Politics / Economics

Punishment must be so unusual as to be significant, to deter, to instruct.

A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual’s instinct to survive – and nowhere else! – and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.

Ah yes, the “unalienable rights.” Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. Life? What “right” to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What “right” to life has a man who must die if he is to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of “right”? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to deal, which man’s right is “unalienable”? And is it “right”? As to liberty, the heroes who signed that great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called “natural human rights” that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.

The third “right”? – the “pursuit of happiness”? It is indeed unalienable but it is not a right; it is simply a universal condition which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeoning, burn me at a stake, crown me king of kings, I can “pursue happiness” as long as my brain lives – but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it.

…their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of “rights”…and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.

Under the right system, every voter and officeholder would be a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage. He may fail in wisdom, he may lapse in civic virtue. But his average performance is enormously better than that of any other class of rules in history.

Authority and responsibility must be equal – else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between pints of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority…other than through the tragic logic of history. The unique “poll tax” that we must pay was unheard of. No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority. If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead – and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundation-less temple.

We require each person who wishes to exert control over the state to wager his own life – and lose it, if need be – to save the life of the state. The maximum responsibility a human can accept is thus equated to the ultimate authority a human can exert. Yin and yang, perfect and equal.

Is it possible to abolish war by relieving population pressure (and thus do away with the all-too-evident evils of war) through constructing a moral code under which population is limited to resources? Without debating the usefulness or morality of planned parenthood, it may be verified by observation that any breed which stops its own increase gets crowded out by breeds which expand. Some human populations do so, and other breeds move in and engulf them.

Free speech. The reason that free speech is an inviolable responsibility…you have a right to free speech because if you don’t speak properly, then we can’t set the world right and we lose your perspective. So you have the responsibility of free speech so that you can speak freely and truly so that you can set the world in order.

Attempts to herd human destiny ofttimes produce stampedes, which trample would-be shepherds.

Politics has and should have its own rules and should not accept rules of any kind or from any source where the object is not to win or prevail over others.

It would be best to be both loved and feared, but, when necessity forces a choice, it is better to be feared, because men love at their convenience but they fear at the convenience of the prince. Friends may fail you, but the dread of punishment will ever forsake you.

There cannot be good laws where there are not good arms, and where there are good arms there must be good laws.

The prince should have no other object or thought but the art of war. He must be armed, since it is quite unreasonable for one who is armed to obey one who is unarmed.

Men should either be caressed or eliminated, because they avenge themselves for slight offenses but cannot do so for grave ones; so the offense one does to a man should be such that one does not fear revenge for it.

Whoever does not lay his foundations at first might be able, with great virtue, to lay them after, although they might have to be laid with hardship for the architect and with danger to the building.

Men offend either from fear or from hatred.

Whoever believes that among great personages new benefits will make old injuries be forgotten deceives himself.

In taking hold of a state, he who seizes it should review all the offenses necessary for him to commit, and do them all at a stroke, so as not to have to renew them every day and, by not renewing them, to secure men and gain them to himself with benefits. Whoever does otherwise, either through timidity or through bad counsel, is always under necessity to hold a knife in his hand…For injuries must be done all together, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; and benefits should be done little by little so that they may be tasted better.

He should never lift his thoughts from the exercise of war, and in peace he should exercise it more than in war. This he can do in two modes, one with deeds, the other with the mind. And as to the deeds, besides keeping his armies well ordered and exercised, he should alway be out hunting, and through this accustom the body to hardships; and the meanwhile he should learn the nature of sites, and recognize how mountains rise, how valleys open up, how plains lie, and understand the nature of rivers and marshes – and in this invest the greatest care.  As to exercise of the mind, a prince should read histories and consider in them the actions of excellent men, should see how they conducted themselves in war, should examine the causes of their victories and losses, so as to be able to avoid theater and imitate the former. Able all he should do as some excellent man has done in the past who found someone to imitate who had been praised and glorified before him, whose exploits ad actions he always kept beside himself, as they say Alexander the Great imitated Achilles.

Therefore, so as not to rob his subjects, to be able to defend himself, not to become poor and contemptible, nor to be forced to become rapacious, a prince should esteem it little to incur a name for meanness, because this is one of those vices which enable him to rule.

If one has good arms, one will always have good friends.

Princes should have anything blamable administered by others, favors, by themselves.

Both liberal democracy and Communism are utopian and look forward to “an end to history” where their systems will prevail as a permanent status quo. Both are historicist and insist that history is inevitably moving in their direction. Both therefore require that all social institutions – family, churches, private associations – must conform to liberal-democratic rules in their internal functioning. Both are devoted to social engineering to bring about this transformation. Because social engineering is naturally resisted, both are engaged in a never-ending struggle against enemies of society (superstition, tradition, the past, intolerance, etc.).

Liberal democracy claims that it is a system of breathtaking diversity. But the opposite view seems now closer to the truth. Liberal democracy is a powerful unifying mechanism, blurring differences between people and imposing uniformity of views, behavior, and language. Liberal democracy now significantly narrows the area of what is permissible.

Both communism and liberal democracy are regimes whose intent is to change reality for the better. They are modernization projects.

Everything that exists in society must become liberal-democratic over time and be imbued with the system. As once when all major designations had to be preceded by the adjective “socialist” or “communist,” so now everything should be Liberal, democratic, or liberal-democratic, and this labeling almost automatically gives. Recipient a status of credibility and even respectability. Conversely, a refusal to use such a designation or, even worse, an ostentatious rejection of it, condemns one to moral degradation, merciless criticism, and, ultimately, historical annihilation. Further, the political system should permit every section of public and private life (state, church, ethics and mores, family, schools, universities, community organizations, culture, and even human sentiments and aspirations. Everything that exist outside the liberal-democratic pattern are outdated, backward-looking, useless, yet dangerous as preserving the remnants of old authoritarianisms. Therefore, why debate them? Why waste time with someone whom the march of history condemned to nothingnesses and oblivion? Why ever into a debate with an opponent who represents what is historically indefensible and what will sooner or later perish?

Having found himself with rights, modern man found himself in a most comfortable situation with no precedent: he no longer had to justify his claims and actions as long as he qualified them as rights. Regardless of what demands he would make on the basis of those rights and for what purpose he would use them, he did not and, in fact, could not lose his dignity, which he had acquired for life simply by being born human. And since having this dignity carried no obligation to anything particularly good or worthy, he could, while constantly invoking it, make claims that were increasingly more absurd and demand justification for ever more questionable activities. Sinking more and more into arrogant vulgarity, he could argue that this vulgarity not only did not contradict his inborn dignity, but it could even, by a stretch of the imagination, be treated as some sort of an achievement. After all, can a dignity that is inborn and constitutes the essence of humanness, generate anything that would be essentially undignified and nonhuman?

