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About this Quotation:

2010 is the 100th anniversary of the publication in English of Guyot’s Socialist Fallacies. In the title Guyot is making reference to two precursors, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850). The former wrote The Book of Fallacies (1824) and the latter wrote Economic Sophisms (1845), both of which were intended to debunk the political and economic errors and myths of their day. Guyot attempts to do the same for turn of the century France. One of his targets is the motto of the French state - “Liberty. Egality. Fraternity” - which arose during the French Revolution and was used by socialists in the1848 Revolution and then which became adopted officially in the Third Republic. Under socialism these three ideals are transformed into “Tyranny. Class rule. Class War.” This quote is also interesting because like his older colleague, Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912), Guyot predicts the rise of socialist ideas and with it, the inevitable coming to power of new “Caesars” who will destroy individual liberty. Little did they realize how destructive the new socialist Caesars like Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Mao would be in the 20th century.

Other quotes from this week:

• 2013: Percy Shelley on the two types of property [1820]
• 2012: Benjamin Constant on why the oppressed often prefer their chains to liberty (1815)
• 2011: John Stuart Mill on “the sacred right of insurrection” (1862)
• 2010: Yves Guyot accuses all those who seek Protection from foreign competition of being “Socialists” (1893)
• 2009: John Stuart Mill on the need for limited government and political rights to prevent the “king of the vultures” and his “minor harpies” in the government from preying on the people (1859)
• 2006: Forrest McDonald discusses the reading habits of colonial Americans and concludes that their thinking about politics and their shared values was based upon their wide reading, especially of history (1978)
• 2005: John Milton believes men live under a “double tyranny” within (the tyranny of custom and passions) which makes them blind to the tyranny of government without (1649)

Other quotes about Socialism & Interventionism:

• 2012: Molinari appeals to socialists to join him in marching down “the broad, well-trodden highway of liberty” (1848)
• 2011: Mises on how price controls lead to socialism (1944)
• 2011: Mises and the Emergence of Etatism in Germany (1944)
• 2011: Mill on the dangers of the state turning men into “docile instruments” of its will (1859)
• 2011: James Madison on the “sagacious and monied few” who are able to “harvest” the benefits of government regulations (1787)
• 2010: Sumner criticizes the competing vested interests and the role of legislators in the “new democratic State” (1887)
• 2009: Ludwig von Mises on the impossibility of rational economic planning under Socialism (1922)
• 2008: Alexis de Tocqueville stood up in the Constituent Assembly to criticize socialism as a violation of human nature, property rights, and individual liberty (1848)
• 2008: Nassau Senior objected to any government regulation of factories which meant that a horde of inspectors would interfere with the organization of production (1837)
• 2007: Ludwig von Mises argues that monopolies are the direct result of government intervention and not the product of any inherent tendency within the capitalist system (1949)