the country — in fact, to do anything it wants.

Once the door was open, once it was settled that the government should help some people at the expense of others, there was no stopping it. If the coercion of government can endow one person with property he hasn't earned, then everyone will want to use government to get something he wants. So it's not surprising that, over the past two centuries, more and more people have concluded that they deserve government's help.

Government lets people take from others without having to face the people being hurt.

When someone asks for a government program, he is saying in effect, 'Tell the police to use their guns to get me what I want.'

The government that's strong enough to give you what you want by taking it from someone else is strong enough to take everything you have and give it to someone else.

But coercion never produces harmony. How harmonious are people who are being forced to act against their will? Most likely, those who are coerced will resent those who benefit from the coercion. This sets group against group; it doesn't bring them together.

I call this The Dictator Syndrome. You see suffering or danger, and in your imagination you see a government program eliminating it. But in the real world the program would operate as you expect only if you were an absolute dictator — having at your disposal all the government's power to compel everyone to do things your way.

Once its considered proper to use government force to solve one person's problem, force can be justified to solve anyone's problem.

So what is government? Very simply, it is an agency of coercion. Of course, there are other agencies of coercion — such as the Mafia. So to be more precise, government is the agency of coercion that has flags in front of its offices. Or to put it another way, government is society's dominant producer of coercion. The Mafia and independent bandits are merely fringe competitors — seeking to take advantage of the niches and nooks neglected by the government.

If you resist, their job will be to 'take you into custody' — which is a euphemism for seizing you, handcuffing you, and taking you to jail. At this point, it will be obvious that the regulation's purpose is to force barbers to charge at least $8 — not by persuasion, but with a gun. Every government program, no matter how benign it may appear, is the same. Coercion is the reason — and the only reason — it is a government program.

A big philosophical breakthrough for me was the realization that my own freedom was not only possible, but far more important than the establishment of a free society.

Don't be so afraid of sudden, sharp discomfort that you willingly tolerate chronic, continual, deadening pain the rest of your life. If you refuse to undergo temporary discomfort, you're resigning yourself to a lifetime with little happiness. The chronic pain can deaden your senses, destroy your love of life, and make you bitter.