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| Quotations - General | [Quote No.43085] Need Area: Friends > General
"Vindictiveness comes from insecurity." - Sivaya Subramuniyaswami
(1927–2001), also known as Gurudeva Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami by his followers, was born in Oakland, California, on January 5, 1927, and adopted 'Saivism' as a young man. He traveled to India and Sri Lanka where he received initiation from Yogaswami of Jaffna in 1949. In the 1970s he established a Hindu monastery in Kauai, Hawaii and founded the magazine 'Hinduism Today'. He was one of Saivism's Gurus, the founder and leader of the Saiva Siddhanta Church. Subramuniyaswami was lauded by Klaus Klostermaier as 'the single-most advocate of Hinduism outside India'. [http://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=3872 ]
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| [Quote No.43092] Need Area: Friends > General
"[Statism's various socio-economic and political philosophies, for example - ranging from communism and socialism to fascism, that revolve around government monopolising power, by their very nature always threaten individual liberty and should be better understood by the average person, especially those concerned with personal freedom and unalienable human rights:]
---- The Fascist Threat: -
Everyone knows that the term ‘fascist’ is a pejorative, often used to describe any political position a speaker doesn't like. There isn't anyone around who is willing to stand up and say, 'I'm a fascist; I think fascism is a great social and economic system.’
But I submit that if they were honest, the vast majority of politicians, intellectuals, and political activists would have to say just that.
Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the police state as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive state the unlimited master of society.
This describes mainstream politics in America today. And not just in America. It's true in Europe, too. It is so much part of the mainstream that it is hardly noticed any more.
It is true that fascism has no overarching theoretical apparatus. There is no grand theorist like Marx. That makes it no less real and distinct as a social, economic, and political system. Fascism also thrives as a distinct ‘style’ of social and economic management. And it is as much or more of a threat to civilization than full-blown socialism.
This is because its traits are so much a part of life — and have been for so long — that they are nearly invisible to us.
If fascism is invisible to us, it is truly the silent killer. It fastens a huge, violent, lumbering state on the free market that drains its capital and productivity like a deadly parasite on a host. This is why the fascist state has been called the ‘vampire economy’. It sucks the economic life out of a nation and brings about a slow death of a once-thriving economy.
Let me just provide a recent example.
--- The Decline ---
The papers last week were filled with the first sets of data from the 2010 US Census. The headline story concerned the huge increase in the poverty rate. It is the largest increase in 20 years, and now up to 15 percent.
But most people hear this and dismiss it, probably for good reason. The poor in this country are not poor by any historical standard. They have cell phones, cable TV, cars, lots of food, and plenty of disposable income. What's more, there is no such thing as a fixed class called the poor. People come and go, depending on age and life circumstances. Plus, in American politics, when you hear kvetching about the poor, everyone knows what you're supposed to do: hand the government your wallet.
Buried in the report is another fact that has much more profound significance. It concerns median household income in real terms.
What the data have revealed is devastating. Since 1999, median household income has fallen 7.1 percent. Since 1989, median family income is largely flat. And since 1973 and the end of the gold standard, it has hardly risen at all. The great wealth-generating machine that was once America is failing.
No longer can one generation expect to live a better life than the previous one. The fascist economic model has killed what was once called the American dream. And the truth is, of course, even worse than the statistic reveals. You have to consider how many incomes exist within a single household to make up the total income. After World War II, the single-income family became the norm. Then the money was destroyed and American savings were wiped out and the capital base of the economy was devastated.
It was at this point that households began to struggle to stay above water. The year 1985 was the turning point. This was the year that it became more common than not for a household to have two incomes rather than one. Mothers entered the workforce to keep family income floating.
The intellectuals cheered this trend, as if it represented liberation, shouting hosannas that all women everywhere are now added to the tax rolls as valuable contributors to the state's coffers. The real cause is the rise of fiat money that depreciated the currency, robbed savings, and shoved people into the workforce as taxpayers.
This story is not told in the data alone. You have to look at the demographics to discover it.
This huge demographic shift essentially bought the American household another 20 years of seeming prosperity, though it is hard to call it that since there was no longer any choice about the matter. If you wanted to keep living the dream, the household could no longer get by on a single income.
But this huge shift was merely an escape hatch. It bought 20 years of slight increases before the income trend flattened again. Over the last decade we are back to falling. Today median family income is only slightly above where it was when Nixon wrecked the dollar, put on price and wage controls, created the EPA, and the whole apparatus of the parasitic welfare-warfare state came to be entrenched and made universal.
Yes, this is fascism, and we are paying the price. The dream is being destroyed.
The talk in Washington about reform, whether from Democrats or Republicans, is like a bad joke. They talk of small changes, small cuts, commissions they will establish, curbs they will make in ten years. It is all white noise. None of this will fix the problem. Not even close.
The problem is more fundamental. It is the quality of the money. It is the very existence of 10,000 regulatory agencies. It is the whole assumption that you have to pay the state for the privilege to work. It is the presumption that the government must manage every aspect of the capitalist economic order. In short, it is the total state that is the problem, and the suffering and decline will continue so long as the total state exists.
