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| Quotations - General | [Quote No.37716] Need Area: Friends > General
"The most persistent sound which reverberates through men's history is the beating of war drums." - Arthur Koestler
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| [Quote No.37717] Need Area: Friends > General
"[In politics especially] We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them." - Abigail Adams
(1744 - 1818)
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| [Quote No.37720] Need Area: Friends > General
"Men build too many walls and not enough bridges." - Sir Isaac Newton
(1643 - 1727)
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| [Quote No.37721] Need Area: Friends > General
"An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth." - Mark Twain
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| [Quote No.37730] Need Area: Friends > General
"The path of least resistance makes all rivers, and some men [and women], crooked." - Napoleon Hill
(1883-1970), author
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| [Quote No.37736] Need Area: Friends > General
"[What is it to be sympathetic:]
Can I see another's woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another's grief,
And not seek for kind relief?" - William Blake
'Songs of Innocence'
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| [Quote No.37739] Need Area: Friends > General
"Capitalism works better than it sounds, while socialism sounds better than it works." - Richard Nixon
(1913 - 1994), American politician, 37th President of the United States of America
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| [Quote No.37740] Need Area: Friends > General
"Potentially, a government is the most dangerous
threat to Man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly
on the use of physical force against
legally disarmed victims." - Ayn Rand
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| [Quote No.37741] Need Area: Friends > General
"Relying on the government to protect your privacy
is like asking a peeping tom
to install your window blinds." - John Perry Barlow
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| [Quote No.37747] Need Area: Friends > General
"We claim that any man [or woman] who is honest, fair, tolerant, kind, charitable, and well-behaved is a success. No matter what his [or her] station in life." - Jay House
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| [Quote No.37751] Need Area: Friends > General
"Dictators always look good until the last minutes." - Tomas G. Masaryk
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| [Quote No.37758] Need Area: Friends > General
"Government is itself an art, one of the subtlest of arts." - Felix Frankfurter
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| [Quote No.37759] Need Area: Friends > General
"When the acts of a popular power attain a certain degree of arbitrariness and become oppressive, they are always presented as acts of self-defense and public safety." - Augustin Cochin
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| [Quote No.37760] Need Area: Friends > General
"A wise and frugal government ... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government..." - Thomas Jefferson
First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801.
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| [Quote No.37784] Need Area: Friends > General
"Enough lawyers do not make the following points clearly and repeatedly to those that they are involved in law cases. Any person, especially the innocent, should remember that our Western legal system is adversarial. So do not be surprised, in fact be prepared, if you are a witness or even the victim in a legal court case, to be verbally attacked, insulted and your honesty and reputation impugned. It is a battle of fire. Although it will be very hard, do not take it personally. Do not expect the opposition lawyer to fight 'fair'. Do not expect your lawyer or the judge to object or defend you or your testimony to your satisfaction. Do not rise to the opposition lawyer's tactics to discredit, belittle, anger and rattle you. Be a model of calm, patient, clarity, honesty and reasonableness. In this way you give the court, judge and jury, the best chance to eventually adjudicate the case fairly and hopefully in your favour." - Seymour@imagi-natives.com
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| [Quote No.37793] Need Area: Friends > General
"Welfare’s purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence." - Ronald Reagan
US President
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| [Quote No.37795] Need Area: Friends > General
"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe
while the [government] legislature is in session." - Mark Twain
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| [Quote No.37812] Need Area: Friends > General
"Acquaintance lessens fame." - Claudius
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| [Quote No.37813] Need Area: Friends > General
"No matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helped you." - Althea Gibson
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| [Quote No.37841] Need Area: Friends > General
"Once we start from this idea, accepted by all our political theorists [at present, that] 'The motive force of society is the government'; once men consider themselves as sentient, but passive, incapable of improving themselves morally or materially by their own intelligence and energy, and reduced to expecting everything from the law; in a word, when they admit that their relation to the state is that of a flock of sheep to the shepherd, it is clear that the responsibility of the government is immense. Good and evil, virtue and vice, equality and inequality, wealth and poverty, all proceed from it. It is entrusted with everything, it undertakes everything, it does everything; hence, it is responsible for everything." - Frederic Bastiat
'The Law', 1850.
