Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been to much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to p… - Rose Wilder Lane

Various authorities have been trying to force a Social Security number on me. They telephone and tell me I MUST have one; since I have none, they are giving me one. I tell them I won’t have it. I get forms, my humble request to be entitled to Social Security benefits; with command, Sign here and return to—I put them in the wastebasket. I get orders to appear at such an hour, such a date, at such an office, with all records and receipts to show cause—I reply that it is not convenient for me to appear—etc., etc. I even get an order to appear and support with documents my claim for refund of the tax‐and‐fine that I paid; I return this, writing across it, I have made no such claim. The telephone rings, and I am informed that I am being given the necessary Social Security number; I say I have none and I shall NOT have one; I will have nothing to do with that Ponzi fraud because it is treason; it will wreck this country as it wrecked Germany; I won’t have it; you can’t make me.

How thoroughly have you studied compulsory insurance in Germany? And why do you believe that it will work here otherwise than it worked there? I would really like to know. My own opinions haven’t ripened yet. So far, I am opposed to so-called ‘Social Security’ principally because I am opposed to tyranny; I think it is tyranny to take my money, money earned by my labor, and to spend it for me—in any way whatever—instead of allowing me to send it for myself. But so far as I have learned, and thought, about this use of tyranny in Germany since Bismarck established it, I’m inclined to believe that it can’t work otherwise than as disastrously as it worked there.

We would learn more by looking at America. Oddly enough, statistics appear only in times of agitation and distress. Their function would appear to be that of omens of worse to come. We seem to have a morbid taste for them, like that of children for ghost stories that raise the hair. The American air has not been so full of fragmentary statistics since the Panic of 1893. I read again, for instance, that less than 10 per cent of our population own more than 90 per cent of the wealth… I read also that a hundred years ago 80 per cent of our population owned property and that today the percentage is 23.