The modern sense of entertainment increasingly resembles what Pascal long ago called divertissement: that is, an activity – as he wrote in his thoughts – that separates us from the seriousness of existence and fills this existence with false content. Divertissement is thus not only being entertained in the ordinary sense of the word, but living and acting within artificial rules that organize our lives, setting conventional and mostly trivial goals which we pursue, getting involved in disputes and competitions, aspiring to honors-making careers, and doing everything that would turn our thoughts away from fundamental existential matters. By escaping the questions of the ultimate meaning of our own lives, or of human life in general, our minds slowly get used to that fictitious reality, which we take for the real one, and are lured by its attractions.

This is not an excuse to say: it is not that democracy is the least objectionable of all regimes, but that it is the best one. And if it is the best one, its defects are negligible. With this twist of meaning, any criticism of democracy becomes unfounded, and any critic irresponsible and not worth listening to: there is no sense in criticizing something that by definition is superior to the alternatives. The crowing step of this reasoning was that whatever democracy’s shortcomings, they can be removed by more democracy; the best cannot be corrected by anything but the best. Nobody would say that the cure to monopoly is progressive monopoly, or that the cure to anarchy is more anarchy. Why not so with democracy? In what way will more democracy reduce, for example, democratic vulgarity, or the cult of mediocrity, or the weakening of social customs and traditions, or the overproduction of legislation, or the omnipresent spirit of partisanship penetrating every aspect of life?…If democracy introduces yet further groups in the political and legislative process and provides them with the tools to secure their interests through legislation, which, in turn, leads to legislative excesses, then why would the increased number of these group and their increased influence generate legislative constraint?

John Stuart Mill wrote how freedom was threatened after the fall of traditional autocracies, particularly by the process of democratization through which a society gained an indirect, but more profound control of the mind of an individual.

Aristotle, Plutarch and Cicero could not help but notice that rampant democratization was accompanied by the unification of thinking that was a direct offshoot of an anti-hierarchical conformity, as typical of the democratic man.

What we have seen in recent time is not the introduction of liberalism into democracy, but the democratization of liberalism.

Liberalism should be defined as: the situation in which relatively independent units cooperate through a system of contracts. The democratization turned liberalism into a doctrine in which the primary agents were no longer individuals, but groups and the institutions of the democratic state. Instead of individuals striving for the enrichment of social capital with new ideas and aspirations, there emerged people voicing demands called rights and acting with the scope of organized groups. These groups subsequently petitioned state institutions and exerted pressure on them to change legislation and political practices; over time, they began to affect judicial decisions by the courts, demanding legal acceptance of their position and acquired privileges. A peculiar race began: on the one hand, the groups were inventing more and more effective means to influence the policies of the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches, and on the other, politicians, lawmakers, and judges were increasingly involved in a competition to see which would be the best provider of the new privileges and rights to those groups.

Multiculturalism is not about culture, but about politics. In fact, they should be “polite” (as in “politburo”) rather than “cultur”, and “mono” rather than “multi.”

The modern state openly, proudly carries out the policy of social engineering, intervening deeply in the lives of communities while enjoying total impunity, which is guaranteed by its control of lawmaking and law enforcement procedures. A markedly important function of the law, to act as a barrier to political hubris, was lost or significantly weakened. Instead, the law has become a sword against the unresponsiveness and sometimes resistance of society to the policy of aggressive social restructuring that is euphemistically called modernization. The law in liberal democracy – as under communism – is no longer blind. No longer can one envision it as a blindfolded goddess holding the scales to determine guilt and punishment. It is now, as it was under communism, one of the engines that transforms the present into the future and the backward into the progressive.

See whether the law takes from some persons that which belongs to them, to give to terms what does not belong to them. See whether the law performs, for the profit of one citizen, and, to the injury of others, an act that this citizen cannot perform without committing a crime. Abolish this law without delay; it is not merely an iniquity – it is a fertile source of iniquities; for it invites reprisals; and if you do not take care, the exceptional case will extend, multiply, and become systematic.

I cannot possibly conceive fraternity legally enforced, without liberty being legally destroyed, and justice legally trampled under foot. Legal plunder has two roots: one of them is in human greed; the other is in misconceived philanthropy.

Plunder is an idea expressed as the opposite to property. When a portion of wealth passes out of the hands of him who has acquired it, without his consent, and without compensation, to him who has not created it, whether by force or by artifice, I say that property is violated, that plunder is perpetrated. I say that this is exactly what the law ought to repress always and everywhere. If the law itself performs the action it ought to repress, I say that plunder is still perpetrated in a social point of view, under aggravated circumstances.

We suffer a system that appears to me to be unjust; and this is so independent of intentions, that each of us profits by it without wishing it, and suffers from it without being aware of its cause.

“In 2015, the top 1 percent of earners paid a greater share of individual income tax than the bottom 90 percent combined. The top 5 percent paid 60 percent of total individual income taxes. If these people were chased out of the country via confiscatory tax policies, the United States would collapse. Not only is the existence of rich people a good thing for the country overall, but if you’re poor, they are paying for all of your government stuff.”

When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.

65% of the 30,000 gun deaths annually are homicides. Of the remaining 35%, 80% of those gun homicides are gang related (24% total). 3-5% are accidental deaths. Therefore, 92-94% of all gun deaths exist outside the realm of “normal” society.

Happily they dig the mass grave, with a shovel called equality.

“… [avoid] likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertions in time of peace to discharge the debts, which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden, which we ourselves ought to bear.”

Contrary to collectivism, capitalism widens our circle of compassion to include strangers. As Marsh puts it, “In individualist cultures, high relational mobility means that anyone unfamiliar could ‘one day become a friend.”‘

The evolution of capitalism has been in the direction of more trust and transparency, and less self-serving behavior; not coincidentally, this evolution has brought with it greater productivity and economic growth. That evolution, of course, has not taken place because capitalists are naturally good people. Instead, it’s taken place because the benefits of trust-that is,of being trusting and of being trustworthy-are potentially immense and because a successful market system teaches people to recognize those benefits. At this point, it’s been well demonstrated that flourishing economies require a healthy level of trust in the reliability and fairness of everyday transactions.

The rise in altruism that Marsh observes has occurred concurrently with the rise of capitalism. This correlation is not spurious. To do business, we learn to trust strangers and to be trustworthy to strangers. As a consequence, we are placing “more value on the welfare of strangers.”

In fact, the origins of the American Welfare State can be traced to the second bill signed into law by the nation’s first president. At the behest of so many “infant” industries (soon to be “establishment” interests), the Tariff Act of 1789 was meant not just to pay the expense of government, but to “encourage [domestic] manufactures.” The series of protective tariffs Congress imposed did just that, but artificially raised prices for farmers, planters, shipbuilders and seaport merchants and cost thousands of seamen their livelihoods. How did we get from that day to this? Once the nation decided that some of its citizens had a right not to go out and get but to lobby Congress and be given, it confronted two thorny questions: who else should be given and how much should the ever-expanding gaggle of special interests get? There was only one answer: politics – the corrupt game of give-and­ take. Jefferson, in opposing Hamilton’s bill to charter a national bank warned: To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to stake possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.

