In every society organised on the principle of force, there are two classes: those who plunder and those who are plundered. The plunderer may be a conqueror, a king, an aristocracy, a theocracy, or a majority. The form varies; the principle does not. Wherever men live under institutions that permit some to seize the fruits of others' labour without their consent, you will find this fundamental division. Call it what you will: castes, orders, classes. The name changes nothing. The reality is the same.

The socialists require us to divide humanity into two groups: those who own the means of production and those who do not. But who, precisely, belongs to the first group? The great factory owner, certainly. But also the artisan who owns his tools, the peasant who owns his plough, the doctor who owns his medical instruments, the lawyer who owns his library. And who belongs to the second group? The factory worker, they say. But also, by the same logic, the great artist who has no studio of his own, the distinguished journalist who writes for hire, the celebrated scientist who works in a university laboratory. This classification produces absurdities at every turn.

The distinction between capitalist and worker is far less stable in a free society than the socialist imagines. The worker of today becomes the small saver of tomorrow; the small saver becomes the investor; the investor becomes the entrepreneur. This mobility, so characteristic of free societies, is precisely what socialism wishes to suppress. In suppressing it, it would suppress the very mechanism by which men rise from poverty to prosperity.

In ancient societies, the position of women was that of a being made for service, dependent on the arbitrary will of a father or a husband. Her lesser productive power and the general insecurity of life penalised her disproportionately. In the modern commercial society, founded on voluntary contract and the rule of law, two things change fundamentally: security improves, so that physical strength becomes less decisive; and as work becomes increasingly mechanical and intellectual, the difference in physical capacity between men and women diminishes in economic significance. The market does not care about sex; it cares about service rendered.

The critics of the existing order point to the luxuries of the rich as evidence of exploitation. But they neglect to observe that the commodities once reserved for kings are now within reach of the ordinary working man. The cotton shirt, the glass window, the printed book, the metal tool: these were luxuries in the Middle Ages. They are necessities today. This is what the progress of industry and exchange has accomplished. It has not made the rich richer at the expense of the poor; it has made both richer, and the poor proportionally more so, since they have gained access to goods that no amount of wealth could previously have purchased.

You say you defend the worker. But the worker is also a consumer. Every tariff that raises the price of iron raises the price of his tools. Every tariff that raises the price of wheat raises the price of his bread. Every restriction on exchange is a tax paid by the many for the benefit of the few. If you truly care for the poor, you will free them from these burdens.