Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"Facebook has every right to limit speech on its own company-owned platforms, but it should not go in with government to limit the speech of its competitors, now or future unknown. Government doesn’t have that power and never should have that power. That power is a totalitarian threat.

Does it make any sense to allow such a monstrous totalitarian threat in order to remove the kinds of sites and commentators now being removed? Usually the pretext is that they are using hate speech or spinning conspiracy theories or failing to say politically-correct things about people and events in various categories. Again, the 'solution' of government control of speech is invoking an elephant to kill a flea. The targets of control are actually non-problems. Alex Jones is not a problem. If he were breaking any laws, see to it that he’s indicted.

There is now a truckload of people tossed off Facebook and YouTube and Twitter who are actually non-problems and are breaking no laws. Tossing them off has created an outcry. The outcry now allows Facebook and others to call for regulation, which they desire and benefit from. But there is a huge downside for our system because it means government censorship becomes legal. Don’t do it."

Michael Rozeff

"Political cults are caravans to mass graves and fortunately all politics has a shelf life, some folks just like to put the pedal to the metal when it comes to scrambling over the ideological cliff for their masters.

Burn this into your skulls and sear it into your brain: the quaint term 'Deep State' is nothing more than a civilized synonym for communism."

Bill Buppert

"I agree with Adam Smith in the idea that normal citizens will act to pursue success, but also to pursue balance. When given the opportunity to actually function within a true free market, most people are not going to destroy their surrounding environment and resources in some mad dash for gain. Why? Because it is in their self-interest not to. They know that if they abuse the structures around them they will lose their source of commerce. They know that if they ruin the system for others that they will be shunned in business. They also know that if they fail in such a spectacular manner and commit criminal sabotage of the free market system they will have to suffer the regret and shame that will follow.

The only factor that this does not apply to are the elites themselves; the narcissistic sociopaths devoid of conscience with whom we now contend for our freedoms. I would suggest that Smith’s free markets, unshackled from centralization and government interference, would function almost perfectly if these people were cut from the equation entirely."

Brandon Smith

"America focuses more on transgender bathrooms and whether Bruce Jenner is a girl than on its endless and draining wars. China sends its brightest to the world’s best technical school while America makes its universities into playpens for the mildly retarded. The country crumbles but spends drunkenly on defective fighter planes it doesn’t need in the first place.

This won’t work a whole lot longer."

Fred Reed

"Just how intelligent is a race of people who will themselves to extinction? We should call it a moral crisis. We fear tyranny, we fear war, we fear disease, we fear economic depression, but we have absolutely no fear of self-extinction. 

On the contrary, it seems to be a badge of distinction to have only one child and then kill oneself."

Bob Livingston

"A government accountable to law and to the people requires a united people, not the disunity of multiculturalism and Identity Politics.  With the indigenous ethnic base of all of the Western countries under attack as 'white supremacists,' the West can no longer defend its culture from the immigrants who do not share the culture."

Paul Craig Roberts

"The egalitarian worldview of the Left is not only incompatible with libertarianism, however. It is so out of touch with reality that one must be wondering how anyone can take it seriously. The man-on-the-street certainly does not believe in the equality of all men. Plain common sense and sound prejudice stand in the way of that. And I am even more confident that no one of the actual proponents of the egalitarian doctrine really, deep down, believes what he proclaims. Yet how, then, could the Leftist worldview have become the dominant ideology of our age? At least for a libertarian, the answer should be obvious: the egalitarian doctrine achieved this status not because it is true, but because it provides the perfect intellectual cover for the drive toward totalitarian social control by a ruling elite."

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

"Certainly government is the wrong institution to have a powerful influence in educating children. A major result is that government uses its tax power to glorify itself. Over time, it worms its way into the historical narratives taught in schools. Some famous and influential philosophers have advocated this very result as being appropriate for society, and this just makes matters worse. Public education finds advocates, and the children’s minds are systematically filled with rubbish and robbed of proper education."

Walter Williams

"I always look on the bright side. Which is that – if you give yourself a little psychological distance – this is all a comedy. AOC, The Donald, Bolton, Bernie Sanders, Pocahontas, Hillary, Kamala, etc., etc. They’re all dangerous megalomaniacs. But the chimpanzees listen to them, choose teams, hang on to their every word, support them, and are easily incited to hoot and pant at each other. The American public is going to get exactly what it deserves. I have no sympathy for them. Or about as much as I would have had for the Romans in the fifth century, when the empire was collapsing."

Doug Casey

"A general rule: the second someone accuses you of being a 'white supremacist,' you can assume you are dealing with a mental defective, or a smear artist.

And when someone accuses libertarianism itself as being a tool of white supremacism, mute him. Do not engage. You are dealing with low-grade mental illness."

Tom Woods