Luís’s Reviews > The Philosophy of Poverty > Status Update

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.
(...)

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.

I have proved, and better, I imagine, than it has ever established before:

That monopoly is necessary since it is the antagonism of competition;

That it is essential to society since, without it, the community would never have emerged from the primaeval forests and, without it, would rapidly go backwards;

(...)

Socialism, while protesting, and with reason, against this anarchical competition, has as yet proposed nothing satisfactory for its regulation, as is proved by the fact that we meet everywhere, in the utopias which have seen the light, the determination or socialization of value abandoned to arbitrary control, and all reforms ending, now in hierarchical operation, now in State monopoly, or the tyranny of communism.

To prevent or let alone - such is the eternal alternative of the economists: beyond it, their genius does not go. In vain is it cried out at them that it is not a question of preventing anything or permitting everything; that what society expects of them is a reconciliation: this double idea does not enter their heads.

"The premiums granted to encourage exportation," observes M. Reybaud somewhere, "are equivalent to the taxes paid for the importation of raw material; the advantage remains absolutely null, and serves to encourage nothing but a vast system of smuggling."

(...)
Does the English government, for instance, know any way of giving labour to the unfortunates who take refuge in its workhouses? And if it knew, would it dare? Aid yourself, and Heaven will aid you! This note of widespread distrust of Divinity tells us what we must expect of power - nothing.