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| [Quote No.37862] Need Area: Friends > General
"Let us with great diligence implant in our souls... humility." - John Chrysostom
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| [Quote No.37863] Need Area: Friends > General
"It's a sign of your own worth sometimes if you are hated by the right people." - Miles Franklin
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| [Quote No.37886] Need Area: Friends > General
"[If history is any guide, anyone who chooses to live outside generally accepted standards of decent, civilised society - ie as an 'outlaw' - should expect] continual fear and danger of violent death... [and a life that is...] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." - Thomas Hobbes
Philosopher. Quote from his book, 'Leviathan'.
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| [Quote No.37894] Need Area: Friends > General
"When it becomes serious, you have to lie. [In war they say the first casualty is truth. Unfortunately truth is the first casualty of any serious difficulty, as most politicians have come to think that their appearance and popular confidence, even if it is only ignorance and misplaced trust, is all that matters. They do not practically believe that their citizens' have a right to know the truth so they can decide what is right for them, themselves. These politicians believe that citizens must not be allowed to make informed choices and that they have no right to liberty or democracy, only the appearance of it. These politicians forget that they are public servants and have let power go to their heads and corrupt them so that they believe that they are like feudal royalty with no responsibility to their citizens and to the inalienable rights humans have to life and liberty. They show by their actions, rather than their words, that they believe that their citizens are their property, to be disposed of as they choose, like slaves, rather than as free humans with the right, even the obligation, to make their own decisions. They are a disgrace to human dignity, society and history.] " - Jean-Claude Juncker
The Prime Minister of Luxembourg and Chairman of the Eurozone Finance Ministers.
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| [Quote No.37895] Need Area: Friends > General
"[Socialist and other ‘big government’ politicians are for ever looking to increase their power at the expense of their citizens’ inalienable human rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and private property. One example of this was European politicians usurping sovereign powers and human rights with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 regarding creating a monetary union. A monetary union, especially without a fiscal union,] ...is not only inefficient but undemocratic. A danger not only to our wealth but also our freedoms, and ultimately, our peace. The villains of the story... are bureaucrats and self-aggrandizing politicians. [Monetary union] ...is a mechanism for subordinating the economic welfare, democratic rights, and national freedom of the European countries to the political and bureaucratic elites whose power-lust, cynicism, and delusions underlie the actions of the vast majority of those who now strive to create a European superstate. [This was eventually shown to be true during 2011, when a great number of political steps were taken to try to save this monetary union, without any consultation with politicians’ citizens, after the monetary union had backfired by allowing many countries to borrow and spend for political gain to the point that their countries were essentially bankrupt and unable to repay those loans, without taxing to destruction the lives of their own citizens.]" - Bernard Connolly
Quote from his book, ‘The Rotten Heart of Europe: The Dirty War for Europe’s Money’, published 1995.
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| [Quote No.37898] Need Area: Friends > General
"Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education." - Franklin D. Roosevelt
US President
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| [Quote No.37903] Need Area: Friends > General
"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others..." - Simone De Beauvoir
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| [Quote No.37931] Need Area: Friends > General
"Liberty: It’s a simple idea, but it’s also the linchpin of a complex system of values and practices: justice, prosperity, responsibility, toleration, cooperation, and peace. Many people believe that liberty [freedom] is the core political value of modern civilization itself, the one that gives substance and form to all the other values of social life. They’re called libertarians." - Libertarianism.org
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| [Quote No.37932] Need Area: Friends > General
"Libertarianism is the belief that each person has the right to live his life as he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others. Libertarians defend each person’s right to life, liberty [freedom], and property. In the libertarian view, voluntary agreement is the gold standard of human relationships. If there is no good reason to forbid something (a good reason being that it violates the rights of others), it should be allowed. Force should be reserved for prohibiting or punishing those who themselves use force, such as murderers, robbers, rapists, kidnappers, and defrauders (who practice a kind of theft). Most people live their own lives by that code of ethics. Libertarians believe that that code should be applied consistently, even to the actions of governments, which should be restricted to protecting people from violations of their rights. Governments should not use their powers to censor speech, conscript the young, prohibit voluntary exchanges, steal or 'redistribute' property, or interfere in the lives of individuals who are otherwise minding their own business.
