Three from Belloc

“The idea that Capitalism arose of itself, and necessarily, from the mere institution of private property, is the fruit of bad history pressed into the service of bad philosophy.”

~ An Essay on the Restoration of Property, 40

 

“Had Capitalism not been present before the Industrial Revolution, that revolution might have proved as beneficent to Englishmen as it has proved maleficent.  But Capitalism — that is, the owenership by a few of the springs of life — was present long before the great discoveries came.  It warped the effect of these discoveries and new inventions, and it turned them from a good into an evil thing.  It was not machinery that lost us our freedom; it was the loss of a free mind.”

~ The Servile State, 53-54

 

“It has been found in practice, and the truth is witnessed to by the instincts in all of us, that such a widely distributed property as a condition of freedom is necessary to the normal satisfaction of human nature.  In its absence general culture ultimately fails and so certainly does citizenship.  The cells of the body politic are atrophied and the mass of men have not even, at last, an opinion of their own, but are moulded by the few who retain ownership of land and endowments and reserves.”

~ An Essay on the Restoration of Property, 27-28