La Liberté de presse: prérequis pour une société libre

Extrait de la Mentalité anticapitaliste de Ludwig Von Mises (1954):

Unlicensed printing is the lifeblood of literature.

A free press can exist only where there is private control of the means of production. In a socialist commonwealth, where all publication facilities and printing presses are owned and operated by the government, there cannot be any question of a free press. The government alone determines who should have the time and opportunity to write and what should be printed and published. Compared with the conditions prevailing in Soviet Russia, even Tsarist Russia, retrospectively, looks like a country of a free press. When the Nazis performed their notorious book auto-da-fes, they exactly conformed to the designs of one of the great socialist authors, Cabet.[1]