"The communist doctrines speak abundantly of the end of capitalist exploitation and of future abundance, but the actual functioning of this great administration that would own all the land, all the machines, and manage all the factories, all of this is very poorly explained. The theorists of communism have been generous with their vision of the destination and remarkably parsimonious with any account of the journey. This reticence is not accidental. It reflects a fundamental difficulty that the communist cannot resolve: the impossibility of calculating, directing, and coordinating production without the signals that the price mechanism provides and that communism, by abolishing private property, necessarily destroys."

"Organised spoliation on a national scale: that is the only honest description of the system. Each man will be required to deliver the fruit of his labour to the central administration, which will then decide, according to criteria that it will define and that no one will be able to contest, what portion each shall receive in return. This is, in substance, slavery. The slave at least enjoyed the security of his master's self-interest; the citizen of the communist state enjoys no such guarantee."

"The socialist does not wish to go as far as the communist. He recoils from the logical conclusions of the premises he shares with him. He wishes to keep a little property here, a little market there, a little freedom in this corner, a little competition in that one. But the logic of his position carries him, step by step, toward the destination he professes to resist. He is the man who jumps from the tenth floor and congratulates himself, as he passes the fifth, on not having fallen as far as he feared."

"The man who believes himself to be the proprietor of his house discovers, when he attempts to exercise his ownership, that he is merely its usufructuary. He may live in it, subject to the payment of his taxes. He may paint it, subject to the approval of the local authority. He may sell it, subject to the deduction of a succession of duties. He may leave it to his children, subject to a progressive inheritance tax. At each step he finds that a prior claim has been registered, that an invisible co-owner accompanies him everywhere, that the state is the senior partner in every enterprise and the silent beneficiary of every asset. This silent partner, unlike every other partner, contributes nothing and consents to nothing: he merely collects."

"A system that excludes half the human race from the enjoyment of its own faculties is not a system of freedom but of privilege, and privilege is the negation of freedom. There is no middle way: either the faculties of every individual belong to that individual, or they belong to the collectivity. The liberal cannot accept the latter; he must therefore accept the former, without exception, without reservation, and without the hypocritical indulgence that permits a man to proclaim liberty for himself while denying it to his wife."

"If Jews wished to form their own communities, practise their trades, or profess their ideas, this was simply individual liberty in action, protected by freedom of religion, expression, and association. To restrict these activities is not to defend the nation; it is to violate the rights that the nation was constituted to protect. The liberal cannot be selective about whose liberty he defends without ceasing to be a liberal."