 "No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent."
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln, October 16, 1854, title page of Book IV of Nancy Kress's "Beggars in Spain"
"I would not wish death upon Paul Krugman or Nancy Pelosi. However, if I outlive either of them and one day read their obituary, that particular day will almost certainly be a bit happier and more enjoyable than it otherwise would be. If that makes me a bad human being, so be it."
Jim Henshaw
Reason.com , "David Weigel Resigns From the Washington Post", 6.26.10 @ 9:29PM
You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealth out of prosperity.
anonymous
(email from a friend)
One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary.
Ayn Rand
Voice of Reason
A gaffe in Washington is when someone inadvertently blurts out the truth.
Arnaud de Borchgrave
Washington Times
Rather than fight the same tired battles that have dominated Washington for decades, it’s time to try something new. Let’s invest in our people without leaving them a mountain of debt. Let’s meet our responsibility to the citizens who sent us here. Let’s try common sense.
President Barack Obama
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/
....today there is little economic freedom in America. And almost from our first day as a Nation, there was little monetary freedom; now, there is none.
Henry Mark Holzer
Gold and Monetary Reform
"Also invariably critics on the left accuse libertarians of being "selfish" and "greedy" and being for rich people and against ordinary people. This charge is so far off the mark and beside the point it is almost impossible to respond to. It’s like accusing a computer of being short. It has nothing to do with what a computer is."
Doug Carkuff
"Neither Left Nor Right" at LewRockwell.com
"I maintain, however, that the effectiveness of government versus that of private arrangements to produce goods and services is irrelevant to the issue of the desirability of government in a libertarian society. Governments are not created to produce goods and services for citizens. Rather, they are created and imposed on people by force, most often for the purpose of transferring resources from the control of those outside government to the control of those within it. Without government—or even with a weak government—predatory groups will impose themselves on people by force and create a government to extract income and wealth from these subjects."
Randall G. Holcombe
Government: Unnecessary but Inevitable
"[Slavery consists of being] "subject to the incessant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man. "
John Locke
Second Treatise of Civil Government
"The seminal error is to insist on exceptions to the principle that government – assuming, of course, that one should be permitted to exist – must be strictly limited to protecting the life, liberty, and property of every individual."
William Norman Grigg
the blog Pro Libertate
"Every invasion of individual rights happens with the eager support of people acting in the sincere and thoroughly mistaken confidence that what they permit the state to do to others will never be done to them."
William Norman Grigg
author of the blog Pro Libertate
Government exists to secure our rights, not to make us morally good, whether as this is understood by modern liberals or by modern conservatives.
Tibor R. Machan
Anti-Libertarian Point Refuted
"I've long had a theory that most people don't find libertarianism so much as it happens to them. They find themselves on the receiving end of some sort of government incompetence or abuse, or they know someone who is, and it starts them on the road to a generally more skeptical view of state power."
Radley Balko
Reason.com "I used to be somebody that trusted the government. Now I really don’t trust anything."
"Minarchists such as [Tibor Machan] are libertarians with regard to all goods and services except those they arbitrarily label as “governmental.” Regarding those, they are socialists pure and simple, conceptually indistinguishable from their fellow socialists, in this one arena."
Walter Block
Anarchism and Minarchism; No Rapprochement Possible: Reply to Tibor Machan
Few combinations are more poisonous than race and politics. That combination has torn whole nations apart and led to the slaughters of millions in countries around the world.
Thomas Sowell
Race and Politics: Part I
A terrible thing happened to America on Sunday, March 21, 2010. The country took its biggest step ever down a road diametrically opposed to its original intent of keeping the state small so that the individual can be free and great.
Dennis Prager
It's a Civil War: What We Do Now
If you're one of those who have spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically-elected governments into submission, then hear this: We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work. And we be many, but you be few.
GREENPEACE Climate Rescue Weblog
http://weblog.greenpeace.org/climate/2010/04/will_the_real_climategate_plea_1.html
We honored the vows of our founders who in the Declaration of Independence talked about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We believe the legislation that we have gives all people in our country the liberty to have healthier lives.
Nancy Pelosi
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/health/policy/23health.html?src=me
"[Bypassing the filibuster via reconciliation] would change the character of the Senate forever ... you would essentially have still two chambers, the House and the Senate, but you have simply majoritarian, absolute power on either side, and that's just not what the Founders intended."
Barack Hussein Obama
Investors.com via RealClearPolitics.com about an Obama quote from 4-25-2005
The palpable whiff given off by the White House inner circle is that they're the last people on the planet still besotted by Barack Obama, and that they're having such a cool time starring in their own reality-show remake of "The West Wing," they can only conceive of the public — and indeed the world — as crowd-scene extras in "The Barack Obama Show."
Mark Steyn
If 'Unsustainable' Is New Normal, Collapse Is Closer Than We Think
There is a simple way to get corporate money out of politics: get the government out of our lives and economic affairs. If government has no favors to sell, no one will spend money trying to win them.
John Stossel
http://www.theatlasphere.com/columns/100126-stossel-free-speech.php
The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed, is that of attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood.
Thomas Paine
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&ref=nf&gid=264168131106#/group.php?v=info&ref=nf&gid=264168131106
What's the difference between 'weather' and 'climate'? Climate is when it's warming and weather is when it's not.
James Delingpole
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100021337/q-whats-the-difference-between-weather-and-climate/
"I don't know if there is a senator that doesn't have something in this bill that was important to them," he said Monday about what's become known as "cash for cloture." "And if they don't have something in it important to them, then it doesn't speak well of them."
Harry Reid
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/chi-1224edit1dec24,0,3305796.story
Society is no more a God or a master than it is a family. It is a panoply of opportunities for rewarding exchanges with other self-owning individuals in pursuit of our own happines.