Libertarian ideas are becoming increasingly influential. Philosopher Robert Nozick’s 'Anarchy, State, and Utopia' helped to revitalize political theory and to focus attention on the proper limits of state power. Classical liberal economists and social scientists have pioneered the understanding of processes of social coordination and change, many of them earning Nobel Prizes in the process. And the broad global trend toward economic deregulation, freer trade, limits on taxes, toleration of minorities, and greater personal freedom shows the influence of libertarian ideas and libertarian thinkers and activists.
Libertarianism is one of the most exciting developments in modern thought. Libertarian scholars address hard problems and propose solutions that are both moral and realistic. Libertarian activists work to defend liberty from its many enemies and to advance liberty to those who have been excluded from its blessings. They seek to liberate individuals and bring about open, free, humane, and prosperous societies. The people of the world have waited long enough to be free." - Libertarianism.org
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| [Quote No.37933] Need Area: Friends > General
"Most great nations, at the peak of their economic power, become arrogant and wage great world wars at great cost, wasting vast resources, taking on huge debt, and ultimately burning themselves out." - Kevin Phillips
Quote from 'Wealth and Democracy'
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| [Quote No.37934] Need Area: Friends > General
"One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations share a sharp curve of decline ...demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak in population, wealth and power. [That's why humility and eternal vigilance is advised.]" - Jared Diamond
Quote from the book, 'Collapse'
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| [Quote No.37935] Need Area: Friends > General
"[Political leaders need]...the courage to practice long-term thinking, make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they reach crisis proportions. [Instead, they fail to act boldly, delay. History tells us politicians act in short-term self-interest, not long-term public interests, only finding the will and political support when the situation has become a crisis. This ability to address big problems early is the mark of great political leaders.]" - Jared Diamond
Quote from 'Collapse'.
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| [Quote No.37948] Need Area: Friends > General
"[Do we give politicians too much power and trust them too much? Given the following article, 'Politicians share personality traits with serial killers', perhaps we should keep a much more careful watch on them and enshrine a limit to their powers in any constitution as the founding fathers of the US constitution thought wise.] Using his law enforcement experience and data drawn from the FBI's behavioral analysis unit, Jim Kouri has collected a series of personality traits common to a couple of professions.
Kouri, who's a vice president of the National Assn. of Chiefs of Police, has assembled traits such as superficial charm, an exaggerated sense of self-worth, glibness, lying, lack of remorse and manipulation of others.
These traits, Kouri points out in his analysis, are common to psychopathic serial killers.
But - and here's the part that may spark some controversy and defensive discussion - these traits are also common to American politicians. (Maybe you already suspected.)
Yup. Violent homicide aside, our elected officials often show many of the exact same character traits as criminal nut-jobs, who run from police but not for office.
Kouri notes that these criminals are psychologically capable of committing their dirty deeds free of any concern for social, moral or legal consequences and with absolutely no remorse.
'This allows them to do what they want, whenever they want,' he wrote. 'Ironically, these same traits exist in men and women who are drawn to high-profile and powerful positions in society including political officeholders.'
