Time & Perspective Quote by Benjamin Tucker

Tucker is doing something sharper than warning about “big government.” He is puncturing a specific promise: the State Socialist assurance that once the state owns the big levers of the economy, it will politely stop at the bedroom door. His sentence is built like a cross-examination. “However” signals he’s rebutting a friendly hypothetical. “Would not be exercised” casts state power as a latent weapon - a right that can be invoked at will. Then comes the killing move: history, not theory.

The intent is defensive in the most aggressive way: Tucker, an American individualist anarchist, is staking out liberty not as an add-on to equality but as the core constraint on any political project. In the late 19th and early 20th century, socialism was gaining institutional plausibility; Tucker’s target is the idea that centralized control can be quarantined. He’s arguing that power doesn’t stay in its assigned lane because it can’t. Once a bureaucracy is empowered to plan production, regulate labor, and “rationalize” society, it acquires both the incentive and the administrative machinery to regulate people.

The subtext is almost clinical cynicism about governance: states do not merely coordinate; they moralize. “More intimate and private relations” is a loaded phrase that gestures at family, sex, conscience, speech, education - the places where social order is enforced when economic order is threatened. Tucker’s line works because it replaces ideological debate with a track record. He’s not asking you to fear a hypothetical future; he’s asking you to recognize a pattern: authority expands until it meets resistance, not until it meets a principle.