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… is from page 103 of Leonard Read [2]’s 1975 book [3], The Love of Liberty [4]:
Property – access to valuable resources – is simply a tool to help satisfy human desires. As long as the ownership and use of property is determined and guided by the market forces of open competition, everyone has access to these valuable resources in proportion to his own productive effort. Private ownership means personal control over the tools of production and, thus, personal control over one’s life. But when government owns and controls the property and thereby denies the functioning of the market, then government controls lives.