Sunday, April 15, 2012

Quotes of the Week

From the Light:
“For those who don’t want to be under the threat of coercion, inherently anarchy works. For those who prefer peaceful means of relationships, anarchy works. For those who believe the initiation of force is wrong, again anarchy works. For such people, in fact it is the only form of structuring society that ‘works.’
For those who believe it is right that man lords over man, anarchy does not work. For such people, the state certainly works. For those who believe that the same act could be either legal or illegal, depending on the employer of the actor, the state works. For those who believe that force and coercion is the proper means by which to order society, the state works.”
From the blog, “bionic mosquito”

“Blaming capitalism for the world's economic ills is like blaming the guy who invented gunpowder for nuclear holocaust. Sure, you could make an argument that the two are loosely related, but the real blame lies with the system itself-- a system which awards perverse power and control to an elite few.”
Simon Black

“People talk about how it should be a ‘living document’ that evolves with the times. But those people almost always want to abolish what few limitations there are on the government. They want to change the actual working parts of the Constitution, the ones that define and shape the government, not the tedious pages with ‘Robert's Rules of Order’ type stuff governing how motions are passed in Congress and the like. Curiously, this trivia – about how the president of the Senate is elected and so forth – is the only part of the Constitution that the government still adheres to. It follows the trivia fastidiously but disregards the important parts that designate what the government may and may not do.”
Doug Casey

“The constitutionalism of Ron Paul (returning to its original interpretation) appears for him quite possibly to be a means to a greater goal, which is a libertarian society, which in this context implies wide social agreement on the concept of voluntary self-governments and tolerance of them. The quickest way to get there is by making as much of government as possible optional or voluntary. This means making secession at the personal level more and more of a reality. And even if it is difficult to see how this can happen, it is very important to keep it in view as a goal. This goal contrasts starkly with any spreading of government involuntaryism (or coercion) into more and more areas of life, here and across the world.”
Michael S. Rozeff

“The political class is not really running things. As I’ve written many times, the political class is only the veneer of the state; it is not the state itself. The state is the permanent bureaucratic structures, those untouched by elections. These institutions make up the real ruling apparatus of government.”
Jeffrey Tucker

“Economics is simple. Nearly the full extent of it can be taught in a near pamphlet, as has been done in Henry Hazlitt's ‘Economics in One Lesson.’ That is the full extent that any individual needs and should know about economics.
Those four to eight years in college to get a bachelor or PhD in Economics? Pure mental masturbation – at best.”
Jeff Berwick

“Austrian economics HAS taught me that if I want to live a more comfortable life in a more comfortable world, the only way this can be achieved is through the application of the golden rule by society as a whole. It is interesting that morality is not forced upon us by some great all powerful being, yet if we reject the golden rule, the natural laws of the universe will make our life a living hell. Conversely, if we were all to obey the golden rule, life on this Earth would approach a state of Nirvana.”
Michael Suede

"….No society can achieve any kind of justice based on the concept that some people have a "right" to coerce disfavored people for the benefit of favored people.
It simply creates a power struggle that is endless, pointless, futile, and destructive.”
Garry Reed

“The truth is, there’s really no need for a ‘Constitution’ to maintain peace and civility in a free society. Just follow the rule of law, by forbidding the initiation of physical aggression, forbidding theft and fraud, and forbidding trespass.
Assigning a monopoly power to an institution – government – in which the people are compelled by law to use, with threats of violence to enforce such a relationship, is immoral and criminal in nature, and violates the individual’s right to choose which services one wants to use.
In a free, civilized society, no one should be above the law, and no one has any legitimate authority over anyone else without voluntary consent.”
Scott Lazarowitz

“The true slave is not a person who has been shackled, beaten, tortured, and made to comply under threat of death. As long as that poor soul has the spirit of rebellion and is ever seeking freedom, they are not imprisoned fully. The true slave is a person who enjoys their subservience, who is weighted with fear by the very idea of independence from the system, and who would actually fight and die to maintain the establishment which enslaves them. The true slave is not able to imagine living any other life beyond his micro-managed existence.”
Brandon Smith

