Benjamin Tucker - The Four Monopolies

The Four Monopolies

Tucker argued that the poor condition of American workers resulted from four legal monopolies based in authority:

1. the money monopoly
2. the land monopoly
3. tariffs
4. patents

His focus, for several decades, became the state's economic control of how trade could take place, and what currency counted as legitimate. He saw interest and profit as a form of exploitation, made possible by the banking monopoly, which was in turn maintained through coercion and invasion. Tucker called any such interest and profit "usury" and he saw it as the basis of the oppression of the workers. In his words,

"interest is theft, Rent Robbery, and Profit Only Another Name for Plunder."

Tucker believed that usury was immoral; however, he upheld the right of all people to engage in immoral contracts.

"Liberty, therefore, must defend the right of individuals to make contracts involving usury, rum, marriage, prostitution, and many other things which are believed to be wrong in principle and opposed to human well-being. The right to do wrong involves the essence of all rights."

He asserted that anarchism is meaningless

"unless it includes the liberty of the individual to control his product or whatever his product has brought him through exchange in a free market—that is, private property."