In his 2006 study, Harvard professor Robert Putnam found that, based on analysis of the responses of almost 30,000 Americans, the greater the diversity in a community, the less people trusted each other, the less they donated to charity or worked on community projects, and the less they voted and were civically-engaged. In the communities “enriched” by diversity, neighbors trusted one another half as much as they did in homogeneously white communities.

We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur…I shiver at the thought. We will have fewer but more severe crises. The rarer the event, the less we know about its odds. It means that we know less and less about the possibility of a crisis. Network theory basics.

Bildungsphilister: a philistine with cosmetic, non-genuine culture. Nietzche used this term to refer to the dogma-prone newspaper reader and opera lover with cosmetic exposure to culture and shallow depth. I extend it to the buzzword-using researcher in nonexperimental fields who lack in imagination, curiosity, erudition, and culture and is closely centered on his ideas, on his “discipline.” This prevents him from seeing the conflicts between his ideas and the texture of the world.

The Ten Principles for a Back Swan-Robust Society 1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks – and hence the most fragile – become the biggest. 2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal. 3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus. The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean. 4. Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks. Odds are he would cut every corner on safety to show “profits” while claiming to be “conservative”. Bonuses do not accommodate the hidden risks of blow-ups. It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards. 5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity. Complexity from globalisation and highly networked economic life needs to be countered by simplicity in financial products. The complex economy is already a form of leverage: the leverage of efficiency. Such systems survive thanks to slack and redundancy; adding debt produces wild and dangerous gyrations and leaves no room for error. Capitalism cannot avoid fads and bubbles: equity bubbles (as in 2000) have proved to be mild; debt bubbles are vicious. 6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning. Complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it. Citizens must be protected from themselves, from bankers selling them “hedging” products, and from gullible regulators who listen to economic theorists. 7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence”. Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them. 8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains. Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab. 9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for their retirement. Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control). 10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs. Finally, this crisis cannot be fixed with makeshift repairs, no more than a boat with a rotten hull can be fixed with ad-hoc patches. We need to rebuild the hull with new (stronger) materials; we will have to remake the system before it does so itself. Let us move voluntarily into Capitalism 2.0 by helping what needs to be broken break on its own, converting debt into equity, marginalising the economics and business school establishments, shutting down the “Nobel” in economics, banning leveraged buyouts, putting bankers where they belong, clawing back the bonuses of those who got us here, and teaching people to navigate a world with fewer certainties.

Variations also act as purges. Small forest fires periodically cleanse the system of the most flammable material, so this does not have the opportunity accumulate. Systematically preventing forest fires from taking place “to be safe” makes the big one much worse. For similar seasons, stability is not good for the economy: firms become very weak during long periods of steady prosperity devoid of setbacks, and hidden vulnerabilities accumulate silently under the surface – so delaying crises is not a very good idea. Likewise, absence of fluctuations in the market causes hidden risks to accumulate with impunity. The longer one goes without a market trauma, the worse the damage when commotion occurs.

A democracy is where the incentive is to always promise a better outcome than the other guy, regardless of the actual, delayed cost.

Is democracy epiphenomenal? Supposedly, democracy works because of this hallowed rational decision making on the part of voters. but consider that democracy may be something completely accidental to something else, the side effect of people liking to cast ballots for completely obscure reasons, just as people enjoy expressing themselves just to express themselves.

A good governmental golden rule: no borrowing allowed, forced fiscal balance.

Half the US population accounts for less than 3% of healthcare costs, with the sickest 10% accounting for 64%.

Hammurabi’s code— now about 3,800 years old— identifies the need to reestablish a symmetry of fragility, spelled out as follows: If a builder builds a house and the house collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house— the builder shall be put to death. If it causes the death of the son of the owner of the house, a son of that builder shall be put to death. If it causes the death of a slave of the owner of the house— he shall give to the owner of the house a slave of equal value. It looks like they were much more advanced 3,800 years ago than we are today. The entire idea is that the builder knows more, a lot more, than any safety inspector, particularly about what lies hidden in the foundations— making it the best risk management rule ever, as the foundation, with delayed collapse, is the best place to hide risk. Hammurabi and his advisors understood small probabilities. Now, clearly the object here is not to punish retrospectively, but to save lives by providing up-front disincentive in case of harm to others during the fulfillment of one’s profession. The first heuristic addresses the asymmetry in rewards and punishment, or transfer of fragility between individuals. A simple rule: people voting for war need to have at least one descendant (child or grandchild) exposed to combat. For the Romans, engineers needed to spend some time under the bridge they built – something that should be required for financial engineers today. The English went further and had the families of the engineers spend time with them under the bridge after it was built.

Let us not forget something embedded in the U.S. Constitution: the president is commander in chief. Caesar, Alexander, and Hannibal were on the battlefield – the last, according to Livy, was first in, last-out of combat zones. George Washington, too, went to battle, unlike Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who played video games while threatening the lives of others. Even Napoleon was personally exposed to risks; his showing up during a battle was the equivalent of adding twenty-five thousand troops. Churchill showed an impressive amount of physical courage. They were in it; they believed in it. Status implied you took physical risks.

I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.

The researchers Dhananjay Gode and Shyam Sunder came to a surprising result in 1993. You populate markets with zero intelligence agents, that is buying and selling randomly, under some structure such that a proper auction process matches bids and offers in a regular way. And guess what? We get the same allocative efficiency as if market participants were intelligent. Hayek had this theory long ago. Yet one of the most cited ideas in history, that of the invisible hand, appears to be the least integrated into modern psyche. “Under the right market structure, a collection of idiots produces a well-functioning market.”

Typically, the Intellectual-Yet-Idiots (IYI) get first-order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects, making him totally incompetent in complex domains.

Complex regulations allow former government employees to find jobs helping firms navigate the regulations they themselves created.

39% of Americans will spend a year in the top 5% of the income distribution, 56% will find themselves in the top 10%, and 73% will spend a year in the top 20%.

If the process is fat-tailed (Extremistan), then wealth is generated at the top, which means increases in wealth lead to increases of measured inequality. Within populations, wealth creation is a series of small probability bets. So it is natural that the pool of wealth (measured in years of spending) increases with wealth. Consider one hundred people in a 80/20 world: the additional 50% of wealth should come from 1 person, with the remaining bottom fifty contributing very little if anything. It is not a zero-sum gain: eliminate that 1 person, and there will be almost no wealth increases (not just 50%, but the % that increases due to that wealth generation). In fact the rest are already benefiting from the contribution of the minority, even if they themselves contribute little or nothing.

Two people can be using the same word, meaning different things, yet continue the conversation, which is fine for coffee, but not when making decisions, particularly policy decisions affecting others. But it is easy to trip them, as Socrates did, simply by asking them what they think they mean by what they said – hence philosophy was born as rigor in discourse and disentanglement of mixed-up notions, in precise opposition to the sophist’s promotion of rhetoric.

Any vestigial sense of social identity still present in Western men, any desire to observe and maintain social boundaries or protect perimeters, is highly discouraged by Western governments and corporate cultures alike.

