We hold from God the gift which includes all others.  This gift is life—physical, intellectual, and moral life.

     But life cannot maintain itself alone.  The Creator of all life has entrusted us with the responsibility of preserving, developing, and perfecting it.  In order that we may accomplish this, He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties.  And He has put us in the midst of a variety of natural resources.  By the application of our facilities to these natural resources we convert them into products, and use them.  This process is necessary in order that life may run its course.

     Life, faculties, production—in other words, individuality, liberty, property—this is man.  And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it.

     Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

     What, then, is the law?  It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.

     Each of us has a natural right—from God—to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.  These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two.  For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties?

     If every person has the right to defend—even but force—his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly….

     It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder….

     As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose—that it may violate property instead of protecting it—then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder…. But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong, See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.