Daily Inspiration Quote by George Reisman

Reisman’s line is engineered to sting: it takes socialism’s moral high ground and flips it with a cold, accountant’s logic. The provocation isn’t just “socialism is bad,” but that socialism’s harm is structurally invisible. Under chattel slavery, the brutality is at least legible in the ledger: an owner bears a financial loss when a person is maimed, killed, or worked past endurance. That’s not a defense of slavery; it’s Reisman weaponizing the grotesque clarity of property rights to argue that socialism dissolves accountability. If no one owns the “asset,” no one has a direct, personal incentive to preserve it.

The subtext is pure political economy: incentives, not intentions, govern outcomes. Reisman is aiming at the classic socialist promise that eliminating private ownership liberates the worker. He counters with a darker claim: remove ownership and you don’t remove domination, you just spread it into bureaucracy, norms, and coercive policy. You get “slaves” without a single identifiable master - which, in his telling, makes the system harder to indict and easier to perpetuate.

Context matters. Reisman writes from a pro-capitalist, Austrian-influenced tradition that treats private property as the essential scaffold for rational calculation and responsibility. The quote is also a rhetorical landmine: by invoking slavery, he forces the reader into an uncomfortable comparison that can feel morally indecent. That discomfort is part of the intent. It dares critics to argue about semantics while he keeps the spotlight on his central charge: socialism socializes not just resources, but blame.