Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"All varieties of (government) interference with the market phenomena not only fail to achieve the ends aimed at by their authors and supporters, but bring about a state of affairs which — from the point of view of the authors' and advocates' valuations — is less desirable than the previous state of affairs which they were designed to alter. If one wants to correct their manifest unsuitableness and preposterousness by supplementing the first acts of intervention with more and more of such acts, one must go farther and farther until the market economy has been entirely destroyed and socialism has been substituted for it." 

Ludwig von Mises

"The world would be better off if nobody thought in political terms, if we thought strictly in economic terms. Society would be vastly more peaceful, prosperous, and happy if people thought mainly about what goods and services they can provide to other people in the market. Not how the people in government should reorder society.

Politics isn’t the solution. It’s the problem."

Doug Casey

"He who builds his fortune, his beliefs or his health upon a foundation of information from the mainstream builds his house upon the sand. This syndrome is no different from the drug addict who plans his existence upon acquiring the next fix. 

Think about transferring your existence from mass media and false phrases designed to deceive you to life and reality above the 'madness of the crowd' while you can.

Encrypt everything, even your thinking. You're on the animal farm. Propaganda puts us in an altered state of consciousness, otherwise we would know that the supposed fight for equality and social justice is a war on us."

Bob Livingston

"Trade between entities residing in two different countries should not be regarded as any different from what happens when two entities in the United States engage in commerce. Trade is really just international commerce. Free trade is really just commercial freedom. That the two parties engaged in commerce are not located in the same country has no economic significance whatsoever. Nations as such don’t gain or lose from trade; only individual traders do. The erroneous idea that trade takes place between nations also leads to the bogus concept of the trade deficit. But as Adam Smith wrote in 'The Wealth of Nations back in 1776': ‘Nothing can be more absurd than the whole doctrine of the balance of trade’."

Laurence Vance

"The longest lasting and most (relatively) libertarian society had law that was supported by something transcendent, something not human and more than human; call it respect for culture and tradition or call it God.  In its place, we have tried constitutions and we have tried strongmen.

Neither has worked very well at securing and maintaining liberty."

Bionic Mosquito

"We live in a country where five people on a court decide what the law is for 320 million people. And for some reason, many people think this is entirely normal. It's our own American version of the Soviet politburo, but few are even bothering to ask whether it's a good idea.

After all, if it makes sense for a small handful of people to decide law for the entire country, why even bother with a House of Representatives? Even the Senate — composed primarily of multimillionaires living full-time in Washington, DC, is is extravagantly ‘democratic.’

In practice, the Supreme Court is just another federal legislature, although this one decides matters of public policy based on the opinions of a mere five people, most of whom spend their time utterly divorced from the economic realities of ordinary people while cavorting with oligarchs and other elites."

Ryan McMaken

"The whole history of ideas about society has been spent trying to come up with some system that serves the common man rather than just the elites, the rulers, and the powerful. When the market economy, and its capitalistic structure, came into being, that institution was finally discovered. With the advent of economic science, we came to understand how this could be. We began to see how it is that billions of unplanned economic choices could conspire to create a beautiful global system of production and distribution that served everyone. And how do the intellectuals respond to this? By denouncing it as providing too much to too many.

But are people buying superfluous things that they can do without? Certainly. But who is to say for sure what is a need as versus a mere want? A dictator who knows all? How can we know that his desires will accord with my needs and yours? In any case, in a market economy, wants and needs are linked, so that one person's necessities are met precisely because other people's wants are met."

Lew Rockwell

"Egalitarianism under the best circumstances becomes hypocrisy; if sincerely accepted and believed in, its menace is greater. Then all actual inequalities appear without exception to be unjust, immoral, intolerable. Hatred, unhappiness, tension, a general maladjustment is the result. The situation is even worse when brutal efforts are made to establish equality through a process of artificial leveling (‘social engineering’) which can only be done by force, restrictions, or terror, and the outcome is a complete loss of liberty."

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn