Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"The Donald pretends to be a conservative; but there is nothing conservative about him. The liberals pretend to be 'progressive, but their most urgent priority is to take aim at the future… and shoot it dead before it gets too close."

Bill Bonner

"There is no such thing as 'the common good' when it comes to democratic politics, for nothing is ever unanimous in politics except in very small groups of a few people.  Such unanimity is the domain of the free market, where all voluntary transactions do in fact have unanimous consent.  It is the domain of the civil society where individuals join together to support churches, create charities, do volunteer work, play sports, and perform thousands of other voluntary functions.

Government, by contrast, is always and everywhere about the use of violence, force, and intimidation to plunder one group of citizens for the benefit of others.  It is about enslaving one portion of the population for the benefit of another, in other words, so that the enslavers – the politicians – can reap healthy  'profits' themselves by manipulating the political process.  Repeating 'the common good' over and over and over again will not change this reality."

Tom DiLorenzo

"The real beauty of free market capitalism is that anyone who wants to voluntarily participate in a socialist/communist society is free to do so. The inverse does not hold true."

Jacob Leddy

"The State mobilizes public opinion in favor of war through events with large public signals, like the Maine, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, the 38th Parallel, the Gulf of Tonkin, and 9/11. Lately the signals are terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Anthrax, Chemical warfare, genocide and nuclear proliferation. Pavlov rings the bell and we salivate. The State propagandizes. Our government justifies a war by using phrases like aggression against our rights and freedom. The public responds."

Michael Rozeff

"Individuals, left to their own interests and passions, have the capacity for unimaginable brilliance. 

But when they latch into the hive mind, they err on the side of the herd (whose stance is always 'We are not like the other guys') and do and say things wildly outside of their normal characters."

Chris Campbell

"Sound money is an essential requirement for individual freedom from despotism and repression, as the ability of a coercive state to create money can give it undue power over its subjects, power which by its very nature will attract the least worthy, and most immoral."

Ammous Saifedean

"All these socialists, social democrats, liberals, Democrats—their names are legion—think they’re doing the right thing. They think they’re being moral. And you can’t convince them otherwise. Intellectual arguments are useless against these people. It’s a psychological problem, not an intellectual one.

You can’t make an intellectual argument to a mob."

Doug Casey

"Modern psychological force is based on the propaganda doctrines of altruism and self-sacrifice among the people. Anti-productive politicians and bureaucrats use and coerce the public mind with the doctrines of self-sacrifice and altruism. This is a system of appeal to the unconscious mind. When you hear a politician use the term 'common good,' 'for the children,' 'fairness' or 'your fair share,' he is manipulating you to give up something – rights, privileges and wealth — to nonproductive government.

If the manipulative fiction of self-sacrifice were to become widely known, the people could readily see that taxes, regulations and innumerable laws are a complex system of government force."

Bob Livingston

"Grown men do not need leaders."

Edward Abbey