Good, modern, civilized men are burdened with the expectation that they must somehow become the guardians of all and none. 7.2 billion struggling souls…and we’re expected to care about the fate of all of them — but none too much.

The price of free speech is a steep one.

I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery.

The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant, without inviting their own suicide.

Tolerance should be given to all religions / ideologies, so long as their dogmas contain nothing contrary to the duties of citizenship. But whoever dares to say “Outside the Church is no salvation,” ought to be driven from the state.

My case against capital punishment is this: the state does not have the right to decide life and death questions.

In order to be a part of the totalitarian mindset, it is not necessary to wear a uniform or carry a club or a whip. It is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the subjection of others. What is a totalitarian system if not one where the abject glorification of the perfect leader is matched by the surrender of all privacy and individuality, especially in matters sexual, and in denunciation and punishment—’for their own good’—of those who transgress?

As soon as any part of a person’s conduct affects prejudicially the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it, and the question whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by interfering with it, becomes open to discussion. But there is no room for entertaining any such question when a person’s conduct affects the interests of no persons besides himself, or needs not affect them unless they like (all the persons concerned being of full age, and the ordinary amount of understanding). In all such cases there should be perfect freedom, legal and social, to do the action and stand the consequences.

‘Society is itself the tyrant’, and more oppressive than any tyrant of old because ‘it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself’. It imposes a new ‘despotism of custom’; it dictates its will by means of public opinion; it presumes to tell men what to think and read, how to dress and behave; it sets itself up as the judge of right and wrong, propriety and impropriety; it discourages spontaneity and originality, personal impulses and desires, strong character and unconventional ideas; it is fatal, in short, to individuality. And all of this, Mill predicted, was bound to get worse as the public more and more felt its power and acted upon it.

Honor based on respect is a superior moral imperative to obedience based on rules and law.

When men function out of rules and laws, they do the bare minimum they can without being punished.

Without honor, mediocrity, corruption and incompetence rule.

To imagine that the economic life of a vast area comprising many different people can be directed or planned by democratic procedure betrays a complete lack of awareness of the problems such planning would rase. Planning on an international scale, even more than is true on a national scale, cannot be anything but a naked rule of force, an imposition by a small group on all the rest of that sort of standard and employment which the planners think suitable for the rest. If anything is certain, it is that Grossraumwirtschaft of the kind at which the Germans have been aiming can be successfully realized only by a master race, ruthlessly imposing its aims ad ideas on the rest.

I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you earned, but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.

The very same people who say that government has no right to interfere with sexual activity between consenting adults believe that the government has every right to interfere with economic activity between consenting adults.

What do you call it when someone steals money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes money by force? Robbery. What do you call I when a politician takes someone else’s money and gives it to someone likely to vote for him? Social justice

Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.

Humility is the distinguishing virtue of the believer in freedom; arrogance, of the paternalist.

The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Children die every day because millions of us tell ourselves that caring is just as good as doing. It’s an internal mechanism controlled by the lazy part of your brain to keep you from actually doing work.

Denying the utility of power, vilifying it’s usages, is in itself a means of using power.

Economic freedom is a necessary condition for civil and political freedom; political freedom, desirable though it may be, is not a necessary condition for economic and civil freedom.

The scope of government must be limited. Its major function must be to protect our freedom both from the enemies outside our gates and from our fellow citizens: to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, to foster competitive markets.

Government power must be dispersed. If government is to exercise power, better in the county than in the state, better in the state than in Washington. If I do not like what my local community does, be it in sewage disposal, or zoning, or schools, I can move to another local community, and though few may take this step, the mere possibility acts like a check. If I do no like what my state does, I can move to another. If I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations.

The power to do good is also the power to do harm; those who control the power today may not tomorrow; and, more important, what one man regards as good, another may regard as harm. The great tragedy of the drive to centralization, as of the drive to extend the scope of government in general, is that it is mostly led by men of good will who will be the first to rue its consequences.

Political freedom came along with the free market and the development of capitalist institutions. Competitive capitalism promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power. The seller is protected from coercion by the consumer because of other consumers to whom he can sell. The employee is protected from coercion by the employer because of other employers for whom he can work, and so on. And the market does this impersonally and without centralized authority. Indeed, a major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it does this task so well. It gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

What the market does is to reduce greatly the range of issues that must be decided through political means, and thereby to minimize the extent to which government need participate directly in the game.

The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated — a system of checks and balances. By removing the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority, the market eliminates this source of coercive power. It enables economic strength to be a check to political power rather than a reinforcement.

There can be many millionaires in one large economy. But can there be more than one really outstanding leader, one person whom the energies and enthusiasms of his countrymen are centered? If the central government gains power, it is likely to be at the expense of local governments. There seems to be something like a fixed total of political power to be distributed. Consequently, if economic power is joined to political power, concentration seems almost inevitable. On the other hand, if economic power is kept in separate hands from political power, it can serve as a check and a counter to political power.

The groups in our society that have the most at stake in the preservation and strengthening of competitive capitalism are those minority groups which can most easily become the object of the distrust and enmity of the majority — the Negroes, the Jews, the foreign born, to mention only the most obvious. Yet, paradoxically enough, the enemies of the free market — the socialists and communists — have been recruited in disproportionate measure from precisely these groups. Instead of recognizing that the existence of the market has protected them from the attitudes of their fellow countrymen, they attribute the residual discrimination to the market.

The use of political channels, while inevitable, tends to strain the social cohesion essential for a stable society. The strain is least if agreement for joint action need be reached only on a limited range of issues on which people in any event have common views. Every extension of the range of issues for which explicit agreement is sought strains further the delicate threads that hold society together.

Fundamental differences in basic values can seldom if ever be resolved at the ballot box; ultimately they can only be decided, though not resolved, by conflict.

The development of capitalism has been accompanied by a major reduction in the extent to which particular religious, racial, or social groups have operated under special handicaps in respect of their economic activities; have, as the saying goes, been discriminated against. The substitution of contract arrangements for status arrangements was the first step toward the freeing of the serfs in the Middle Ages. The preservation of Jews through the Middle Ages was possible because of the existence of a market sector in which they could operate and maintain themselves despite official persecution.

Licensure therefore frequently establishes essentially the medieval guild kind of regulation in which the state assigns power to the members of the profession. In practice, the considerations taken into account in determining who shall get a license often involve matters that, so far as a layman can see, have no relation whatsoever to professional competence. (Uber)

Capitalism leads to less inequality than alternative systems of organization and that the development of capitalism has greatly lessened the extent of inequality.

I find it hard, as a liberal, to see any justification for graduated taxation solely to redistribute income. This seems a clear case of using coercion to take from some in order to give to others and thus to conflict head-on with individual freedom.

One cannot be both an egalitarian, in this sense, and a liberal. An egalitarian will defend taking from one in order to give to others for the sake of justice.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. The opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible. They have no authority to decide the question for all mankind, and exclude every other person from the means of judging. To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.

Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being “pushed to an extreme;” not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility, when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be questioned because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.

Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom. Persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any other people—less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their own character. If from timidity they consent to be forced into one of these moulds, and to let all that part of themselves which cannot expand under the pressure remain unexpanded, society will be little the better for their genius.

Traditional justice is about impartial processes rather than either results or prospects.

Cultures have consequences. Ignoring those consequences while proclaiming equality as a self-justifying ideal does nothing to benefit the less fortunate, and in fact tends to freeze them into their backward position while the rest of the world moves forward.

Printing any currency promiscuously destroys its value and there is no reason to doubt that the same principle applies to the currency of respect.

There has now been created a world in which success of others is a grievance, rather than an example. Irrational as such ideological indulgences maybe, they are virtually inevitable when equality becomes the social touchstone for equality can be achieved only by either divorcing performance from reward or by producing equal performances. The passion for equality leads toward a divorce of performance and reward – which is to say a divorce of incentive and behavior, and even a divorce of cause and effect in our minds.

Human beings are sacrificed to the tyranny of visions because those sacrificed are not the same as those exhilarated by the vision.

Democracy implies majority sanction as the basis for laws, but democracy by itself implies nothing about either freedom or the rule of law. A majority may destroy the freedom of a minority or make the issuance of edicts as arbitrary and discriminatory as it wishes. The systematic denial of rights to American blacks in the Southern states during the Jim Crow era was a classical example of democratic despotism.

It’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

One loves in proportion to the sacrifices that one has committed and the troubles that one has suffered,” writes Renan, “One loves the house that one has built and that one passes on.

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man; a debt he propose to pay off with your money.

70% marginal tax: These arguments fail to consider that the high individual tax rates from 1950 through 1980 largely drove entrepreneurial business income out of the individual income tax system and into the corporate income tax system. This phenomenon reversed itself during the 1980s when the top individual income tax rate fell below the corporate rate and restrictions on the structure and participation in partnerships and S corporations eased. These trends suggest that the high personal income rates from 1950 through 1980 simply encouraged the rich to modify the composition of their income. Their wealth was still there during this period, it was just not accounted for on individual tax returns. The shifting composition of income claimed by the rich due to changes in tax laws explains this illusion. Focusing solely on the individual income tax data leads to a misjudgment on the historic level of inequality.

For the less meritorious, demanding redistribution is a way of getting what you can’t otherwise achieve.

Patriarchal gangs are much more conducive for fighting off rival gangs who inevitably compete for resources. A matriarchal structure simply cannot work under such conditions. But under conditions of post-scarcity or at least of resource plenty, patriarchal structures become demonized because they do not align with the female sexual strategy that tends to win out relatively under such conditions. The problem today is that we exist at a time of plenty. But that is by no means a guarantee of conditions into the future. Feminized / matriarchal structures, if it becomes the primary sexual strategy for a society, will be decimated by a patriarchal opponent when a time of scarcity comes around.

When world champion boxer Joe Louis voluntarily joined the U.S. Army in 1942 he was asked about his decision to enter the (then) racially segregated organization, he replied: “Los of things wrong with America, but Hitler ain’t going to fix them.”

Racism is not dead, but it is on life support – kept alive by politics, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists.’

One of the paradoxes of experiences is that, in spite of this historical evidence, it is precisely the minority groups that have frequently furnished the most vocal and most numerous advocates of fundamental alterations in a capitalist society. They have tended to attribute to capitalism the residual retractions they experience rather than to recognize that the free market has been the major factor enabling these restrictions to be as small as they are.

The egalitarian will defend taking from some to give to others, not as a more effective means by whereby the “same” can achieve an objective they want to achieve, but on grounds of “justice.” At this point, equality comes sharply into conflict with freedom; one must choose. One cannot be both an egalitarian and a liberal.

Kant did not believe that citizens of democratic states were necessarily more moral than other people, just that they had greater control over the policies of their court and would make careful, self-interested calculations in deciding whether to fight.

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive other of theirs, or to impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own heart, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.

It’s a problem of our time. The range of human knowledge today is so great that we’re all specialist and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.

Imagine if you were living in a world surrounded by people who do not grasp individual liberty and basic economics and that those people wanted to collectively make decisions on how you should run your life.

All too many folks think that this is what democracy looks like: serial attempts to exercise an incoherent, screaming heckler’s veto.

Our inability to predict in environments subjected to Black Swans, coupled with a general lack of the awareness of this state of affairs, mean that certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not. Based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at narrating – or, worse, at smoking you with complicated mathematical models. They are also more likely to wear a tie.

If you believe in equal rights, then what do ‘women’s rights,’ ‘gay rights,’ etc., mean? Either they are redundant or they are violations of the principle of equal rights for all.

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

People are overdosing on virtue signaling. Society-wide we have moved on from praise of material wealth (but still covet it), and moved onto desire for praise of virtue.

There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.

A nation can survive its foes, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government self. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

Crime is violence, and the government is supposed to have a monopoly on violence. If a government can’t keep crime under control, then that government loses its legitimacy.

Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, he that is not with me is against me.

When spiritual death creeps through the land like poison gas, the school and its pupils are of course among its first to suffocate.

“250 pathetic little figures, darker than ever against the sunset, crowd and crestfallen, were trailing slantwise across the camp. On they went, each of them glimpsed briefly in the rays of the setting sun, a dawdling, endless chain, as though those behind regretted that the foremost had set out, and were loath to follow. Some, feebler than the rest, were led by the arm or the hand, and so uncertain were their steps that they looked like blind men with their guides. Many, to, held mess tins or mugs in their hands, and this mean prison ware, carried in expectation of a supper too copious to gulp down onto constricted stomach, these tins and cups held out like begging bowls, were more degrading and slavish and pitiable tan anything else about them. I felt myself weeping. I glanced at my companions as I spied away my tears, and saw theirs. Hut N. 9 had spoken, and decide for us all. It was there that the dead had been lying around for four days, since Tuesday evening. Thy went into the mess hall, and it was as though they had decided to forgive the murderers in return for their bread ration and some mush. We went away without a word. It was the that I learned the meaning of Polish Pride, and understood their recklessly brave rebellions. The Polish engineer Jerzy Wegierski, was now in our team. Even when he was a work assigner no one had ever heard him raise his vice. He was always quiet, polite, and gentle. But now – his face was distorted with rage, scorn, and suffering, as he tore his eyes away from that procession of beggars, and cried I an angry, steely voice: “Foreman! Don’t wake me up for supper! I shan’t be going.” He clambered up not the top bunk, turned his face to the wall – an didn’t get up again. That night we went to eat – but he would get up. In his mind’s eye he steam from a bowl of mush could not veil the ideal of freedom. If we had all been so proud and so strong, what tyrant could have held out against us?” -Gulag Archipelago

Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. Actually, it WILL eventually destroy our world.

Rule of law has been displaced by rule of the regulator.

Regulation is a form of central planning.

Fun fact: administrative agencies keep all the money that they fine citizens / companies / orgs. Does not go back to the Treasury

What exactly is your ‘fair share’ of what ‘someone else’ has worked for?

