Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"With membership in the Union, you receive access to this wonderful thing called the 'Bill of Rights' that outlines all of the protections of your liberty that you will have as a member. It’s been around for over 200 years and is rock solid. Pay no attention to the asterisks or the fine print. They are only there to guide the federal government on how the federal courts have interpreted each of those rights to make them mean whatever the federal government wants them to mean in a particular situation. No need to worry…"

Daniel Miller

"Banning anyone about anything is banning freedom and individual choice, no matter how disturbing or disgusting the alleged 'hate speech' may be. Libertarians will never advocate banning other people’s beliefs on the simple premise that 'hate speech' should be countered by 'more speech' and that the sunlight of individualism and freedom is the best disinfectant against the cockroach of hate speech."

Garry Reed

"One has to wonder how it serves the image and power of the United States to be portrayed, as it is portrayed, as fighting Israel’s wars for domination of the Middle East. How does the world avoid seeing the US of A as a two-bit vassal of Zionist Israel? Doesn’t Trump’s national security advisor, John Bolton, and Trump’s Jewish son-in-law make this perfectly clear every day? The President of the United States is nothing but the punk two-bit vassal of Zionism.

The US Department of State formerly was in the hands of 'Arabists.'  Today it is in the hands of Zionists. Washington in its total incompetence has aligned with a tiny percentage of the population against the majority in the Middle East. This will come to no good result."

Paul Craig Roberts

"Pretty soon, America might have to start asking: what exactly is 'progressive' about going insane? I think we’re getting close to answering that, and the answer is: nothing. The Left has managed to drain the meaning from the word 'progressive.' We will not be able to take it seriously for generations to come (if there are any generations to come). The Left has applied every possible gimmick from the bad faith trick-bag to disable thinking in this republic generally, and the language that serves thinking. But its contorted maledictions are working mainly against itself as one preposterous idea after another bursts out of its collective pie-hole and into the blue-checked Twitter windows."

James Howard Kunstler

"The system of taxation is one in which the violence against you is initiated by the system over which your control and say is negligible. To you, the tax collector is more or less as a thief. Your attitude toward this thievery may be favorable or unfavorable, but your attitude is irrelevant compared to the real fact that you lack control over the taxes. They are taken from you whether you like it or not.

It is this taxation procedure upon which all social welfare programs rest. They cannot be right morally if the taxation procedure is not right. So, is it right or wrong? Taxation extracted from you and over which you have no real say, except that 1/100,000,000th share of the vote, initiates violence against you. This means you have no choice. You must pay the taxes. This means your freedom is curtailed. Is this right? Is it right that your freedom should be curtailed by everyone else or by a system arranged in this way? It doesn’t matter what happens to the money extracted from you, whether it goes to good causes or bad causes. That misses the point, which is to evaluate its extraction from you, because no matter what’s done with your money, the way it’s taken from you is still the same, and that way is still open to a moral evaluation. (Besides right and wrong are not determinable by how the money is used. For one thing, you have no say over that either; and reasonable people differ on good and bad causes. The disposition of the money is likewise a process over which your say and control are nil.)"

Michael Rozeff

"The institutional order depends for its support on members of the general public believing that it is capable of gathering and assessing information in order to craft rules that will lead to predictable outcomes. But as the study of chaos and complexity shows that such talents are nowhere possible, it becomes evident  that promises by political systems to establish order in a complex world are illusory. The more far-reaching the range of what they presume to promulgate, the more widespread the resulting damage. This is why socialist systems have produced the most dramatic records of death and destruction from the massive mobilization of hubris that has energized such erstwhile utopias as the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, China, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela, to name some of the more recent and obvious."

Butler Shaffer

"Despite the shaping of their minds by twelve plus years of government education and the nearly constant barrage of government supremacism in the media, even the most hardened collectivists tend to realize that their personal behavior is largely driven not by fear of punishment for doing the wrong thing but the moral compass which starts to crystallize at an early age for taking the hard right over the easy wrong.  This is not to say that fear, the sine qua non, of all government is not ever-present.  It has continued to warp and fracture individuals every day in their pursuit of productivity and happiness."

Bill Buppert

"Throughout history, every great empire that has ever existed has eventually collapsed. Invariably, the pattern is the same. The political class, increasingly, becomes populated with pathological types. They create massive debt, make promises to the electorate that they can never deliver on, overestimate their power internationally, then, finally, wage a war that they cannot win.

This final step almost always proves to be the death knell of the empire, for two reasons: first, because the empire underestimates the collective power and resolve of its opponents and, second, because, in the midst of war, it runs out of money, due to its pre-existing debt and the massive capital demand of warfare.

No one has ever succeeded in stopping an empire from destroying itself in this manner. The best that can be done is to get well away from the Goliath before it falls."

Jeff Thomas

"Altruism is an attribute of the liberal mind. It is based on groupism, which is the concept of egalitarianism. It is the opposite of individuality and responsibility. It is the basis upon which all redistributive schemes are launched."

Bob Livingston

"Politicians who call for law and order are often viewed negatively, but poor people are more dependent on law and order than anyone else. In the face of high crime or social disorder, wealthier people can afford to purchase alarm systems, buy guard dogs, hire guards and, if things get completely out of hand, move to a gated community. These options are not available to poor people. The only protection poor people have is an orderly society.

Ultimately, the solution to high crime rests with black people. Given the current political environment, it doesn’t benefit a black or white politician to take those steps necessary to crack down on lawlessness in black communities. That means black people must become intolerant of criminals making their lives living hell, even if it requires taking the law into their own hands."

Walter Williams

"A certain type of person strives to become a master over all, and to extend his force, his will to power, and to subdue all that resists it. But he encounters the power of others, and comes to an arrangement, a union, with those that are like him: thus they work together to serve the will to power. And the process goes on."

Friedrich Nietzsche

"Today, much more is known about the intent of the political class and its elitist controllers, but it seems as if there is much more apathy today than at anytime in the past. How can this be? How can a more informed citizenry continue to hide their heads in the sand, and worship the nation state apparatus and its agents of force in the military? This is a travesty, and exposes the success achieved by the elites to brainwash the public into supporting any kind of butchery and mass murder under the guise that they are protecting the nation from non-existent monsters from afar. Societal weakness at this level deserves no respect or admiration whatsoever. It deserves only contempt. There is no excuse for such complicity in acts of war. The truth that must be accepted is that it is not just the government that should be blamed for all its heinous acts, but that each and every citizen who stands silent in the face of that evil committed in their name is fully responsible as well."

Gary D. Barnett

"Until society grows wealthy enough, all the rage in the world can't make it possible to take two days a week off from work.

Can you imagine, in the primitive economies of 300 years ago, agitating for a shorter work week? People would have thought you insane.

With little capital, and with most goods produced by hand, it takes all the labor power all the hours it can spare just to make life barely livable.

That's why people worked long hours in terrible conditions in the past (and why they do in the Third World today). Not because short men with white mustaches and a monocle took delight in oppressing them.

What emancipated people from these dehumanizing conditions was capital goods. With workers vastly more productive than before, thanks to the assistance of machines, physical output was multiplied in quantity and quality many, many times over. This greater abundance put downward pressure on prices relative to wage rates, and people's standard of living rose.

At that time they opted for more leisure and more pleasant working conditions rather than more cash.

But if you ask people who work in sweatshops today if they'd rather have more pleasant conditions (or fewer working hours) and less take-home pay, they overwhelmingly say no."

Tom Woods

"There are no human gods here, just hoods who think they are."

Fakeer Ishavardas