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GREAT QUOTES GREAT QUOTES May 9,2008 "The taxpayer: That’s someone who works for the federal government but doesn’t have to take the civil service examination." Ronald Reagan "If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks… will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered… "I sincerely, believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs." Thomas Jefferson "The elimination of profit, whatever methods may be resorted to for its execution, must transform society into a senseless jumble. It would create poverty for all." Ludwig von Mises "To write about business one should be in business, just as in writing about Tasmania one should visit Tasmania." James Cook May 8, 2008 "Big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it’s not ‘you’ who’s got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about." Mark Steyn "The Federal Reserve Banking is nothing but a banking fraud and an unlawful crime against Civilization. Why? Because they ‘create’ the money made ‘out of nothing’, and our Uncle Sap Government issues their ‘Federal Reserve Notes’ and stamps our Government approval with NO obligation whatever from these Federal Reserve Banks or National Banks. Etc. H. L. Birum, Sr. "I had never thought the Federal Bank System would prove such a failure. The country is in a state of irretrievable bankruptcy." Senator Carter Glass "There is no reason why capitalists and entrepreneurs should be ashamed of earning profits." Ludwig von Mises May 7, 2008 "You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help small men be tearing down big men. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatreds. You cannot establish security on borrowed money. You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man’s initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do themselves." Abraham Lincoln "When millions of people are going hungry, it’s a crime against humanity that food should be diverted to biofuels." Palaniappan Chidambaram "I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress." Ronald Reagan "The entrepreneur profits to the extent he has succeeded in serving the consumers better than other people have done." Ludwig von Mises May 6, 2008 "It is understandable that young people are so strongly attracted to Obama. Youth is another name for inexperience – and experience is what is most needed when dealing with skillful and charismatic demagogues." Thomas Sowell "We have stricken the (slave) shackles from four million human beings and brought all laborers to a common level, not so much by the elevation of former slaves as by practically reducing the whole working population, white and black, to a condition of serfdom. While boasting of our noble deeds, we are careful to conceal the ugly fact that by our iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which though more refined, is no less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery." Horace Greeley "The epithet profiteer is the expression of an arbitrary judgment of value. There is no other standard available for the distinction between profiteering and earning fair profits than that provided by the censor’s personal envy and resentment." Ludwig von Mises "Repetition causes stress." James Cook May 5, 2008 "My agency in promoting the passage of the National Bank Act was the greatest financial mistake of my life. It has built up monopoly which affects every interest in the country. It should be repealed; but before that can be accomplished, the people will be arrayed on one side and the banks on the other, in a contest such as we have never seen before in this country." Salmon P. Chase "Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong." Ronald Reagan "A fine is a tax for doing something wrong. A tax is a fine for doing something right." Unknown "Society is best served when the means of production are in the possession of those who know how to use them best." Ludwig von Mises May 2, 2008 "There is a long history of monetary experience. It tells us that government is at heart a counterfeiter and therefore cannot be trusted to control money, and that this is true of both autocratic and popular government." Garet Garrett – 1948 "Obama’s pitch to fawning audiences is so hopelessly idealistic and his promises so painfully unrealistic that it’s amazing he’s taken as seriously as he it." David Limbaugh "The truth is that the characteristic feature of capitalism was and is mass production for the needs of the masses." Ludwig von Mises "In business a little paranoia is good." James Cook May 1, 2008 "What’s scarier than Obama’s far-fetched promises is that people – in droves – believe them." David Limbaugh "The colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the Colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction." Benjamin Franklin "Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw included the working class among the ‘detestable’ people who ‘have no right to live.’ He added: ‘I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves." Thomas Sowell "Americans achieved a living standard that is the envy of the world. It is the direct result of the large degree of economic freedom we have enjoyed. Unleashing the lawyers to ‘protect’ us will kill many, many dreams." John Stossel "Neither the entrepreneurs nor the farmers nor the capitalists determine what has to be produced. The consumers do that." Ludwig von Mises April 30, 2008 "People try to live within their income so they can afford to pay taxes to a government that can’t live within its income." Robert Half "Yes, some Americans (2 percent of those who had mortgages) suffered foreclosures, and some jobs disappeared (80,000 last month). But the lawyer and other anti-business hysterics in politics and the media never acknowledge that corporate America built those homes in the first place. It was corporate America that made homeowners’ dreams possible by giving mortgages to the 98 percent of homeowners who haven’t defaulted. It was also corporate America that created 25 million jobs over the past 15 years." John Stossel "We live in a unique world of unregulated Credit. Excess has evolved to the point of being endemic to an apparatus that operates without any mechanism for adjustment or self-correction. There is, of course, no gold reserve system to restrain domestic monetary expansions." Doug Noland "If history could prove and teach us anything, it would be that private ownership of the means of production is a necessary requisite of civilization and material well-being…Only nations committed to the principle of private property have risen above penury and produced science, art and literature." Ludwig von Mises April 29, 2008 "If two parties, instead of being a bank and an individual, were an individual and an individual, they could not inflate the circulating medium by a loan transaction, for the simple reason that the lender could not lend what he didn’t have, as banks can do… Only commercial banks and trust companies can lend money which they manufacture by lending it." Irving Fisher "Karl Marx said, ‘The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.’ In other words, they mattered only in so far as they were willing to carry out the Marxist agenda." Thomas Sowell "The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so." Ronald Reagan "Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will." Ludwig von Mises "People say preposterous things when explaining their motives." James Cook April 28, 2008 "A virtuous circle is turning into a potentially vicious one – not only must China, et al, balk at throwing good money after bad with their newly earned dollars, they must be sorely tempted to shift their Accumulated Reserves into hard assets that better retain their value." Stuart Hill "You don’t pay taxes. They take taxes." Chris Rock "Today, the liberal and Democratic world’s only concern with regard to Iraq, where America is engaged in the greatest current battle against organized evil, is how soon America can withdraw." Dennis Prager "The ultimate source of the determination of prices is the value judgments of the consumers." Ludwig von Mises April 25, 2008 "Nothing keeps a company honest and efficient like the threat of other companies coming along and taking its business away." John Stossel "We must care for each other more, and tax each other less." Bill Archer "I recall asking the late eminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, in a public forum in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, if he would say that America was, all things considered, a better, i.e., more moral, society than Soviet society. He said he would not." Dennis Prager "Some think that they will exercise power for the general good, but that is what all those with power have believed. Power is evil in itself, regardless of who exercises it." Ludwig von Mises "Subsidies have changed the way the nation behaves." James Cook April 24, 2008 "The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help." Ronald Reagan "The enemies who confront us are religious barbarians, armed with the technologies of modern warfare but guided by morals that are medieval and grotesque. Their stated goal is the obliteration of America and the conquest of the West." David Horowitz and Ben Johnson "Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay." Milton Friedman "Market competition polices companies – and it does so far better than regulation and lawyers ever will. If GM offers shoddy or overpriced cars, competitors will clean GM’s clock." John Stossel "The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody; the process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples’ want satisfaction. The entrepreneurs, the capitalists and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers." April 23, 2008 "Vietnam occurred and Democrats and liberals (in academia, labor and the media) abandoned that war and abandoned millions of Asians to totaliterianism and death, defamed America’s military, became anti-war instead of anti-evil, became anti-anti-Communist instead of anti-Communist, and embraced isolationism, a doctrine I and others previously had always associated with conservatives and the Republican Party. This change was perfectly exemplified in 1972, when the Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern ran on the platform ‘Come home, America.’ This in turn led to the liberal embrace of the immoral doctrine of moral equivalence. As I was taught at Columbia, where I studied international relations, America was equally responsible for the Cold War, and there was little moral difference between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. They were essentially two superpowers, each looking out for its imperialist self-interest. I will never forget when the professor of my graduate seminar in advanced Communist Studies, Zbigniew Brzezinski, chided me for using the word ‘totalitarian’ to describe the Soviet Union." Dennis Prager "I’m against a system that doesn’t require a losing plaintiff to pay the winning defendant’s legal expenses – a system used by most of the world because it weeds out frivolous litigation." John Stossel "Obama is also part of a long tradition on the left of being for the working class in the abstract, or as people potentially useful for the purposes of the left, but having disdain or contempt for them as human beings." Thomas Sowell "The mixing of politics and business not only is detrimental to politics, as is frequently observed, but even much more so to business." Ludwig von Mises April 22, 2008 "Wal-Mart has become the whipping boy for political demagogues, unions and anti-traders. I suggest that they have the wrong target…. Wal-Mart exists and prospers because tens of millions of Americans find Wal-Mart to be a suitable source of goods and services. Clinton, Obama, unions and anti-traders should direct their outrage and condemnation at the tens of millions of Americans who shop at Wal-Mart and keep it in business." Walt Williams "I have no problem with lawyers representing people who are truly harmed by corporations. I’m against a system that can encourage lawyers to enrich themselves by manufacturing grievances and allows them to force even innocent companies to surrender big bucks in settlements because the cost of litigation is so great." John Stossel "I cannot lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." James Madison "The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars and revolutions