The global corporation transcends race, sex, nation and religion. Godlike, it loves all the little children of the world, hears all of their prayers, answers them with products — and accepts payment in every currency. When the universalism of this age is understood as grease on the gears of global commerce, when contemporary universalism is understood as a commercial ethos that has superseded all religious, tribal, cultural and rational moral systems, the ecstatic zealotry of today’s moral crusaders is easily explained and understood.

And, whereas female empathy helps intratribally and within families to help parties see both sides of a disagreement and reconcile their differences, when female empathy is applied intertribally, the effect is never-ending inclusiveness. The points of view of outsiders and enemies are considered and they are invited in without regard to how it might alter or corrupt the tribe. Both social and national borders are viewed as overly formal, and men are scolded for voicing practical or tactical concerns about the indiscriminate inclusion of immigrants, refugees and individuals who express values that conflict with the existing values of the tribe. Everyone must be sympathized with, invited, and accepted. Eventually, no one can be banished but the banishers. Choosing to care completely for a few and refusing to care at all for the many will seem callous, but caring for a few sincerely means truly knowing and caring about people instead of being manipulated into emoting theatrically about strangers. The tribal man will seem immoral, but members of his tribe will demand far more of him morally than bureaucrats, fair weather friends and business associates. The tribal man will be seen as a parasite, because he takes from the Empire for his people and gives nothing to the Empire in return. Tribal interests run counter to the universalistic ethos of this commercial age, so men who are tribal may be regarded as criminals by those charged with protecting commercial interests. The tribal man will have to re-think what it means to him to be regarded as an outlaw or a parasite or a monster to the people of the Empire. He will have to reconsider whose denouncements truly matter.

The knight-errant with no round table suits the universalist Zeitgeist perfectly. Every man owes his allegiance to everyone and no one at the same time, and he is pitted only against his own perception of “evil” in the service of that which is good for all man and woman-kind. He wanders through crowds alone, and alone, he can do very little harm to any established interests. He feels all-powerful, the captain of his own soul, but except in the rarest of cases he is all but inconsequential.

Every citizen of the Empire of Nothing lives and dies by a set of rules determined by others. Those others are almost always strangers. So much is already predetermined for the individuals of the Empire. Holding on to one’s individualism is so often little more than a romantic mask for a fear of losing bourgeois respectability and an attachment to the material comforts afforded to the successfully conforming citizen. Men don’t want to belong to any group because they don’t want to be seen as weirdos or cult members and be socially ostracized.

From an economic standpoint, universal love — love spread among billions — is also worthless. It is offered to anyone in exchange for nothing. The love of a man who is willing to discriminate, to separate “us” from “them,” has far greater value than the cheap sentiment of the man who says he loves all mankind. The love of a man who loves everyone and anyone is spread so thin it is weak and meaningless, but the love of man who discriminates is concentrated, powerful and profound. It gives him direction and purpose.

It is unlikely that you have power to significantly influence events in far-flung corners of the world or even down the block, so any emotional investment in political outcomes or the suffering of strangers overseas is a total waste of time, effort and energy that you could be investing in helping and building mutually beneficial relationships with people who you know, like or admire in your local area. Those investments are far more likely to yield a reciprocal return of love, caring, loyalty and even resources than investments in people you will never meet who live in places you will never go to. The same is true even much closer to home. Even if you avoid television and social media and never listen to news on the radio, a simple trip to a grocery or convenience store will probably alert you to some new panic or riot or outrage or tragedy that everyone is supposed to care about one hundred or one thousand miles away. You will be inundated with stimuli designed, like the soundtrack to a movie, to invoke your sympathies or even your outrage. Taking the bait keeps you psychologically enslaved to the Empire of Nothing, to this interminable, desperate mass of interchangeable strangers vying for attention.

The state — the Empire of Nothing — is essentially a collection of self-perpetuating bureaucratic organizations. The state sees you as a number, a demographic, a tax bracket, a potential violator of law to be dealt with “impartially.” To the politicians who direct the operations of the state you are a vote, a poll number, a donor — possibly even an enemy or a threat. In theory, the government of the United States of America exists to protect the bodies, rights and interests of American citizens. All 300 million or so of them. In reality, politicians legislate to protect their biggest donors, the special interest groups that get them elected, and people to whom they owe favors. The state itself may theoretically exist to protect national interests — the interests of its people as a whole — but the adoption of universalist morality has blurred the line between citizens of the state and “citizens of the world.” The US and the governments in Europe which are also stricken with universal morality have welcomed the export of jobs, the import of unskilled immigrants and hostile refugees, and they have engaged their citizens in costly foreign wars that offer little or no benefit or protection to average citizens.

The state does not serve your interests. It serves its own. As the largest of large corporations whose interests are protected and enforced by the largest of gangs, the state will extort as much money and labor from you as it can within the limits it sets for itself to maintain a minimum level of public support and a maximum level of compliance. It does not, and cannot love you or care what happens to you. The state is not your friend, or your mom, or your dad. It does not worry about you or respect you or appreciate your contribution. When the state “gives” you something, whether it is a commendation or a welfare check, it does so largely for the theater of public relations.

Public choice economists have long argued that conventional economists hold markets to far higher standards than they hold government. Markets “fail” unless they’re optimal. Governments “succeed” unless they’re on fire. If this seems unfair, compare the standard definitions of “market failure” and “failed state.” Market failure exists whenever markets fall short of perfect efficiency. To be a failed state, in contrast, requires habitual disaster.

The Judiciary’s job is to say what the law is. Not what it should be.

“If you are not in danger,” says Sun-tzu, “do not fight.” It is almost a physical law: What is bloated beyond its proportions inevitably collapses. The mind must not wander from goal to goal, or be distracted by success from its sense of purpose and proportion. What is concentrated, coherent, and connected to its past has power. What is dissipated, divided, and distended rots and falls to the ground. The bigger it bloats, the harder it falls.

A church is an organization or movement that specializes in telling people what to think. Can be truth. Can be misinformation. A separation of Church and State is the separation of government from an organization that tells people what to think.

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.

Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.

Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.

Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.

There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.

It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.

The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.

It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the ‘right’ to education, the ‘right’ to health care, the ‘right’ to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.

The most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways.

Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free: as they cannot destroy either one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large that holds the end of his chain. By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience.

Princes had, so to speak, turned violence into a physical thing but our democratic republics have made it into something as intellectual as the human will it intends to restrict. Under the absolute government of one man, despotism, in order to attack the spirit, crudely struck the body and the spirit escaped free of its blows, rising gloriously above it. But in democratic republics, tyranny does not behave in that manner; it leaves the body alone and goes straight to the spirit. No longer does the master say: “You will think as I do or you will die”; he says: “You are free not to think like me, your life, your property, everything will be untouched but from today you are a pariah among us. You will retain your civic privileges but they will be useless to you, for if you seek the votes of your fellow citizen, they will not grant you them and if you simply seek their esteem, they will pretend to refuse you that too. You will retain your place amongst men but you will lose the rights of mankind. When you approach your fellows, they will shun you like an impure creature; and those who believe in your innocence will be the very people to abandon you lest they be shunned in their turn. Go in peace; I grant you your life but it is a life worse than death.