Good grief! And we not only voted for these people, we're paying their salaries and entrusting them to spend our national treasure in wise ways... He adds:
'While many political leaders will deny the assessment regarding their similarities with serial killers and
other career criminals, it is part of a psychopathic profile that may be used in assessing the behaviors of many officials and lawmakers at all levels of government.' " - Andrew Malcolm
'Los Angeles Times', June 15, 2009.
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| [Quote No.37949] Need Area: Friends > General
"[Arguably many politicians are not averse to telling huge lies - political fraud - to sway the feelings of their constituents to the result they want, rather than change what they want to what is truthful and therefore best for their citizens. The following quote suggests that politicians learn this Machiavellian 'trick' of 'the big lie' to exploit the human trait to trust their leaders in 'serious matters'.] All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true in itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down [as a lie], a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying." - Adolph Hitler
Nazi [National Socialist] Dictator in Germany during World War II. Quote from his book, 'Mein Kampf' ['My Struggle'].
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| [Quote No.37966] Need Area: Friends > General
"The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible... The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. [A foreign policy of non-interference and non-intervention in the inalienable rights of other countries' citizens to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and personal property.]" - George Washington
US President. Quote from his farewell address in 1796.
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| [Quote No.37967] Need Area: Friends > General
"[It is important when considering political leaders that the public understand them and their political, military and media advisors better and that they will behave as others have in the past in a 'game', with no real rules other than to win, that is every bit as ruthless as wild animal survival on the African savanah. The following quote from a well-known American geo-political analyst's book gives examples of this reality, where legality, morality, honesty and common decency to friend or foe mean nothing. In an ideal world it would not be condoned. In the dog-eat-dog real world, where survival itself is at stake, its appropriateness is perhaps more understandable if still abhorrent. But ultimately whether this is a good or bad thing for the average person depends to a large extent on whether they benefit from it and whether they think others will or have done it. The one important thing is that the average person understands that this is the real, rather than the sanitised and manipulating, truth so they can make really informed decisions in exercising their inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and property.] For those who are made squeamish by any talk of empire, much less talk of bringing order to imperial control, I would point out that the realities of geopolitics do not give presidents [US or leaders of other countries or groups] the luxury of exercising virtue in the way we think of it when applied to ordinary citizens. Two presidents who attempted to pursue virtue directly, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, failed spectacularly. Conversely, other presidents, such as Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, who were much more ruthless, failed because their actions were not directed at and unified by any overriding moral purpose.
In bringing order to empire, I propose that future presidents follow the example of three of our most strikingly effective leaders, men who managed to be utterly ruthless in executing a strategy that was nonetheless guided by moral principle. In these cases, moral ends did in fact justify means that were not only immoral but unconstitutional.
Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union and abolished slavery by initiating a concerted program of deception and by trampling on civil liberties. To maintain the loyalty of the border states, he never owned up to his intention to abolish slavery made clear in the great debates of 1858. Instead he dissembled, claiming that while he opposed the spread of slavery beyond the South, he had no intention of abolishing the right to own slaves in states where owning them was already legal.
But Lincoln did more than prevaricate. He suspended the right to habeas corpus [Habeas Corpus, literally in Latin 'you have the body' is a term that represents an important right granted to individuals in America. Basically, a writ of habeas corpus is a judicial mandate requiring that a prisoner be brought before the court to determine whether the government has the right to continue detaining them. The individual being held or their representative can petition the court for such a writ. According to Article One of the Constitution, section nine, the right to a writ of habeas corpus can only be suspended 'in cases of rebellion or invasion [when] the public safety may require it.' Habeas corpus was suspended during the Civil War and Reconstruction, in parts of South Carolina during the fight against the Ku Klux Klan, and during the War on Terror after the 9-11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, 2001] throughout the country and authorized the arrest of pro-secession legislators in Maryland. He made no attempt to justify these actions, except to say that if Maryland and the other border states seceded, the war would be lost and the nation would be dismembered, leaving the Constitution meaningless.
