They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. That is too much, even for a joke. . . . Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. . . And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
For members of the political class, the crucial question is always: how can we push out the frontier, how can we augment the government's dominion and plunder, with net gain to ourselves the exploiters who live not by honest production and voluntary exchange, but by fleecing those who do so?
The mission of law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even thought the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its mission is to protect property.
When commercial capital occupies a position of unquestioned ascendancy, it everywhere constitutes a system of plunder.
What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue.
Patriotism means advocating plunder in the interests of the privileged class of your particular country. The time will soon come when calling someone a patriot will be the deepest insult.
Interest is theft, Rent Robbery, and Profit Only Another Name for Plunder.
The welfare state is institutionalized crime - 'organized plunder,' as the French economist Frederic Bastiat called it. It systematizes what is intrinsically wrong: forcing some people to support others. The Democrats favor the indefinite expansion of the welfare state, perpetually increasing the ratio of force to freedom in society.
And this is what has taken place. The delusion of the day is to enrich all classes at the expense of each other; it is to generalize plunder under pretense of organizing it.
Legal plunder has two roots: One, as we have just seen, is in human selfishness; the other is in false philanthropy.
When plunder becomes a way of life, men create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.
We have for years been building a society in which everybody plunders everybody, and while we are weary of being plundered, we enjoy the plunder.
Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.
To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.
On the free market, everyone earns according to his productive value in satisfying consumer desires. Under statist distribution, everyone earns in proportion to the amount he can plunder from the producers.
You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans - my fellow veterans - whose future you stole.
I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder.
Plunder is morally wrong. It ruins your credibility.
Sighing, she shut the book with a snap. “All right. You need to vent, so I’ll listen to you vent. But do it quickly, because Rydstorm was about to plunder Sabine with his thick, hard—