--- The Origins of Fascism ---
To be sure, the last time people worried about fascism was during the Second World War. We were said to be fighting this evil system abroad. The United States defeated fascist governments, but the philosophy of governance that fascism represents was not defeated. Very quickly following that war, another one began. This was the Cold War that pitted capitalism against communism. Socialism in this case was considered to be a soft form of communism, tolerable and even praiseworthy insofar as it was linked with democracy, which is the system that legalizes and legitimizes an ongoing pillaging of the population.
In the meantime, almost everyone has forgotten that there are many other colors of socialism, not all of them obviously left wing. Fascism is one of these colors.
There can be no question of its origins. It is tied up with the history of post–World War I Italian politics. In 1922, Benito Mussolini won a democratic election and established fascism as his philosophy. Mussolini had been a member of the Italian Socialist Party.
All the biggest and most important players within the fascist movement came from the socialists. It was a threat to the socialists because it was the most appealing political vehicle for the real-world application of the socialist impulse. Socialists crossed over to join the fascists en masse.
This is also why Mussolini himself enjoyed such good press for more than ten years after his rule began. He was celebrated by the ‘New York Times’ in article after article. He was heralded in scholarly collections as an exemplar of the type of leader we needed in the age of the planned society. Puff pieces on this blowhard were very common in US journalism all through the late 1920s and the mid-1930s.
Remember that in this same period, the American Left went through a huge shift. In the teens and 1920s, the American Left had a very praiseworthy anti-corporatist impulse. The Left generally opposed war, the state-run penal system, alcohol prohibition, and all violations of civil liberties. It was no friend of capitalism, but neither was it a friend of the corporate state of the sort that FDR forged during the New Deal.
In 1933 and 1934, the American Left had to make a choice. Would they embrace the corporatism and regimentation of the New Deal or take a principled stand on their old liberal values? In other words, would they accept fascism as a halfway house to their socialist utopia? A gigantic battle ensued in this period, and there was a clear winner. The New Deal made an offer the Left could not refuse. And it was a small step to go from the embrace of the fascistic planned economy to the celebration of the warfare state that concluded the New Deal period.
This was merely a repeat of the same course of events in Italy a decade earlier. In Italy too, the Left realized that their anti-capitalistic agenda could best be achieved within the framework of the authoritarian, planning state. Of course our friend John Maynard Keynes played a critical role in providing a pseudoscientific rationale for joining opposition to old-world laissez-faire to a new appreciation of the planned society. Recall that Keynes was not a socialist of the old school. As he himself said in his introduction to the Nazi edition of his [economic treatise, the] ‘General Theory’, National Socialism was far more hospitable to his ideas than a market economy.
--- Flynn Tells the Truth ---
The most definitive study on fascism written in these years was ‘As We Go Marching’ by John T. Flynn. Flynn was a journalist and scholar of a liberal spirit who had written a number of best-selling books in the 1920s. He could probably be put in the progressive camp in the 1920s. It was the New Deal that changed him. His colleagues all followed FDR [US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat] into fascism, while Flynn himself kept the old faith. That meant that he fought FDR every step of the way, and not only his domestic plans. Flynn was a leader of the America First movement that saw FDR's drive to war as nothing but an extension of the New Deal, which it certainly was.
But because Flynn was part of what Murray Rothbard later dubbed the Old Right — Flynn came to oppose both the welfare state and the warfare state — his name went down the Orwellian memory hole after the war, during the heyday of CIA conservatism.
‘As We Go Marching’ came out in 1944, just at the tail end of the war, and right in the midst of wartime economic controls the world over. It is a wonder that it ever got past the censors. It is a full-scale study of fascist theory and practice, and Flynn saw precisely where fascism ends: in militarism and war as the fulfillment of the stimulus-spending agenda. When you run out of everything else to spend money on, you can always depend on nationalist fervor to back more military spending.
In reviewing the history of the rise of fascism, Flynn wrote,
‘One of the most baffling phenomena of fascism is the almost incredible collaboration between men of the extreme Right and the extreme Left in its creation. The explanation lies at this point. Both Right and Left joined in this urge for regulation. The motives, the arguments, and the forms of expression were different but all drove in the same direction. And this was that the economic system must be controlled in its essential functions and this control must be exercised by the producing groups.’
Flynn writes that the Right and the Left disagreed on precisely who fits the bill as the producer group. The Left tends to celebrate laborers as producers. The Right tends to favor business owners as producers. The political compromise — and it still goes on today — was to cartelize both.
Government under fascism becomes the cartelization device for both the workers and the private owners of capital. Competition between workers and between businesses is regarded as wasteful and pointless; the political elites decide that the members of these groups need to get together and cooperate under government supervision to build a mighty nation.
The fascists have always been obsessed with the idea of national greatness. To them, this does not consist in a nation of people who are growing more prosperous, living ever better and longer lives. No, national greatness occurs when the state embarks on building huge monuments, undertaking nationwide transportation systems, carving Mount Rushmore or digging the Panama Canal.
In other words, national greatness is not the same thing as your greatness or your family's greatness or your company's or profession's greatness. On the contrary. You have to be taxed, your money's value has to be depreciated, your privacy invaded, and your well-being diminished in order to achieve it. In this view, the government has to ‘make’ us great.
Tragically, such a program has a far greater chance of political success than old-fashioned socialism. Fascism doesn't nationalize private property as socialism does. That means that the economy doesn't collapse right away. Nor does fascism push to equalize incomes. There is no talk of the abolition of marriage or the nationalization of children.