“ALL nations are born in divorce and secession from other imperial or dying nation-states. It is the natural ecology of governments around the world as they create unsustainable hothouses of dependency and oppression that inspire the orchids of liberty that briefly spawn. I say briefly because the fire of liberty and freedom is usually quickly extinguished by the weed of rot and tyranny we call modern government.”
Bill Buppert

“You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born free should be contented to be penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases.”
Chief Joseph Nez Perce
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From the Darkness:
“Some people worry that the real goal is to control populations. All these side issues have attached themselves to the core idea that men and women should be able to decide when to have a child. As a result, birth control has almost disappeared from the global health agenda.”
Melinda Gates, demonic authoritarian and eugenicist

“When you carry a gun, you mean to harm somebody, kill somebody. We’ve got to get the gun out of the hands of people who are supposed to be on neighborhood watch.”
Bill Cosby, commenting on the Trayvon Martin killing

“Unless the international community is equally committed to supporting the Syrian people and thwarting Assad, including by military means, the killing will go on and there will be no hope to a diplomatic end to the conflict.”
From a joint statement by Joe Lieberman and John McCain, looking to create some killing of their own

“I’ve met libertarians who say Dr. Martin Luther King, Dr. King, is somebody they can’t support because someone should have the right to exclude people in this country from being able to go into a restaurant, go into a hotel or go into a place of business solely based on the color of their skin. You can’t call yourself a patriot and adopt an extreme ideology that would spit in the face of Dr. King.”
Van Jones, former White House clown, making his monthly broadcast of ignorance

“An alternative is for diplomatic efforts to focus first on how to end the violence [in Syria] and how to gain humanitarian access, as is being done under Annan’s leadership. This may lead to the creation of safe-havens and humanitarian corridors, which would have to be backed by limited military power. This would, of course, fall short of U.S. goals for Syria and could preserve Asad in power. From that starting point, however, it is possible that a broad coalition with the appropriate international mandate could add further coercive action to its efforts.”
From a report, “Assessing Options for Regime Change” by the Brookings Institution, calling for military intervention in Syria

“The attackers want the Fed to slam on the brakes when it should be stepping on the gas; they want the Fed to choke off recovery when it should be doing much more to accelerate recovery. Fundamentally, the right wants the Fed to obsess over inflation, when the truth is that we’d be better off if the Fed paid less attention to inflation and more attention to unemployment. Indeed, a bit more inflation would be a good thing, not a bad thing.”
Paul Krugman, so-called “economist”

“We need a more authoritative world. We've become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say. It's all very well, but there are certain circumstances – a war is a typical example – where you can't do that. You've got to have a few people with authority who you trust who are running it. And they should be very accountable too, of course.
But it can't happen in a modern democracy. This is one of the problems. What's the alternative to democracy? There isn't one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”
James Lovelock, authoritarian climate kook

"We won't hesitate to wage a total, relentless war to regain our territorial integrity and also to kick out of our country all these invaders who bring despair and misery.”
Mali's new interim leader Dioncounda Traore, pledging to murder whomever resists his gang’s territorial monopoly

“I think America is deeply depressing because they are 49 out of 50 of the latest republicans elected to whichever chamber it was were kind of [warming] skeptics. I think we should remove the word ‘skeptics, as Chris Rapley says, climate denialists. They don’t just don’t accept…. and there’s a major cultural problem I think in the United States politically, and that’s got to be addressed.”
Anthony Costello of the Institute of Global Health [So now it’s a “cultural problem” if individuals are smart enough to resist a scam.]

“Collectively, these programs [bank and corporate bailouts]—carried out by both a Republican and a Democratic administration—were effective in preventing the collapse of the financial system, in restarting economic growth, and in restoring access to credit and capital. They were well-designed and carefully managed. Because of this, we were able to limit the broader economic and financial damage.”
An anonymous Treasury official, defending its thieving bailout programs

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