Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance."

H.L. Mencken

"Americans do not much argue about whether we are governed by DC, and only slightly over how we are governed by DC. But we argue viciously about who governs us from DC.

The sensible and humane way out of this is to decentralize, let people make their own decisions, and call off the low-intensity civil war.

This is the one solution that will not be considered."

Jeff Deist

"Voting is a primary tool for tyrants, they need the blame shifted from themselves to the willing accomplices in the population for the crimes they’ve committed and those uncommitted up to the time they resume their nefarious tasks of threatening, fining, kidnapping, maiming and killing selected Helots who happen to slide into the sight the government machine has focused on its latest rapine project."

Bill Buppert

"Nullification and secession allow our neighbor to protect his 'ox,' while our 'ox' is secure. The truth is that, in a Republic, all 'oxen' are endangered whenever the federal government assumes the right to 

gore our neighbor’s ox.' Perhaps Calexit will provide ideologues of both left and right an occasion to stop to consider the possibility of the mutual benefits of nullification and secession—it is certainly better than the alternative of a new Civil War. Perhaps only Southerners who understand the truth about Southern secession and the horrors inflicted upon our people by the Northern invader are capable of understanding this harsh reality."

James Ronald Kennedy

"Abraham Lincoln did not cause the death of so many people from a mere love of slaughter, but only to bring about a state of consent that could not otherwise be secured for the government he had undertaken to administer. When a government has once reduced its people to a state of consent – that is, of submission to its will – it can put them to a much better use than to kill them; for it can then plunder them, enslave them, and use them as tools for plundering and enslaving others."

Lysander Spooner

"There is nothing lawmakers love more than making laws, even when they know their laws won't accomplish their stated purpose. This is particularly true of those laws that take more authority for the state, or if they enrich the fascist system. For lawmakers, the 'unintended consequences' of their laws are just like gravy because they lead to the passing of more laws to correct the unintended consequences. This, of course, leads to more 'unintended consequences' and the passage of more laws."

Bob Livingston

"If people were marching toward your home, would you allow them an open border?  If you were paying someone – voluntarily or not – to provide protection from invasion, would you expect them to allow these 'visitors?' 

Until individuals in the west have complete private property rights, any talk of open borders is naïve at best and tyrannical at worst.  Until individuals in the west have complete private property rights, someone other than you will be making decisions about who does and doesn’t cross borders.

Until there are no state borders, it will be the state that makes the decision on who crosses the borders.  In a world of state borders, every decision regarding immigration is a centrally-planned, state-enforced-at-the-end-of-the-barrel-of-a-gun decision; even a position of open borders."

Bionic Mosquito

"Whatever happened to justice? What is 'just'? It means everybody gets what they deserve. Now, perhaps you can solve the problem. It’s a bit more specific, more focused, to find out what you deserve as opposed to what’s fair. Because, frankly, some people don’t deserve anything. Simply existing doesn’t necessarily give you a right to a piece of the pie—or even a right to vote on it. But nobody talks about justice today; they talk about fairness. And, of course, this corrupts the moral character of society."

Doug Casey

"The roles of most teachers, academicians, and make-believe journalists are essentially the same: to condition and reinforce the belief in the necessity for children and adults to accept the political arrangement for living 'responsible' lives. 'Obedience to institutionally constituted authority' is the premier article of faith in our politically dominated world."

Butler Shaffer

"The American idea of individuals being responsible and taking responsibility is utterly foreign to the 'elite,' who seem much more comfortable with the European idea of infantilizing subjects to make them dependent on a parentified government to protect them, care for them, dole out money to them, and in general control their lives. If people cannot even choose their own light bulbs, toilets, or dishwasher detergent, in what sense are they free?"

David C. Stolinksy

"The Left’s main beef these days is that Mr. Trump is in the White House, signifying that Daddy’s in the House, an intolerable condition. The Left is desperate to get rid of that particular Daddy and Daddyism per se and altogether. Daddyism represents rules and boundaries. The Left prefers chaos. It’s clearly a juvenile disposition, since that point-of-view fails to apprehend that the universe is chaotic enough without additional help from them. And they are still in despair over the failure of 'mommy' (HRC) and her disappearance into the darkling woods of political ignominy."

James Howard Kunstler