Religion is not abolished but used as a tool of political manipulation. The fascist state was far more politically astute in this respect than communism. It wove together religion and statism into one package, encouraging a worship of God provided that the state operates as the intermediary.
Under fascism, society as we know it is left intact, though everything is lorded over by a mighty state apparatus. Whereas traditional socialist teaching fostered a globalist perspective, fascism was explicitly nationalist. It embraced and exalted the idea of the nation-state.
As for the bourgeoisie, fascism doesn't seek their expropriation. Instead, the middle class gets what it wants in the form of social insurance, medical benefits, and heavy doses of national pride.
It is for all these reasons that fascism takes on a right-wing cast. It doesn't attack fundamental bourgeois values. It draws on them to garner support for a democratically backed all-around national regimentation of economic control, censorship, cartelization, political intolerance, geographic expansion, executive control, the police state, and militarism.
For my part, I have no problem referring to the fascist program as a right-wing theory, even if it does fulfill aspects of the left-wing dream. The crucial matter here concerns its appeal to the public and to the demographic groups that are normally drawn to right-wing politics.
If you think about it, right-wing statism is of a different color, cast, and tone from left-wing statism. Each is designed to appeal to a different set of voters with different interests and values.
These divisions, however, are not strict, and we've already seen how a left-wing socialist program can adapt itself and become a right-wing fascist program with very little substantive change other than its marketing.
---- The Eight Marks of Fascist Policy ----
John T. Flynn, like other members of the Old Right, was disgusted by the irony that what he saw, almost everyone else chose to ignore. In the fight against authoritarian regimes abroad, he noted, the United States had adopted those forms of government at home, complete with price controls, rationing, censorship, executive dictatorship, and even concentration camps for whole groups considered to be unreliable in their loyalties to the state.
After reviewing this long history, Flynn proceeds to sum up with a list of eight points he considers to be the main marks of the fascist state.
As I present them, I will also offer comments on the modern American central state.
--- Point 1. The government is totalitarian because it acknowledges no restraint on its powers.
This is a very telling mark. It suggests that the US political system can be described as totalitarian. This is a shocking remark that most people would reject. But they can reject this characterization only so long as they happen not to be directly ensnared in the state's web. If they become so, they will quickly discover that there are indeed no limits to what the state can do. This can happen boarding a flight, driving around in your hometown, or having your business run afoul of some government agency. In the end, you must obey or be caged like an animal or killed. In this way, no matter how much you may believe that you are free, all of us today are but one step away from Guantanamo.
As recently as the 1990s, I can recall that there were moments when Clinton seemed to suggest that there were some things that his administration could not do. Today I'm not so sure that I can recall any government official pleading the constraints of law or the constraints of reality to what can and cannot be done. No aspect of life is untouched by government intervention, and often it takes forms we do not readily see. All of healthcare is regulated, but so is every bit of our food, transportation, clothing, household products, and even private relationships.
Mussolini himself put his principle this way: ‘All within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.’ He also said: ‘The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative.’
I submit to you that this is the prevailing ideology in the United States today. This nation, conceived in liberty, has been kidnapped by the fascist state.
--- Point 2. Government is a de facto dictatorship based on the leadership principle.
I wouldn't say that we truly have a dictatorship of one man in this country, but we do have a form of dictatorship of one sector of government over the entire country. The executive branch has spread so dramatically over the last century that it has become a joke to speak of checks and balances. What the kids learn in civics class has nothing to do with reality.
The executive state is the state as we know it, all flowing from the White House down. The role of the courts is to enforce the will of the executive. The role of the legislature is to ratify the policy of the executive.
Further, this executive is not really about the person who seems to be in charge. The president is only the veneer, and the elections are only the tribal rituals we undergo to confer some legitimacy on the institution. In reality, the nation-state lives and thrives outside any ‘democratic mandate.’ Here we find the power to regulate all aspects of life and the wicked power to create the money necessary to fund this executive rule.
As for the leadership principle, there is no greater lie in American public life than the propaganda we hear every four years about how the new president/messiah is going to usher in the great dispensation of peace, equality, liberty, and global human happiness. The idea here is that the whole of society is really shaped and controlled by a single will — a point that requires a leap of faith so vast that you have to disregard everything you know about reality to believe it.
And yet people do. The hope for a messiah reached a fevered pitch with Obama's election. The civic religion was in full-scale worship mode — of the greatest human who ever lived or ever shall live. It was a despicable display.
Another lie that the American people believe is that presidential elections bring about regime change. This is sheer nonsense. The Obama state is the Bush state; the Bush state was the Clinton state; the Clinton state was the Bush state; the Bush state was the Reagan state. We can trace this back and back in time and see overlapping appointments, bureaucrats, technicians, diplomats, Fed officials, financial elites, and so on. Rotation in office occurs not because of elections but because of mortality.
--- Point 3. Government administers a capitalist system with an immense bureaucracy.
The reality of bureaucratic administration has been with us at least since the New Deal, which was modeled on the planning bureaucracy that lived in World War I. The planned economy — whether in Mussolini's time or ours — requires bureaucracy. ‘Bureaucracy’ is the heart, lungs, and veins of the planning state. And yet to regulate an economy as thoroughly as this one is today is to kill prosperity with a billion tiny cuts.