America…has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart…But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own…She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

I regard free speech as a prerequisite to a civilized society, because freedom of speech means that you can have combat with words. That’s what it means. It doesn’t mean that people can happily and gently exchange opinions. It means that we can engage in combat with words, in the battleground of ideas. And the reason that that’s acceptable, and why it’s acceptable that people’s feelings get hurt during that combat, is that the combat of ideas is far preferable to actual combat.

It is more noble to teach young people about responsibilities than about rights.

Your values have to be hierarchically organized with something absolute at the top, because otherwise they do nothing but war. You have to organize your values hierarchically or else you stay confused. This is true if you’re an individual and it’s true if you’re a state. If you don’t know what the next thing you should do is, then there are fifty things you should do. Then, how are you doing to do any of them. You can’t. You have to prioritize. Something has to be above something else. It has to be arranged in a hierarchy for it not to be chaotic. So there is some principle at the top of the hierarchy.

It’s the failure of the individual at the moral level that maintains the tyranny that presently exists.

If we lose the virile, manly qualities, and sink into a nation of mere hucksters, putting gain over national honor, and subordinating everything to mere ease of life, then we shall indeed reach a condition worse than that of the ancient civilizations in the years of their decay.

We must ever keep the core of our national being sound, and see to it that not only our citizens in private life, but, above all, our statesmen in public life, practice the old commonplace virtues which from time immemorial have lain at the root of all true national wellbeing.

Let us make it evident that we intend to do justice. Then let us make it equally evident that we will not tolerate injustice being done to us in return. Let us further make it evident that we use no words which we are not prepared to back up with deeds, and that while our speech is always moderate, we are ready and willing to make it good. Such an attitude will be the surest possible guarantee of that self-respecting peace, the attainment of which is and must ever be the prime aim of a self-governing people.

The first essential of civilization is law. Anarchy is simply the handmaiden and forerunner of tyranny and despotism. Law and order enforced with justice and by strength lie at the foundations of civilization. Law must be based upon justice, else it cannot stand, and it must be enforced with resolute firmness, because weakness in enforcing it means in the end that there is no justice and no law, nothing but the rule of disorderly and unscrupulous strength. Without the habit of orderly obedience to the law, without the stern enforcement of the laws at the expense of those who defiantly resist them, there can be no possible progress, moral or material, in civilization. There can be no weakening of the law-abiding spirit here at home, if we are permanently to succeed; and just as little can we afford to show weakness abroad.

When the weather is good for crops it is also good for weeds.

Many qualities are needed by a people which would preserve the power of self- government in fact as well as in name. Among these qualities are forethought, shrewdness, self-restraint, the courage which refuses to abandon one’s own rights, and the disinterested and kindly good sense which enables one to do justice to the rights of others. Lack of strength and lack of courage and unfit men for self-government on the one hand; and on the other, brutal arrogance, envy — in short, any manifestation of the spirit of selfish disregard, whether of one’s own duties or of the rights of others, are equally fatal.

The death-knell of the Republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others.

A republic such as ours can exist only by virtue of the orderly liberty which comes through the equal domination of the law over all men alike, and through its administration in such resolute and fearless fashion as shall teach all that no man is above it and no man below it.

Upon the success of our experiment much depends, not only as regards our own welfare, but as regards the welfare of mankind. If we fail, the cause of free self-government throughout the world will rock to its foundations, and therefore our responsibility is heavy, to ourselves, to the world as it is to-day, and to the generations yet unborn.

Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood—the virtues that made America. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

Unjust war is to be abhorred; but woe to the nation that does not make ready to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it! And woe thrice over to the nation in which the average man loses the fighting edge, loses the power to serve as a soldier if the day of need should arise!

The good citizen must be a good citizen of his own country first before he can with advantage be a citizen of the world at large.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts ‘native’ before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as anyone else. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart allegiance, the better it will be for every good American. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.

Therefore, we should devote ourselves as a preparative to preparedness, alike in peace and war, to secure the three elemental things: one, a common language, the English language; two, the increase in our social loyalty citizenship absolutely undivided, a citizenship which acknowledges no flag except the flag of the United States and which emphatically repudiates all duality of intention or national loyalty; and third, an intelligent and resolute effort for the removal of industrial and social unrest, an effort which shall aim equally at securing every man his rights and to make every man understand that unless he in good faith performs his duties he is not entitled to any rights at all.

Political correctness makes speech itself political, and so everything becomes political. – Naval

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

“When national debts have once been accumulated to a certain degree, there is scarce, I believe, a single instance of their having been fairly and completely paid. The liberation of the public revenue, if it has ever been brought about at all, has always been brought about by bankruptcy; sometimes by an avowed one, but always by a real one, though frequently by a pretend payment.” – Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter III, Part V, pg.1012

“Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal – else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority… other than through the tragic logic of history… No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority. If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead – and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple.” ― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

“The very same people who say that the government has no right to interfere with sexual activity between consenting adults believe that the government has every right to interfere with economic activity between consenting adults.” -Thomas Sowell

“The public acceptance of domineering professions is essentially a political event. Each new establishment of professional legitimacy means that the political tasks of law-making, judicial review and executive power lose some of their proper character and independence. Public affairs pass from the layperson’s elected peers into the hands of a self-accrediting elite. When medicine recently outgrew its liberal restraints, it invaded legislation by establishing public norms.” -Ivan Illich, Disabling Professions

“Dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies.” Nicolas Gomez Davila

“Price-fixing may often appear for a short period to be successful. It can seem to work well for a while, particularly in wartime, when it is supported by patriotism and a sense of crisis. But the longer it is in effect the more its difficulties increase. When prices are arbitrarily held down by government compulsion, demand is chronically in excess of supply. We have seen that if the government attempts to prevent a shortage of a commodity by reducing also the prices of the labor, raw materials and other factors that go into its cost of production, it creates a shortage of these in turn. But not only will the government, if it pursues this course, find it necessary to extend price control more and more downwards, or “vertically”; it will find it no less necessary to extend price control “horizontally.” If we ration one commodity, and the public cannot get enough of it, though it still has excess purchasing power, it will turn to some substitute. The rationing of each commodity as it grows scarce, in other words, must put more and more pressure on the unrationed commodities that remain. If we assume that the government is successful in its efforts to prevent black markets (or at least prevents them from developing on a sufficient scale to nullify its legal prices), continued price control must drive it to the rationing of more and more commodities. This rationing cannot stop with consumers.” -Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson

“The natural consequence of a thoroughgoing over-all price control which seeks to perpetuate a given historic price level, in brief, must ultimately be a completely regimented economy. Wages would have to be held down as rigidly as prices. Labor would have to be rationed as ruthlessly as raw materials. The end result would be that the government would not only tell each consumer precisely how much of each commodity he could have; it would tell each manufacturer precisely what quantity of each raw material he could have and what quantity of labor. Competitive bidding for workers could no more be tolerated than competitive bidding for materials. The result would be a petrified totalitarian economy, with every business firm and every worker at the mercy of the government, and with a final abandonment of all the traditional liberties we have known.” -Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson

