 It's not that the market failed; it's that the rules under which the system operated generated perverse outcomes that were translated through market mechanisms.
Peter Boettke
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/11/boettke_on_elin.html
...if America today could operate fully secure from a national security standpoint with today's defense spending ratio (about 5% of national income...) and without social [spending], then today's federal government total spending would be but 10% of the economy's national income instead of 150% higher at 26% of the economy. That would amount to federal spending of about $1.1 trillion, instead of today's spending total of $2.8 Trillion, a cut of $1.7 trillion equivalent to $5,686 per man, woman and child.
Michael Hodges
Grandfather Economic Report series
On the 233rd day of his presidency, Barack Obama grabbed the country's lapels for the 263rd time—that was, as of last Wednesday, the count of his speeches, press conferences, town halls, interviews, and other public remarks. His speech to Congress was the 122nd time he had publicly discussed health care. Just 14 hours would pass before the 123rd, on Thursday morning. His incessant talking cannot combat what it has caused: An increasing number of Americans do not believe that he believes what he says.
George Will
Why No One Believes Obama
It is morally acceptable to allow one's neighbors to die because they cannot afford medical care, and it is morally acceptable to allow one's neighbors to go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for as long as you like. Health care is NOT and should NOT be a right or an entitlement!
Luke Setzer
Facebook Wall
"We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that -- if you quit on school -- you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country." . . . If the adults won’t listen, go after the kids. Can you think of a better way to inculcate the character of totalitarian servitude and obeisance in children than this speech?
Edward Cline
Barack Obama: Seducer of the Young
The problems of our economy have occurred not as an outgrowth of laissez-faire, unbridled competition. They have occurred under the guidance of federal agencies, and under the umbrella of federal regulations.
Ted Kennedy
http://blog.american.com/?p=4328
Are you happy to see the state to which we've fallen - pressure group pitted against pressure group, old against young, citizen against citizen all fighting to grab a share of the swelling portion of our national income funneled through the hands of Congress?
Bill Frezza
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2009/08/24/what_is_the_foundation_of_your_economic_beliefs_97371.html
Let me get this straight. Turn in a running vehicle that people can afford, to buy a brand new vehicle that they can't afford and accumulate more debt. Then destroy the running vehicle, rather than resell it to someone who can afford it. O, by the way, let's subsidize this by the taxpayer that is unemployed. I am so glad we have common sense in Congress. Not!"
Unknown Author
Reader at Marketwatch.com
Democrats treat judicial nominations like war -- while Republicans keep being gracious, hoping Democrats will learn by example.
Ann Coulter
Will the Defendant Please Rise?
I'm a natural scientist. I'm out there every day, buried up to my neck in shit, collecting raw data. And that's why I'm so sceptical of these models, which have nothing to do with science or empiricism but are about torturing the data till it finally confesses.
Ian Plimer
On Global Warming, The Spectator
In theory, this ought to be boom time for lefties. As their jobs, homes and savings vanish, the downtrodden masses should be stampeding back to the embrace of the Big Government nanny’s apron strings. Instead, the Euro-left got hammered at the polls, the center-right survived, and a significant chunk of the electorate switched to the “far right” – the various neo-nationalist and quasi-fascist parties cleaning up everywhere from Northern England to the Balkans. My favorite of these new and mostly unlovely groupings is Bulgaria’s Attack party, mainly because of its name. I would suggest the Republican Party adopt it, but no doubt within a month or two the latest Bush scion would be claiming to stand for a Compassionate Attack movement, and governors of coastal states would be declaring themselves fiscally attacking but socially surrendering, and the whole brand would go to hell.
Mark Steyn
The New Right, er, Left
They are the biggest of the big — the Citigroups, the Goldman Sachses, the AIGs and other financial behemoths. The Obama administration doesn't want so many around anymore.
The Associated Press
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31711461/ns/business-stocks_and_economy
And any scum-sucking scoundrel who points out that "doing nothing" already includes spending billions on renewable energies and living under thousands of regulations is, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman shrewdly noted, a traitor to humankind.
David Harsanyi
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/07/01/lets_do_something_--_anything_97252.html
We must spend now as an investment for the future.