This doesn't necessarily mean economic contraction, at least not right away. But it definitely means killing off growth that would have otherwise occurred in a free market.
So where is our growth? Where is the peace dividend that was supposed to come after the end of the Cold War? Where are the fruits of the amazing gains in efficiency that technology has afforded? It has been eaten by the bureaucracy that manages our every move on this earth. The voracious and insatiable monster here is called the Federal Code that calls on thousands of agencies to exercise the police power to prevent us from living free lives.
It is as Bastiat said: the real cost of the state is the prosperity we do not see, the jobs that don't exist, the technologies to which we do not have access, the businesses that do not come into existence, and the bright future that is stolen from us. The state has looted us just as surely as a robber who enters our home at night and steals all that we love.
--- Point 4. Producers are organized into cartels in the way of syndicalism.
Syndicalist is not usually how we think of our current economic structure. But remember that syndicalism means economic control by the producers. Capitalism is different. It places by virtue of market structures all control in the hands of the consumers. The only question for syndicalists, then, is which producers are going to enjoy political privilege. It might be the workers, but it can also be the largest corporations.
In the case of the United States, in the last three years, we've seen giant banks, pharmaceutical firms, insurers, car companies, Wall Street banks and brokerage houses, and quasi-private mortgage companies enjoying vast privileges at our expense. They have all joined with the state in living a parasitical existence at our expense.
This is also an expression of the syndicalist idea, and it has cost the US economy untold trillions and sustained an economic depression by preventing the post-boom adjustment that markets would otherwise dictate. The government has tightened its syndicalist grip in the name of stimulus.
---Point 5. Economic planning is based on the principle of autarky.
Autarky is the name given to the idea of economic self-sufficiency. Mostly this refers to the economic self-determination of the nation-state. The nation-state must be geographically huge in order to support rapid economic growth for a large and growing population.
This was and is the basis for fascist expansionism. Without expansion, the state dies. This is also the idea behind the strange combination of protectionist pressure today combined with militarism. It is driven in part by the need to control resources.
Look at the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. We would be supremely naive to believe that these wars were not motivated in part by the producer interests of the oil industry. It is true of the American empire generally, which supports dollar hegemony.
It is the reason for the planned North American Union.
The goal is national self-sufficiency rather than a world of peaceful trade. Consider, too, the protectionist impulses of the Republican ticket. There is not one single Republican, apart from Ron Paul, who authentically supports free trade in the classical definition.
From ancient Rome to modern-day America, imperialism is a form of statism that the bourgeoisie love. It is for this reason that Bush's post-9/11 push for the global empire has been sold as patriotism and love of country rather than for what it is: a looting of liberty and property to benefit the political elites.
--- 6. Government sustains economic life through spending and borrowing.
This point requires no elaboration because it is no longer hidden. There was stimulus 1 and stimulus 2, both of which are so discredited that stimulus 3 will have to adopt a new name. Let's call it the American Jobs Act.
With a prime-time speech, Obama argued in favor of this program with some of the most asinine economic analysis I've ever heard. He mused about how is it that people are unemployed at a time when schools, bridges, and infrastructure need repairing. He ordered that supply and demand come together to match up needed work with jobs.
Hello? The schools, bridges, and infrastructure that Obama refers to are all built and maintained by the state. That's why they are falling apart. And the reason that people don't have jobs is because the state has made it too expensive to hire them. It's not complicated. To sit around and dream of other scenarios is no different from wishing that water flowed uphill or that rocks would float in the air. It amounts to a denial of reality.
Still, Obama went on, invoking the old fascistic longing for national greatness. ‘Building a world-class transportation system,’ he said, ‘is part of what made us an economic superpower.’ Then he asked, ‘We're going to sit back and watch China build newer airports and faster railroads?’
Well, the answer to that question is yes. And you know what? It doesn't hurt a single American for a person in China to travel on a faster railroad than we do. To claim otherwise is an incitement to nationalist hysteria.
As for the rest of this program, Obama promised yet another long list of spending projects. Let's just mention the reality: No government in the history of the world has spent as much, borrowed as much, and created as much fake money as the United States. If the United States doesn't qualify as a fascist state in this sense, no government ever has.
None of this would be possible but for the role of the Federal Reserve, the great lender to the world. This institution is absolutely critical to US fiscal policy. There is no way that the national debt could increase at a rate of $4 billion per day without this institution.
Under a gold standard, all of this maniacal spending would come to an end. And if US debt were priced on the market with a default premium, we would be looking at a rating far less than A+.
--- Point 7. Militarism is a mainstay of government spending.
Have you ever noticed that the military budget is never seriously discussed in policy debates? The United States spends more than most of the rest of the world combined.
And yet to hear our leaders talk, the United States is just a tiny commercial republic that wants peace but is constantly under threat from the world. They would have us believe that we all stand naked and vulnerable. The whole thing is a ghastly lie. The United States is a global military empire and the main threat to peace around the world today.
To visualize US military spending as compared with other countries is truly shocking. One bar chart you can easily look up shows the US trillion-dollar-plus military budget as a skyscraper surrounded by tiny huts. As for the next highest spender, China spends 1/10th as much as the United States.
