"People challenged by the complexities of nature are eager to embrace those who promise them certitude in life. This attitude serves the interests of those who own the machinery of the state. Elitists who comprise the Establishment have their flocks of self-appointed 'experts' from within the mainstream media, the halls of academia, and the very institutions that presume to rule all of humanity. These experts are eager to inform the rest of us that life is far too complicated to allow us to understand, much less function, without their direction. Most of us readily accept such thinking, in part because we have been consistently trained to do so; and in part because it relieves us from the hard work of doing our own thinking. As we were as children, it is easier to have 'big daddy' bear this task."
Butler Shaffer
"Watch that word democracy. It is the charade for criminal politics. It’s hard to believe how writers who pretend to oppose big government endear this most deceptive word. They are either a part of the system or victims of the system’s brainwash. In any case, they are perpetuating the deception.
When you see or hear anyone use the word democracy implying human liberty, you should suspect treason whether the use is intentional or otherwise."
Bob Livingston
"The reason you can afford a supercomputer that fits in your pocket and has more computing power than NASA did in the late ‘60s is the result of market forces, not government management. It is the result of decentralized, competing innovation -- not redistribution of wealth and centralized control.
The government is in the business of making such innovation slow, cumbersome, unipolar, monopolistic and, as a result, extremely expensive. The government is in the business of not caring how much things cost because, after all, it’s not their money. And they can always just raise taxes or print more.
Sustainable behaviors and restraint, be damned."
Chris Campbell
"As a child in government schools, I must have recited the pledge of allegiance thousands of times. And not once did it occur to me that the 'one nation . . . indivisible' part of it is simply an embrace of the Lincolnian heresy, a preemptive attack on the potential for any kind of organized withdrawal whatsoever. At this point in history, can we not see what a terrifying affirmation this doctrine really is? No matter how oppressed people may be, their secession from the overbearing super-state is obstructed by invisible ideological walls. Thus the words of the Declaration of Independence have turned inward and eaten themselves like an absurd snake consuming itself from the tail forward."
Robert Higgs
"Contrary to popular political opinion, 'national unity' is not synonymous with basic human decency and peace among men. Quite the opposite. But as long as 'our' political leaders continue to conflate the two, a cruel irony will be at work here. The more America’s political leaders try to 'unite' the nation through political power at the federal level, nationalizing every issue in the process, the more divided the nation will become. The United States is too diverse to be treated as one big happy family ready to march in lockstep."
Joey Clark
"Unfortunately, the end of the Cold War did not spell the end of America’s national-security state nightmare. We still have the same totalitarian-like system — massive and permanent military-intelligence establishment, torture, assassination, surveillance, regime-change operations, and other characteristics of totalitarian regimes. The only difference is that now it’s all justified by “terrorism” and Russia rather than communism and the Soviet Union. It’s still being portrayed as essential to our 'freedom' and 'security,' just as it was in the Soviet Union and just as it is today in North Korea."
Jacob Hornberger
"The true barriers of our liberty in this country are our State governments; and the wisest conservative power ever contrived by man, is that of which our Revolution and present government found us possessed."
Thomas Jefferson
"The elevation of the presidency to a super-dignified position is a statist device. Insisting on the president being above everyone is stuffy and hypocritical. It’s an act of reverence toward his power and that of the government to make laws. Everyone must kneel and kiss the ring on his finger. He in turn must act with dignity and do nothing beneath his office. Otherwise he lessens the office. So, when Trump makes clear that the president is just a man, after all, statists from Left and Right both get upset."
Michael Rozeff
"The governed are willing to put up with an arbitrary federal government for only as long as the checks keep coming. The voters' grudging support of the federal government and the major political parties is completely dependent on the ability of the government to extract loot from one group and send it to members of the other group. This is the politics of plunder. Politics has been the politics of plunder. But the level of plunder, and the dependence of those who are dependent on plunder, is now on a scale in the United States that it has never been before."
Gary North
"The government is changing citizens’ behavior with incentives and disincentives, which destroys the natural spontaneous order society would otherwise fall into.
The government has basically turned society into a pinball machine which bounces citizens from here to there, taking away control of their destiny. And then, they use their own coercion as an example of why we need more coercion: because people cannot control their own outcomes in life!"
The Daily Bell
"Modern opponents of self-determination and secession will claim that secession cannot be tolerated because it is not 'legal.'
This is scarcely relevant. After all, the colonial uprising against the King was not 'legal,' and it hardly matters whether political victors consider any breakaway secession movements legal. Times and societies change, and nothing is forever or written in stone."
Ryan McMaken
"Telling both sides of a story is Journalism 101. But not evidently when the other side is a perceived enemy of the United States. There are only interests in international affairs, not morality. A journalist should not take sides. But American journalists routinely do in international reporting. They take the 'American side' rather than neutrally laying out for the reader the complex clash of interests of nations involved in an international dispute.
Downplaying or omitting the adversary’s side of the story is a classic case of Americans explaining a foreign people to other Americans without giving a voice to those people, whether they be Russians, Palestinians, Syrians, Serbs, Iranians or North Koreans. Depriving a people of their voice dehumanizes them, making it easier to go to war against them."
Joe Lauria
"Economics describes the process of voluntary, worldwide social cooperation -- a process that occurs with no central direction, and which has drastically improved the average person's standard of living.
For the life of me, I can't imagine how someone could find that boring."
Tom Woods
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