A rule, which, in speculation, may seem the most advantageous to society, may yet be found, in practice, totally pernicious and destructive.
—David Hume
It is one of the most disheartening spectacles of our time to see to what extent some of the most precious things which England … has given to the world are now held in contempt in England herself.
—Friedrich A. Hayek
We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become.
—Benito Mussolini
In fact, Benito, you weren’t the first. The palm for first promulgating that principle in all its modern awfulness must go to V. I. Lenin, who back in 1917 boasted that when he finished building his workers’ paradise “the whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory with equality of work and equality of pay.” What Lenin didn’t know about restricting the freedom of the individual wasn’t worth knowing. Granted, things didn’t work out quite as Lenin hoped—or said that he hoped—since as the Soviet Union lumbered on there was less and less work and mostly worthless pay. (Care to exchange some of those dollars for rubles, comrade?) Really, the only equality Lenin and his heirs achieved was an equality of misery and impoverishment for all but a shifting fraction of the nomenklatura. Trotsky got right to the practical nub of the issue, observing that when the state is