is its anticapitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties are eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise." Ludwig von Mises "People hate what they fear." James Cook April 21, 2008 "Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose." Ronald Reagan "The object of war is to break an enemy’s will and destroy his capacity to fight. Therefore, a nation divided in wartime is a nation that invites its own defeat. Yet that is precisely how Americans are facing the global war that radical Islamists have declared on them." David Horowitz and Ben Johnson "What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue." Thomas Paine However inconsistent Obama’s words, his behavior has been remarkably consistent over the years. He has sought out and joined with the radical, anti-Western left, whether Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers of the terrorist Weatherman underground or pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli Rashid Khalidi." Thomas Sowell "There is an inherent tendency in all governmental power to recognize no restraints on its operation and to extend the sphere of its dominion as much as possible." April 18, 2008 "Democrats have an explanation for their defection from a war they originally supported: the president is to blame. But this is a claim that will not stand up to even the most cursory inspection. Between the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, which the Democrats supported, and their attacks on the legitimacy of the war, which began in June, three months later, no event transpired on the battlefield and no change took place in the administration’s war policy that would explain their defection. What changed was the internal politics of the Democratic Party, and this was a direct result of the antiwar campaign organized by the Left." David Horowitz and Ben Johnson "My conclusion is that silver is being increasingly viewed as a monetary metal." Richard Russell "Slate columnist Mickey Kaus has been waiting for Obama to ‘pivot’ to the center as Clinton did in 1992. But it may be that America’s most reliably liberal senator doesn’t think he has to. He isn’t a unifier. He’s a counter-revolutionary." Jonah Goldberg "The men who are to protect the community against violent aggression easily turn into the most dangerous aggressors. They transgress their mandate. They misuse their power for the oppression of those whom they were expected to defend against oppression. The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty." Ludwig von Mises "The most productive people are the first to suffer from the erosion of freedom." James Cook April 17, 2008 "Then there’s Obama’s mysterious association with former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers – whose group bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon and the State Department in the 1970s – which would have been enough to end any other presidential candidacy. So far, the mainstream media have shown no curiosity about the nature and extent of Obama’s relationship with Ayers, despite Ayers’ lack of repentance and defiant statements, ‘I don’t regret setting bombs’ and ‘I feel we didn’t do enough.’" David Limbaugh "Senator Obama is all talk – glib talk, exciting talk, confident talk, but still just talk." Thomas Sowell "The difference between death and taxes is death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets." Will Rogers "The market performs miracles so routinely that we take it for granted. Supermarkets provide 30,000 choices at rock-bottom prices. We take it for granted that when we stick a piece of plastic in a wall, cash will come out; that when we give the same plastic to a stranger, he will rent us a car, and the next month, VISA will have the accounting correct to the penny. By contrast, ‘experts’ in government can’t even count the vote accurately." John Stossel "The planned economy is the most rigid system of enslavement history has ever known." Ludwig von Mises April 15, 2008 "Why is it so important to win an international popularity contest? If America is not popular in the world, what are the other nations going to do to us? Stop buying our products? Kick us out of the U.N.? Vote us off the island? Mona Charen "In all countries where inflation is been rapid, it has been observed that the decrease in the value of the money has occurred faster than the increase in its quantity." Ludwig von Mises "Be cautious with your bidding when the auctioneer is unknown to you." James Cook April 14, 2008 "It is indisputable that, given the state of things, bad economic times will be a forerunner to bad and worse economic policy." Llewellyn Rockwell "Regrettably, all the best efforts by the Federal Reserve and Washington politicians to sustain the U.S. Bubble Economy are doomed to failure." Doug Noland "No increase in the welfare of the members of a society can result from the availability of an additional quantity of money." Ludwig von Mises April 11, 2008 "All present-day governments are fanatically committed to an easy money policy." Ludwig von Mises "Relatives make the severest critics." James Cook April 10, 2008 "Democrats in general, I would submit, confuse change with improvement. They fail to weigh the costs and benefits of change, to consider its unintended consequences, or to worry about what we need to conserve and how we might go about doing that faithfully. They ask Americans to embrace change for its own sake, in the faith that history is governed by a law of progress, which guarantees that change is almost always an improvement." Charles R. Kesler "For members of the political class, the crucial question is always: how can we push out the frontier, how can we augment the government’s dominion and plunder, with net gain to ourselves, the exploiters who live not by honest production and voluntary exchange, but by fleecing those who do so? Robert Higgs "If you increase the quantity of money, you bring about the lowering of the purchasing power of the monetary unit." Ludwig von Mises April 9, 2008 "The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised – a fire that, at best, can be controlled for only a short time before it o’erleaps its improvised confinements and spreads its flames far and wide." Robert Higgs "Depression is the aftermath of credit expansion." Ludwig von Mises April 8, 2008 "We heard that South Korea would no longer accept U.S. Treasury bonds because the yields were so low. My immediate thought was, ‘Good excuse, but the real reason was probably that South Korea no longer wanted U.S. paper.’" Richard Russell "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." C. S. Lewis "If it were really possible to substitute credit expansion (cheap money) for the accumulation of capital goods by saving, there would not be any poverty in the world." Ludwig von Mises "Stupidity is failing to learn from experience." James Cook April 4, 2008 "Politicians in general – black, white, and brown – have avoided talking about illegitimacy, even though it now threatens not just the black community but increasingly Hispanics and poor whites as well. Nearly half of Hispanic babies are being born to single mothers today – a big increase in just the last few years – and one in four white babies are born out of wedlock." Linda Chavez "The top leader in the ethanol hoax is Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), the country’s largest producer of ethanol. Ethanol producers and the farm lobby have pressured farm state congressmen into believing that it would be political suicide if they didn’t support subsidized ethanol production. That’s the stick. Campaign contributions play the role of the carrot." Walter Williams "The valuation of the monetary unit depends not upon the wealth of the country, but upon the ratio between the quantity of money and the demand for it, so that even the richest country may have a bad currency and the poorest country a good one." Ludwig von Mises "Friendships wax and wane with the degree of mutual self interest." James Cook April 3, 2008 "It’s easy to understand how the public, looking for cheaper gasoline, can be taken in by the call for increased ethanol usage. But politicians, corn farmers and ethanol producers know they are running a cruel hoax on the American consumer. They are in it for the money." Walter Williams "Nearly seven in 10 black babies are born to single mothers today. These children will fail in school at higher rates than those born to two parents. They are more likely to become involved in criminal activity. Their poverty rates will be higher. And they are far more likely to repeat this pattern by giving birth to or fathering a child out of wedlock themselves." Linda Chavez "At least since the Supreme Court’s decision in University of California v. Bakke in 1978 – and obviously long before that, or there wouldn’t have been a case or controversy for the court to consider – it has been legal for the government to discriminate against whites on the basis of their race. Consequently, any white person 30 years old or younger has lived, since the day he was born, in an America where it is legal to discriminate against white people. In many cases it’s not just legal, but mandatory, for example, in education, in hiring and in Academy Award nominations." Ann Coulter "Where the free exchange of goods and services is unknown, money is not wanted." Ludwig von Mises April 2, 2008 "Obama avoided dealing in any meaningful way with the single most important issue facing the black community – the breakdown of the black family. And this issue, and the consequences, explains far more about the failure of blacks to thrive today than racism or lack of social spending." Linda Chavez "Conservative opposition to affirmative action and unbridled welfare is not based on greed, selfishness or racism but on a philosophical difference over how best to solve problems while preserving the dignity of all individual human beings." David Limbaugh "The governments alone are responsible for the spread of the superstitious awe with which the common man looks upon every bit of paper upon which the treasury or agencies which it controls have printed the magical words legal tender." Ludwig von Mises April 1, 2008 "People are being led to believe that things are under control, so instead of doing whatever is necessary to prepare for the worst, they are setting themselves up for an even bigger blindsiding than before." Michael Panzer "Government auditors spent the last five years examining all federal programs and found that 22 percent of them – costing taxpayers $123 billion per year – fail to show any positive impact on the populations they serve." Cal Thomas "Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made." George Burns "Fiat money is a money consisting of mere tokens which can neither be employed for any industrial purposes nor convey a claim against anybody." Ludwig von Mises "The longer things don’t change the more they change when they do." James Cook March 31, 2008 "The old baggage has been replaced with shinier suitcases, but the contents are the same as ever. Black America’s problems can be solved by spending more money on the same old Great Society programs. Any talk about black America’s problems that takes the eyes off that prize is a ‘distraction.’ And, yet again, white Americans can prove their commitment to racial justice by going along with more big government. My hope for something better proved too audacious in the end." Jonah Goldberg "Congress has enacted major ethanol subsidies, about $1.05 to $1.38 a gallon, which is no less than a tax on consumers. In fact, there’s a double tax – one in the form of ethanol subsidies and another in the form of handouts to corn farmers to the tune of $9.5 billion in 2005 alone." Walt Williams "The first woman on a presidential ticket got bounced from the Clinton campaign and denounced by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann for her ‘insidious racism’ indistinguishable from ‘the vocabulary of David Duke.’ Oh, for cryin’ out loud. Enjoyable as it is to watch previously expert tossers of identity-politics hand grenades blow their own fingers off, if Geraldine Ferraro’s an ‘insidious racist’, who isn’t?" Mark Steyn "For two hundred years the governments have interfered with the market’s choice of the money medium. Even the most bigoted etatists do not venture to assert that this interference has proved beneficial." Ludwig von Mises March 28, 2008 "Ethanol is so costly that it wouldn’t make it in a free market." Walter Williams "There was the risk of a total meltdown at the beginning of last week. I don’t think most people have any idea how bad this chain could have been, and I am still not sure the Fed can maintain the solvency of the U.S. banking system." James Melcher "Only the naïve inflationists could believe that government could enrich mankind through fiat money." Ludwig von Mises "An optimist is wrong a lot more than a pessimist." James Cook March 27, 2008 "Because he was using his overbearing power against businesses, the anti-business left idolized him [Spitzer], just as they idolized Ralph Nader before him as some sort of secular saint because he attacked General Motors." Thomas Sowell "It is the real $US 9.2 trillion US economy which has to carry a debt load of $US 48.808 trillion. That debt load is 530 percent of the real non-credit US economy." Bill Buckler "Claude Castonguay, the father of the Quebec universal health-care system, later adopted by the whole of Canada. Castonguay recently pronounced his country’s system a failure, and now urges American-style competition and pushes for a greater role by the private sector." Larry Elder "The interests of the capitalists are scarcely ever represented in monetary policy." Ludwig von Mises March 26, 2008 "Ethanol is 20 to 30 percent less efficient than gasoline, making it more expensive per highway mile. It takes 450 pounds of corn to produce the ethanol to fill one SUV tank. That’s enough corn to feed one person for a year. Plus, it takes more than one gallon of fossil fuel – oil and natural gas – to produce one gallon of ethanol. After all, corn must be grown, fertilized, harvested and trucked to ethanol producers – all of which are fuel-using activities. And, it takes 1,700 gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol.: Walter Williams "Washington is a company town and a political machine that spends trillions of our tax dollars to mislead the public." Richard Benson "Many in the media refer to Eliot Spitzer as some moral hero who fell from grace. Spitzer was never a moral hero. He was an unscrupulous prosecutor who threw his power around to ruin people, even when he didn’t have any case with which to convict them of anything." Thomas Sowell "The present unraveling of the U.S. banking sector and the broader U.S. financial sectors is only beginning." Bill Buckler "A nation cannot prosper if its members are not fully aware of the fact that what alone can improve their conditions is more and better production. And this can only be brought about by increased saving and capital accumulation." Ludwig von Mises March 25, 2008 "Democratic partisans take at least some comfort in growing evidence of an impending recession. (What a cheerful party they are.) The hope is for a good deep recession that will drive the fearful American voters into the tender embrace of their presidential standard-bearer." Tony Blankley "The Fed is doing everything it can to stave off disaster, but frankly, it is not rich enough. With assets of about $800 billion, having instituted $400 billion of rescue programs in the last week plus unspecified intervention with Bear Stearns, it is pretty nearly tapped out. It does of course have available a further source of liquidity, the Federal printing press. With inflation already moving at a brisk trot, use of that source will replace an incipient recession with a deeper and highly inflationary recession." Martin Hutchinson "Ethanol contains water that distillation cannot remove. As such, it can cause major damage to automobile engines not specifically designed to burn ethanol. The water content of ethanol also risks pipeline corrosion and thus must be shipped by truck, rail car or barge. These shipping methods are far more expensive than pipelines." Walter Williams "The preservation and the further improvement of what is called ‘the American way of life’ and ‘an American standard of living’ depends on the maintenance and the further increase of the capital invested in American business." Ludwig von Mises "America is aggressively embracing socialistic schemes and ruining itself in the process." James Cook March 24, 2008 "It is our contention that the size of the politically motivated governmental spending, spending which has no ‘hard’ limiting factor or defined discipline, will continue apace and, in fact, significantly worsen due to compounding interest on government borrowing and the coming wave of irrevocable social commitments – on Social Security and Medicare. Against the backdrop of a global fiat monetary regime, the only limitation to government spending is that which the politicians believe will be politically unacceptable to a population. This is, generally speaking, no real limitation at all, given that the public is now apathetic about, and numb to, the real world implications of large numbers." David Galland "You can’t be with someone for 20 years, call him your mentor, and not know about his racist and anti-American views." Thomas Sowell "The U.S. has a shrinking manufacturing base and an expanding bureaucracy powered forward by a credit expansion which is drowning the U.S. under a mountain of unrepayable debts." Bill Buckler "Obama says that pretty much any inconvenient discussion of race is a distraction from what America really needs, a huge expansion of the welfare state." Jonah Goldberg "The average American worker enjoys amenities for which Croesus, Crassus, the Medici, and Louis XIV would have envied him." Ludwig von Mises March 21, 2008 "I believe in an evolving constitution…. A flexible constitution allows U.S. to consider not merely how the world was, but how it ought to be." Elliot Spitzer "So long as credit was expanding, market participants and central bankers could earnestly believe in any number of preposterous stories. Credit is in a vicious contraction and so is the biggest secular belief system in history." Bob Hoye "Within Marxism there is no place for free thought." Ludwig von Mises "With socialized medicine the trick is not to die while waiting for treatment." James Cook March 19, 2008 "In a real free market, a company succeeds only by making things consumers want to buy and keeping costs low enough that the market price yields a profit. Sadly, in our mixed economy, success can be achieved another way: by lobbying the government for advantages over one’s competitors." John Stossel "It is now highly likely that whosoever wins the presidency, we are facing eight more years of unsecured borders and the addition of many millions more illegal immigrants into our already unstable body politic. ‘Alea lacta est.’ (The die is cast.) Tony Blankley "Marx and Engels never tried to refute their opponents with argument. They insulted, ridiculed, derided, slandered, and traduced them, and in the use of these methods their followers are not less expert. Their polemic is directed never against the argument of the opponent, but always against his person." Ludwig von Mises March 18, 2008 "In addition to his own personal contributions to the intellectual diversity of American life, William F. Buckley’s pioneering opened the way for many others to add greatly to our intellectual diversity, the only kind of ‘diversity’ that liberals seem to dislike, especially on our college campuses." Thomas Sowell "There is no moral argument that justifies using the coercive powers of government to force one person to bear the expense of taking care of another." Walter Williams "The fundamental law of the market is: the customer is always right." Ludwig von Mises "Conspiracy implies secrecy which means that conspiracies can rarely exist." James Cook March 17, 2008 "What we are witnessing is essentially the breakdown of our modern-day banking system, a complex of leveraged lending so hard to understand that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke required a face-to-face refresher course from hedge fund managers in mid-August." Bill Gross "In our view, however, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal." Warren Buffett "Within the market society each serves all his fellow citizens and each is served by them. It is a system of mutual exchange of services and commodities, a mutual giving, and receiving." Ludwig von Mises March 14, 2008 "All inflation is the result of increasing the quantity of money and credit; and the cure is simply to halt the increase." Henry Hazlitt "A great deal of what people in less capitalistic countries consider luxury is a common good in the more capitalistically developed countries." Ludwig von Mises "People aren’t dumb, they’re inexperienced." James Cook March 13, 2008 "All inflation is government made." Henry Hazlitt "Behind the wonderful-sounding political ‘solutions’ to our problems is the notion that businesses are just ripping us off with arbitrarily set prices, and that the government can make them stop. It makes a nice story and it can get votes for politicians who play the role of saviors. But it makes little economic sense. Why do so many businesses have losses, and even go bankrupt, if they can set their prices wherever they want to?" Thomas Sowell "Every innovation makes its appearance as a ‘luxury’ of the few well-to-do. After industry has become aware of it, the luxury then becomes a ‘necessity’ for all." March 11, 2008 "The economy is far too complex for any president – no matter how smart – to manage. How can politicians and bureaucrats possibly know what hundreds of millions of individuals know, want and aspire to? How can government employees fathom what trade-offs to make in a world of scarce resources? They can’t. That’s why free people are more prosperous than unfree people. Presidential candidates should promise to keep their hands off the economy." John Stossel "Luxury is the roadmaker of progress." Ludwig von Mises "People love you less when you’re ill." James Cook March 7, 2008 "We will all have to pay a cost for political restrictions and political cleverness, since there is no free lunch. In fact, free lunches are a big part of the reason for once-prosperous regions declining into rust belts." "When the radical chic composer Leonard Bernstein complained about the smearing of the word ‘liberal,’ Buckley replied: ‘Lenny does not realize that one of the reasons the ‘L’ word is discredited is that it was handled by such as Leonard Bernstein.’ The composer was so unnerved by this remark that, just to cheer himself up, he invited several extra Black Panthers to his next cocktail party." Ann Coulter "Liberty is always freedom from the government." Ludwig von Mises "Self interest feeds more people than self sacrifice." James Cook March 6, 2008 "While American auto makers are laying off workers by the thousands, Japanese auto makers like Toyota and Honda are hiring thousands of American workers. But they are not hiring them in the rust belts. They are avoiding the rust belts, just as domestic businesses are avoiding the high costs that have been piled on over the years by both unions and governments in the rust belt regions." Thomas Sowell "Capitalism is the most reliable source of modern progress precisely because when it functions at its best it combines the realism of acquisition (or greed) with the idealism of serving the public." Paul Johnson "Most of what Africa needs, the West cannot give: rule of law, private property rights, fewer economic restrictions, independent judiciary and limited government. The one important thing we can do to help is to lower our trade barriers." Walter Williams "All that Lenin learned about business from the tales of his comrades who occasionally sat in business offices was that it required a lot of scribbling, recording, and ciphering. Thus, he declares that ‘accounting and control’ are the chief things necessary for the organizing and correct functioning of society… Here we have the philosophy of the filing clerk in its full glory." Ludwig von Mises March 5, 2008 "When asked if he had ‘referred to Jesse Jackson as an ignoramus,’ Buckley said, ‘If I didn’t, I should have.’" Ann Coulter "It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens." John Maynard Keynes "The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." Lord Acton "Nothing links men more closely together than a community of language, and nothing segregates them more effectively than a difference of language." Ludwig von Mises March 4, 2008 "The worst thing the West can do to Africa is to give more foreign aid. For the most part, foreign aid is government to government. As such, it provides the financial resources that enable Africa’s grossly corrupt and incompetent regimes to buy military equipment, pay off cronies and continue to oppress their people. It also provides resources for the leaders to live lavishly and set up ‘retirement’ accounts in foreign banks." Walter Williams "When politicians today say that they are going to ‘bring down the cost of medical care’ or make housing ‘affordable,’ what are they talking about other than price controls?" Thomas Sowell "What transformed the world of horse-drawn carriages, sailing ships, and windmills step by step into a world of airplanes and electronics was the laissez-faire principle." Ludwig von Mises "Never become angered at what someone reports to you until you have seen proof." James Cook March 3, 2008 "Americans are so enamored by equality they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom." Alexis de Tocqueville "Laissez faire, laissez passer does not mean: let the evils last. On the contrary, it means: do not interfere with the operation of the market because such interference must necessarily restrict output and make people poorer. It means furthermore: do not abolish or cripple the capitalist system which, in spite of all obstacles put in its way by governments and politicians, has raised the standard of living of the masses in an unprecedented way." Ludwig von Mises February 29, 2008 "Time magazine once called Che the ‘brain’ of the Cuban Revolution, and saluted his ‘icy calculation, vast competence, high intelligence, and … perceptive sense of humor.’ A better description comes from journalist Humberto Fontova, who observes in ‘Exposing The Real Che Guevara’ that Che was for Castro what Heinrich Himmler was for Hitler and Lavrenty Beria for Stalin – ‘the snarling enforcer.’ Fittingly, a massive drawing of Che adorns the headquarters of Cuba’s secret policy in Havana. That this sadistic thug’s face also adorns the office of a US presidential candidate’s supporters [Obama] is appalling and disgraceful. That the candidate couldn’t bring himself to say so is even worse." Jeff Jacoby "Laissez faire means: Let the common man choose and act; do not force him to yield to a dictator." Ludwig von Mises "What you think to be crucially important seldom turns out to be." James Cook February 28, 2008 "Imagine the transformative effects in the region, and indeed in the entire Muslim world, of achieving a secure and stable Iraq, friendly to the United States and victorious over al-Qaeda. Are the Democrats so intent on denying George Bush retroactive vindication for a war they insist is his that they would deny their own country a now-achievable victory?" Charles Krauthammer "The Fed is powerless to prevent the unwinding of the long credit cycle that has been building, with spurts and pauses, for 75 years. A classic debt deflation is upon us. There is no avoiding the consequences; economic activity will shrink, incomes and employment will fall, and asset values will deflate for the next several years. Recovery will begin only when asset prices, especially for houses, have been restores to an adequate degree of affordability." Makund Sheorey "Laissez faire does not mean: let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: let individuals choose how they want to cooperate in the social division of labor and let them determine what the entrepreneurs should produce. Planning means: let the government alone choose and enforce its rulings by the apparatus of coercion and compulsion." Ludwig von Mises February 27, 2008 "Despite all the progress, military and political, the Democrats remain unwavering in their commitment to withdrawal on an artificial timetable that inherently jeopardizes our ‘very real chance that Iraq will emerge as a secure and stable state." Charles Krauthammer "Just because Obama is given to lofty oratory and inspires hope with platitudes doesn’t mean he’s an empty vessel. I’d fear an Obama presidency much less if he were just an empty vessel. We underestimate him at our peril. He is plenty smart and quite capable. And he does have an agenda that, sadly for us, is substance-rich. His generalities-laden, silver-tongued optimism conceals a hard-core leftist blueprint for this country that would make Dennis Kucinich look like Milton Friedman." David Lumbaugh "If one rejects laissez faire on account of man’s fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action." Ludwig von Mises February 26, 2008 "The fresh, young face of Obama represents change, yes. But he also represents something very familiar; liberalism. Government as a permanent, inefficient, out-of-control crutch." Kathryn Lopez "The essence of Keynesianism is its complete failure to conceive the role that saving and capital accumulation play in the improvement of economic conditions." Ludwig von Mises "No matter how bad it is, people will say it is worse." James Cook February 22, 2008 "The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind! Against those hyenas there is no option but extermination. We will bring the war to the imperialist enemies’ very home, to his places of work and recreation. The imperialist enemy must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we’ll destroy him! We must keep our hatred against them (the U.S.) alive and fan it to paroxysms!" Ernesto "Che" Guevara "Keynes did not teach us how to perform the ‘miracle… of turning a stone into bread,’ but the not at all miraculous procedure of eating the seed corn." Ludwig von Mises "Be much less reactive to what you are told than what you experience." James Cook February 21, 2008 "America’s ‘friend’ in the War on Terror, Saudi Arabia, banned Valentine’s Day. The Commission on the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, otherwise known as the Religious Police, even banned the color red on February 14th because of its association with the holiday." Deborah Weiss "The Republican party established and will continue to uphold the gold standard and will oppose any measure which will undermine the government’s credit or impair the integrity of our national currency. Relief by currency inflation is unsound in principle and dishonest in results." Republican National Platform, 1932 (quote courtesy of James Dines) "The unprecedented success of Keynesianism is due to the fact that it provides an apparent justification for the ‘deficit spending’ policies of contemporary governments. It is the pseudo-philosophy of those who can think of nothing else than to dissipate the capital accumulated by previous generations." Ludwig von Mises February 20, 2008 "Money itself is not wealth. If money was actual wealth, then the government could just print up a million dollars for everyone and wipe poverty off the face of the earth. Money is just a substitute for wealth, a store of value for it. True wealth is the goods and services that we have produced. It can never be created with a printing press." Nelson Hultberg "It is the typical policy of apres nous le deluge. Lord Keynes, the champion of this policy, says: ‘In the long run we are all dead.’ But unfortunately nearly all of us outlive the short run. We are destined to spend decades paying for the easy money orgy of a few years." Ludwig von Mises February 19, 2008 "It’s looking like a grim pick of the daisy petals for conservatives: McCain. Clinton. Obama. He loves us not. She loves us not. He wants to waft us upward on a great uniting bipartisan marshmallow of ‘hope’ and ‘change’ so he can implement down-the-line by-the-book highly partisan hopeless unchanged liberal policies." Mark Steyn "Gold has been battling against the doubters and know-nothings for the last eight years. The great mass of Americans still prefer fiat paper currency to real money. But that will change somewhere ahead. When that changes, we’ll call it the third phase of one of the greatest bull markets in history. We’re not there yet, not by a long shot. Meanwhile, gold continues its silent war against ‘printed wealth.’" Richard Russell "A dictum of Lord Keynes: ‘In the long run we are all dead.’ I do not question the truth of this statement; I even consider it as the only correct declaration of the neo-British Cambridge school." Ludwig von Mises "Never be afraid to think the unthinkable, just in case." James Cook February 18, 2008 "Gold is money and nothing else." J.P. Morgan "The combination of a sinking economy and crippling levels of debt ensure that the injection of truly excess liquidity lies ahead." John Embry "Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan "All judgments of value are personal and subjective. There are no judgments of value other than those asserting, I prefer, I like better, I wish." Ludwig von Mises February 15, 2008 "The wise and correct course to follow in taxation is not to destroy those who have already secured success but to create conditions under which every one will have a better chance to be more successful." Calvin Coolidge "If capitalism worked as the socialists think an economic system ought to work, and provided a constant equality of living conditions for all, regardless of whether a man was able or not, resourceful or not, diligent or not, thrifty or not, if capitalism put no premium on resourcefulness and effort and no penalty on idleness or vice, it would produce only an equality of destitution." Henry Hazlitt "It is indeed one of the principal drawbacks of every kind of interventionism that it is so difficult to reverse the process." Ludwig von Mises "Never accept what people claim to be their reasons: look further." James Cook February 14, 2008 "If either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama becomes president, government will grow even larger and become more intrusive." Cal Thomas "Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves." Ronald Reagan "State interference in economic life, which calls itself ‘economic policy,’ has done nothing but destroy economic life." Ludwig von Mises February 13, 2008 "The government has brought on the housing problem, partly by these very low interest rates, which encouraged many people to go way out on a limb. They’ve brought it on by highly restrictive building policies, which have caused housing prices to skyrocket artificially. And they’ve brought it on by the Community Reinvestment Act, which presumes that politicians are better able to tell investors where to put their money than the investors themselves are. When you put all that together, you get something like what you have." Thomas Sowell "This government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of the way." Henry David Thoreau "The increasing tendency under capitalism is that penalties are imposed roughly in proportion to error and neglect and rewards granted roughly in proportion to effort, ability, and foresight. It is precisely this system of graduated rewards and penalties, in which each tends to receive in proportion to the market value he helps to produce, that incites each of us constantly to put forth his greatest effort to maximize the value of his own production and thus (whether intentionally or not) help to maximize that of the whole community." Henry Hazlitt "Every step that leads away from private ownership of the means of production and the use of money is a step away from rational economic activity." Ludwig von Mises February 12, 2008 "Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them." Ronald Reagan "Too many Republicans negotiate with Democrats over the size of new programs and budget increases, rather than reducing the cost and size of the nanny state." Cal Thomas "But for the inefficiency of the law-givers and the laxity, carelessness, and corruption of many of the functionaries, the last vestiges of the market economy would have long since disappeared." Ludwig von Mises "God doesn’t make exceptions." James Cook February 11, 2008 "One reason the socialistic mind-set resonates favorably with many is due to the shift in the last half-century from promoting hard work, self-sufficiency, marriage, personal responsibility and accountability and living within one’s means, to a mentality that I am entitled to the fruits of other people’s labor. That used to be called robbery before government started doing it more than a century ago through the income tax." Cal Thomas "The market will deliver the goods if government doesn’t impose crippling regulations and tax away everyone’s capital to fund its coercive utopian schemes." John Stossel "Institutions that are subject not to the disciplines of the market but to the imperfect controls of a large government bureaucracy become corrupt, and