“Men live by production, but the State lives by appropriation. While the haves and the have-nots struggle over the division of existing wealth, it is the business of the State to improve itself at the expense of both; it picks up the marbles while the boys are fighting. That has been the story of men in organized society since the beginning.”

— Frank Chodorov

Source: The Income Tax: Root of All Evil (1954), p. 36

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Men live by production, but the State lives by appropriation. While the haves and the have-nots struggle over the divis…" by Frank Chodorov?

Frank Chodorov 44

American libertarian thinker 1887–1966

Related quotes

“While the United States has been busy creating lawyers, we have been busier creating engineers.”

Akio Morita (1921–1999) Japanese businessman

'
Source: Made in Japan (1986), p. 173.

“The modern State is not the rational and intelligent product of modern men desiring to live harmoniously together with security of life, property, and opinion. It is not an organization which has been devised as pragmatic means to a desired social end. All the idealism with which we have been instructed to endow the State is the fruit of our retrospective imaginations.”

Randolph Bourne (1886–1918) American writer

¶44. Published under "Psychology of the State," The State https://mises.org/library/state (Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 1998), p. 25, which omits the Oxford comma in the first sentence.
"The State" (1918)

“While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Source: Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

“Both the control of territory and the political domination of one state over another have profound consequences for international economic relations. However… market power or economic power has itself become a principal means by which states seek to organize and manipulate the international division of labor to their own advantage.”

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

p, 125
War and Change in World Politics (1981)

“Spontaneous social action will be broken up over and over again by State intervention; no new seed will be able to fructify. Society will have to live for the State, man for the governmental machine. And as, after all, it is only a machine whose existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports around it, the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of machinery, more gruesome than the death of a living organism. Such was the lamentable fate of ancient civilisation. … Already in the times of the Antonines (IInd Century), the State overbears society with its anti-vital supremacy. Society begins to be enslaved, to be unable to live except in the service of the State. The whole of life is bureaucratised. What results? The bureaucratisation of life brings about its absolute decay in all orders.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XIII: The Greatest Danger, The State

“If rich men would remember that shrouds have no pockets, they would, while living, share their wealth with their children, and give for the good of others, and so know the highest pleasure that wealth can give.”

Tryon Edwards (1809–1894) American theologian

Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 623.

“To begin with, if man, since his origin, has always lived in societies, the State is but one of the forms of social life, quite recent as far as regards European societies.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal (1896)
Context: To begin with, if man, since his origin, has always lived in societies, the State is but one of the forms of social life, quite recent as far as regards European societies. Men lived thousands of years before the first States were constituted; Greece and Rome existed for centuries before the Macedonian and Roman Empires were built up, and for us modern Europeans the centralized States date but from the sixteenth century. It was only then, after the defeat of the free mediæval Communes had been completed that the mutual insurance company between military, judicial, landlord, and capitalist authority which we call "State," could be fully established.

“Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone.”

Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850) French classical liberal theorist, political economist, and member of the French assembly

“When Churchill and Roosevelt state that they want to build up a new social order, later on, it is like a hairdresser with a bald head recommending an unfortunate hair-restorer. These men, who live in the most socially backward states, have misery and distress enough in their own countries to occupy themselves with the distribution of foodstuffs…. We are allied with strong peoples, who in the same need are faced with the same enemies. The American President and his Plutocratic clique have mocked us as the Have-nots-that is true, but the Have-nots will see to it that they are not robbed of the little they have.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Speech Declaring War Against the United States http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/hitler-s-speech-declaring-war-against-the-united-states (December 11, 1941)
1940s

“Small wonder that spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien book On Fairy-Stories

On Fairy-Stories (1939)

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Frank Chodorov 44

Related quotes

Related topics