It is not because men have made laws, that personality, liberty, and property exist. On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty, and propert… - Frédéric Bastiat

The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education.

Bastiat was a nineteenth century French political economist who dedicated the last years of his short life to proving that government by its nature possesses neither the moral authority to intervene in our freedom nor the practical ability to create prosperity through its intervention.

One of the strangest phenomena of our time, and one that will probably be a matter of astonishment to our descendants, is the doctrine which is founded upon this triple hypothesis: the radical passiveness of mankind, — the omnipotence of the law, — the infallibility of the legislator: this is the sacred symbol of the party that proclaims itself exclusively democratic.