Where is the debate about this policy? Where is the discussion? It is not going on. It is just assumed by both parties that it is essential for the US way of life that the United States be the most deadly country on the planet, threatening everyone with nuclear extinction unless they obey. This should be considered a fiscal and moral outrage by every civilized person.
This isn't only about the armed services, the military contractors, the CIA death squads. It is also about how police at all levels have taken on military-like postures. This goes for the local police, state police, and even the crossing guards in our communities. The commissar mentality, the trigger-happy thuggishness, has become the norm throughout the whole of society.
If you want to witness outrages, it is not hard. Try coming into this country from Canada or Mexico. See the bullet-proof-vest-wearing, heavily armed, jackbooted thugs running dogs up and down car lanes, searching people randomly, harassing innocents, asking rude and intrusive questions.
You get the strong impression that you are entering a police state. That impression would be correct.
Yet for the man on the street, the answer to all social problems seems to be more jails, longer terms, more enforcement, more arbitrary power, more crackdowns, more capital punishments, more authority. Where does all of this end? And will the end come before we realize what has happened to our once-free country?
--- Point 8. Military spending has imperialist aims.
Ronald Reagan used to claim that his military build-up was essential to keeping the peace. The history of US foreign policy just since the 1980s has shown that this is wrong. We've had one war after another, wars waged by the United States against noncompliant countries, and the creation of even more client states and colonies.
US military strength has led not to peace but the opposite. It has caused most people in the world to regard the United States as a threat, and it has led to unconscionable wars on many countries. Wars of aggression were defined at Nuremberg as crimes against humanity.
Obama was supposed to end this. He never promised to do so, but his supporters all believed that he would. Instead, he has done the opposite. He has increased troop levels, entrenched wars, and started new ones. In reality, he has presided over a warfare state just as vicious as any in history. The difference this time is that the Left is no longer criticizing the US role in the world. In that sense, Obama is the best thing ever to happen to the warmongers and the military-industrial complex.
As for the Right in this country, it once opposed this kind of military fascism. But all that changed after the beginning of the Cold War. The Right was led into a terrible ideological shift, well documented in Murray Rothbard's neglected masterpiece ‘The Betrayal of the American Right’. In the name of stopping communism, the right came to follow ex–CIA agent Bill Buckley's endorsement of a totalitarian bureaucracy at home to fight wars all over the world.
At the end of the Cold War, there was a brief reprise when the Right in this country remembered its roots in noninterventionism. But this did not last long. George Bush the First rekindled the militarist spirit with the first war on Iraq, and there has been no fundamental questioning of the American empire ever since. Even today, Republicans elicit their biggest applause by whipping up audiences about foreign threats, while never mentioning that the real threat to American well-being exists in the Beltway.
--- The Future ---
I can think of no greater priority today than a serious and effective antifascist alliance. In many ways, one is already forming. It is not a formal alliance. It is made up of those who protest the Fed, those who refuse to go along with mainstream fascist politics, those who seek decentralization, those who demand lower taxes and free trade, those who seek the right to associate with anyone they want and buy and sell on terms of their own choosing, those who insist they can educate their children on their own, the investors and savers who make economic growth possible, those who do not want to be felt up at airports, and those who have become expatriates.
It is also made of the millions of independent entrepreneurs who are discovering that the number one threat to their ability to serve others through the commercial marketplace is the institution that claims to be our biggest benefactor: the government.
How many people fall into this category? It is more than we know. The movement is intellectual. It is political. It is cultural. It is technological. They come from all classes, races, countries, and professions. This is no longer a national movement. It is truly global.
We can no longer predict whether members consider themselves to be left wing, right wing, independent, libertarian, anarchist, or something else. It includes those as diverse as home-schooling parents in the suburbs as well as parents in urban areas whose children are among the 2.3 million people who languish in jail for no good reason in a country with the largest prison population in the world.
And what does this movement want? Nothing more or less than sweet liberty [and the unalienable right of individual freedom from force, coercion and fraud]. It does not ask that the liberty be granted or given. It only asks for the liberty that is promised by life itself and would otherwise exist were it not for the Leviathan state that robs us, badgers us, jails us, kills us.
This movement is not departing. We are daily surrounded by evidence that it is right and true. Every day, it is more and more obvious that the state contributes absolutely nothing to our well-being; it massively subtracts from it.
Back in the 1930s, and even up through the 1980s, the partisans of the state were overflowing with ideas. They had theories and agendas that had many intellectual backers. They were thrilled and excited about the world they would create. They would end business cycles, bring about social advance, build the middle class, cure disease, bring about universal security, and much more. Fascism believed in itself.
This is no longer true. Fascism has no new ideas, no big projects — and not even its partisans really believe it can accomplish what it sets out to do. The world created by the private sector is so much more useful and beautiful than anything the state has done that the fascists have themselves become demoralized and aware that their agenda has no real intellectual foundation.
It is ever more widely known that statism [a political system in which the state has substantial centralized control over social and economic affairs, whether communist, socialist or fascist] does not and cannot work. Statism is the great lie. Statism gives us the exact opposite of its promise. It promised security, prosperity, and peace; it has given us fear, poverty, war, and death. If we want a future, it is one that we have to build ourselves. The fascist state will not give it to us. On the contrary, it stands in the way.
