"I believe [William Graham Sumner] was one of the greatest professor we
ever had at Yale, but I have drawn far away from his point of view, that
of the old laissez faire doctrine. I remember he said in his classroom:
'Gentlemen, the time is coming when there will be two great classes,
Socialists, and Anarchists. The Anarchists want the government to be
nothing, and the Socialists want government to be everything. There can
be no greater contrast. Well, the time will come when there will be only
these two great parties, the Anarchists representing the laissez faire
doctrine and the Socialists representing the extreme view on the other
side, and when that time comes I am an Anarchist.' That amused his class
very much, for he was as far from a revolutionary as you could expect."
-- Irving Fisher before the Yale Socialist Club in 1941, quoted in Mark
Thorton, The Economics of Prohibition (University of Utah Press, 1991),
p. 17. See below, in the Anti-liberty section, for Fisher's comment.