President Obama
You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again.
Ben Bernanke, in a speech on Milton Friedman's 90th birthday acknowledging the Fed's role in deepening the Great Depression, Nov. 8, 2002
Business Week, April 27, 2009
The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests or the strong prejudices which may oppose it: he seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board; he does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.
Adam Smith
The Theory of Moral Sentiments VI,II,2
Suddenly the focus of the morality has shifted from simply helping other people to sacrificing in order to do it. You're judged as virtuous if you sacrifice a lot for the cause. In fact, how moral the act is gets measured by how much you benefit or sacrifice for it. If you benefit, it lowers how moral it was. If you sacrifice for it, it increases the virtue of the act by showing how dedicated you are to helping other people.
Joseph Rowlands
http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Rowlands/Is_Altruism_Really_About_Self-Sacrifice.shtml
"If it's really a charitable contribution, I'm assuming [the tax savings] shouldn't be the determining factor of whether you're giving to the homeless shelter down the street." The change in the deduction rate, he added, "is not going to cripple" wealthy taxpayers.
Barack H. Obama
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/03/24/live_blogging_obamas_press_con.html
...prosperity foregone is invisible. In other words, we can never tell how much richer we would have been without today's level of congressional interference in our lives...
Walter E. Williams
http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2009/03/18/prosperity_lost
Will capitalism be any different?
Charlie Rose
Charlie Rose interview of Timothy Geithner
The idea that capitalism -- in the 'unknown ideal' sense of which Rand spoke -- lends itself to pull-peddling and corporate welfare, is pure, and total, nostrum. This myth needs to be exploded, if ever folks are to gain a correct and productive idea of the inherent benevolence of capitalism. The conflation of centralized initiation of force ("subsidies," "regulations," and bailouts for bad investments) with capitalism is the pivotal issue at hand. This wrong-headed view must be countered by correct epistemology and ethics. It must not continue to infect the minds of the masses.
Edward D. Thompson
http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Thompson/What_Were_Up_Against_Critique_of_a_Contemporary_College_Text.shtml
"After Obama's election, I felt as close to hopelessness about this country's future as I've ever felt. But now I see a possible ray of hope. It may be that Republicans -- since at this point they have nothing to lose, and in the face of the disaster to which Obama is leading us -- will finally return to to the principles that once animated their party, and particularly to the defense of capitalism. And it might even happen that the controls Obama will establish, with their concomitant impoverishment of the country, will awaken the American voter to the fact that freedom is to his best interest, not entitlements and Big Brother. If both those things were to happen, then the long agony that faces us will have been worthwhile."
Barbara Branden
Using long, drawn-out processes to put money into circulation to meet an emergency is like mailing a letter to the fire department to tell them that your house is on fire.
Thomas Sowell
http://www.theatlasphere.com/columns/090130-sowell-government-spending.php
The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.
Margaret Thatcher
"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation."
Dr. Adrian Rogers
We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work ... After eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... And an enormous debt to boot!
Henry Morgenthau
Treasury Secretary under FDR, after 2 terms of FDR's "New Deal". Quote originally posted on DrHurd.com.
"If there were no losses, there would be no premiums."
Thomas Caldecott Chubb
Chubb & Son (1957)
We have gone from a market economy to a political economy
Irwin Stelzer
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/11/the_washington_stock_market.html
There is only one genuine protection for the public: the discipline of profit and loss. Nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of bankruptcy.
John Stossel
http://www.theatlasphere.com/columns/081128-stossel-reregulation.php
They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq .... Why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it has worked for over 200 years, and we're not using it anymore.
Bent Nail
Comment by a Marketwatch reader
The continued existence of society depends upon private property.
Ludwig von Mises
Liberalism p. 87
A man that represents not simply an opposing view but the view of those who oppose America and all it stands for, will sit in the Oval Office. Worse still he did not get there through a democratic election but through fraud, voter intimidation and every dirty trick culminating in a campaign that had little in common with conventional American politics and a great deal in common with the cults of personality cultivated by totalitarian dictators.
