Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 289, 290

The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.
Adam Smith

The Wealth Of Nations

Take away the energy-distributing networks and the
industrial machinery from America, Russia and all the world's
industrialized countries, and within six months more than 2 billion
swiftly and painfully deteriorating people will starve to death. Take away
all the world's politicians, all the ideologies and their professional
protagonists, from those same countries and send them of on a rocket
trip around the sun, and leave all the countries their present energy
networks, industrial machinery, routine production and distribution
personnel, and no more humans will starve or be afflicted in health than
at present.

R. Buckminster Fuller

note: Fuller wrote this before the growth of homelessness etc in the Northern/Western world. He advocated feeding, clothing, sheltering, and freeing everyone on the planet. --JS