Seventy-five years later, in the midst of another grave crisis for the nation, Franklin Roosevelt also did what needed to be done while lying to hide his actions from a public that was not yet ready to follow his lead. In the late 1930s, Congress and the public wanted to maintain strict neutrality as Europe prepared for war, but Roosevelt understood that the survival of democracy itself was at stake. He secretly arranged for the sale of arms to the French and made a commitment to Winston Churchill to use the U.S. Navy to protect merchant ships taking supplies to England—a clear violation of neutrality.
Like Lincoln, Roosevelt was motivated by moral purpose, which meant a moral vision for global strategy. He was offended by Nazi Germany, and he was dedicated to the concept of democracy. Yet to preserve American interests and institutions, he formed an alliance with Stalin's Soviet Union, a regime that in moral terms was every bit as depraved as the Nazis. At home he defied a Supreme Court ruling and authorized wiretapping without warrants as well as the interception and opening of mail. Yet his most egregious violation of civil liberties was to approve the detention and relocation of ethnic Japanese, regardless of their citizenship status. Roosevelt had no illusions about what he was doing. He was ruthlessly violating rules of decency in pursuit of moral necessity.
Ronald Reagan also pursued a ruthless path toward a moral purpose. His goal was destruction of what he called the evil empire of the Soviet Union, and he pursued it—in part by ramping up the arms race, which he knew the Soviets could not afford. He then went to elaborate and devious lengths to block Soviet support for national liberation movements in the Third World. He invaded Grenada in 1983 and supported insurgents fighting the Marxist government of Nicaragua. This led to the elaborate ruse of engaging Israel to sell arms to Iran in its war with Iraq and then funneling the profits to the Nicaraguan insurgents, as a way of bypassing a law specifically designed to prevent such intervention. We should also remember Reagan's active support for Muslim jihadists in Afghanistan fighting the Soviets. As with Roosevelt and Stalin, a future enemy can be useful to defeat a current one...
Because a president must not force the public to confront directly realities that it isn't ready to confront, he must become a master at managing illusions. Slavery could not have survived much beyond the 1860s, no matter how much the South wanted it to. World War II could not have been avoided, regardless of public leanings toward isolationism. Confrontation with the Soviet Union had to take place, even if the public was frightened by those crises. In each case, a strong president created a fabric of illusions to enable him to do what was necessary without causing a huge revolt from the public. In Reagan's case, when his weapons-dealing machinations came to light as 'the Iran-contra affair,' complete with congressional hearings and indictments and convictions for many of the participants, his well-maintained persona as a simpleminded fellow shielded his power and his image from the fallout. The goings-on in Israel, Iran, and Nicaragua were so complex that even his critics had trouble believing that he could have been responsible...
The United States has been in this position of near hegemonic power for only twenty years. The first decade of this imperial period was a giddy fantasy in which the end of the Cold War was assumed to mean the end of war itself—a delusion that surfaces at the end of every major conflict. The first years of the new century were the decade in which the American people discovered that this was still a dangerous planet and the American president led a frantic effort to produce an ad hoc response. The years from 2011 to 2021 will be the decade in which the United States begins to learn how to manage the world's hostility.
Presidents in the coming decade must craft a strategy that acknowledges that the threats that resurfaced in the past ten years were not an aberration. Al Qaeda and terrorism were one such threat, but it was actually not the most serious threat that the United States faced. The president can and should speak of foreseeing an era in which these threats don't exist, but he must not believe his own rhetoric. To the contrary, he must gradually ease the country away from the idea that threats to imperial power will ever subside, then lead it to an understanding that these threats are the price Americans pay for the wealth and power they hold. All the same, he must plan and execute the strategy without necessarily admitting that it is there.
Facing no rival for global hegemony, the president must think of the world in terms of distinct regions, and in doing so set about creating regional balances of power, along with coalition partners and contingency plans for intervention. The strategic goal must be to prevent the emergence of any power that can challenge the United States in any given corner of the world.
