Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:
“All living things seek to perpetuate themselves into the future, but humans seek to perpetuate themselves forever. This seeking -- this will to immortality -- is the foundation of human achievement; it is the wellspring of religion, the muse of philosophy, the architect of our cities and the impulse behind the arts. It is embedded in our very nature, and its result is what we know as civilization.”
Stephen Cave
“My gosh, everyone these days needs to be ‘offended’ over something, or find some reason to claim victimhood and seek that special status that affords them the right to weep openly on television talk shows. ‘People never accepted me because I’m a vegan! Someone actually unloaded a family-pack of pork chops from a grocery cart right in front of me! I was so traumatized, I needed to seek professional counseling! I think we need a law that either bans meat altogether or makes it all packed in black plastic bags so it can’t offend anyone!’ Hey, I don’t make this crap up, folks. This is where we’re at now. Everyone wants to be a victim and have a cause to trumpet with bumper stickers and t-shirts. And their own ‘activists’.”
Jack Perry
“Governments rule by deception because they otherwise could not rule at all. There is no such thing as understanding government by a name or form such as republican or democracy or socialism or communism. This is because governments have life, philosophy, motivation and recognizable expression (language) patterns. All harmonize to the perpetual expansion of government power.”
Bob Livingston
“If gun control opponents were serious about limiting military power, they would advocate for a radical change to the balance of military power in the United States with an eye toward creating a federal dependence on state-controlled militaries that can only be deployed with the consent of state governments.
(As with all attempts to decentralize political power, devolution to the state level should, of course, not be viewed as the end-all-be-all of decentralization, but only as a step in the right direction toward even more radical decentralization and localism.)”
Ryan McMaken
“If you bound the arms and legs of gold-medal swimmer Michael Phelps, weighed him down with chains, threw him in a pool and he sank, you wouldn’t call it a ‘failure of swimming.’ So when markets have been weighted down by inept and excessive regulation, why call this a ‘failure of capitalism’?”
Peter Boettke
“Power comes from stripping away appearances and seeing things as they really are. Socialism appeals to psychological and intellectual weaklings. Identify and replace all external authorities with internal strength and competence. Take full control of, and responsibility for, your conscious mind and every aspect of your life. Being incompetent or dependent in any part of your life or business opens you up to sloppiness, manipulation and irrationality.”
David Kekich
“In both their policies and personalities, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the natural offspring of the upside-down incentives of the political plunderland that the American system has degenerated into: where governance is perverted into a regime of kleptocratic power grabbing and the paternalistic social engineering of human relationships. There will be no escape from these types of political candidates until Americans learn to understand and embrace the philosophy of human freedom.”
Richard Ebeling
“Most people think of the State in the quaint light of a grade school civics book. They think it has something to do with ‘We the People’ electing a Jimmy Stewart character to represent them. That ideal has always been a pernicious fiction, because it idealizes, sanitizes, and legitimizes an intrinsically evil and destructive institution, which is based on force. As Mao once said, political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.”
Doug Casey
“To criminalize discrimination is to criminalize freedom of thought.”
Laurence Vance
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