"I've often said that bureaucrats and politicians have an extremely limited playbook consisting of taxation, regulation, and inflation. These three ugly sisters of bureaucracy effectively serve to steal from people, make things more difficult for them, and rob them of their purchasing power... and yet they're dressed up as solutions instead of problems."
Simon Black
“Governments and their intellectual front men believe that nothing unites a population like a war. Actually, that's not quite true. What happens is that during war, governments strike fear into their domestic opponents and silence them through intimidation. The appearance of unity is wholly illusory.”
Lew Rockwell
“True liberty isn’t the result of good government conquering evil by force. Freedom is not a grant of the state and to treat it as such by subjugating ourselves to the state is a logical absurdity. Indeed, a free society first requires a free people to build, sustain, and defend it against the state’s inherent lust for power.”
Michael Roberts
“Everyone knows that in the United States if you’re a robber caught breaking into someone’s house, you’ll be brought to trial, but if you’re caught breaking into someone else’s country, you’ll be free to take to the lecture circuit, write your memoirs, or become a university professor.”
Tom Engelhardt
“The state depends for its existence, and that of its economic system, on tractable, 'civic-minded' subjects, pietistic sheep who will accept without thought “the way things are.” That the state has dominated society so completely and for so long leads most to believe that it ought to exist, that it has won out on the practicality and strength of what it does for us.
Nothing, however, can be accomplished through arbitrary force and compulsion that cannot be achieved through voluntary agreement, trade and cooperation. The important difference between a market anarchist society set free from the state and society as it is today is in the initiation of aggression against the peaceful person.”
David D'Amato
“Money Power depends on the myth of infallibility buttressed by an overwhelming sense of fear. In the 20th century, this worked well. The entire mechanism of global government was put in place and people didn't object. In fact, many welcomed it. But today is another story. With the failure of its many memes (thanks in part to the Internet Reformation in my view), the power elite turned to increasingly to violence – as they always do. But what if violence doesn't work either? What then?”
Anthony Wile
“All talk about 'spaceship earth' is specious and politically motivated. It invokes a military-bureaucratic metaphor -- a spaceship -- to describe the decentralized decision-making of men and the unplanned operations of nature.”
Gary North
“Royals, historically, are basically no more than successful thugs – people with no distinction other than being exceptionally ruthless and effective at seizing power and subduing others with it. The first king in the world was probably an unusually crafty leader of a particularly strong band of thieves who attacked and subdued a more peaceful tribe of early farmers. Instead of just killing the men and children and enslaving the women, he offered them a deal: ‘You give me and my men the best huts, the prettiest girls, and feed us, and we’ll let you all live and keep farming – we’ll even defend you against other thugs like us, if each family gives us a son to train as fighters.’”
Doug Casey
“My four years at Virginia Military Institute (VMI) and, to a lesser extent, my 8 years in the Army Reserves, taught me that I never want to live in an environment in which military officials take care of me, watch every move I make, regulate my every act, and tightly control my behavior. It was a great lesson in learning to despise socialist systems and to love free societies.”
Jacob Hornberger
“To slip so easily from moral obligation to political policy is a dangerous game. In the name of enforcing Christian obligation, you can inadvertently create a nation of thieves and robbers, or those who benefit from thieving and robbery. This is what happens when you ignore the distinction between invasion and invitation.”
Jeffrey Tucker
"Militarists see war as productive, as offering solutions rather than posing problems. They see it as heroic. When wars are romanticized as action-packed tests of a nation’s warriors, cuts to war spending are naturally seen as perfidiously unpatriotic -- as kneecapping those same heroes. Hence our ever-growing ‘defense’ budgets, even as a sledgehammer of a national debt hobbles America’s economic vitality and social security."
William J. Astore
*************************************************************************
From the Darkness:
“We may not be there yet, but we are getting very close, so if you really care about protecting the Syrian people from slaughter, now is the time to let Assad know that all options are on the table. It has gotten to the point where Gadhafi’s behavior and Assad’s behavior are indistinguishable. You need to put on the table all options, including a model like we have in Libya.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, looking to start still another war"The Texas legislation is designed to showcase the state's independence. But what it really shows off is how some politicians in the Lone Star State will do anything to score political points -- even if it means echoing misinformation and wasting time and money passing legislation that can't practically be implemented and isn't in the best interest of constituents."
Bob Keefe, senior press secretary with the Natural Resources Defense Council, objecting to a law passed by Texas state lawmakers that allows Texans to skirt federal efforts to promote poisonous, florescent light bulbs
“Furthermore, I will not apologize for suggesting once Iraq becomes prosperous, it should consider repaying the United States for the hundreds of billions of dollars spent to liberate them from a tyrannical dictator and helping to establish a democratic government. There’s nothing wrong with suggesting that the people who have benefited from our benevolence should consider repaying us for what we have given them.”
Dana Rohrabacher [To people like Rohrabacher, Shock & Awe and brutal occupation = “benevolence.”]
“The premise Mises pushes in ‘Human Action’ is that if humanity doesn't believe in and act upon the holy writ as laid down by the Austrian school, civilization is doomed. Mull that one over for a second, while the wind rustles through the coconut palms and the crash of the surf works its hypnotic magic on your soul. And pass me another margarita. The Austrians are coming.”
Andrew Leonard, Salon
"Bahrain is a partner, and a very important one, to the United States."
Queen Hillary, pledging a support for a regime that has killed scores of regime protestors since mid-February
"I know people are frustrated. The country has been at war for 10 years [in Afghanistan]. I know people are tired. People also have to think in terms of stability and in terms of the potential of (al-Qaida) reconstitution. What's the cost of failure?"
Robert Gates, showing the willingness to kill thousands more to preserve his legacy
"In the end, this isn't just about the stories, but about having the men and women and their families who serve our country feel the gratitude every day from a grateful nation. If we set this foundation, not just for today but for forever, regardless of whom the president is in office, that this is a part of who we are as Americans and lifting these families up ... then we've been successful."
Michelle Obama, pleading Hollywood to produce more pro-military, pro-war propaganda
“You see, when our armed forces are not firing missiles, they live by an astonishingly liberal ethos — and it works. The military helped lead the way in racial desegregation, and even today it does more to provide equal opportunity to working-class families — especially to blacks — than just about any social program. It has been an escalator of social mobility in American society because it invests in soldiers and gives them skills and opportunities.”
Nicholas D. Kristof, NY Times
“In my book ‘Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America,’ I make the case that liberals, and never conservatives, appeal to irrational mobs to attain power. There is, I now recall, one group of people who look like conservatives, but also appeal to the mob. They're called ‘libertarians.’”
Ann Coulter
“Most government lie to each other. That’s the way business gets done.”
Robert Gates
“I was a libertarian as a teenager, but I emerged from adolescence…”
Ann Coulter [….and submerged into statist barbarism.]
“Having taught management to future public managers for about thirty years, I don't pretend to be objective on the importance of government and public service. I believe that every American should be frightened by the profound and intensifying attack on government and public service.”
Steven Cohen, Huffington Post
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