David Kelley
Life: Your Adventure in Entrepreneurship
In a much quoted passage in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country....” Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic “what your country can do for you” implies that the government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, “what you can do for your country” implies that the government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary. To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them... [H]e regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served. The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather “What can I and my compatriots do through government” to . . . advance our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom? And he will accompany this question with another: How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect?
Milton Friedman
Capitalism and Freedom
The ultimate constraint that we all face is knowledge — what we know and don't know. ... Neither you nor the U.S. Congress has the complete knowledge to know exactly what's best for you. ... There is only one reason for the forcible transference of decision-making authority over important areas of our private lives to elite decision-makers in Congress and government bureaucracies. Doing so confers control, power, wealth and revenue to society's elite.
Walter Williams
The Pretense of Knowledge
I know what I'll be thankful for this Thanksgiving. I'll be thankful for Climategate.
Robert Tracinski
TIA Daily, 25 Nov 09
Instead of throwing telethons for paternalistic megalomania, we throw elections.
Fred Bartlett
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/GeneralForum/1527.shtml#10
Today, there is a name for the political doctrine that rejoices in scarcity of everything except government. The name is environmentalism.
George Will
Oil's Expanding Frontiers
When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.
Will Durant
You say, "Come on, Williams, there will never be the kind of socialist oppression seen elsewhere here!" You might be right because Americans have become very compliant with unconstitutional and immoral congressional edicts. But what do you think would happen if some Americans began to rise up and heed Thomas Jefferson's admonition "Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force." and decided to disobey unconstitutional congressional edicts?
Walter E. Williams
For the first time in their lives, millions of Americans are coming to understand the left. It is difficult to overstate how important this is. For decades, the left has largely controlled the news media, the arts, the universities and the entertainment media. And vast numbers of Americans have imbibed these leftist messages and the leftist critiques of conservatives. What these Americans have never been able to do is to see what the left would actually do if in power.
Dennis Prager
Enacting California on the National Stage
Obama is not a president. He just plays one on TV.
Ted Keer
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/Quotes/1558.shtml#4
No government ever reduces itself in size. So government programs once launched never disappear. Actually a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this Earth
Ronald Reagan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt1fYSAChxs
"We simply disagree that he has done nothing, He got the prize for what he has done."
Thorbjoern Jagland
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091013/ap_on_re_eu/eu_nobel_peace_obama
Peace is not more important than justice, and until those who desire peace realize that, there will be no world peace. Peace without Justice is nothing more than a well run prison camp, it is only to the extent which individuals and nations reward the just and punish the unjust that they are peaceful.
Michael F Dickey
But who made your life complicated? You did, of course. It wasn't society, the economic system, the people you consider to be nuisances, your parents, or anyone else. Every complication in your life today is the result of something you've allowed to happen. You initiated it, or you consented to it, or you've allowed it to continue. You are where you are today because you've chosen to be there. And you can choose not to be there.
Harry Browne
How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World
If you are confused by the first nine months of the Obama administration, take solace that there is at least a pattern. The president, you see, thinks America is a university and that he is our campus president. Keep that in mind, and almost everything else makes sense.
Victor Davis Hanson
National Review
Six months ago, Obama's approval rating was 70 percent. Does Carter think that number has sunk to 50 percent because tens of millions of Americans suddenly discovered Obama was black? ... The destructiveness of what Carter has done is hard to exaggerate. ...if we don't have a black president after 2012, much credit should go to the mean little peanut farmer from Plains.
Patrick J. Buchanan
Race and Stupidity
Since nature does not guarantee automatic security, success and survival to any human being, it is only the dictatorial presumptuousness and the moral cannibalism of the altruist-collectivist code that permits a man to suppose (or idly to daydream) that he can somehow guarantee such security to some men at the expense of others.
Ayn Rand
VOS "Collectivized Ethics," p.104
Our objections to the Democrats’ health care proposals are not mere “bickering” or “games.” They are not an attempt to “score short term political points.” And it’s hard to listen to the President lecture us not to use “scare tactics” when in the next breath he says that “more will die” if his proposals do not pass.
Sarah Palin
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/note.php?note_id=131081638434&ref=nf
You lie.
South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson
Outburst at President Obama's Health Care Address to Congress
Critics say that greed is the driving force of capitalism. My answer is that envy is the driving force of socialism.
Svetlana Kunin
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=336952385266203
Any self-respecting schoolkid, enjoined by his principal to be a "servant" to the head of state, would reply, "Get lost, creep." And, if they still taught history in American schools, he'd add, "Oh, and by the way, that question was settled in 1776."
Mark Steyn
Obama 'Outreach' To School Kids Feels More Like Personality Cult
Can you imagine the press running an article in 1939 saying that Hitler, speaking from Moscow, approves of FDR's decision not to allow increased immigration of Jews from Europe and hopes that FDR keeps his promise to turn back refugees? Without comment. With a straight face?
Ted Keer
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/NewsDiscussions/2549.shtml#0
There are things you can do to be free, and if you turn your attention to those things, no one will stand in your way. But when you become preoccupied with those who are blocking you, you overlook the many alternatives you could use to bypass them.
Harry Browne
How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World
The fundamental issue here is not the proper role of government; it is the proper concept of rights.
William Dwyer
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/NewsDiscussions/2540.shtml#4
Having aggressively, even promiscuously, blurred the distinction between public and private sectors with improvised and largely unauthorized interventions in the economy, will [President Obama and other statists] ever countenance a retreat of the state? Or do they have an aspiration that they dare not speak?
George Will
Will Obama's Statism Ever Retreat?
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