Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:
"American socialists have always searched for deceptive euphemisms for socialism with which to disguise their totalitarian plans for the rest of us. 'Liberal,' 'progressive,' 'economic democracy,' 'liberation theology,' 'social justice,' and 'industrial policy' are just a few examples. 'Green New Deal' is the latest manifestation of this political con game."
Tom DiLorenzo
"If you are against the international U.S. empire, shouldn’t you also recognize that the U.S. also operates a domestic empire over the states and the people? And shouldn’t you be as strongly against Washington’s domestic abuses and misuses of national power as you are against its international abuses and misuses of power?
Of course, you should, if you are a consistent exponent of non-aggression."
Michael Rozeff
"The left-liberals and neoconservatives alike, who always seem to put aside their pretend differences when an idiotic war is in the offing, and who make saccharine speeches about democracy and openness and peace, are enemies of mankind.
As a reminder of how deranged our cultural elite and political establishment are, how many major political figures of the past hundred years have been dismissed from polite society for urging too much war?
There are lots of things that get you demonized and ostracized in America, but that ain't one of them.
Usually it gets you called a 'statesman.'
This is deranged."
Tom Woods
"A state leader orders the killing of one man and everyone is outraged. But if a state leader orders the killing of thousands in Yemen (Saudi leader) or drone strikes half way around the world (American leader), then most people simply yawn. Why do Americans think we should 'do something' about the Saudi dictator because he had one journalist killed but not 'do something' because he had thousands killed in Yemen? Something is wrong with this kind of thinking."
Laurence Vance
"No matter how ineffective and murderous the regime, the elected psychopaths and their nomenklatura simply point at the masses of duped participants and claim the holy writ of protection by majoritarian tyranny. Sort of like the serial killer standing over the bloody corpse of his latest prey, pointing at him and caterwauling the victim made him do it."
Bill Buppert
"When the insouciant American and Western peoples accept their governments’ lies, they accept their own demise and servitude. The willingness and abandon with which the Western peoples submit makes one conclude that they prefer servitude. They don’t want to be free, because freedom has too many responsibilities, and they don’t want the responsibilities. They won’t go watch a movie, or a TV program, or play video games, or have sex, go shopping, get drunk, have a drug high, or whatever form of amusement that they value far more than they value liberty, or truth, or justice."
Paul Craig Roberts
"The double minded man forever seeks liberty under party labels. There are two illusions here. The first is that political parties appear different simply because they have different names. The second great illusion is that political parties lead to political freedom. The opposite is true. Collective plunder does not lead to human liberty, but to human conformity. When Americans had freedom, there were no political parties."
Bob Livingston
"The US government has constructed at tremendous cost to its taxpayers some of the most impressive structures – both architectural and organizational – of all time. Yet somehow it has failed to build a viable wall on the Mexican border.
How did we Americans arrive at a place where such a fundamental element of nationhood – that is, the ability to control our borders from any and all outside illegal intruders – is considered a radical concept? Since when did the universally accepted idea of a strong national border become an issue for debate and contention among our legislators? Since when have weak, porous borders become a desired state of affairs for a global superpower, and especially one that has a habit of attacking sovereign states? Part of the answer seems to lie within the present atmosphere of political correctness and identity politics that has conflated the need for a strong border with racism and even white supremacist ideology."
Robert Bridge
"From the Nazis to Stalinists to Maoists, tyrants have always started out supporting free speech, just as American leftists did during the 1960s. Their support for free speech is easy to understand. Speech is vital for the realization of their goals of command, control and confiscation. The right to say what they please is their tool for indoctrination, propagandizing and proselytization. Once the leftists gain control, as they have at many universities, free speech becomes a liability and must be suppressed. This is increasingly the case on university campuses. Much of the off-campus incivility we see today is the fruit of what a college education has done to our youth."
Walter Williams
"Licensing: when the government takes away your right to do something and sells it back to you."
Internet meme
"Freedom and responsibility are inseparable concepts. Everyone, having a vested interest in one's own success becomes, ipso facto, responsible for everyone else."
Garry Reed
"Centralization concentrates power in fewer people in smaller spaces, whereas decentralization divides and spreads power among vast networks of people across wider spaces. Under centralized government, good people who enjoy power may, in theory, quickly accomplish good, but evil people who enjoy power may quickly accomplish evil. Because of the inherent, apocryphal dangers of the latter possibility, centralized government must not be preferred. Our tendencies as humans are catastrophic, asserting themselves in the sinful behaviors we both choose and cannot help. There is, moreover, on a considerable range of issues, disagreement about what constitutes the bad and the good, the evil and the virtuous. If questions about badness or goodness, evil and virtuousness are simply or hastily resolved in favor of the central power, then resistant communities—threatened, marginalized, silenced, and coerced—will eventually exercise their political agency, mobilizing into insurrectionary alliances to undermine the central power. Centralized power therefore increases the probability of large-scale violence whereas decentralized government reduces conflicts to local levels where they tend to be minor and offsetting."
Allen Mendenhall
"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
"The Southern political tradition is finding currency in the age of Obama and Trump because unlike the drones at Think Progress and other 'mainstream' media outlets, thoughtful people across the political spectrum are seeking solutions to modern problems that don’t involve Washington D.C. They are being distinctively American. But according to the SPLC, that makes them 'political extremists'."
Brion McClanahan
"Rather than federal indictment, [Julian] Assange deserves a tweaked version of one of Washington’s hottest honors — a Medal of Freedom with a steam whistle."
James Bovard
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