Thomas Hodgskin Quotes

Thomas Hodgskin was an English socialist writer on political economy, critic of capitalism and defender of free trade and early trade unions. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the term socialist included any opponent of capitalism, at the time defined as a construed political system built on privileges for the owners of capital. Wikipedia  

✵ 12. December 1787 – 21. August 1869
Thomas Hodgskin: 21   quotes 0   likes

Famous Thomas Hodgskin Quotes

“Those who make laws, appropriate wealth in order to secure power.”

Source: The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832), p. 49

“What is the law?—Who are the law makers?”

The law is a great scheme of rules intended to preserve the power of government, secure the wealth of the landowner, the priest, and the capitalist, but never to secure his produce to the labourer.—The law-maker is never a labourer, and has no natural right to any wealth.—He takes no notice of the natural right of property.—Manifold miseries which result from his appropriating the produce of labour, and from the legal right of property being in opposition to the natural.

p. 44
The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832)

Thomas Hodgskin Quotes

“Our leaders invent nothing but new taxes, and conquer nothing but the pockets of their subjects.”

Source: The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832), p. 14

“[G]overnments are not producers, they have no commodities on their road to the market, and can have no claim whatever to issue paper-money. Even exchequer bills are wrong,…”

Source: Popular Political Economy: Four lectures delivered at the London Mechanics Institution (1827), p. 212

“Governments have meddled incessantly with money, which in our time has been the fruitful parent of intricate discussions and painful changes.”

Source: Popular Political Economy: Four lectures delivered at the London Mechanics Institution (1827), p. 179

“Domestic slavery, combined with systems of foreign conquest and usurpation, ruined the empires of antiquity.”

Source: Popular Political Economy: Four lectures delivered at the London Mechanics Institution (1827), p. 30

“The evils of society cannot be remedied by acts of parliament.”

Source: Travels in the North of Germany (1820), p. 98, Vol. 2

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