Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"Americans are a very confused people, in my opinion. The thing they are most confused about is how to deal with evils. If they see or are induced to think they see evil in a foreign country, they support their government in making war against it. If they see bad effects of drugs, which there are, and see it as evil, which actually depends on many individual circumstances, they support their government in making war against it. They think that they know what’s evil and what isn’t, and then they think that the evils should be forcefully resisted. This in itself is not always a correct procedure because evils cannot always be identified objectively; and vices can easily be tagged as evils to be fought when they are not in that category. In many cases, attempting to eradicate a supposed evil only makes matters worse."
Michael Rozeff

"People lift themselves out of poverty when they are free to trade and to enjoy the fruits of their labors. They remain poor only when they face violent threats to their lives, liberties, and property. If giving to a charity empowers some vicious gang or government that keeps people poor, you’ve just made poor people’s lives worse. This consideration doesn’t relieve us of the duty to give, but simply adds a duty to investigate seriously the consequences of our gifts before we make them."
Jason Sorens

"People are so naïve. Communism is not dead in Russia. It is not dead in Europe. It is not even dead in the United States. Communism is alive and well worldwide.
Communism is only a cover word or disguise for state capitalism or monopoly capitalism and police state power. With only very small variations the entire world is on this system.
Russian communism gets the bad name because it has been used since World War II by the ruling oligarchy and their military-industrial complex to keep the American people in constant fear and political manipulation. More importantly, Russian communism has been used as a decoy to keep the American people and the world from seeing American communism.
Russian communism was exported to Russia from the U.S. (See 'Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution,' by Antony Sutton). But in the United States, communism was incubated, concealed and sold as democracy."
Bob Livingston

"If California were ever on its own, within six months of its 'independence' it would be unable to function at even a survival level. Though it boasts the sixth largest economy in the world (larger than that of both Brazil and France!), there’s no economy big enough to keep a Marxist country afloat. This has been demonstrated time and again in such failed nations as Cuba, the Soviet Union, Mozambique, and every other country that has experimented with socialism/communism in any of its hideous forms."
Robert Ringer

"Where is socialism successful, and those living under it happy and healthy?
The same place where magic is real, where faster-then-light travel is possible, where shape-shifters live.
Fiction. All those things are in fiction. Books, movies, TV shows. But only in fiction."
Kent McManigal

"If we ceased to desire the goods of our neighbor, we would never commit murder or adultery or theft or false witness. If we respected the tenth commandment, the four commandments that precede it would be superfluous."
René Girard

"The cause of war is preparation for war."
W. E. B. Du Bois

"A law that decrees that the majority shall have the decisive voice in determining the well-being of all cannot be erected on a foundation that is first provided by that law itself. Democracy never founds itself, and continual non-participation implies a rejection of the regime as a whole."
Friedrich Nietzsche

"No matter how glowingly positive advocates are for the benefits of Universal Basic Income, recipients are still wards of the state. UBI is a bribe to shut you up. Any government big, rich and powerful enough to give you 'free money' is big, rich and powerful enough to take it away from you, or even worse, make you so dependent on it that they can manipulate you in any way they wish."
Garry Reed

"The heart of the Great Con of identity politics and political correctness is a tragic irony: the more wealth, income and power that slip through the fingers of the bottom 95%, the more their overlords rely on social 'empowerment,' as if a 'safe space' on campus is a substitute for real political and economic agency. 
That's the Great Con of political correctness: using worthless speech acts about empowerment to distract the working class from its disempowerment in the real world. No amount of 'safe space' and happy talk about empowerment can replace meaningful opportunities for economic security and advancement--precisely what is abundant for the protected technocrat/ managerial class and scarce for the unprotected 95% that's been sold down the river."
Charles Hugh Smith