"...and we must consider," Austen Heller was saying unemotionally, "that
since--unfortunately--we are forced to live together, the most important thing
for us to remember is that the only way in which we can have any law at all is
to have as little of it as possible. I see no ethical standard to which to
measure the whole unethical conception of a State, except in the amount of time,
of thought, of money, of effort and of obedience, which a society extorts from
its every member. Its value and its civilization are in inverse ratio to that
extortion. There is no conceivable law by which a man can be forced to work on
any terms except those he chooses to set. There is no conceivable law to prevent
him from setting them--just as there is none to force his employer to accept
them. The freedom to agree or disagree is the foundation of our kind of
society--and the freedom to strike is a part of it. I am mentioning this as a
reminder to a certain Petronius from Hell’s Kitchen, an exquisite bastard who
has been rather noisy lately about telling us that this strike represents a
destruction of law and order." | by: | Ayn Rand
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter |
Source: | The Fountainhead, as Austen Heller |
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