"There is no such thing as ‘the public interest’ except as the sum of the interests of individual men. And the basic, common interest of all men—all rational men—is freedom. Freedom is the first requirement of 'the public interest'—not what men do when they are free, but that they are free. All their achievements rest on that foundation—and cannot exist without them.
The principles of a free, non-coercive social system are the only form of 'the public interest.'"
Ayn Rand
"The modern GOP is globalist, militarist, corporatist, and anti-populist. The Right chose neoconservatism over non-interventionism, Wall Street over Main Street, city over country, and the managerial state in DC over federalism and state’s rights. They chose the Fed over gold, Lockheed Martin over Woolworth, and Goldman Sachs over your Hometown Bank and Trust. They rejoiced in the rise of the 20th century imperial presidency. They chose supply-side over laissez-faire, Milton Friedman over Mises, tax credits over constitutionalism. They embraced the welfare and regulatory states, instead of making the optimistic case for capitalism and ownership and opportunity. They’ve allowed the Left to cast them as racists and reactionaries. They blessed entitlements just to keep their cushy seats in Congress and their political perks. They chose to nationalize social issues and cede huge amounts of illegal power to the Supreme Court. They chose John McCain and Mitt Romney over Ron Paul!!!"
Jeff Deist
"War is the health of this deified herd called the State because a state of war is a state of desperation, of flight or fight, of primal terror and hate. In such a besieged frame of mind, individuals dismiss the moral principles of civilization as unaffordable luxuries. The human soul regresses to unthinking indulgence in base animal impulses, renouncing civility for the law of the jungle. Toward enemy populations, it is eat or be eaten, kill or be killed, capture or be captured, plunder or be plundered."
Dan Sanchez
"Things come into being and then pass away and become other things. This time is now here in the United States. We are simply not 'united' anymore and states are more like a collection of scorpions in a bottle, battling one another for federal funding. This cannot continue and will not continue. The reason states compete is not for federal funding, in truth. It is to recover wealth stolen by the federal government from the states via federal income tax. One day, states will wake up to that and decide to keep that wealth rather than beg the feds for it as alms."
Jack Perry
"Government is the ultimate hierarchical control structure. While it may attract well-meaning people to its lower echelons, typically based on a deep misconception of government’s true nature, it’s the upper reaches where the truly opulent wealth and unbridled power resides that attracts the worst that the human race can produce."
Garry Reed
"Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and ‘progress,’ everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man’s refusal to bow to Authority."
Robert Anton Wilson
"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Trying to reduce the role of the state by engaging in politics is like trying to put a casino out of business by playing blackjack there. Oh, I have it figured out. I’ll beat the house!' No. You won’t. They want you to think that. They want you to keep playing. Abiding by house rules is no way to protest or change them. Especially when the house gets a little richer every time you do."
Isaac M. Morehouse
"The really unanswerable objection to Prohibition was always the Prohibitionists. If, in fact, they had believed honestly that forbidding rum to man would improve the world and had offered serious arguments for it, however unconvincing, most other men would have been disposed to listen to them politely. But it was quickly manifest that improving the world was the last consideration in their minds. What moved them was simply a violent desire to satisfy their egos by harassing their fellow-men."
H.L. Mencken
"The right to liberty is not limited only to inheritors of one or another tribe or culture, or to practitioners of only one or another religion, or to speakers of one or another language. It is the right of all human beings as such, regardless of religion, color, language, nationality, or other features. It offers the choice to live one’s life as one chooses in association with others in communities one chooses. Some exercise their self-control to live in highly structured voluntary communities (monasteries and convents are the obvious examples), others in fluid urban neighborhoods; some like to live in stable and rooted communities and others prefer to roam the world and experience many ways of life. Free and self-controlling persons make such choices for themselves. They are not dictated to by others. The self-controlling individual is neither atomistic nor anomic, but creates or accepts relations based on choice and voluntary agreement."
Tom G. Palmer
"If the words ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ don’t include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the declaration of independence isn’t worth the hemp it was written on."
Terance McKenna
"At one point during his [Trump’s] address, the president assured Americans that 'You will never be ignored again.'
Just so. But we’d gladly go ignored by Washington if it’s all just the same. Please, ignore our bank account, the amount of cash in our possession, our purchases, our phone calls, our emails, our comings and goings. And we’d gladly leave Washington alone in turn."
Brian Maher
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