Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"What do McCain, Bush 41, and Lincoln have in common? Their corpses were all used as political propaganda props by deep state operatives in well-choreographed show-funerals.

How touching that Bush 41’s casket sat atop the same platform as Lincoln’s in D.C., preserved all these years by the deep state, and that the casket made its way to the cemetery by slow-moving train, just like Lincoln’s."

Tom DiLorenzo

"A president is not a king. He’s certainly not a saint. Calling a former president 'President' for lif'e, giving his wife a title and a staff, building a temple ('presidential library') in his honor, calling on his acquaintances/retainers to lionize him in the media for days, allowing pilgrims to file past his coffin, etc., are not republican traditions. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe… the people who created this country would have been disgusted by this celebration/worship of even the most unsuccessful of these people. Enough already."

Kevin R. Gutzman

"If we’re going to harken back to any time, let’s harken back to a time when presidents weren’t imperial, all-powerful rulers. A time when shrines weren’t built in their honor like for the pharaohs. A time when they weren’t worshipped like saints with wall-to-wall media coverage and national days of mourning."

Bob Livingston

"The naïve sentiment that bringing businessmen into government – in the expectation that their decisions will foster the general profitability of marketplace participants – continues to be voiced. That such practices enhance the allures of 'crony-capitalism,' is the most that can be said for them. But when, under political systems, control is severed from ownership, bankruptcies and other dislocations are likely to occur, as is the likelihood for the collapse of civilizations, whose vibrancies depend upon what one noted historian called 'creative power in the souls of creative people.' It is only when individuals are at liberty to act on their authority in the world – a condition dependent upon the private ownership of some part of that world – that such creative energies are released."

Butler Shaffer

"This is not the Union that Texans agreed to join in 1845. It’s not even the Union our fathers and their fathers knew. It’s akin to joining a Christian church and watching it, over time, fundamentally change its doctrine to venerate Lucifer, the Eucharist being substituted for human sacrifice. This is not a doctrinal shift. It is a monstrous mutation. Far from being the idealized 'land of milk and honey,' it has become the 'land of bilking money'."

Daniel Miller

"In order to end the tyranny of the State, people must stop accepting servitude. They need not take anything away from the tyrant, but they must stop yielding to the power. To get out of tyranny, human beings do not need to change the essence of their nature. They have to shed off what hinders individual advancement. When the tyrant does no longer receive obedience and people do no longer obey his orders, the ruler stands naked, without power and is disarmed of the instruments of his dominance."

Antony P. Mueller

"The biggest myth in politics is that political parties are in business solely to win elections. These criminal cartels are in business to maintain their networks of crony corruption, patronage, and payoff which are their reasons for being. The National Security State, driven by the imperial presidency, an acquiescent congress and a complacent federal judiciary, has destroyed the American Republic. Their parasitic welfare-warfare state, enabled by the Fed, fosters and promotes the profligacy and dependency which is at the root of this destructive process."

Charles Burris

"We've been told since fourth grade that decentralization is for hicks, losers, and 'racists,' and that human progress demands that 320 million people be ruled from a single city.

The result is what we have now: a society in which everything from pronouns to chicken sandwiches is political."

Tom Woods

"Federalism and subsidiarity, applied with increasing intensity, are the non-violent path forward. Insistence on universalism, decided by a slight majority and applied top-down from DC, will fail here at home in the same way — and for the same reason — nation-building fails abroad."

Jeff Deist

"Most of the people that get Nobels in Economics, Peace, or Literature are actually enemies of humanity. Or, at best, undeserving. They gave Barack Obama a Peace Prize when he was president. What was the possible reasoning for that? Perhaps they’ll also give him one for Literature when he has a ghost write his memoirs, and one for both Economics and Medicine when ObamaCare collapses the economy…"

Doug Casey

"Local residents in Philadelphia could have barred the doors of the building the Founding Lawyers were plotting their coup in 1787 and started a bonfire for liberty. Aaron Burr could have shot Alexander Hamilton before the Constitutional ink dried, George Washington’s considerable corpse could have had its knees to the breeze decorating a tree at the end of a hemp rope in Pennsylvania during the Whiskey Rebellion and on and on.

But these are acts of violence! No, these are acts of self-defense.

Refusing concession to the fetid results of a government-sponsored plebiscite is an act of self-defense. I know we all hear the empirical rubbish of the implied social contract and other such paranormal nonsense. As Lysander Spooner would say today, I didn’t sign shit. I looked through all my legal paperwork in the house and failed to find any document that proves the government owns me and directs me as they wish that I agreed to."

Bill Buppert