When one brushed aside the reformers’ verbiage, the situation was perfectly clear. I was not witnessing a “revolt of the masses” against an alien pow… - Albert Jay Nock

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When one brushed aside the reformers’ verbiage, the situation was perfectly clear. I was not witnessing a “revolt of the masses” against an alien power; nor yet a war between labour and capital; nor yet a struggle to break up big business; nor yet an attempt to abolish capitalism. What I was looking at was simply a tussle between two groups of mass-men, one large and poor, the other small and rich, and as judged by the standards of a civilised society, neither of them any more meritorious or promising than the other. The object of the tussle was the material gains accruing from control of the State’s machinery. It is easier to seize wealth than to produce it; and as long as the State makes the seizure of wealth a matter of legalised privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on.

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About Albert Jay Nock

Albert Jay Nock (13 October 1870 – 19 August 1945) was an American author, educational theorist, libertarian, social critic of the early and middle 20th century, and a philosophical founder of the modern, libertarian conservative movement later embraced by Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Ron Paul.

Biography information from Wikiquote

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Additional quotes by Albert Jay Nock

Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and counterfeiting [central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be “reformed”,”improved”, nor “limited” in scope, simply because of their innate criminal nature.

Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class.

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I had before me the product of two mutually exclusive philosophies. Economism would insist that having made the perfect pencil, Thoreau should make more pencils and sell them for money with which to buy more material to make still more pencils to sell for money to buy still more material, and so on, because the making and selling of pencils is the whole content of life. Thoreau did not believe it is the whole content of life. It was clear that economism's philosophy was the only one which my companion was capable of accepting. Detach him from his particular specialised practice of it, and existence would have no further meaning for him; and in this he was representative of the great bulk of society in this present age.

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