Monday, July 23, 2018

What I complain of now is that the State, being a small and dangerous plutocracy, has become the organ of abnormal and unpopular power, and tends to interfere not with the people's enemies, but simply with the people. [...] It is to reform the people. And the people are to be reformed not in the sense in which every man knows very well that he needs to be reformed, but in the sense of being formed again as what he would call a deformity. The ordinary citizen is to be changed [...] into the image of something that only exists in the imagination of a mad millionaire. It is something that he only has the power to work for because he is a millionaire [...] In other words, the power of government is not used to punish rich people for doing what everybody thinks wrong, but it is used to punish poor people for doing what nearly everybody thinks right. Anybody who likes may call my objection to this an objection to any kind of government. But I should call it an objection to the very worst kind of misgovernment [...]
-November 15, 1924, Illustrated London News

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