Isabel Paterson Quotes

A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.

There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.

Poverty can be brought about by law; it cannot be forbidden by law.

The military state is the final form to which every planned economy tends rapidly.

Right now it is a terrible thing to be a rugged individualist; but we don't know what else to be except a feeble nonentity.

A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state...The most vindictive resentment may be expected from the pedagogic profession for any suggestion that they should be dislodged from their dictatorial position; it will be expressed mainly in epithets, such as "reactionary," at the mildest. Nevertheless, the question to put to any teacher moved to such indignation is: Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you to pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?

The objection to profit is as if a bystander, observing the planter digging his crop, should say: "You put in only one potato and you are taking out a dozen. You must have taken them away from someone else; those extra potatoes cannot be yours by right." If profit is denounced, it must be assumed that running at a loss is admirable. On the contrary, that is what requires justification. Profit is self-justifying.

Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status.

In arguing against free enterprise capitalism, the collectivist always adopts the false assumption of a fixed number of jobs in that system. Conversely, in arguing for collectivism, he always assumes that there will be as many jobs as there are workers. The government will make the jobs.

Years ago, a well-known political writer, Isabel Paterson, was talking to a businessman outraged by some government action. She urged him to speak up for his principles. “I agree with you totally,” he said, “but I’m not in a position right now to do it.” “The only position required,” she replied, “is vertical.

Production is profit; and profit is production. They are not merely related; they are the same thing. When a man plants potatoes, if he does not get back more than he put in, he has produced nothing.

If everyone were invariably honest, able, wise, and kind, there should be no occasion for government. Everyone would readily understand what is desirable and what is possible in given circumstances, all would concur upon the best means toward their purpose and for equitable participation in the ensuing benefits, and would act without compulsion or default. The maximum production was certainly obtained from such voluntary action arising from personal initiative. But since human beings will sometimes lie, shirk, break promises, fail to improve their faculties, act imprudently, seize by violence the goods of others, and even kill one another in anger or greed, government might be defined as the police organization. In that case, it must be described as a necessary evil. It would have no existence as a separate entity, and no intrinsic authority; it could not be justly empowered to act excepting as individuals infringed one another's rights, when it should enforce prescribed penalties. Generally, it would stand in the relation of a witness to contract, holding a forfeit for the parties. As such, the least practicable measure of government must be the best. Anything beyond the minimum must be oppression.

If Charles F. Kettering or Thomas Alva Edison or Henry Ford had been put to work digging ditches under duress, one could calculate approximately how much energy or work could have been got out of them. Left to their own devices, as they were, it is impossible to say how much energy they actually released into production.

by stressing intrinsic value in thought. And it is true that when men have become engrossed in practical devices they are apt to narrow their field of vision and lose sight of the interconnection of the various branches of knowledge. More than that, as is now the case, they will even forget the larger principles they have applied, and on which their well-being depends.

Fear and want are subjective; and poverty is the absence of wealth. If it were promised that from the hour of his birth no man should ever again stand in his naked skin, who is to produce the clothes? who is to have such absolute power over every person? The only condition in which no one can experience poverty, want, or fear, is that of rigor mortis. The dead neither want nor fear.

Another "advanced" educational method does not mark examination papers for their accuracy; instead, grades are given indicating that the child has done well in relation to his capacities. That is, the teacher assumes divine omniscience, and pretends to know the child's innate capacities absolutely, by some supernal means, instead of judging the specific result of a specific examination.

Allowing the war-prone individuals, bent on evil, to gain power in governments must be one of the most significant reasons that wars erupt. Individuals with prowar inclinations are naturally aggressive and seek power over others. As Friedrich Hayek argued in his book The Road to Serfdom, “the worst get on top.” The power seekers also convince themselves that they are superior to average people and have a moral responsibility to use force to mold the world as they see fit. The propaganda is that war is for the sake of “goodness and righteousness.” Isabel Paterson described it in her book The God of the Machine as “the humanitarian with a guillotine.” Those who are more prone to peace tend to be complacent and to not resist the propaganda required to mobilize otherwise peaceful people to fight and die for the lies told and the false noble goals proposed by the self-appointed moral leaders.

Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, and Isabel Mary Paterson each published philosophical works early that year. Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom appeared in January 1943; Rand’s The Fountainhead followed in April; Paterson’s The God of the Machine came out in May. Three weird sisters in an antifeminist trifecta, they each celebrated in their books the strapping male as a hero, and exhibited a striking dissociation from what was happening around the world. Emphasizing free will as essential to liberty, the works laid the foundation for the libertarian political movement in the United States.

The intrinsic nature of the power authorized was so little realized that this was called "free education," the most absolute contradiction of facts by terminology of which the language is capable. Everything about such schools is compulsory, not free; and the true nature of the institution has developed so fully along its own lines with the passage of time that parents are now helpless when it is admitted by a schoolboard that a small number of teachers are mentally unbalanced. The parents must still deliver their children into the power of those teachers, on penalty of a fine. The teachers have "security of tenure." They can't be discharged.

Newton was asked as a mathematician, not as a moralist. He replied 'Gentlemen, in applied mathematics, you must describe your unit.

As the several items can be exchanged, they must be equal; but in what terms? Not in pounds, yards, or hours; they are equal in value. Then what is wanted is a unit of value to reckon by.

