Daily Inspiration Quote by Benjamin Tucker

Tucker’s line is a political roast disguised as kitchen wisdom: the same “laissez faire” sauce gets ladled onto labor as moral instruction, while capital quietly eats something else. The proverb about “goose and gander” usually argues for equal treatment; Tucker flips it to expose selective principle. In his telling, free-market rhetoric isn’t a neutral creed, it’s a class-aimed condiment - thin gruel for workers, rich gravy for owners.

The intent is surgical. Tucker, an individualist anarchist, isn’t rejecting freedom of exchange; he’s attacking the rigged version sold in late 19th-century America as “natural law.” When bosses and politicians preach hands-off government to workers, the subtext is discipline: accept low wages, precarity, and “market forces” as inevitability. But capital’s world is never truly hands-off. It gets the gander’s privileges: charters, banking monopolies, protective tariffs, land titles enforced by the state, strikebreaking, courts that sanctify certain kinds of property and contract. Tucker’s larger project was to argue that what passed as capitalism depended on state power, and that a genuinely freed market would erode profits, rents, and interest by removing those artificial scarcities.

The wit lands because it treats ideology like food service: the elite’s principles are “sauce,” applied for flavor, not truth. Tucker’s cynicism is calibrated, not nihilistic: he’s demanding symmetry. If laissez faire is the rule, it has to bind capital too - or admit it’s just propaganda with a napkin tucked into the wrong collar.