that corruption, which is proportionate to the resources controlled, represents pure loss of output to the economy as a whole." Martin Hutchinson "On the unhampered market there prevails an irresistible tendency to employ every factor of production for the best possible satisfaction of the most urgent needs of the consumers. If the government interfered with this process, it can only impair satisfaction; it can never improve it." Ludwig von Mises February 8, 2008 "Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets." Ronald Reagan "Capitalism will continue to eliminate mass poverty in more and more places and to an increasingly marked extent if it is merely permitted to do so." Henry Hazlitt "The middle-of-the-road policy is not an economic system that can last. It is a method for the realization of socialism by installments." Ludwig von Mises "Lenin lived an error." James Cook February 7, 2008 "Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States." Ronald Reagan "The State, by relieving idleness, improvidence, or misconduct from the punishment, and depriving abstinence and foresight of the reward, which have been provided for them by nature, may indeed destroy wealth, but most certainly will aggravate poverty." Nassau Senior "The capitalist system has lifted mankind out of mass poverty. It is this system that in the last century, in the last generation, even in the last decade, has acceleratively been changing the face of the world, and has provided the masses of mankind with amenities that even kings did not possess or imagine a few generations ago." Henry Hazlitt "Interventionism cannot be considered as an economic system destined to stay. It is a method for the transformation of capitalism into socialism by a series of successive steps." Ludwig von Mises February 6, 2008 "Government relief tends constantly to get out of hand. And even when it is kept within reasonable bounds it tends to reduce the incentives to work and to save both of those who receive it and of those who are forced to pay it. It may be said, in fact, that practically every measure that governments take with the ostensible object of '‘helping the poor’ has the long-run effect of doing the opposite." Henry Hazlitt "It requires a long train of reasoning to show that the capital on which the miracles of civilization depend is the slow and painful creation of the economy and enterprise of the few, and of the industry of the many, and is destroyed, or driven away, or prevented from arising, by any causes which diminish or render insecure the profits of the capitalist." Nassau Senior "Economic interventionism is a self-defeating policy. The individual measures that it applies do not achieve the results sought. They bring about a state of affairs, which – from the viewpoint of its advocates themselves – is much more undesirable than the previous state they intended to alter." Ludwig von Mises February 5, 2008 "In an interview with The New York Times, Sen. Clinton said as president she would inject government more into the economy and rely less on market forces. She specifically mentioned income inequality and economic excesses, such as executive-pay packages, which she termed ‘offensive’ and ‘wrong.’ Cal Thomas "Socialism and interventionism. Both have in common the goal of subordinating the individual unconditionally to the state." Ludwig von Mises "Relief, or redistribution of income, voluntary or coerced, is never the true solution of poverty, but at best a makeshift, which may mask the disease and mitigate the pain, but provides no basic cure." Henry Hazlitt "Welfare corrupts the lower class much faster than the middle class." James Cook February 4, 2008 "I find it rather ironic that Wall Street is so fervidly lambasting the Fed. For twenty years now the Fed has basically done everything that Wall Street requested and more." Doug Noland "You are much surer that you are doing good when you pay money to those who work, as a recompense of their labor, than when you give money merely in charity." Samuel Johnson
"No matter whether it is their intention or not, almost anything that the rich can legally do tends to help the poor. The spending of the rich gives employment to the poor. But the saving of the rich, and their investment of these savings in the means of production, gives just as much employment, and in addition makes that employment constantly more productive and more highly paid, while it also constantly increases and cheapens the production of necessities and amenities for the masses." Henry Hazlitt "If all interventionist laws were really to be observed they would soon lead to absurdity." Ludwig von Mises February 1, 2008 "What this economy needs is more freedom for the individual and less manipulation by over-taxing, over-spending and over-regulating government." Cal Thomas "The essence of the interventionist policy is to take from one group to give to another. It is confiscation and distribution." Ludwig von Mises "Both fact and logic seem to me to support the view that savings invested in privately owned economic tools of production amount to an act of charity. And further, I believe it to be – as a type – the greatest economic charity of all." F. A. Harper "Since humans are never perfect their political and economic systems will always be imperfect." James Cook January 31, 2008 "Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society." Adam Smith "In the market society the proprietors of capital and land can enjoy their property only by employing it for the satisfaction of other people’s wants. They must serve the consumers in order to have any advantage from what is their own. The very fact that they own means of production forces them to submit to the wishes of the public. Ownership is an asset only for those who know how to employ it in the best possible way for the benefit of the consumers. It is a social function." Ludwig von Mises "Contrary to age-old prejudices, the wealth of the rich is not the cause of the poverty of the poor, but helps to alleviate that poverty." Henry Hazlitt January 30, 2008 "The fuel of economic growth is the creation of new wealth, not the redistribution of existing wealth. Rebating some of last year’s taxes or expanding welfare-like benefits won’t encourage anyone to be more productive. Permanently lowering tax rates – letting Americans keep more of the money they earn, this year and every year – will." Jeff Jacoby "The U.S. political debate is moving in a negative direction as ‘fairness’ and income redistribution replace growth as the policy lodestar and proposals for tax increases proliferate." Paul Gigot "The sad truth is that one of the reasons people have to go on relief in the first place is that they have been as incompetent or heedless in spending money as in earning it. The worst thing one can give a spendthrift, a drunkard, a drug addict, or a compulsive gambler is cash." Henry Hazlitt "What governments call international monetary cooperation is concerted action for the sake of credit expansion." Ludwig von Mises January 29, 2008 "Even when the left and the right aren’t sure if there is a recession, they can always get together on a plan to give away money – especially in an election year." Debra J. Saunders "The lower-class individual lives from moment to moment. If he has any awareness of a future, it is of something fixed, fated, beyond his control: things happen to him, he does not make them happen. Impulse governs his behavior, either because he cannot discipline himself to sacrifice a present for a future satisfaction or because he has no sense of the future. He is therefore radically improvident: whatever he cannot consume immediately he considers valueless. His bodily needs (especially for sex) and his taste for ‘action’ take precedence over everything else – and certainly over any work routine." Edward C. Banfield "If there is to be no loss whatever of dignity or self-respect in getting and staying on relief, then there can be no gain in dignity or self-respect in making some sacrifices to keep off." Henry Hazlitt "No international authority can preserve peace if economic wars continue. In our age of international division of labor, free trade is the prerequisite for any amicable arrangement between nations." Ludwig von Mises "Taxes are a penalty on progress." James Cook January 28, 2008 "As the world gets freer, it gets richer." John Gwartney "Economic freedom leads to good things, while government coercion leads to poverty and oppression." John Stossel "The more ‘adequate’ we make relief, the more people we are going to find willing to get on it and stay on it indefinitely. The more we try to make sure that everybody really in need of relief gets it, the more certain we can be that we are also giving it to people who neither need nor deserve it." Henry Hazlitt "Public opinion always wants ‘easy money,’ that is, low interest rates." Ludwig von Mises January 25, 2008 "Although we are at peace and without a Cold War, our government is currently spending at a higher rate than the peak 30%-of-GDP rate of World War I, and nearing the record 50%-of-GDP rate of World War II! There is a broad consensus that government spending must be cut." R. J. Rodgers "Government-to-government foreign aid promotes statism, dirigisme, socialism, dependence, pauperization, inefficiency and waste. It prolongs the poverty it is designed to cure. Voluntary private investment in private enterprise, on the other hand, promotes capitalism, production, independence and self-reliance." Henry Hazlitt "The educated classes are possessed by the idea that in the social domain anything can be accomplished if only one applies enough force and is sufficiently resolute." Ludwig von Mises "The test of good writing is to simplify complex subjects." James Cook January 24, 2008 "No ordinary misfortune, no ordinary misgovernment, will do so much to make a nation wretched as the constant effort of every man to better himself will do to make a nation prosperous. It has often been found that profuse expenditures, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundations, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it." Thomas Babington Macaulay "There is a profound contrast between the effects of foreign aid and of voluntary private investment: Foreign aid goes from government to government. It is therefore almost inevitably statist and socialistic." Henry Hazlitt "Almost all the fathers of socialism were members of the upper middle class or of the professions." Ludwig von Mises January 23, 2008 "If you have government health care, you not only annex a huge chunk of the economy, you also destroy a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher, and you make it very difficult ever to change back." Mark Steyn "In 1913, the 16th Amendment legalized a federal income tax with a levy of 1% of GDP. Today, the American Dream is being eroded by the ever-increasing burden of federal, state, and local taxes, which consume a whopping 35% of our national output." T. J. Rodgers "Competition always tends to bring about the most economical and efficient method of production. Those who are most successful in this competition will acquire more capital to increase their production still further; those who are least successful will be forced out of the field. So capitalist production tends constantly to be drawn into the hands of the most efficient." Henry Hazlitt "The first socialists were the intellectuals; they and not the masses are the backbone of Socialism." Ludwig von Mises January 22, 2008 "Taxing the rich to fund poorly managed government programs is simply a self-destructive decision: It does nothing more than move money and investment decisions away from proven moneymakers (read: job producers) to Washington amateurs. In both cases, American’s lose." T.J. Rodgers "We are so accustomed to the miracle of private enterprise that we habitually take it for granted. But how does private industry solve the incredibly complex problem of turning out tens of thousands of different goods and services in the proportions in which they are wanted by the public?.