Kevin Duffy on how socialists should lead by example

Q: How would a socialist convince a hard core capitalist to espouse their views? 

A: Talk is cheap.  Lead by example. 

Your goal is to eradicate private property.  Your means are govermental force.  That scares people who think they will lose everything they’ve worked their lives for with very little in return. 

Instead, try showing them how this can work voluntarily and on a small scale.  Once you’ve achieved that, you should have no problem convincing others to join your experiment.  As my mother likes to say, “you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.”

~ Kevin Duffy, Quora answer, March 13, 2022

Oscar Ameringer on politics

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.

~ Oscar Ameringer, "the Mark Twain of socialism," (1870-1943)

Frederic Bastiat on socialist objections to anti-statists

"… every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain."

Frederic Bastiat, The Law, 1850, from the section titled "A Confusion of Terms"