"When the common good of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals."
Ayn Rand
"We cannot escape this creeping American Socialism until our intellect overpowers spiritual and political deception. Eventually we get the great revelation that politics and organized religion are more alike than they are different. This is the master key and the essential ingredient. This is the key to understanding.
The globalist mass media must be decoded on our terms — on the basis of our original politics, our original culture, our original beliefs, and our original traditions.
Unless one approaches the mass media and the propagandists in this way, one does not have the tools to keep from being brainwashed by globalism, even if it is called 'democratic' globalism."
Bob Livingston
"Many among us today are thoughtlessly living off the labor of others.
Throughout history there have been looters of this or that variety. But we seem now to be confronted with a progression of such harmful behavior. As more and more people have abandoned moral scruples—feathering their nests at the expense of others—looting in its countless forms has more and more become a way of life.
Emerson wrote, 'Thought is the seed of action.' Honest, moral and sound economic thought results in commendable and creative action; each person serves himself through serving others. But if dishonest, immoral and uneconomic thinking prevails, the results must be harmful, not only to others but to self as well. Such thoughtlessness, then—rather than careful thought—is the seed of actions which presently bedevil us. And the seeds, more often than not, are words with garbled meanings … warped from bad to good.
It is increasingly evident that countless millions in all walks of life thoughtlessly 'live' off others; they loot and they don’t know it. They are the unwitting victims of their own naivete, stumbling along the devolutionary road … with pride instead of guilt."
Leonard Reed
"There are five tell-tale signs of a social scare: (1) concern, (2) hostility, (3) consensus, (4) disproportion, and (5) volatility. First, there must be sufficient concern that the perceived threat poses a serious risk to traditional values and must be measurable. Statistics and opinion polls are often used to sound the alarm, but they are not always accurate."
Robert E. Bartholomew (“A Colorful History of Popular Delusions”)
"The words freedom and liberty signified for the most eminent representatives of mankind one of the most precious and desirable goods. Today it is fashionable to sneer at them. They are, trumpets the modern sage, 'slippery' notions and 'bourgeois' prejudices.
Freedom and liberty are not to be found in nature. In nature there is no phenomenon to which these terms could be meaningfully applied. Whatever man does, he can never free himself from the restraints which nature imposes upon him. If he wants to succeed in acting, he must submit unconditionally to the laws of nature.
Freedom and liberty always refer to interhuman relations. A man is free as far as he can live and get on without being at the mercy of arbitrary decisions on the part of other people. In the frame of society everybody depends upon his fellow citizens. Social man cannot become independent without forsaking all the advantages of social cooperation."
Ludwig von Mises
"The monopoly of truth is upstream of the monopoly of violence."
Balaji Srinivasan
"It is true that bureaucrats are free to decide questions of vital importance in the individual's life; it is true that the unelected bureaucrats are no longer 'the servants of the citizenry but irresponsible and arbitrary masters'; it is true, furthermore, that 'bureaucracy is imbued with an implacable hatred of business and free enterprise.' But none of this is the fault of bureaucracy primarily. It is the outcome of 'that system of government which restricts the individual's freedom to manage his own affairs and assigns more and more tasks to the government.'
Bureaucracy, therefore, is not itself the disease. It is a cancerous phenomenon and betokens the fact that one kind of tissue has got out of control and is growing wild at the expense of other tissue."
Garet Garrett. 1945
"Schoolchildren are given the impression that the private sector is the source of all wickedness and oppression, from which public-spirited government officials, in their selfless commitment to justice, must rescue and protect us. The selection of subject matter itself exhibits a pro-state bias: students leave school knowing all about how a bill becomes a law, for example, but with no idea of how markets work.
All of this applies just as strongly to popular culture and the media, with of course a few noble exceptions like John Stossel. That is why I am surprised not by how much of the market economy has been suppressed in the United States, but by how much has managed to survive in the face of a hostile educational and cultural establishment."
Tom Woods
"There’s an unspoken assumption in the modern mind that history has come to an end. The structures we have today will be the structures we’ll have in 100… 300… 500 years. It’s true of currency. It’s true of finance. It’s true of governance. It’s true of science. It’s true of business structures. It’s true of social structures. It’s true of everything. But it’s a lie. And it’s not even a good lie. What’s most profound about our time is we are currently—as in right now—on the precipice of a new epoch. History reveals that new structures are constantly being formed while old structures fight against them… and lose."
Venkatesh Rao
"The current pandemic and lockdown environment has created a 'forced localism' of sorts where people have been compelled to tune in to their local politics to stay updated on the latest policy absurdities that state and local officials have foisted on them.
The more people distrust the electoral and the broader political process, the easier it will be to get them to consider new forms of political organization. Even if the system were to collapse, there always exist opportunities to forge ahead and build a new decentralized order that better reflects the political desires and cultural vision of America’s multifarious constituencies.
Exercising some degree of political creativity, through the embrace of soft secessionism and other gradualist forms of nullification, could provide an off ramp to a potential conflict. Continuing the present course is only asking for increased tension and for a potential tragedy to unfold."
Jose Nino
"In a free society, the right to discriminate is essential and absolute. A free society must include the freedom to discriminate against any individual or group for any reason and on any basis. A free society may or may not be free of discrimination, but it must be free of discrimination laws. By their very nature, the rights of private property, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, free enterprise, and freedom of contract include the right to discriminate. But not only are anti-discrimination laws an attack on these things, they are also an attack on freedom of thought. In a free society, everyone has the natural right to think whatever he wants—good or ill—about any individual or group and to choose to associate or not associate, in a personal or business capacity, with any individual or group on the basis of those thoughts. His thoughts may be erroneous, irrational, or illogical, and his opinions may be based on stereotypes, prejudice, or bigotry—but in a free society everyone is entitled to his own thoughts and opinions.
Since discrimination in any form is not aggression, force, coercion, violence, or threat, insofar as the law is concerned, it should never be considered a crime. And neither should it matter, insofar as the law is concerned, on what basis the discrimination takes place, the reason why the discrimination occurs, or what any individual or group thinks about it. Therefore, insofar as the law is concerned, the government should not proscribe it, seek to prevent it, or punish those who do it."
Laurence Vance
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