Who Said It?

1. "Every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require."

2. "All rights are derived from the purposes of the society in which they exist."

3. "True individual freedom can't exist without economic security...the right to a useful and remunerative job...a decent home...good health...and a good education."

4. "In a country where the sole employer is the state, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle, 'Who does not work shall not eat,' has been replaced by a new one: 'Who does not obey shall not eat.'"

5. "Property doesn't have rights, and people don't either."

6. "The fundamental principle of Socialism, which would make all possessions public property, is to be utterly rejected because it injures the very ones whom it seeks to help."

7. "The Soviet growth rate generally exceeded that of the United States in the post-World War II period as a whole."

8. "In 1989, per capita income was higher in East Germany than in West Germany."

9. "In 1980, East Germany's GDP per capita was higher than Japan's."

10. "A constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State, or of laissez faire."

Answers:

1. President Theodore Roosevelt, 1910.

2. Justice Louis Brandeis of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1921.

3. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's State of the Union Address, 1944.

4. Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Russian October 1917 Communist Revolution.

5. Nadine Strossen of the NYU School of Law and the ACLU, 1993, pointing out that if people don't have property rights, they don't have any rights.

6. Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum, 1891.

7. America's best-selling economics textbook, 1987.

8. The Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1989.

9. The Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1989.

10. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1905 Lochner case, where he wrote a dissenting opinion that property rights -- a mere "economic theory" -- were not protected by the Constitution.

Source: The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Throughout the Ages, by Tom Bethell