Politics & Power Quote by Ayn Rand

Rand’s line is a trapdoor disguised as a civics lesson: start with a premise that sounds like commonsense (“government cracks down on criminals”), then pull the floor out from under the idea of neutral law. The intent is polemical and strategic. She isn’t describing how states sometimes behave; she’s insisting that coercion is the state’s core competency, and that everything else it claims to do is marketing.

The subtext is a theory of political appetite. Power, in Rand’s telling, doesn’t merely respond to wrongdoing; it requires wrongdoing to justify itself. If the supply is low, the state manufactures demand by expanding the definition of “criminal” until ordinary life becomes prosecutable. That’s why the sentence pivots from “criminals” to “one makes them” so quickly: the villain is not individual bad actors but a system that feeds on categorization. “One declares” is deliberately faceless, implying bureaucracy and statute rather than a single tyrant. The horror is procedural.

Context matters. Rand wrote in the long shadow of Soviet totalitarianism and mid-century American anxieties about collectivism, where legal regimes could turn yesterday’s citizen into today’s enemy with a signature. Her target is the slippery moral alchemy of regulation becoming criminalization: the shift from “you shouldn’t” to “you’re illegal.” The line works because it reframes freedom as something lost not only through dramatic crackdowns, but through quiet accumulation - the banal sprawl of laws that makes innocence an administrative impossibility.