“A power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.” -Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers

“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.” ― Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century

“A liberal is fundamentally fearful of concentrated power. His objective is to preserve the maximum degree of freedom for each individual separately that is compatible with one man’s freedom not interfering with other men’s freedom. He believes that this objective requires that power be dispersed. He is suspicious of assigning to government any functions that can be performed through the market, both because this substitutes coercion for voluntary cooperation in the area in question and because, by giving government an increased role, it threatens freedom in other areas.” Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom

“A very rarely discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities – even in moderate quantities.” -Nassim Taleb

“Buy when there’s blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own.” -Baron Rothschild

“Eye contact with one’s peers changes one’s behavior. But for a desk- grounded office leech, a number is just a number. Someone you see in church Sunday morning would feel uncomfortable for his mistakes—and more responsible for them. On the small, local scale, his body and biological response would direct him to avoid causing harm to others. On a large scale, others are abstract items; given the lack of social contact with the people concerned, the civil servant’s brain leads rather than his emotions—with numbers, spreadsheets, statistics, more spreadsheets, and theories.” -Nassim Taleb

“But the curse of every ancient civilization was that its men in the end became unable to fight. Materialism, luxury, safety, even sometimes an almost modern sentimentality, weakened the fiber of each civilized race in turn; each became in the end a nation of pacifists, and then each was trodden under foot by some ruder people that had kept that virile fighting power the lack of which makes all other virtues useless and sometimes even harmful.” -Theodore Roosevelt

“When you men get home and face an anti-war protestor, look at him in the eyes and shake his hand. Then, wink at his girlfriend, because she knows she’s dating a pussy.” General James Mattis

“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%.” -Thomas Jefferson

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” -John Adams

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.” -Benjamin Franklin

“We are a Republican government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of democracy.” -Alexander Hamilton

“The first principle is that voting is a responsibility, not a right. In design you want to calibrate your voting filtration to select for more responsible and civic minded voters. All voting will necessarily have filtration. The second issue is potential for abuse. Whether or not it is currently abused there is a long term concern for a system that has exploitable weaknesses. A ban on distance voting would quash all variants of those.” -NM

“Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the Government take care of him, better take a closer look at the American Indian.” -Henry Ford

“Black voters are expected to be Democrats – or at least left-leaning in their politics – not because of their views on this-or-that policy initiative, but because of the perceived racial attitudes of Republicans. But this has resulted in an odd paradox – despite black progressives’ professed hatred for ‘systemically racist’ government and institutions, they continue to trust in and empower those same institutions by voting for policies that strengthen them and their ability to hold sway in our lives. If you believe the government is oppressing you, it is surely counter-productive to demand that it take more of your money, that it institute policies that further criminalize your behavior, or that increase its ability to infringe on your privacy.”

“A market measures desire; desire is beauty in action. And by measuring beauty we measure truth, because truth is beautiful.”

“Anyone who asserts a right to rule on the basis of his claim to wisdom is accordingly condemned in advance as a charlatan by philosophy itself – Philosopher-kings are not possible, and genuine philosophers will always prefer a regime of equality under the law.” -Harry Jaffa

Rates of future yield growth depend far more on whether poor nations get access to tractors, irrigation, and fertilizer than on climate change, says FAO.

“The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.” Thomas Sowell

“Brains are evolved to make sense of the world via a narrative structure. Groups cohere around common narratives of varying kind for various purposes. Narratives that fulfill 4 basic functions that are evolved psychological needs are what myths are, which in turn are what cultures are. A culture is a collection of a sufficient group of people who have the same set of memes in their heads that constitute a coherent meme-o-plex / narrative / mythology. IF the mythological narrative can be moved, then the entire culture moves along with it. This is why politics is downstream of culture and culture is downstream of theology. Propagandize enough people on the right points and you mutate the entire society.” -NM

“Everybody has asked the question. . .”What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!” —Frederick Douglass

“The task of weaning various people and groups from the national nipple will not be easy. The sound of whines, bawls, screams and invective will fill the air as the agony of withdrawal pangs finds voice.” —Linda Bowles

“But either you believe in limited government or you don’t. And if you do, you must recognise, with John Stuart Mill, that the business of government is not to mend our morals but to protect our freedoms.”

“The public acceptance of domineering professions is essentially a political event. Each new establishment of professional legitimacy means that the political tasks of law-making, judicial review and executive power lose some of their proper character and independence. Public affairs pass from the layperson’s elected peers into the hands of a self-accrediting elite. When medicine recently outgrew its liberal restraints, it invaded legislation by establishing public norms.” -Ivan Illich, Disabling Professions

“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%.” -Thomas Jefferson

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” -John Adams

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.” -Benjamin Franklin

“We are a Republican government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of democracy.” -Alexander Hamilton

“The philosophy of the rich versus the poor is this: The rich invest their money and spend what is left; the poor spend their money and invest what is left.” – Jim Rohn

“Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics.” – General Robert Barrow, former-Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps

“I Would Rather Be Governed By the First 2,000 People in the Telephone Directory than by the Harvard University Faculty.” -William F. Buckley Jr.

“Very frequently propaganda is described as a manipulation for the purpose of changing idea or opinions of making individuals ‘believe’ some idea or fact, and finally of making them adhere to some doctrine—all matters of the mind. It tries to convince, to bring about a decision, to create a firm adherence to some truth. This is a completely wrong line of thinking: to view propaganda as still being what it was in 1850 is to cling to an obsolete concept of man and of the means to influence him; it is to condemn oneself to understand nothing about propaganda. The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action. It is no longer to change adherence to a doctrine, but to make the individual cling irrationally to a process of action. It is no longer to transform an opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief.”

Man is free if he needs to obey no person but solely the laws.

I will accept any rules that YOU feel necessary to YOUR freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I ALONE am morally responsible for everything I do.

There is an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups. To act on behalf of a group seems to free people of many of the moral restraints which control their behavior as individuals within the group.

Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one belief or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be served. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe. It shows a complete confusion of thought to suggest that, because under any sort of system the majority of people follow the lead of somebody, it makes no difference if everybody has to follow the same lead. To deprecate the value of intellectual freedom because it will never mean for everybody the same possibility of independent thought is completely to miss the reasons which give intellectual freedom its value. What is essential to make it serve its function as the prime mover of intellectual progress is not that everybody may be able to think or write anything but that any cause or idea may be argued by somebody. So long as dissent is not suppressed, there will always be some who will query the ideas using their contemporaries and put new ideas to the test of argument and propaganda.

There need be little difficulty in planning the economic life of a family, comparatively little in a small community. But, as the scale increases, the amount of agreement on the order of ends decreases and the necessity to rely on force and compulsion grows.

What is the main difference between a soldier and a civilian? The difference lies in the field of civic virtue. A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not.

“May I ask this? Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a member of that group to do alone?” -Robert Heinlein, The Moon is A Harsh Mistress