Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"By allowing full scope for investment, mobility, the division of labor, creativity, and entrepreneurship, the free economy thereby creates the conditions for rapid economic development. It is freedom and the free market, as Adam Smith well pointed out, that develop the 'wealth of nations.' Thus, freedom leads to economic development, and both of these conditions in turn multiply individual development and the unfolding of the powers of the individual man. In two crucial ways, then, freedom is the root; only the free man can be fully individuated and, therefore, can be fully human."

Murray Rothbard

"The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests."

Joseph Schumpeter

"The state has become the 'idol' everyone turns to and worships. Statolatry is without a doubt the most serious and dangerous social disease of our time. We are taught to believe all problems can and should be detected in time and solved by the state. Our destiny lies in the hands of the state, and the politicians who govern it must guarantee us everything our well-being demands. Human beings remain immature and rebel against their own creative nature (an essential quality which makes their future inescapably uncertain).

They demand a crystal ball to ensure not only that they know what will happen in the future, but also that any problems which arise will be resolved. This 'infantilization' of the masses is deliberately fostered by politicians and social leaders, since in this way they publicly justify their existence and guarantee their popularity, predominance, and governing capacity. Furthermore, a legion of intellectuals, professors, and social engineers join in this arrogant binge of power."

Jesus Huerta de Soto

"Capitalism is not a 'system.' It can’t be improved, reformed, or redesigned.

Like freedom itself, all you can do is take it away – by breaking contracts, stealing property, and counterfeiting money."

Bill Bonner

"The right stands for liberty, a free, unprejudiced form of thinking; a readiness to preserve traditional values (provided they are true values); a balanced view of the nature of man, seeing in him neither beast nor angel, insisting on the uniqueness of human beings which cannot be transformed into or treated as mere numbers or ciphers. The left is the advocate of the opposite principles; it is the enemy of diversity and the fanatical promoter of identity. Uniformity is stressed in all leftist utopias, paradises in which everybody is the same, envy is dead, and the enemy is either dead, lives outside the gates, or is utterly humiliated. Leftism loathes differences, deviations, stratifications…. The word 'one' is its symbol: one language, one race, one class, one ideology, one ritual, one type of school, one law for everybody, one flag, one coat of arms, one centralized world state."

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

"Apart from the Hollywood and Washington image, there is no purity and no nobility in fighting wars and making sacrifices that could have been avoided and that are not in self-defense; wars that are entered into with propaganda, calls for revenge, and battle cries ringing in our ears.

If Americans really believe and accept this,'…our country, then as always, would fight against aggression and all the aggressors that challenged the rights of free men', it means we will have an empire until the costs break us and other countries unite against us."

Michael Rozeff

"Given that the left has sought the complete transformation of society, and given that such wholesale change is bound to come up against the resistance of ordinary people who don’t care for having their routines and patterns of life overturned, we should not be surprised that the instrument of mass terror has been the weapon of choice. The people must be terrified into submission, and so broken and demoralized that resistance comes to seem impossible.

Likewise, it’s no wonder the left needs the total state. In place of naturally occurring groupings and allegiances, it demands the substitution of artificial constructs. In place of the concrete and specific, the Burkean 'little platoons' that emerge organically, it imposes remote and artificial substitutes that emerge from the heads of intellectuals. It prefers the distant central government to the local neighborhood, the school board president over the head of household."

Lew Rockwell

"Nation states—governments—are well aware of the value and effectiveness of terror, and use their own variations of it. Drone strikes and B-52 raids are prominent examples, but aren’t characterized as terror, because it’s convenient to say only the bad guys do that."

Doug Casey