… It solves these problems through the institutions of private property, competition, the free market, and the existence of money – through the interrelations of supply and demand, costs and prices, profits and losses." Henry Hazlitt "Many ‘progressive’ professors have for some time served in one of the various alphabetical government agencies…They compiled statistics and wrote memoranda which their superiors, either politicians or former managers of corporations, filed without reading. The professors did not instill a scientific spirit into the bureaus. But the bureaus gave them the mentality of authoritarianism. They distrust the populace and consider the State (with a capital S) as the God-sent guardian of the wretched underlings. Only the Government is impartial and unbiased. Whoever opposes any expansion of governmental powers is by this token unmasked as an enemy of the commonweal." Ludwig von Mises "The best possible way to learn about the world is to run your own business." James Cook January 18, 2008 "The Mortgage Finance Bubble is a bust, Wall Street finance is imploding, and foreign financial institutions are keen to cut and run from the business of providing U.S. Credit. Countrywide’s mortgage problems will be absorbed – along with so many other risks – by our own highly vulnerable domestic banking system. Worse yet, the economy is quickly succumbing to recessionary forces. With a high degree of confidence we can proclaim that the Mortgage Crisis has now evolved into a Corporate Debt Crisis – and this crisis will not be resolved anytime soon – by rates, by helicopters, or by bailouts." Doug Noland "Another false remedy for poverty is the progressive income tax, as well as a very heavy burden of capital gains taxes, inheritance taxes, and corporate income taxes. All of these have the effect of discouraging production, investment, and capital accumulation. To that extent they must prolong rather than cure poverty." Henry Hazlitt "There are people to whom monetary calculation is repulsive. They do not want to be roused from their daydreams by the voice of critical reason. Reality sickens them, they long for a realm of unlimited opportunity. They are disgusted by the meanness of a social order in which everything is nicely reckoned in dollars and pennies." Ludwig von Mises "Guilt is a powerful force for good." James Cook January 17, 2008 "New taxes are so unpopular that most ‘social’ handout schemes are originally enacted without enough increased taxation to pay for them. The result is chronic government deficits, paid for by the issuance of additional paper money." Henry Hazlitt "American authors or scientists are prone to consider the wealthy businessman as a barbarian, as a man exclusively intent upon making money." Ludwig von Mises January 16, 2008 "The mounting burden of taxation not only undermines individual incentives to increased work and earnings, but in a score of ways discourages capital accumulation and distorts, unbalances, and shrinks production." Henry Hazlitt "It is certain that many intellectuals envy the higher income of prosperous businessmen and that these feelings drive them toward socialism. They believe that the authorities of a socialist commonwealth would pay them higher salaries than those that they earn under capitalism." Ludwig von Mises January 15, 2008 "When any welfare scheme is being proposed, its political sponsors always dwell on what a generous and compassionate government should pay to Paul; they neglect to mention that this additional money must be seized from Peter." Henry Hazlitt "The intellectual leaders of the peoples have produced and propagated the fallacies which are on the point of destroying liberty and Western civilization." Ludwig von Mises "Muscles make the athlete." James Cook January 14, 2008 "Socialists will often talk as if some form of superbly equalized destitution were preferable to ‘maldistributed’ plenty. A national income that is rapidly growing in absolute terms for practically everyone will be deplored because it is making the rich richer." Henry Hazlitt "Inflation is the true opium of the people and it is administered to them by anticapitalist governments and parties." Ludwig von Mises January 11, 2008 "There are two distinct classes of men. Those who pay taxes and those who receive and live upon taxes." Thomas Paine "The collapse of values and the risks of the credit squeeze are the worst since the Great Depression. We are going to put the economy’s resilience to a severe test." Mort Zuckerman "No emergency can justify a return to inflation. Inflation can provide neither the weapons a nation needs to defend its independence nor the capital goods required for any project. It does not cure unsatisfactory conditions. It merely helps the rulers who policies brought about the catastrophe to exculpate themselves." Ludwig von Mises "It’s much easier to adjust to new circumstances when there is no other option." James Cook January 10, 2008 "The envious are not satisfied with equality; they secretly yearn for superiority and revenge. In the French Revolution of 1848, a woman coal-heaver is said to have remarked to a richly dressed lady: ‘Yes, madam, everything’s going to be equal now; I shall go in silks and you’ll carry coal.’" Henry Hazlitt "Man’s envy is at its most intense where all are almost equal; his calls for redistribution are loudest when there is virtually nothing to redistribute." Helmut Schoeck "The economy is clearly transitioning to much slower growth, sharply tighter lending standards, a declining housing market, and pressure on consumer spending. People and companies are trying to cope with the debt accumulated during several years of profligate lending and spending. The real danger from a credit crunch is that everyone, from banks to corporations to households, may retrench simultaneously." Mort Zuckerman "Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism." Ludwig von Mises January 9, 2008 "None of the candidates looks truly inspiring at this point. I wouldn’t buy a used car from most of them, nor a brand new car from some of them. John Edwards is the easiest to peg. He looks just like the phony that he is. His talk about poor children going to bed hungry may rouse the far left in his party but in fact the lowest-income people are even more obese than the rest of us, not that the facts make the slightest difference to Senator Edwards." Thomas Sowell "In sum, there is no way to have a cleaning of balance sheet excesses without running enormous risks with the economy. So policy makers feel little option other than to keep easing regardless of future consequences." Bank Credit Analyst "Columbia University won’t allow U.S. military recruiters on campus because ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ discriminates against homosexuals, but it will invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose government beheads you if they think you’re bebottoming." Mark Steyn "Inflation has always been an important resource of policies of war and revolution and why we also find it in the service of socialism." Ludwig von Mises January 8, 2008 "Apparently the only people who are supposed to be responsible are the taxpayers – and they are increasingly made responsible for other people’s irresponsibility." Thomas Sowell "The problem for the Fed is that monetary policy may be no match for the deep structural contradictions that plague the financial system. We are dealing here with a whole new set of credit instruments that are little understood and therefore extremely difficult to price." Mort Zuckerman "The envious are more likely to be mollified by seeing others deprived of some advantage than by gaining it for themselves. It is not what they lack that chiefly troubles them, but what others have." Henry Hazlitt "The advocates of public control cannot do without inflation. They need it in order to finance their policy of reckless spending and of lavishly subsidizing and bribing the voters." Ludwig von Mises "Once you have something negative written about you in the press you generally take the side of those who are being written about." James Cook January 7, 2008 "The grade schools no longer teach American history as any kind of coherent narrative. ‘Paint me warts and all,’ Oliver Cromwell instructed his portraitist. But in public education, American children paint only the warts – slavery, the ill-treatment of Native Americans, the pollution of the environment, more slavery… There are attempts to put a positive spin on things – the Iroquois stewardship of the environment, Rosa Parks’ courage on the bus – but cumulatively, heroism comes to be defined as opposition to that towering Mount Wartmore of dead white males." Mark Steyn "Every year we now have to hear whining from dolts who are offended not only by a baby laying in a manger, but also by images of decorated trees and a jolly old man in a beard. Call me a theocrat, but I have had enough of this politically correct bilge." Bill O’Reilly "The authorities are caught in a trap: they can’t let the system implode, and the only solution is to encourage more excesses that will cause greater problems later on." Bank Credit Analyst "What is now seriously in question is the capacity of our financial system to provide enough credit to support the scale of investment that has maintained our long economic expansion. Coming at a time of soaring oil prices, we may have a simultaneous decline in consumer spending, residential investment, and business investment. The economy was strong in the third quarter but clearly dropping off by the end. We may be at the finish of not just the long-term borrowing bubble but the long-term spending bubble." Mart Zuckerman "Inflation is essentially antidemocratic." Ludwig von Mises January 4, 2008 "There can be little doubt that many egalitarians are motivated at least partly by envy." Henry Hazlitt "Credit expansion and inflationary increase of the quantity of money frustrate the ‘common man’s’ attempts to save and to accumulate reserves for less propitious days." Ludwig von Mises "People judge you on what you are, not why you are what you are." James Cook January 3, 2008 "Once the premise is accepted that poverty is never the fault of the poor but the fault of ‘society’, or of ‘the capitalist system,’ then there is no definable limit to be set on relief, and the politicians who want to be elected or reelected will compete with each other in proposing new ‘welfare’ programs to fill some hitherto ‘unmet need.’" Henry Hazlitt "The same government that requires a taxpaying citizen to document every statement on his tax return decrees that questioning a welfare applicant demeans and humiliates him." Ronald Reagan "The pretended solicitude for the nation’s welfare, for the public in general, and for the poor ignorant masses in particular was a mere blind. The governments wanted inflation and credit expansion, they wanted booms and easy money." Ludwig von Mises January 2, 2008 "The Bible tells us that not a sparrow falls but that God knows about it. Congressional Republicans seem to have decided that the federal government should follow the same rule. Nothing should happen in America without Congress getting involved." David Boaz "The tendency of welfare spending in the United States has been to increase at an exponential rate." Henry Hazlitt "Inflation and credit expansion, the preferred methods of present day government openhandedness, do not add anything to the amount of resources available. They make some people more prosperous, but only to the extent that they make others poorer." Ludwig von Mises "Inflation makes the wealthiest people richer and the masses poorer." James Cook December 28, 2007 "My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government." Thomas Jefferson "The first (lesson) which we meet again and again in history, is that once the dole or similar relief programs are introduced, they seem almost inevitably – unless surrounded by the most rigid restrictions – to get out of hand. The second lesson is that once this happens the poor become more numerous and worse off than they were before, not only because they have lost self-reliance, but because the sources of wealth and production on which they depended for either doles or jobs are diminished or destroyed." Henry Hazlitt "Inflationism, however, is not an isolated phenomenon. It is only one piece in the total framework of politico-economic and socio-philosophical ideas of our time. Just as the sound money policy of gold standard advocates went hand in hand with [classical] liberalism, free trade, capitalism and peace, so is inflationism part and parcel of imperialism, militarism, protectionism, statism and socialism." Ludwig von Mises "Social welfare is the principal cause of today’s poverty." James Cook December 27, 2007 "For members of the political class, the crucial question is always: how can we push out the frontier, how can we augment the government’s dominion and