[I]n a hotel lobby in Branson, Missouri, I met a young man almost in tears, totally woebegone and despairing. He had spent seventy days in Stone Coun… - Rose Wilder Lane

Chattel slavery really was an interesting illustration of this fact. The slavery-owners were in process of destroying their own economy by maintaining slavery. That’s why they could not win a military victory over the northerners. ‘Natural resources’ were more abundant in the south than in the north, but wealth was progressively less in comparison because slavery inhibited the use of human energy in the south. So the southerner was hampering the use of his own liberty by suppressing the slave’s use of his. The increasingly indebted slave-owner on his increasingly mortgaged property was unable to do much that he wanted to do, and the reason for his diminishing area of freedom was his denial of freedom to his slaves.

‘The people’ have in fact done everything that is done; they built the houses and roads and railroads and telephones and planes, they organized world‐wide cooperative institutions—the oil companies, the banks—and the postal services, and the militia companies, and the schools—what didn’t ‘the people’ do? What happens is that, after they do it, The Government takes it. The Government takes the roads, the postal service, the systems of communication, the banks, the markets, the stock exchanges, the insurance companies, the schools, the militia, the building trades, the telegraph and telephones, the radios, after ‘the people’ have done all these things for themselves.

I can imagine nothing more wonderful than always wanting to keep a man...It's this NOT wanting to keep them, and yet not quite being able to disentangle one's self, never quite having the ruthlessness to stike at the hands on the gunwale with an oar until they let go -- that's the horrible thing.