Government cannot "restore competition," or "ensure" it. Government is monopoly; and all it can do is to impose restrictions which may issue in monopoly, when they go so far as to require permission for the individual to engage in production. This is the essence of the Society of Status.

Meantime the producers, receiving less and less in exchange for their products, were impoverished and discouraged. Naturally they tended to produce less, since they would get no fair return; in fact, effort from which there is no net return automatically must cease. They consumed their own products instead of putting them into exchange. With that the taxes began to dry up. Taxes must come from surplus. The bureaucrats inevitably came down on the producers, with the object of sequestrating the energy directly at the source, by a planned economy. Farmers were bound to the soil; craftsmen to their workbenches; tradesmen were ordered to continue in business although the taxes and regulations did not permit them to make a living. No one could change his residence or occupation without permission. The currency was debased. Prices and wages were fixed until there was nothing to sell and no work to be had. "The reforms of Diocletian, A.D. 260-268, made still heavier the already unendurable load of citizenship."1 Men who had formerly been productive escaped to the woods and mountains as outlaws, because they must starve if they went on working.

The true remedy for such an injurious condition is to strengthen the regional bases and limit the control and absorption of the national finances by the central executive. That is what the Charter was intended to do; with a wisdom in advance of the age, it did not propose either penalization or expulsion of "the jews" or financiers, but restriction of the authority of the crown. Here it may be said that at any time when finance is under attack through the political authority, it is an infallible sign that the political authority is already exercising too much power over the economic life of the nation through manipulation of finance, whether by exorbitant taxation, uncontrolled expenditure, unlimited borrowing, or currency depreciation.

Nothing increases the number of jobs so rapidly as labor-saving machinery, because it releases wants theretofore unknown, by permitting leisure. In a pre-industrial economy, jobs are made by simple division of labor; acquired skill and organization permit some economy of effort; but on the whole people literally have not enough surplus energy to want much. What does any person who is thoroughly fatigued want? The answer is just nothing.

Nothing is more essential to the welfare of a nation than the countercheck on government, by legitimate means. A mechanism without a brake, a motor without a cut-off, is built for self-destruction.

It is disgraceful to our educational institutions and to the political intelligence of Americans, that in discussion of the notorious "Moscow trials," not one comment indicated any knowledge of the American constitutional safeguard against trials of that type, and of the base of that safeguard on individual private property; nor even of the collectivist political theory which admitted the Russian procedure until the example of the United States shamed them into desuetude.

The political power had intervened, and such was its necessary effect. The Western farmers, who willingly took what appeared to be the advantage of it, in so doing had surrendered their power of choice for an indefinite future period. The intervention of the political power had created a monopoly. And even its supposed beneficiaries found it odious.

In the free economy, there can be no fixed number of jobs, not for one minute. Employment, production, and consumption in a free enterprise society cannot be figured on the same ratios or relations as are assumed by collectivists (which have in fact obtained in collectivist societies).

But in a free enterprise economy, increased production increases the number of jobs. It might be said that one job creates another, which is true as far as it goes, but open to misinterpretation; for only productive employment does that. If a man were paid to pick up pebbles on the beach and throw them into the ocean, it would be just the same as if he were in a "government job," or on the dole; the producers have to supply his subsistence with no return, thus preventing the normal increase of jobs.

Strictly quantitative mechanical calculations, by ratio or number, cannot be applied beforehand to human free productive organization as a whole.

Why did the humanitarian philosophy of eighteenth century Europe usher in the Reign of Terror? It did not happen by chance; it followed from the original premise, objective and means proposed. The objective is to do good to others as a primary justification of existence; the means is the power of the collective; and the premise is that "good" is collective.

The Germans are notably literate; and they had very fine technical schools. Their literacy enabled them to read "Mein Kampf," and their technology enabled them to build up a war machine which must destroy them. That is what education under the political power must do, once it has obtained full control. It routes human energy into the dead-end political channels.

[T]heir work was not backward-looking. They saw themselves as resolutely modern. And it was not primarily about politics or economics. Instead, they sought to advance a principled case for individualism as a moral and cultural phenomenon - a value they thought precious and rare, and that they saw threatened both by the stifling traditionalism that Lewis's literature satirized and by the collectivist trends of fascism and communism around the world and in America.

The objection occurs that Christian Europe wore the iron collar of serfdom, and countenanced outright chattel slavery. Nevertheless, the axiom of liberty cannot be postulated except on the basis affirmed by Christian philosophy. For its realization, the secular principles educed by Greece and Rome are no less indispensable. Yet America was regarded as its native soil.

Rome was never an undifferentiated "whole," a simple aggregation of particles, as the theory of democracy postulates. From the beginning, the city of Rome was a federation, with the federal form, which comprises permanent bases and structure, the elements of architecture.

Politics consists of the power to prohibit, obstruct, and expropriate. Its field is marginal; but for this reason it always tends to encroach on the primary field of freedom, in such manner that the producer may be compelled to obtain permission before he can get to work. Where permission is required, or expropriation possible, a consideration may be extorted. Does the element of corruption inhere in business or in politics?

The test of a military society lies in the question whether the civil or military authority is recognized as superior. The Roman civil authority was supreme, as with Paul, when the man of the sword was "afraid" before his prisoner. An empire can exist only if it offers to the world some negotiable benefit in exchange for tribute. Roman law was Rome's export commodity.