Source: Economics Of The Welfare State (Fourth Edition), Chapter 15, Conclusion, p. 349
Elinor Ostrom (2009) "Nobel Prize Lecture", December 8.
Socialism (1922), Epilogue (1947)
Context: In fact, however, the supporters of the welfare state are utterly anti-social and intolerant zealots. For their ideology tacitly implies that the government will exactly execute what they themselves deem right and beneficial. They entirely disregard the possibility that there could arise disagreement with regard to the question of what is right and expedient and what is not. They advocate enlightened despotism, but they are convinced that the enlightened despot will in every detail comply with their own opinion concerning the measures to be adopted. They favour planning, but what they have in mind is exclusively their own plan, not those of other people. They want to exterminate all opponents, that is, all those who disagree with them. They are utterly intolerant and are not prepared to allow any discussion. Every advocate of the welfare state and of planning is a potential dictator. What he plans is to deprive all other men of all their rights, and to establish his own and his friends' unrestricted omnipotence. He refuses to convince his fellow-citizens. He prefers to "liquidate" them. He scorns the "bourgeois" society that worships law and legal procedure. He himself worships violence and bloodshed.
“Communism, socialism, the welfare state, et cetera, are essentially one and the same thing.”
Leonard Read Journals, November 5, 1951 https://history.fee.org/leonard-read-journal/1951/leonard-e-read-journal-november-1951/
Redistribution: Blocking the Revenge of the Nerds? http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2007/06/redistribution_1.html (June 21, 2007)
“Once socialism replaces capitalism, reason will determine the policies of states.”
Source: Man, the State, and War (1959), Chapter V, Some Implications Of The Second Image, p. 150
Source: Anarcho-Syndicalism (1938), Ch. 1 "Anarchism: Its Aims and Purposes"
Context: Anarchism is no patent solution for all human problems, no Utopia of a perfect social order, as it has so often been called, since on principle it rejects all absolute schemes and concepts. It does not believe in any absolute truth, or in definite final goals for human development, but in an unlimited perfectibility of social arrangements and human living conditions, which are always straining after higher forms of expression, and to which for this reason one can assign no definite terminus nor set any fixed goal. The worst crime of any type of state is just that it always tries to force the rich diversity of social life into definite forms and adjust it to one particular form, which allows for no wider outlook and regards the previously exciting status as finished. The stronger its supporters feel themselves, the more completely they succeed in bringing every field of social life into their service, the more crippling is their influence on the operation of all creative cultural forces, the more unwholesomely does it affect the intellectual and social development of any particular epoch.
Source: The Future As History (1960), Chapter IV, Part 1, A Recapitulation, p. 177
Source: Defence Quarterly, 1993, p. 32.