Whereas Roosevelt and Reagan had the luxury of playing a single integrated global hand—vast but unitary—presidents in the decade ahead will be playing multiple hands at a highly fragmented table. The time when everything revolved around one or a few global threats is over. The balance of power in Europe is not intimately connected to that of Asia and is distinct from the balance of power that maintains the peace in Latin America. So even if the world isn't as dangerous to the United States as it was during World War II or the Cold War, it is far more complicated...
All of which brings us to the president's challenge in the decade ahead: to conduct a ruthless, unsentimental foreign policy in a nation that still has unreasonable fantasies of being loved, or at least of being left alone. He must play to the public's sentimentality while moving policy beyond it.
An unsentimental foreign policy means that in the coming decade, the president must identify with a clear and cold eye the most dangerous enemies, then create coalitions to manage them. This unsentimental approach means breaking free of the entire Cold War system of alliances and institutions, including NATO, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations. These Cold War relics are all insufficiently flexible to deal with the diversity of today's world, which redefined itself in 1991, making the old institutions obsolete. Some may have continuing value, but only in the context of new institutions that must emerge. These need to be regional, serving the strategic interests of the United States under the following three principles:
1. To the extent possible, to enable the balance of power in the world and in each region to consume energies and divert threats from the United States.
2. To create alliances in which the United States maneuvers other countries into bearing the major burden of confrontation or conflict, supporting these countries with economic benefits, military technology, and promises of military intervention if required.
3. To use military intervention only as a last resort, when the balance of power breaks down and allies can no longer cope with the problem.
At the height of the British Empire, Lord Palmerston said, 'It is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.' This is the kind of policy the president will need to institutionalize in the coming decade. Recognizing that the United States will generate resentment or hostility, he must harbor no illusions that he can simply persuade other nations to think better of us without surrendering interests that are essential to the United States. He must try to seduce these nations as much as possible with glittering promises, but in the end he must accept that efforts at seduction will eventually fail. Where he cannot fail is in his responsibility to guide the United States in a hostile world." - George Friedman
STRATFOR.com geo-political analyst and author. Quote from the first chapter 'The Unintended Empire' of his book 'The Next Decade', published 2011.
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| [Quote No.37977] Need Area: Friends > General
"I know myself, but that is all. [No-one can truly know another.]" - F. Scott Fitzgerald
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| [Quote No.37981] Need Area: Friends > General
"The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man [or woman] really clever who has not found that he [or she] is stupid [and that others know and understand more about some things than he or she and that only each individual really knows what they need and want for themselves]." - Gilbert K. Chesterton
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| [Quote No.37987] Need Area: Friends > General
"How much easier is it to be generous than just." - Junius
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| [Quote No.37990] Need Area: Friends > General
"Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles." - Woodrow T. Wilson
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| [Quote No.37995] Need Area: Friends > General
"The greatest problem in the world today is intolerance. Everyone is so intolerant of each other." - Diana, Princess of Wales
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"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy." - Abraham Lincoln
(1809 - 1865), lawyer and US President
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"All restraints upon man's natural liberty, not necessary for the simple maintenance of justice, are of the nature of slavery, and differ from each other only in degree." - Lysander Spooner
(1808 - 1887)
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"All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave." - Bertrand Russell
(1872 - 1970)
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"Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them." - George Santayana
(1863 - 1952)
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"The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right." - William Safire
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"People believe that, when we demand free trade, we are motivated exclusively by the desire to allow labor and capital to take the direction most advantageous to them. Public opinion is mistaken on this point; this is merely a secondary consideration with us. What grieves us, afflicts us, horrifies us in the protectionist system is that it is the negation of law, justice, and property rights; that it turns the law, which should guarantee justice and the right to property, against them; that it both subverts and perverts the conditions under which society exists." - Frederic Bastiat
Lawyer and politician. Quote from his book, 'Plunder and Law', published 1850.
