Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"What can we say about the forcible extraction of money from you by the government or system? It’s involuntary. It reduces your freedom. Its a form of servitude or slavery, because it takes what’s yours and transfers it elsewhere. No matter what you think of the procedure, it’s a theft whenever the taking is without your consent. Does voting amount to consent? Have you consented to taxation by voting? No one knows but you, and unless taxes are made to be voluntary, no one can ever know. We cannot infer from the act of voting that you consent to the system or the taxes you pay, nor can we infer that you do not consent. We can ask why force is necessary if indeed everyone consents. The fact of force being imposed is consistent with the idea that otherwise the government would not be able to raise the amount of funds that it raises using force. This means that consent to taxes is not the rule. You may be voting for the lesser of evils. It cannot be concluded that your vote is a form of consent to taxes.

Do you tacitly consent to the taxes by not revolting or joining a revolutionary movement? That cannot be concluded either. The rightness or wrongness of taxes doesn’t depend upon whether or not you take up arms to defend your freedom. The moral judgment depends on whether you are being robbed or not, and there seems to be no way of escaping the conclusion that you are being robbed. By this is not meant that every single one of us thinks he is being robbed or doesn’t consent. It means that the system of taxation is arranged in the manner of armed robbery, and this would not be so or necessary if robbery were not the intent and the reality."

Michael Rozeff

"The unfortunate thing about fear is that it is paralyzing. Fear causes people, especially so in the case of major political questions, to make terrible decisions. It causes them to embrace a hated status quo rather than imagine the potential for a positive future. It can, if wielded by would-be tyrants, rob an entire people of their self-confidence and reduce them to a status of willful dependence. It is the political version of Stockholm Syndrome.

Thinking about independence in this way may help you and the people of your State reject fear and embrace self-government outside the context of the federal union. For a freedom-loving people who believe in individual liberty and limited government, fixing the federal government and supporting those who promise to do so, is no longer an option. 

Having this discussion right now is a matter of survival. If history has taught us anything, it’s that there is no such thing as the status quo. Much like Newton’s Laws of Motion, tyranny in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. In this instance, it is the force of a people who are no longer content to be deprived of the right of self-government."

Daniel Miller

"A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims, but accomplices."

George Orwell

"Any decent psychological detective can conclude why the Left, including especially the Democratic Party — formerly a pillar of our political system — has gone insane. Losing a national election two and half years ago traumatized the base. In the process, the party made the rueful discovery that it was devoid of reality-based political ideas. This prompted the adoption of reality-optional excuses for failure masquerading as political ideas: Russia did it! Trump was 'Putin’s puppet.' That clinically paranoid meme, and the massive investigatory activity it provoked, ended in more failure, so profound that the party still can’t face it."

James Howard Kunstler

"Government is not the glue that holds society together.  It is the savage adhesive that bonds subject populations to their rulers through the use of violence and the threat of violence to milk every possible liter of unearned succor to support the imperious warfare/welfare state that is so commonplace today.  The genius of the mechanism is the endless parade of useful idiots and willing slaves, especially in all facets of the media, who sing endless serenades to their keepers and controllers.  A somewhat Hobbesian version the Stockholm syndrome et large."

Bill Buppert

"It is antithetical to the very idea of science to peddle a theory (a hypothesis, really) that can be made to fit anything. And that’s exactly what 'climate change' theory does. It can’t be pinned down – fact checked – because the climate constantly changes. Its eponymous assertion – that the climate changes – can’t be questioned. 

Such a person is a 'denier' – an interestingly religious term.

Which is what we’re dealing with here. A Doomsday Cult, actually. Led by professional Jim Joneses, who aren’t interested in mass suicide but mass control.

Once you understand this, you understand everything else."

Eric Peters

"New code words and phrases enter our language all the time. They work off old ones that have been around for years. Terms like 'public policy,' which really means government policy; 'conspiracy theory,' which means any challenge to conventional wisdom; 'extremist,' which means anyone who advocates for small government and a return to the constitution; and 'terrorist,' which means anyone the government decides, including Americans who advocate for liberty; are all old code words.

Democracy may be the most deceptive code word ever conceived. It implies liberty and one man, one vote. But it is mob rule collectivism and benevolent totalitarianism."

Bob Livingston

"The situation of having to belong to a state to which one does not wish to belong is no less onerous if it is the result of an election than if one must endure it as the consequence of a military conquest."

Ludwig von Mises

"The nature of the political class is like that of a partnership, where regardless of individual beliefs or desires, only one agenda is primary. The end result is a meeting of the minds of this union, so that collectively, they can achieve the single proper outcome. Individual needs are secondary, but not forgotten in this political circus, and are pursued through a type of publicly staged animosity that leaves the false impression that one side is against the other. This is the most deceptive characteristic of this deadly game, but it is a key component in keeping the common voters at each other’s throats so that they are distracted and not aware of the growth of power and control over them.

In other words, the political class bathes in the same dirty tub, and when bathing in feces, none are ever truly clean. They live by empty promises and lies, and compromise is their manner of survival. They have voluntarily chosen to be a part of the most corrupt venture and greatest failure of mankind, government. Because of this, most should never be admired or trusted."

Gary D. Barnett

"The unintended consequences of demonizing the white population—all except those guilt-ridden white liberals living on multi-million dollar trust funds who join in the demonization of white people—are many and far reaching. For example, why would any white male with a brain join the military of a country that has abandoned his interest and is operating against him?  Why would he join a military of a country that the Democratic Party prevents from defending its own borders?  Why would he join a military and be sent to kill Arabs in the Middle East and blacks in North Africa when he is taught to feel guilt for his racial hatred of 'racial minorities?'

Doesn’t a country collapse when its core population is demonized and dispossessed?

When agendas advance themselves by using lies to suppress truth, how can rational decisions be made?

When emotions displace reason, the result is conflict."

Paul Craig Roberts

"After the USSR fell and America emerged as the undisputed ruler of a unipolar world, it was determined with the help of influential neoconservative think tankers that the US must maintain this unipolar paradigm at all costs. As soon as that view became the establishment orthodoxy, any threat to US hegemony was now interpreted as a threat to national security. An 'attack' on America was no longer limited to physical attacks on US soil, or even on US allies and assets: any attempt to escape unipolarity is now treated as a direct attack on the empire.

This is why we’ve seen nations like Iraq, Libya and Syria spoken about by the propagandists as 'enemies' as though they pose some kind of direct threat to the American people. There was never any actual threat to the physical United States, but those nations were not complying with the dictates of US hegemony, and that noncompliance was treated as a direct attack

This 'if you’re not obeying us you’re attacking us' mentality is ridiculous on its face and no right-thinking citizen would ever consent to it, which is why the consent manufacturers need to promote imaginary nonsense like weapons of mass destruction, a Russian 'attack' on American democracy, and a conspiracy theory about the Kremlin infiltrating the highest levels of the US government. It’s got nothing to do with actual fears of those nations posing any threat to actual Americans." 

Caitlin Johnstone

"Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too."

Marcus Aurelius

"It is always the adventurers who do great things, not the sovereigns of great empires."

Montesquieu