Status Updates From The Philosophy of Poverty

You triumphed, and no one dared to contradict you when, after having tormented in his body and his soul the righteous Job, a type of our humanity, you insulted his genuine piety, his prudent and respectful ignorance. We were as nought before your invisible majesty, to whom we gave the sky for a canopy and the earth for a footstool. And now here you are, dethroned and broken.
(...)

(...)
Whence comes this mania? From the fact, you say that his competitor sets him the example! And this competitor, who incites him? Some other competitors. So that, if we make the tour of society, we shall find that it is the mass, and in the assembly, each particular individual, who, by a tacit agreement of their passions - pride, sloth, greed, distrust, jealousy - have organized this detestable war.

There is a necessity, I repeat, of a MAJOR FORCE to invert the actual formulas of society; a necessity that the LABOR of the people, not their valour nor their votes, should, by a scientific, legitimate, immortal, insurmountable combination, subject capital to the people and deliver power to them.

Society, or the prince who represents it, cannot and should not guarantee the invention since, in granting a monopoly for fourteen years, the community becomes the purchaser of the privilege. Consequently, it is for the patentee to furnish the guarantee.
(...)

The progressive tax resolves itself, whatever it will do, into a denial of justice, prohibition of production, and confiscation. It is unlimited and unbridled absolutism, given power over everything which contributes to public wealth by labour, economy, and improvement.

The revolution of 1830 demoralized us; socialism is making us effeminate. But, like the political economy, whose contradictions it simply sifts again, socialism is powerless to satisfy the movement of minds: it is, subsequently, in those whom it subjugated, only a new prejudice to destroy, and, in those who propagate it, a charlatanism to be unmask, the more dangerous because almost always sincere.