Source: Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943), p. 32
Rose Wilder Lane: Governance
Rose Wilder Lane was American journalist. Explore interesting quotes on governance.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
Context: Representative government cannot express the will of the mass of the people, because there is no mass of the people; The People is a fiction, like The State. You cannot get a Will of the Mass, even among a dozen persons who all want to go on a picnic. The only human mass with a common will is a mob, and that will is a temporary insanity. In actual fact, the population of a country is a multitude of diverse human beings with an infinite variety of purposes and desires and fluctuating wills.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
Context: The picture of the economic revolution as the final step to freedom was false as soon as I asked myself that question. For, in actual fact, The State, The Government, cannot exist. They are abstract concepts, useful enough in their place, as the theory of minus numbers is useful in mathematics. In actual living experience, however, it is impossible to subtract anything from nothing; when a purse is empty, it is empty, it cannot contain a minus ten dollars. On this same plane of actuality, no State, no Government, exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.
Journal entry (April 15, 1937), as quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, ch. 14, by William V. Holtz (1993)
Commenting on the domestic policies of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Source: Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943), p. 239
https://mises.org/system/tdf/The%20Discovery%20of%20Freedom_2.pdf?file=1&type=document Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority
Source: Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943), p. 238
https://mises.org/system/tdf/The%20Discovery%20of%20Freedom_2.pdf?file=1&type=document Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority
Give Me Liberty (1936)
Source: The Lady and The Tycoon: Letters of Rose Wilder Lane and Jasper Crane (1973), pp. 332-333 (letter July 13, 1963)
Source: Give Me Liberty (1936), p. 47