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"[War:] Can any thing be more ridiculous than that a man has a right to kill me because he dwells the other side of the water, and because his prince has a quarrel with mine, although I have none with him?" - Blaise Pascal
French mathematician and philosopher. Quote from his book, 'Pensees', IV, published 1670.
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"[In 2011, in the US and elsewhere] The threat today is not state socialism. It’s bureaucratic corporatism [crony capitalism for the politically powerful elite, where profits are privatised and losses are socialised] dressed up as progressive democracy. [Both deny each citizen's inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and private property.]" - Sheldon Richman
'From 1944 to Nineteen Eighty-Four'.
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| [Quote No.38045] Need Area: Friends > General
"'Capitalism and the Right to Rise - In freedom lies the risk of failure. But in statism lies the certainty of stagnation': Congressman Paul Ryan recently coined a smart phrase to describe the core concept of economic freedom: 'The right to rise.'
Think about it. We talk about the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to assembly. The right to rise doesn't seem like something we should have to protect.
But we do. We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business. We need to let people take risks. We need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck.
That is what economic freedom looks like. Freedom to succeed as well as to fail, freedom to do something or nothing. People understand this. Freedom of speech, for example, means that we put up with a lot of verbal and visual garbage in order to make sure that individuals have the right to say what needs to be said, even when it is inconvenient or unpopular. We forgive the sacrifices of free speech because we value its blessings.
But when it comes to economic freedom, we are less forgiving of the cycles of growth and loss, of trial and error, and of failure and success that are part of the realities of the marketplace and life itself.
Increasingly, we have let our elected officials abridge our own economic freedoms through the annual passage of thousands of laws and their associated regulations. We see human tragedy and we demand a regulation to prevent it. We see a criminal fraud and we demand more laws. We see an industry dying and we demand it be saved. Each time, we demand 'Do something . . . anything.'
As Florida's governor for eight years, I was asked to 'do something' almost every day. Many times I resisted through vetoes but many times I succumbed. And I wasn't alone. Mayors, county chairs, governors and presidents never think their laws will harm the free market. But cumulatively, they do, and we have now imperiled the right to rise.
Woe to the elected leader who fails to deliver a multipoint plan for economic success, driven by specific government action. 'Trust in the dynamism of the market' is not a phrase in today's political lexicon.
Have we lost faith in the free-market system of entrepreneurial capitalism? Are we no longer willing to place our trust in the creative chaos unleashed by millions of people pursuing their own best economic interests?
The right to rise does not require a libertarian utopia to exist. Rather, it requires fewer, simpler and more outcome-oriented rules. Rules for which an honest cost-benefit analysis is done before their imposition. Rules that sunset so they can be eliminated or adjusted as conditions change. Rules that have disputes resolved faster and less expensively through arbitration than litigation.
In Washington, D.C., rules are going in the opposite direction. They are exploding in reach and complexity. They are created under a cloud of uncertainty, and years after their passage nobody really knows how they will work.
We either can go down the road we are on, a road where the individual is allowed to succeed only so much before being punished with ruinous taxation, where commerce ignores government action at its own peril, and where the state decides how a massive share of the economy's resources should be spent.
Or we can return to the road we once knew and which has served us well: a road where individuals acting freely and with little restraint are able to pursue fortune and prosperity as they see fit, a road where the government's role is not to shape the marketplace but to help prepare its citizens to prosper from it.
In short, we must choose between the straight line promised by the statists and the jagged line of economic freedom. The straight line of gradual and controlled growth is what the statists promise but can never deliver. The jagged line offers no guarantees but has a powerful record of delivering the most prosperity and the most opportunity to the most people. We cannot possibly know in advance what freedom promises for 312 million individuals. But unless we are willing to explore the jagged line of freedom, we will be stuck with the straight line. And the straight line, it turns out, is a flat line." - Jeb Bush
Republican governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007. Published in the Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2011. [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203893404577100330414585006.html?mod=googlenews_wsj ]
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