Pamela Geller
Atlas Shrugs blog, upon election of Obama in 2008
Governor Palin and I don’t agree on a lot of things, mostly social issues. But I have grown to appreciate the Governor. I was one of those initial skeptics and would laugh at the pictures. Not anymore. When someone takes on a corrupt political machine and a sitting governor, that is not done by someone with a low I.Q. or a moral core made of tissue paper. When someone fights her way to get scholarships and work her way through college even in a jagged line, that shows determination and humility you can’t learn from reading Reinhold Niebuhr. When a mother brings her son with special needs onto the national stage with love, honesty, and pride, that gives hope to families like mine as my older brother lives with a mental disability. And when someone can sit on a stage during the Sarah Palin rap on Saturday Night Live, put her hands in the air and watch someone in a moose costume get shot—that’s a sign of both humor and humanity.
Wendy Button, speechwriter until recently for Obama, Edwards, and Clinton, on why she’s voting McCain
The Daily Beast
John McCain and Sarah Palin they call this socialistic. You know I don’t know when, when they decided they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness.
Barack H. Obama
Barack H. Obama, Obama's New Attack on Those Who Don't Want Higher Taxes: ‘Selfishness’
There is no truth on earth that I fear to be known.
Thomas Jefferson
Frank Herbert, The White Plague
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
H. L. Mencken
Europeans call it socialism, Americans call it welfare, and Barack Obama calls it change.
McCain Campaign today, on Obama’s Plan for Redistribution of Wealth
Poster on TexasDarlin blog
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
Abraham Lincoln
And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you—not financially to help him—we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right. … There are gonna be a lot of you who want to go, “Whoa, wait a minute, yo, whoa, whoa, I don’t know about that decision.” Because if you think the decision is sound when they’re made, which I believe you will when they’re made, they’re not likely to be as popular as they are sound. Because if they’re popular, they’re probably not sound.
Sen. Joe Biden
ABC News’ Matthew Jaffe
When I’m president, I won’t meet unconditionally with the Castro brothers. The day is coming when Cuba will be free!
Senator John McCain, R-Arizona
Today, at Florida International University
War is the default natural state of man, whether vendetta or inter-tribal. This state of nature can also be called anarchy, a fact which so-called anarcho-capitalists evade. Political freedom exists only within a polity, and a polity arises only through effort. The polity must establish its sovereign autonomy and must maintain it, by war, when necessary. Only historically ignorant or spoiled children born in the modern West have had the luck to evade this truth. Wars of conquest, like that of England against Ireland, are evil and to be avoided. War itself is a necessity of every free man's existence.
Ted Keer
http://www.solopassion.com/node/1671
OCTOBER: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The other are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.
Mark Twain
POVERTY is attracted to the one whose mind is favorable to it, as money is attracted to the one whose mind has been deliberately prepared to attract it, and through the same laws. POVERTY CONSCIOUSNESS WILL VOLUNTARILY SEIZE THE MIND WHICH IS NOT OCCUPIED WITH MONEY CONSCIOUSNESS.
Napoleon Hill
Think and grow rich
The [$700 Billion Buyout] votes have been tallied. 228 NAY. 205 YEA. The Crap Sandwich goes down in flames.
Michelle Malkin
http://michellemalkin.com/
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world
David Harrison Levi
Entertainment Worldwide
Crisis is the friend of the State.
John Stossel
http://www.creators.com/opinion/john-stossel.html
Despite corrections in the marketplace and instances of abuse, democratic capitalism is the best system ever devised. It has unleashed the talents and the productivity, and entrepreneurial spirit of our citizens. It has made this country the best place in the world to invest and do business. And it gives our economy the flexibility and resilience to absorb shocks, adjust, and bounce back.
George W. Bush
President's Address to the Nation, 24 Sep 2008
Ever heard Hollywood liberals talk about suspected jihadists the way they talk of suspected GOP book banners?
Michelle Malkin
NY Post, 9/17/2008
There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.
William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar
We laugh at the buffoon Chavez but at least he nationalizes the profitable enterprises.
Steve Wolfer
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/NewsDiscussions/2140.shtml#4
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