It also seems to me that the old-time romance of the classical liberals with the idea of the limited state is gone. It is far more likely today that young people embrace an idea that 50 years ago was thought to be unthinkable: the idea that society is best off without any state at all.
I would mark the rise of anarcho-capitalist theory as the most dramatic intellectual shift in my adult lifetime. Gone is that view of the state as the night watchman that would only guard essential rights, adjudicate disputes, and protect liberty.
This view is woefully naive. The night watchman is the guy with the guns, the legal right to use aggression, the guy who controls all comings and goings, the guy who is perched on top and sees all things. Who is watching him? Who is limiting his power? No one, and this is precisely why he is the very source of society's greatest ills. No constitution, no election, no social contract will check his power.
Indeed, the night watchman has acquired total power. It is he who would be the total state, which Flynn describes as a government that ‘possesses the power to enact any law or take any measure that seems proper to it.’ So long as a government, he says, ‘is clothed with the power to do anything without any limitation on its powers, it is totalitarian. It has total power.’
It is no longer a point that we can ignore. The night watchman must be removed and his powers distributed within and among the whole population, and they should be governed by the same forces that bring us all the blessings the material world affords us.
In the end, this is the choice we face: the total state or total freedom. Which will we choose? If we choose the state, we will continue to sink further and further and eventually lose all that we treasure as a civilization. If we choose freedom, we can harness that remarkable power of human cooperation that will enable us to continue to make a better world.
In the fight against fascism, there is no reason to be despairing. We must continue to fight with every bit of confidence that the future belongs to us and not them.
Their world is falling apart. Ours is just being built.
Their world is based on bankrupt ideologies. Ours is rooted in the truth about freedom and reality.
Their world can only look back to the glory days. Ours looks forward to the future we are building for ourselves.
Their world is rooted in the corpse of the nation-state. Our world draws on the energies and creativity of all peoples in the world, united in the great and noble project of creating a prospering civilization through peaceful human cooperation.
It's true that they have the biggest guns. But big guns have not assured permanent victory in Iraq or Afghanistan — or any other place on the planet.
We possess the only weapon that is truly immortal: the right idea. It is this that will lead to victory.
As Mises said,
‘In the long run even the most despotic governments with all their brutality and cruelty are no match for ideas. Eventually the ideology that has won the support of the majority will prevail and cut the ground from under the tyrant's feet. Then the oppressed many will rise in rebellion and overthrow their masters.’ " - Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
He is chairman and CEO of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com, and author of ‘The Left, the Right, and the State’. This article was first presented as a talk delivered at the Doug Casey conference, ‘When Money Dies,’ in Phoenix on October 1, 2011. It was later published in the ‘Mises Daily’, Tuesday, June 19, 2012. [Copyright © 2012 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided full credit is given.]
[http://mises.org/daily/5752/The-Fascist-Threat ]
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| [Quote No.43103] Need Area: Friends > General
"I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil!" - Molly Ivins
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"In...politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners ... [and so on. This is not the way to get the best political system or to vote intelligently and responsibly. The political franchise requires: engagement and thought; researched and well-founded principles rather than just personal greed; or else unscrupulous, power-hungry politicians will be able to buy off the disengaged and unprincipled with empty promises and trinkets, ironically often paid for with their own money taken in taxes or extracted from less privileged minorities in other ways.]" - Mark Twain
Quote from his ‘Autobiography’, published 1959.
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"As long as people believe in [socio-economic and political] absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities. " - Voltaire
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"If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it." - Marcus Aurelius
Roman Emperor and stoic philosopher
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"Living with integrity means: -- Not settling for less than what you know you deserve in your relationships; -- Asking for what you want and need from others; -- Speaking your truth, even though it might create conflict or tension; -- Behaving in ways that are in harmony with your personal values; -- Making choices based on what you believe, and not what others believe. " - Barbara De Angelis
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"The political principle that underlies the [capitalist free] market mechanism is unanimity [of individual choice and freedom]. In an ideal free market resting on private property, no individual can coerce any other, all cooperation is voluntary, all parties to such cooperation benefit or they need not participate. [No individuals are coerced into sacrificing their 'life, liberty and the pursuit of their own happiness' in order to help others, unless they volunteer to.] There are no values, no ‘social’ responsibilities in any sense other than the shared values and responsibilities of individuals [to not do anything which hinders or hurts another's equal right to exercise their freedom to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of their own happiness']. Society is a collection of individuals and of the various groups they voluntarily form. [No actions are entered into in this voluntary system unless benefiting both parties. On the other hand, contrasting and endangering this voluntary, mutually beneficial, free market mechanism (win:win) is the (statist, socialist, communist) political doctrine of some having to sacrifice their interests to others regardless of their interests or equal rights (lose:win).] The political principle that underlies the political mechanism is conformity [regardless of each individual’s choice and freedom]. The individual must serve a more general social interest — whether that be determined by a church or a dictator or a majority. The individual may have a vote and say in what is to be done, but if he is overruled, he must conform [unlike in the free market where that individual can then simply refuse to trade-exchange and is no worse off. Therefore the two mechanisms – (free) market and political (force), are at odds and the unalienable human right to honest, peaceful, individual freedom can only be reconciled by either severely limiting the government’s sole spheres of coercive authority and interference in individual’s lives and freedom or having multiple concurrent free-market competing providers, of what are now provided only by a single overarching government, as in anarcho-capitalism, as described for example in the book, ‘The Market For Liberty’, by Linda and Morris Tannehill]." - Milton Friedman
