17 Karl Hess Quotes

Karl Hess quotes

1. Laissez-faire capitalism, or anarchocapitalism, is simply the economic form of the libertarian ethic. Laissez-faire capitalism encompasses the notion that men should exchange goods and services, without regulation, solely on the basis of value for value. It recognizes charity and communal enterprises as voluntary versions of this same ethic. Such a system would be straight barter, except for the widely felt need for a division of labor in which men, voluntarily, accept value tokens such as cash and credit. Economically, this system is anarchy, and proudly so.

2. Given a nation that not enough citizens can be attracted to defend voluntarily, you probably also have a nation that, by definition, isn't really worth defending.

3. Individualism. Self-reliance. Decentralization. Individual responsibility.

4. Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

5. Theodore H. White tells a remarkable story about Goldwater's chief speechwriter, Karl Hess. Chief speechwriters of losing campaigns usually find a safe berth somewhere in the party machine, but not so Hess. First, he applied for positions with conservative senators and congressmen-the very politicians who had been cheering him on a few months before. Unwanted, he lowered his sights dramatically. Could he perhaps work the elevators in the Senate or the House? Still no luck. The apostle of the free market was reduced to the ranks of the unemployed. He enrolled in a night-school course in welding and eventually found a job working the night shift in a machine shop.

1. I am in total opposition to any institutional power. I favor a world of neighborhoods in which all social organization is voluntary and the ways of life are established in small, consenting groups. These groups could cooperate with other groups as they saw fit. But all cooperation would be on a voluntary basis. As the French anarchist Proudhon said. “Liberty [is] not the daughter but the Mother of Order.

2. It is curious to note that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty. But there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing. Apparently, the state takes money more seriously than life.

3. Vietnam should remind conservatives that whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder.

4. Government programs aim at getting money for poor people. Our hope was that knowledge would in the long run be more useful, provide more money, and eventually strike at the system-causes of poverty. Government believes that poverty is just a lack of money. We felt, and continue to feel, that poverty is actually a lack of skill, and a lack of the self-esteem that comes with being able to take some part of one's life into one's own hands and work with others towards shared-call them social-goals.

5. The fundamental question of politics has always been whether there should be politics.

6. The most revolutionary thing you can do is get to know your neighbors.

7. Liberty, finally, is not a box into which people are to be forced. Liberty is a space in which people may live. It does not tell you how they will live. It says, eternally, only that we can.

8. A Call for Revolution, 1993 Libertarianism is rejected by the modern left - which preaches individualism but practices collectivism. Capitalism is rejected by the modern right - which preaches enterprise but practices protectionism. The libertarian faith in the mind of man is rejected by religionists who have faith only in the sins of man. . . . The libertarian insistence that each man is a sovereign land of liberty, with his primary allegiance to himself, is rejected by patriots who sing of freedom but also shout of banners and boundaries.

9. There is no better way to return the matter of taxation to full public discusssion than to repeal the withholding taxes on wages and salaries. Only when the American people are confronted with the enormous excesses of government in a personal and direct way - by an annual bill for services rendered - will they be able to make an informed judgment about which services they want and which ones they can do without.

10. The dinosaurs invented Jesus to test our confidence in science.

11. The Declaration of Independence is so lucid were afraid of it today. It scares the hell out of every modern bureaucrat, because it tells them there comes a time when we must stop taking orders.

12. Everybody knows that the federal government promises a lot and delivers damn little, and pays for most of what it does deliver out of the earnings of individuals rather than the profits of great corporations.