Because to give up their monopoly would be to give up their control of those great armies of servants--the wage laborers--from whom all their wealth is derived, and whom they can now coerce by the alternative of starvation, to labor for…
Lysander Spooner
The Public Record
Lysander Spooner was an American abolitionist, entrepreneur, lawyer, essayist, natural rights legal theorist, pamphleteer, political philosopher, and writer often associated with the Boston anarchist tradition.
gutenberg.org
They will hold on to it as long as they own and control governments as they do now.
But will the monopolists of money give up their monopoly?
They will also be able to hire their capital at very low rates of interest; and will then put into their own pockets all the proceeds of their labor, except what they pay as interest on their capital.
The real producers of wealth, with few or no exceptions, will then be able to hire all the capital they need for their industries, and will do business for themselves.
This they can do, by simply abolishing the monopoly of money.
That is to say, they have it in their power, not only to elevate immensely the condition of the laboring classes in this country, but also to set an example that will be very rapidly followed in all other countries; and the result will be…
Hundreds of millions of them are receiving, for their labor, not more than three, five, or, at most, ten cents a day.
It is, then, by the monopoly of land, and the monopoly of money, that more than a thousand millions of the earth's inhabitants--as savages, barbarians, and wage laborers--are kept in a state of destitution, or on the verge of destitution.
But in those portions of Europe and the United States, where manufactures have been most extensively introduced, and where, by science and machinery, great wealth has been created, the laborers have been kept in the condition of wage…
Much the larger portion of these have been reduced to the condition of wage laborers, by the monopoly of land, which mere bands of robbers have succeeded in securing for themselves by military power.
The laborers, who are paupers, or on the verge of pauperism--who are destitute, or on the verge of destitution--comprise (with their families) doubtless nine-tenths, probably nineteen-twentieths, of all the people on the globe.