(1912 – 2006), American economist, statistician, and author who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades. He was a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. As a leader of the Chicago school of economics, he influenced the research agenda of the economics profession. A survey of economists ranked Friedman as the second most popular economist of the twentieth century behind John Maynard Keynes, and 'The Economist' described him as 'the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century...possibly of all of it.' Friedman's challenges to what he later called 'naive Keynesian' (as opposed to New Keynesian) theory began with his 1950s reinterpretation of the consumption function, and he became the main advocate opposing activist Keynesian government policies. In the late 1960s he described his own approach (along with all of mainstream economics) as using 'Keynesian language and apparatus' yet rejecting its 'initial' conclusions. During the 1960s he promoted an alternative macroeconomic policy known as 'monetarism'. He theorized there existed a 'natural' rate of unemployment, and argued that governments could increase employment above this rate (e.g., by increasing aggregate demand) only at the risk of causing inflation to accelerate. He argued that the Phillips curve was not stable and predicted what would come to be known as stagflation. Friedman argued that, given the existence of the Federal Reserve, a constant small expansion of the money supply was the only wise policy. Friedman was an economic adviser to conservative President Ronald Reagan. His political philosophy extolled the virtues of a free market economic system with minimal intervention. He once stated that his role in eliminating U.S. conscription was his proudest accomplishment, and his support for school choice led him to found The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. In his 1962 book 'Capitalism and Freedom', Friedman advocated policies such as a volunteer military, freely floating exchange rates, abolition of medical licenses, a negative income tax, and education vouchers. His ideas concerning monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation influenced government policies, especially during the 1980s. His monetary theory influenced the Federal Reserve's response to the global financial crisis.
Quote from ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits’ in ‘The New York Times Magazine’ (13 September 1970). [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman ]
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"I think the government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem and very often makes the problem worse [due to the force or legal coercion involved, ideological bias, pandering to special interest groups, lack of fully understanding the problems and the unintended incentives and consequences of policy actions before acting due to their political need to be seen to be in charge and doing something, etc]." - Milton Friedman
(1912 – 2006), American economist, statistician, and author who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades. He was a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. As a leader of the Chicago school of economics, he influenced the research agenda of the economics profession. A survey of economists ranked Friedman as the second most popular economist of the twentieth century behind John Maynard Keynes, and The Economist described him as 'the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century...possibly of all of it.' Friedman's challenges to what he later called 'naive Keynesian' (as opposed to New Keynesian) theory began with his 1950s reinterpretation of the consumption function, and he became the main advocate opposing activist Keynesian government policies. In the late 1960s he described his own approach (along with all of mainstream economics) as using 'Keynesian language and apparatus' yet rejecting its 'initial' conclusions. During the 1960s he promoted an alternative macroeconomic policy known as 'monetarism'. He theorized there existed a 'natural' rate of unemployment, and argued that governments could increase employment above this rate (e.g., by increasing aggregate demand) only at the risk of causing inflation to accelerate. He argued that the Phillips curve was not stable and predicted what would come to be known as stagflation. Friedman argued that, given the existence of the Federal Reserve, a constant small expansion of the money supply was the only wise policy. Friedman was an economic adviser to conservative President Ronald Reagan. His political philosophy extolled the virtues of a free market economic system with minimal intervention. He once stated that his role in eliminating U.S. conscription was his proudest accomplishment, and his support for school choice led him to found The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. In his 1962 book 'Capitalism and Freedom', Friedman advocated policies such as a volunteer military, freely floating exchange rates, abolition of medical licenses, a negative income tax, and education vouchers. His ideas concerning monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation influenced government policies, especially during the 1980s. His monetary theory influenced the Federal Reserve's response to the global financial crisis.
Quote from ‘An Economist's Protest’ (1975), p. 6; often quoted as ‘The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.’ [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman ]
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"I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintenance of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing and it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind. It requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you [as the government] step in to do something about them [forcefully or coercively] you not only may make them worse, you will spread your tentacles and get [unintended incentives and] bad results elsewhere." - Milton Friedman
(1912 – 2006), American economist, statistician, and author who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades. He was a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. As a leader of the Chicago school of economics, he influenced the research agenda of the economics profession. A survey of economists ranked Friedman as the second most popular economist of the twentieth century behind John Maynard Keynes, and The Economist described him as 'the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century...possibly of all of it.' Friedman's challenges to what he later called 'naive Keynesian' (as opposed to New Keynesian) theory began with his 1950s reinterpretation of the consumption function, and he became the main advocate opposing activist Keynesian government policies. In the late 1960s he described his own approach (along with all of mainstream economics) as using 'Keynesian language and apparatus' yet rejecting its 'initial' conclusions. During the 1960s he promoted an alternative macroeconomic policy known as 'monetarism'. He theorized there existed a 'natural' rate of unemployment, and argued that governments could increase employment above this rate (e.g., by increasing aggregate demand) only at the risk of causing inflation to accelerate. He argued that the Phillips curve was not stable and predicted what would come to be known as stagflation. Friedman argued that, given the existence of the Federal Reserve, a constant small expansion of the money supply was the only wise policy. Friedman was an economic adviser to conservative President Ronald Reagan. His political philosophy extolled the virtues of a free market economic system with minimal intervention. He once stated that his role in eliminating U.S. conscription was his proudest accomplishment, and his support for school choice led him to found The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. In his 1962 book 'Capitalism and Freedom', Friedman advocated policies such as a volunteer military, freely floating exchange rates, abolition of medical licenses, a negative income tax, and education vouchers. His ideas concerning monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation influenced government policies, especially during the 1980s. His monetary theory influenced the Federal Reserve's response to the global financial crisis.
