The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State

In violent times
You shouldn't have to sell your soul
In black and white
They really, really ought to know
--Tears for Fears

Wonderful essay written in 1885 by Englishman Auberon Herbert. Like contemporaries such as Bastiat, Spencer, and Sumner, Herbert focused on the issue that is still central today: the extent to which the state, defined primarily as a democratic majority of people, can legitimately exercise power over human action.

In fact, he suggests that this issue, one captured by the following question:

"Have twenty men--just because they are twenty--a moral title to dispose of the minds and bodies and possession of ten other men, just because they are ten?"

is perhaps the most important question that an inquiring mind in pursuit of truth can consider.

I happen to agree.

Socialism is Slavery

Morpheus: It's the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.
--The Matrix

Nice review by Henry Hazlitt of a work by Herbert Spencer written in 1884 called The Man Versus the State. Despite 'common wisdom' that Big Government was a product of the Progressive Era and the Great Depression, Spencer demonstrated that many statist programs (e.g., Social Security, State ownership of enterprises, escalating regulation, progressive income tax) were in motion and/or fully predictatble in the 1880s.

Spencer also notes that the meaning of liberal was already being co-opted by 'New Tories' sympathetic to State interventionism.

Spencer was clearly concerned about the ramifications of socialism on freedom. Marx and Engel's work had revived socialist movements, which were active in Europe and in the US by the late 1800s.

I wanted to record Spencer's comments on socialism and slavery:

"All socialism...involves slavery. That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labors under coercion to satisfy another's desires." Taxation is thus a form of slavery of the individual to the community. "Essential question is - How much is he compelled to labor for other benefit than his own, and how much can he labor for his own benefit?"

Spencer titles an early chapter "The Coming Slavery."

The future is now.