In Kenya, the elephant population dropped from 65,000 to 19,000 even though elephant hunting was forbidden. In Zimbabwe, however, natives can claim, or homestead, elephants living on their lands. Natives can legally sell permits to hunt them. Zimbabwe’s elephant population grew from 30,000 to 43,000. People will protect the environment when they own it and profit from it. —Mary J Ruwart
By unleashing China’s greatest asset, a labour force that was counted in the hundreds of millions, Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors. Instead of following the Soviet model of development, which leaned heavily towards industry alone, China would ‘walk on two legs’: the peasant masses were mobilised to transform both agriculture and industry at the same time, converting a backward economy into a modern communist society of plenty for all.
In the pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivised, as villagers were herded together in giant communes which heralded the advent of communism.
People in the countryside were robbed of their work, their homes, their land, their belongings and their livelihood. Food, distributed by the spoonful in collective canteens according to merit, became a weapon to force people to follow the party’s every dictate.
Irrigation campaigns forced up to half the villagers to work for weeks on end on giant water-conservancy projects, often far from home, without adequate food and rest. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives.
—Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine
At what exact point, should one resist? When one’s belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one’s home?
How we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
If … if … We didn’t love freedom enough. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Those whose libertarianism is based on utilitarianism are oftentimes willing to sacrifice liberty in a doomed attempt to achieve an important goal. In contrast, those with a moral commitment to liberty are unlikely to betray liberty by endorsing government force. —Ron Paul
Even if somehow waging violent coups and regime change wars across the planet could guarantee freedom for those people, it would necessarily come at the expense of those whose lives and liberty our government is actually sworn to protect: ours. —Scott Horton
It isn’t a coincidence that governments everywhere want to educate children. If the government’s propaganda can take root as children grow up, those kids will be no threat to the state apparatus — they’ll fasten the chains to their own ankles. —Lew Rockwell
Governments confiscate more than a third of all family income. Each year the average American taxpayer works 127 days, from January 1st until May 7th — just to pay taxes. —Thomas DiLorenzo
Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government. —James Madison
I viewed the marketplace as a cruel place, where you need intervention by government to protect people. But after watching the regulators work, I have come to believe that markets are magical, and the best protectors of the consumer. It is my job to explain the beauties of the free market. —John Stossel
To be an anarchist only means that you believe that aggression is not justified, and that states necessarily employ aggression. And, therefore, the aggression they necessarily employ, are unjustified. It’s quite simple, really. It’s an ethical view. —Stephan Kinsella, Lawyer, Author, Anarcho-Capitalist