plunder, with net gain to ourselves, the exploiters who live not by honest production and voluntary exchange, but by fleecing those who do so? Robert Higgs "There are still plenty of people seeking to take our liberty, to force us into collectivist schemes, to promise us security or handouts in return for our freedom, or to impose their agendas on the rest of us." David Boaz "The real solution to the problem of poverty consists in finding how to increase the employment and earning power of the poor." Henry Hazlitt "The market is color-blind." W. H. Hutt "Inflation can be pursued only so long as the public still does not believe it will continue. Once the people generally realize that the inflation will be continued on and on and that the value of the monetary unit will decline more and more, then the fate of the money is sealed. Only the belief, that the inflation will come to a stop, maintains the value of the notes." Ludwig von Mises December 26, 2007 "Cutting taxes and controlling spending creates a government that is smaller and smarter, more efficient and more effective. It can help balance the budget and reduce the deficit. Most of all, a healthy combination of pro-growth policies and fiscal discipline unleashes the genius of America’s free-market economy – empowering not government, but the citizens it exists to serve." Rudy Giuliani "With capitalism and prosperity came something new: the idea of progress. This is the notion that things are getting better and will continue to get better in the future." Dinesh D’Souza "Before the Industrial Revolution the prevailing trades catered almost exclusively to the wants of the well-to-do. But mass production could succeed only by catering to the needs of the masses. And this could be done only by success in dramatically reducing the costs and prices of goods to bring them within the buying power of the masses. So modern capitalism benefited the masses in a double way – both by greatly increasing the wages of the masses of workers and greatly reducing the real prices they had to pay for what was produced." Henry Hazlitt "The most important thing to remember is that inflation is not an act of God, that inflation is not a catastrophe of the elements or a disease that comes like the plague. Inflation is a policy." Ludwig von Mises "I have concluded that the U.S. will fail in the greatest possible sense and that no one will believe the extent of it if you tell them now." (c. 1990) James Cook December 21, 2007 "Sound science and sound economics lead many people of good faith to conclude that the policies promoted by the global warming alarmists … will actually harm the people, and the planet, that they seek to help. A growing number of these faithful, well-intentioned people include scientists and climate change experts whose voice has been stifled by the premature declaration of the ‘end of debate’ over climate change." Martin Andrade "We have been subjected to a lot of nonsense about climate disasters as some zealots have been painting extreme scenarios to frighten us. What we were seeing from the doomsdayers was an induced dose of mild hysteria, semi-religious if you like, but dangerously close to superstition." Australian Cardinal George Pell "We need to root out wasteful spending and fraud in benefit payments and contracts by convening a Government Waste Commission, such as the one that closed military bases." Rudy Giuliani "But the certain fact about inflation is that, sooner or later, it must come to an end. It is a policy that cannot last." Ludwig von Mises "Before human beings learn to live forever something will surely kill them all." James Cook December 20, 2007 "I wonder if Al Gore knows what he’s doing. Reducing and sacrificing the U.S. standard of living as a way to bring others up the ladder, rather than allowing the U.S. to maintain its living standard while encouraging and helping others to reach our level, is a foolish and dangerous plan. It is simply unacceptable. Al Gore and his friends live in a Democratic society and have the absolute right to say what they want. But those of us who do not want to see the U.S. punished because of its success have rights, too. I believe it is our duty to denounce Al Gore’s unwise attacks on America and hold him accountable for what he says." Ed Koch "In order to appease campus radicals, all sorts of new ideologically oriented courses, programs and departments were created, with an emphasis on teaching victimhood and resentments, often hiring people whose scholarly credentials were meager or even non-existent." Thomas Sowell "Alan Greenspan…..insists that it wasn’t his fault that housing grew into a grisly bubble. Greenspan’s now running around the world defending himself against his wildly inflationary actions. Greenspan makes the absurd claim that bubbles can not be recognized beforehand, but that they can only be addressed after they burst. Really, then what did he mean years ago when he warned about ‘irrational exuberance’?" Richard Russell "What people today call inflation is not inflation, i.e., the increase in the quantity of money and money substitutes, but the general rise in commodity prices and wage rates which is the inevitable consequence of inflation. This semantic innovation is by no means harmless." Ludwig von Mises December 19, 2007 "State propaganda, statist ideologies, and long-established routine combine to convince many people that they have a legitimate obligation, even a moral duty to pay taxes to the state that rules their society. They fall into such erroneous moral reasoning because they are told incessantly that the tribute they fork over is actually a kind of price paid for essential services received, and that in the case of certain services, such as protection from foreign and domestic aggressors against their rights to life, liberty, and property, only the government can provide the service effectively. They are not permitted to test this claim by resorting to competing suppliers of law, order, and security, however, because the government enforces a monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged ‘services’ and brings violence to bear against would-be competitors. In so doing, it reveals the fraud at the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket." Robert Higgs The assistance of inflation is invoked whenever a government is unwilling to increase taxation or unable to raise a loan; that is the truth of the matter." Ludwig von Mises "One may say that capitalism civilizes greed in much the same way that marriage civilizes lust." Dinesh D’Souza "The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition… is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration." Adam Smith "The long-run historical tendency of capitalism has not only been to increase real incomes more or less proportionately nearly all along the line, but to benefit the masses even more than the rich." Henry Hazlitt December 18, 2007 "People who value freedom will always have to defend it from those who claim the right to wield power over others." David Boaz "Reforming a culture of wasteful spending requires standing up to special interests and insisting on transparency and accountability. Congress spent $29 billion on earmarks last year alone. Earmarks are the broken windows of the federal budget, signs of dysfunction and distress." Rudy Giuliani "Men who never knew want such as that in which the world lived during many by-gone centuries, are unable to value at its true worth such abundance as now exists, and are unhappy because it is not greater." E. Parmalee Prentice "If it be taught that all who are born have a right to support on the land, whatever be their number, and that there is no occasion to exercise any prudence in the affair of marriage so as to check this number, the temptations, according to all the known principles of human nature, will inevitably be yielded to, and more and more will gradually become dependent on parish assistance." Thomas Malthus "Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe." Ludwig von Mises "Constant bickering among parents leads to hyperactive disorders in children." James Cook December 17, 2007 "Government spending is up. We face new regulations on hiring, firing, accounting, smoking, eating, and more. Businesses, activists, and politicians use legislation and litigation to steal the property of pharmaceutical firms, computer networks, and other creators. Leaders of both parties rush to expand entitlements and hand out subsidies. We have been saddled with new restrictions on civil liberties since September 11, 2001, and our country is mired in an unnecessary war." David Boaz "Over the course of the next two terms, 42% of the federal civilian workforce is due to retire. We’ll only hire back half, taking the opportunity to right size government by taking advantage of technology like the private sector did in recent years, and ultimately save taxpayers $21 billion annually." Rudy Giuliani "While profit remains the final goal, entrepreneurs spend the better part of each day figuring out how better to serve the needs of their actual and potential customers. They are operationally, if not intentionally, altruistic." Dinesh D’Souza "There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently occupied than in getting money." Samuel Johnson "The mothers who worked in the factories had nothing to cook with; they did not leave their homes and their kitchens to go into the factories, they went into factories because they had no kitchens, and if they had a kitchen they had no food to cook in those kitchens. And the children did not come from comfortable nurseries. They were starving and dying." Ludwig von Mises December 14, 2007 "My tax plan commits to making the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent, while aiming for still-lower marginal rates. We’ll give the death tax the death penalty, index the Alternate Minimum Tax for inflation as a step toward eliminating it entirely, expand tax-free savings accounts, and expand health-care choice through tax reform. We also need to reduce the corporate tax rate – which is currently the second highest in the industrialized world." Rudy Giuliani "The solution to our problems is not more paternalism, laws, decrees, and controls, but the restoration of liberty and free enterprise, the restoration of incentives, to let loose the tremendous constructive energies of 300 million Americans." Henry Hazlitt "The market economy itself was not a product of violent action – of revolutions – but of a series of gradual peaceful changes. The implications of the term ‘industrial revolution’ are utterly misleading." Ludwig von Mises "We are all at the mercy of an institution that does evil in the name of good." James Cook December 13, 2007 "Precisely because the State has the monopoly of coercion it can be allowed the monopoly only of coercion. Only if the modern State can be held within a strictly limited agency of duties and powers can it be prevented from regimenting, conquering, and ultimately devouring the society which gave it birth." Henry Hazlitt "The outstanding fact about the Industrial Revolution is that it opened an age of mass production for the needs of the masses. The wage earners are no longer people toiling merely for other people’s well-being. They themselves are the main consumers of the products the factories turn out. Big business depends upon mass consumption." Ludwig von Mises "We should reject the politics of ‘national greatness’ and ‘national goals’ and embrace the American recognition of the greatness of individual liberty." Ed Crane "Capitalism encourages entrepreneurs to act with consideration for others even when their ultimate motive is to benefit themselves." Dinesh D’Souza "The major problems confronting a large segment of the black community have little or nothing to do with racism – problems such as unprecedented illegitimacy, family breakdown, fraudulent education, crime and rampant social pathology. If white people became angels tomorrow, it would do nothing to solve problems that can only be solved by blacks." Walter Williams December 12, 2007 "It is not true that the world hates America. It is the world’s left that hates America. However, because the left dominates the world’s news media and because most people, understandably, believe what the news media report, many people, including Americans, believe that the world hates America." Dennis Prager "I believe it’s already dawned on the Fed and probably central banks around the world that deflation has