Why the State Hates Economic Freedom

Albert Jay Nock writes, in Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, of “the great truth which apparently must forever remain unlearned, that if a regime of complete economic freedom be established, social and political freedom will follow automatically; and until it is established neither social nor political freedom can exist. Here one comes in sight of the reason why the State will never tolerate the establishment of economic freedom. In a spirit of sheer conscious fraud, the State will at any time offer its people ‘four freedoms,’ or six, or any number; but it will never let them have economic freedom. If it did, it would be signing its own death-warrant, for as Lenin pointed out, ‘it is nonsense to make any pretence of reconciling the State and liberty.’ Our economic system being what it is, and the State being what it is, all the mass of verbiage about ‘the free peoples’ and ‘the free democracies’ is merely so much obscene buffoonery.”

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8:47 am on December 23, 2006