"It may come as a surprise to discover that throughout most of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, leading bourgeois philosophers and economists understood and openly stated, as did John Locke in 1690 that “government was created for the protection of property,” and Adam Smith in 1776 that civil authority “is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”"
Michael Parenti

January 1, 1970