Justice & Law Quote by Kim Stanley Robinson

A clean insult disguised as a definition, Kim Stanley Robinson’s line works because it collapses libertarian self-mythology into a single, ugly image: freedom for me, coercion for you. “Anarchists” is bait. It invokes the romantic libertarian pose of radical independence, then yanks it away with “police protection,” the blunt reminder that property rights don’t enforce themselves. The final twist, “from their slaves,” is not polite debate; it’s moral escalation. Robinson drags the conversation from tax rates and regulations to the oldest, most brutal structure of “ownership,” insisting that the libertarian fantasy of the ungoverned individual smuggles in a governed class.

The subtext is about selective statelessness. The state becomes illegitimate when it redistributes, regulates, or protects workers; it becomes essential when it evicts, suppresses, or secures assets. By pairing “anarchists” with “police,” Robinson highlights the contradiction: you can reject collective obligation while still outsourcing violence to a public force. That’s the part many ideologies prefer to keep offstage.

Contextually, Robinson comes out of science fiction’s long argument about political economy: who gets to call their power “natural,” and who pays for it. In a genre obsessed with frontier myths and corporate futures, the line reads like a warning shot at the Silicon Valley-flavored libertarianism that wants moon colonies without labor politics and markets without accountability. It’s meant to sting, and it does, because it reframes “freedom” as a managerial demand backed by badges.