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… is from page 256 of the great Harvard historian Richard Pipes’s 1999 volume, Property and Freedom [2]; this passage occurs immediately following Pipes’s explanation of how the modern state diminishes liberty and prosperity through its vast “takings” of private property (emphasis added):
But, paradoxically, a case can be made that liberty in the modern welfare state is also jeopardized by “givings,” that is, by the dependence created when individuals, business enterprises, and educational institutions come to rely heavily or even exclusively on government subsidies, contracts, and other favors which, for all the benefits they may bring, are not property in the true sense. For if freedom means independence, dependence spells its opposite.