begun to show its face. The central banks are very fearful of deflation. Their answer to deflation is, and will be, to lower interest rates and try to reliquefy their economies. This will entail stepping up the creation of fiat money. There is no limit to the sheer amount of paper that the central banks can create, and as deflation increases its grip on the economies of the world, I expect a virtual blizzard of fiat currencies to be created." Richard Russell "Amid fears of an economic slowdown, now is the time to cut taxes, not raise them. But the Democratic presidential candidates all seem determined to impose an unprecedented $3 trillion tax hike on the American people." Rudy Giuliani "I work for nothing but my own profit – which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it. I do not produce it for their benefit at the expense of mine, and they do not buy it for my benefit at the expense of theirs; I do not sacrifice my interests to them nor do they sacrifice theirs to me; we deal as equals by mutual consent to mutual advantage." Hank Rearden, Atlas Shrugged "The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job. They could only hire people who were ready to work for the wages offered to them. Low as these wage rates were, they were nonetheless much more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them. It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchens and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation." Ludwig von Mises December 11, 2007 "The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised – a fire that, at best, can be controlled for only a short time before it o’erleaps its improvised confinements and spreads its flames far and wide." Robert Higgs "The new regime [Khmer Rouge] forcibly emptied the cities, established rural communes, and eliminated the professional classes. In less than four years, the communist leadership murdered an estimated 1.7 million people, almost one-fourth of the population." Doug Bandow "The American left hates the America that believes in American exceptionalism, is prepared to use force to fight what it deems as dangerous evil, affirms the Judeo-Christian value system, believes in the death penalty, supports male-female marriage, rejects big government, wants lower taxes, prefers free market to governmental solutions, etc." Dennis Prager "More menacing than barbarians storming the walls from without are the seeming citizens within – those who are citizens in gesture, but not in thought." Ludwig von Mises "It’s rare to find someone who won’t sell out for a couple of bucks." James Cook December 10, 2007 "What private property does is connect effort to reward, creating an incentive for people to produce far more. Then, if there’s a free market, people will trade their surpluses to others for the things they lack. Mutual exchange for mutual benefit makes the community richer." John Stossel "The Fed has been arbitrarily experimenting with artificial money and artificial interest rates with no corrections in basic theory or function for 95 years. At least three generations of financial adventurers in policy have displaced long standing traditions of probity and accountability." Bob Hoye "For some reason, our media are fascinated by stories that appear to harm American national interests." Bob Tyrrell "Immigrants soon find their place in urban life, they soon adopt, externally, town manners and opinions, but for a long time they remain foreign to civic thought. One cannot make a social philosophy one’s own as easily as a new costume." Ludwig von Mises "Every extension of the functions and powers of the State beyond its primary duty of maintaining peace and justice should be scrutinized with jealous vigilance." Henry Hazlitt December 7, 2007 "The effect of capitalism is to steer human selfishness so that, through the invisible hand of competition, the energies of the capitalist produce the abundance from which the whole society benefits." Dinesh D’Souza "No one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us." Ludwig von Mises "We need to keep taxes low for our economy to grow." Rudy Giuliani "No nation can survive without passing its heritage, language and, yes, faith to the next generation. A country must be built on something substantial and if the cultural elitists think it can be built on 'diversity,’ that is a foundation of shifting sand."" Cal Thomas "Social welfare is the most corrosive behavioral force ever unleashed by man." James Cook December 6, 2007 "A businessman who can create useful, well-paid and secure jobs is doubly blessed, by the individual he makes self-supporting and by the society he renders more secure. He helps himself, too, for, as Maimonides says, there is joy in lifting people out of want, not by alms but on a permanent basis." Paul Johnson "Some critics accuse capitalism of being a selfish system, but the selfishness is not in capitalism – it is in human nature." Dinesh D’Souza "Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to learn that there are other views." William Buckley "The leading Democratic candidate for president, Hillary Clinton, in a recent interview on MSNBC, said, ‘You know, when I ask people, ‘What do you think the goals of America are today?’ people don’t have any idea. We don’t know what we’re trying to achieve. And I think that in a life or in a country you’ve got to have some goals.’ It is, of course, fine for individuals to have goals in life, but the world is much worse off because of nations presuming to have goals. The American Founders would have considered the idea of a national ‘goal’ absurd, which it is." Ed Crane "Both force and money are impotent against ideas." Ludwig von Mises December 4, 2007 "It is interesting that while capitalism has clearly won the war against socialism, the battle between liberty and power remains." Ed Crane "A return to fiscal conservative principles can put America back on the right track, while giving Washington a much-needed dose of discipline." Rudy Giuliani "It’s hard to study the history of the twentieth century without being alerted to the dogmatic tendencies of the Left." Daphne Patai "Everything that happens in the social world in our time is the result of ideas. Good things and bad things. What is needed is to fight bad ideas. We must oppose the confiscation of property, the control of prices, inflation, and all those evils from which we suffer." Ludwig von Mises "Infatuation in a new relationship equals animosity in the old." James Cook December 3, 2007 "Warren Buffett now heads those who want to keep the inheritance tax in place. In my opinion, Buffett is a genius in investing but a self-satisfied old fool where free enterprise is concerned." Richard Russell "Does anyone still wonder why college culture is the laughingstock of the larger community? Our campuses seem to lurch from one politically correct knee-slapper to the next. Does anyone crack a book at these places anymore?" Katherine Kersten "The army of relief and other subsidy recipients will continue to grow, and the solvency of the government will become increasingly untenable, as long as part of the population can vote to force the other part to support it." Henry Hazlitt "If one rejects laissez faire on account of man’s fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reasons also reject every kind of government action." Ludwig von Mises November 30, 2007 "That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it." Aristotle "If individuals can take from a common pot regardless of how much they put in it, each person has an incentive to be a free rider, to do as little as possible and take as much as possible because what one fails to take will be taken by someone else. Soon, the pot is empty and will not be refilled – a bad situation even for the earlier takers." John Stossel "The progressive notion of the state as a loving, caring parent is becoming a bipartisan affair." Jonah Goldberg "If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization." Ludwig von Mises "Religion has little effect on greed." James Cook November 29, 2007 "To stop the inflation, the government must stop expanding the issue of paper money and credit." Henry Hazlitt "Again and again, the early historians of capitalism have – one can hardly use a milder word – falsified history." Ludwig von Mises November 28, 2007 "Historical knowledge is indispensable for those who want to build a better world." Ludwig von Mises "The crying need today is not for more laws, but for fewer. The world must be saved from its saviors. If the friends of liberty and law could have only one slogan it should be: Stop the remedies!" Henry Hazlitt November 27, 2007 "Man is not evil merely because he wants to enjoy pleasure and avoid pain – in other words, to live. Renunciation, abnegation, and self-sacrifice are not good in themselves." Ludwig von Mises "I am aware that some technical defects can be pointed out in the gold standard, but it has one virtue that more than outweighs them all. It is not, like paper money, subject to the day-to-day whims of the politicians; it cannot be printed or otherwise manipulated by the politicians; it frees the individual holder from that form of swindling or expropriation by the politicians; it is an essential safeguard for the preservation, not only of the value of the currency unit itself, but of human liberty." Henry Hazlitt "It’s impossible for a dishonest person to grow rich in business." James Cook November 26, 2007 "This vital consideration of incentives is almost systematically overlooked in the proposals of agitators for more and bigger government welfare schemes. We should all be concerned about the plight of the poor and unfortunate. But the hard two-part question that any plan for relieving poverty must answer is: How can we mitigate the penalties of failure and misfortune without undermining the incentives to effort and success." Henry Hazlitt "If a man drinks wine and not water I cannot say he is acting irrationally. At most I can say that in his place I would not do so. But his pursuit of happiness is his own business, not mine." Ludwig von Mises November 21, 2007 "Some champions of ever-greater governmental power and spending like Professor J. K. Galbraith, invent the theory that the taxpayers, left to themselves, spend the money they have earned very foolishly, on all sorts of trivialities and rubbish, and that only the bureaucrats, by first seizing it from them, will know how to spend it wisely." Henry Hazlitt "Nobody is called upon to determine what could make another man happier or less unhappy." Ludwig von Mises "It’s unhealthy for a democracy when the majority of citizens don’t see government as a service they’re reluctantly paying for but as an extortionist that cuts them in for a share of the loot." Jonah Goldberg "Sometimes, a thoughtless insult is just a thoughtless insult. Sometimes, the hate is fake. When will we stop allowing hoax crime king Al Sharpton and his ilk to make every single one of these incidents a federal case? Michelle Malkin November 20, 2007 "Democrats keep telling the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers that America’s problems would be solved if only the rich people would pay ‘their fair share’ of income taxes. Not only is this patently untrue and a siren song toward a welfare state, it amounts to covetousness as fiscal policy." Jonah Goldberg "The inexorable rhythm of the politics of racial insult is interrupted only when the insulter doesn’t fit the left-wing grievance narrative. Which explains in part why former GOP Sen. George Allen’s infamous ‘Macaca’ gaffe was covered by the national news media like it was Armageddon, while a female Louisiana Democrat who this week called a black civil rights leader’s mother ‘Buckwheat’ (after the stereotypical ‘Little Rascals’ character) barely warranted a blip on the outrage-o-meter. No pockets to pick, no bribes to extract from protesting a case of abject stupidity that can’t be spun into institutional racism for partisan gain." Michelle Malkin "Each individual is the only and final arbiter in matters concerning his own satisfaction and happiness." Ludwig von Mises "When politics is elevated over business, economic disaster follows." James Cook November 19, 2007 "Now, with the surge in Iraq working, Democrats are completely demoralized. Al-Qaida was counting on them. (We know the surge in Iraq is working because it is no longer front page news.)" Ann Coulter "Let’s take seriously for a moment the notion that rich people are an inexhau |