Politics & Power Quote by L. Neil Smith

Government, in L. Neil Smith's telling, isn’t the default manager of public life; it’s a contingent service provider whose license can be revoked. The line flips a familiar civic premise on its head. We’re used to being told that rights are privileges granted by the state. Smith reverses the polarity: people possess rights inherently, and the state must earn permission to operate at all. That reversal is the point, and it lands with the clean finality of a warning label.

The phrasing does extra work. "I'll remind you" signals impatience, as if the audience has already been seduced by paternalistic assumptions and needs to be dragged back to first principles. "However" frames the claim as a corrective to creeping statism. "Privilege, not a right" borrows the language governments use to discipline citizens (driving is a privilege, etc.) and turns it back on the discipliner. It’s rhetorical judo: using the state's own moral vocabulary to strip it of moral standing.

Context matters because Smith is a libertarian-leaning science fiction writer, steeped in anti-authoritarian thought and the American tradition of suspicion toward centralized power. The quote reads like a distillation of social contract theory as polemic: the state exists only by consent, and consent can be withdrawn when the state grows predatory, incompetent, or self-perpetuating. The subtext is not subtle: if government forgets its instrumental role, citizens should treat it less like a parent and more like an employee who’s stopped doing the job.