Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"'Law' is too important a concept to be left to lawyers, judges, and politicians. It is a means by which free and responsible individuals bargain peacefully for their expectations with one another. To look upon law as a coercive tool to be exclusively employed by the state is to surrender not only control over one’s life, but all existential meaning as well."
Butler Shaffer

"Government under any name or label is all about making and passing laws for the people. Where there are many laws, there is no individual freedom. Where there is no individual freedom, there is no freedom at all."
Bob Livingston

"So there is no escape from the culture war. There is no escape from the politicization of everything. There is no escape from an escalation of violence in politics. The minority now gets to exert its will over the majority and every vice gets declared a civil right we must all worship and subsidize.
In our present atmosphere there is no escape from the American ISIS that is the political left. Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant and then it seeks to silence good. Evil is now dominant — but the partisan line is blurred."
Erick Erickson

"If we don’t have privacy, what we’re losing is the ability to make mistakes, we’re losing the ability to be ourselves. Freedom of speech doesn’t have a lot of meaning if you can’t have a quiet space, a space within yourself, your mind, your community, your friends, your family, to decide what it is you actually want to say."
Edward Snowden

"Everything people want violence to do for them violence can do to them. If you are no longer a libertarian you are an authoritarian. There is no in-between."
Garry Reed

"Karma is not a punishment, per se. It is the fruit of unwholesome action. Reaping what you sow. (Likewise, wholesome action leads to good karmic actions.) If we sowed suffering around the planet, then suffering must eventually come back to us at some point. It’s not a punishment. It’s a lesson to understand that since this feels bad, it stands to reason inflicting it on others on a far greater scale must, therefore, be wrong also. No matter who is doing it from here; your party, their party, your president, the one you like or don’t like, I don’t care. Wrong is wrong whether here, there, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, I don’t care. Don’t justify evil and tell me it obeys international borders, rendering the United States immune to consequences handed down by spiritual forces far greater than this penny-ante government can control."
Jack Perry

"Absent a well-defined and widely accepted culture there is no hope of moving toward a libertarian world.  Such a culture is not a sufficient condition (as not all cultures are conducive to libertarianism), but it is certainly a necessary condition."
Bionic Mosquito

"A government big and powerful enough to cause widespread psychosis after presidential elections is a government without much legitimacy. People become irrational about politics precisely because government depressingly controls so much of our lives. It chooses winners and losers. It is the superstar player in American society, rather than the referee.
The obvious and reasonable option staring us all in the face is to go our separate ways. Let us consider political secession, radical decentralization, nullification, and localism as the realistic alternatives to a much more unpleasant conflict. Let us reconsider living as a loose confederation of states. 320 million vastly diverse people, from Anchorage to San Francisco to Topeka to Miami, cannot be governed by a top-down central authority in Washington."
Jeff Deist

"Government is always a way for the few to exploit the many. But since the widespread use of cheap guns and cheap newsprint, the few have had to bribe, bully, and bamboozle the many in order to hold on to power.
They call it 'democracy.'"
Bill Bonner

"Capitalism is essentially a scheme for peaceful nations. What the incompatibility of war and capitalism really means is that war and high civilization are incompatible."
Ludwig von Mises

"The United States was never a 'grand republic'.Republics are not republics if they are grand: magnificent, imposing, impressive, awe-inspiring, splendid, resplendent, majestic, monumental. Symbols of grandeur are symbols of empire."
Michel Rozeff

"The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy our capacity to form any."
Hannah Arendt

"To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."
Publius Tacitus