In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek quoted Trotsky thusly: “Where the sole employer is the State, opposition means deaths by slow starvation.”  Libertarians have repeated this line ever since, often without realizing that the source is Trotsky, not Hayek.  It wasn’t until today that I checked the context of the quote.  Here is it, straight out of The Revolution Betrayed:

During these years hundreds of Oppositionists, both Russian and
foreign, have been shot, or have died of hunger strikes, or have
resorted to suicide. Within the last twelve years, the authorities have
scores of times announced to the world the final rooting out of the
opposition. But during the “purgations” in the last month of 1935 and
the first half of 1936, hundreds of thousands of members of the party
were again expelled, among them several tens of thousands of
“Trotskyists.” The most active were immediately arrested and thrown
into prisons and concentration camps. As to the rest, Stalin, through Pravda,
openly advised the local organs not to give them work. In a country
where the sole employer is the state, this means death by slow
starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has
been replaced with a new one: who does not obey shall not eat. Exactly
how many Bolsheviks have been expelled, arrested, exiled, exterminated,
since 1923, when the era of Bonapartism opened, we shall find out when
we go through the archives of Stalin’s political police. How many of
them remain in the underground will become known when the shipwreck of
the bureaucracy begins.

Worth noticing: While Trotsky meant what libertarians think he meant, the man’s sheer evil still shines through.  He doesn’t mind if the socialist state starves human beings.  He was delighted to wield this power when ran the Red Army.  No, Trotsky is outraged because the Soviet Union is turning its totalitarian might upon fellow Communists.  Was there ever a better time to snark that “Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword”?