Quote from an interview with Richard Heffner on ‘The Open Mind’ (7 December 1975). [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman ]
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"I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom." - Noam Chomsky
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| [Quote No.43162] Need Area: Friends > General
"[If you need an economic reason --- besides the ethical-moral rationale of each individual's unalienable right to freedom from initiated force, coercion and fraud (which is the primary reason competent individuals agree to live together under a 'social contract' like the US Constitution) --- why interventionist, overly powerful, coercive centralised governments, that is statist governments, are dangerous and harmful, even in, so called but actually mis-named, 'capitalist free markets' consider this:] ...banks would never be able to expand credit in concert [and therefore cause 'business cycles' - booms that then necessitate busts to remove the induced misallocation of funds and malinvestment, thereby creating a painful spike in unemployment and the damage this does to ordinary people, as well as the business community and civil order, as business and the community is forced by the markets to adjust to the now more realistic interest rates and the need to save and pay down over-indebtedness] were it not for the [previous, politically motivated and economically misguided] intervention and encouragement of [that statist] government [which then will say no-one could have predicted it (when in fact Austrian business cycle theorists often do in a quite timely fashion - although nearly all governments, economists and investors ignore their warnings until it is too late, for example Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek in the late 1920's just before The Great Depression and over 50 Austrian economists before the 2007-9 Great Recession, also called the Global Financial Crisis - http://www.lewrockwell.com/block/block168.html ), explain it away as being the result of 'greedy capitalists' or 'speculators' and that they will need even more power, and therefore 'unfortunately' have to still further curtail individual freedom from initiated force, coercion and fraud, in order to fight the 'unexpected crisis' and these 'negative influences'. They will then use Keynesian economic monetary and fiscal policies to justify stimulating aggregate demand and if things are bad enough, use 'money printing', euphemistically called 'quantitative easing', and 'financially repression' to get interest rates below true inflation and the 'cost-of-living' in order to secretly tax and redistribute wealth to politically important constituents and elites at the expense of savers and those on fixed incomes, like pensioners, and make it easier for borrowers, especially the government itself, to repay domestic and foreign borrowings with the consequentially depreciated currency]." - Murray N. Rothbard
(1926 – 1995), Austrian School economist, economic historian, and libertarian political philosopher. Quote from his pamphlet, ‘Economic Depressions: Causes & Cures’, published March 5th 1969 by Constitutional Alliance, Inc.) [http://library.mises.org/books/Murray%20N%20Rothbard/Economic%20Depressions%20Their%20Cause%20and%20Cure.pdf ]
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"[Self-Defence and Martial Arts: War and Peace:] When two tigers fight, one limps away, terribly wounded. The other is dead. [Physical force and fighting is a last resort because even if you 'win' you will be hurt and often badly, - you haven't proven that you're right, only that you're left' - and your opponent 'convinced against his will, will be of the same opinion still!']" - Chinese proverb
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"Law and order is a social service [and in fact, to many social, political and legal philosophers and historians, the key reason, in the first place, for a social contract for the establishment of a government authorised by the people, rather than the many other roles it has subsequently usurped]. Crime and the fear which the threat of crime induces can paralyse whole communities, keep lonely and vulnerable elderly people shut up in their homes, scar young lives and raise to cult status the swaggering violent bully who achieves predatory control over the streets. I suspect that there would be more support and less criticism than today's political leaders imagine for a large shift of resources from [some] Social Security benefits to [the social security of better] law and order — as long as rhetoric about getting tough on crime [preventing, apprehending culprits and 'correcting' violence to physical person and property - i.e. force, coercion and fraud] was matched by practice." - Margaret Thatcher
British Prime Minister
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"There are significant differences between the American and European version of capitalism. The American traditionally emphasizes the need for limited government, light regulations, low taxes and maximum labour-market flexibility. Its success has been shown above all in the ability to create new jobs, in which it is consistently more successful than Europe." - Margaret Thatcher
British Prime Minister
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"...the great and curious truth of the human experience is that [freely chosen - rather than coercively imposed kindness, helpfulness, service, charity and other forms of] selflessness is [one of] the best thing you can do for yourself. " - David McCullough
2012 Wellesley High School Commencement Speech: 'You Are Not Special' [http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/09/david-mccullough-at-wellesley-commencement-you-are-not-special-video.html ]
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"[Freedom, individualism, authenticity and being yourself, so long as it doesn't hurt another's physical person or property:] It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not." - André Gide
French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947.
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"It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
(1929 – 1945), one of the most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Her diary has been the basis for several plays and films. Born in the city of Frankfurt am Main in Weimar Germany, she lived most of her life in or near Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Born a German national, Frank lost her citizenship in 1941 when Nazi Germany passed the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws. She gained international fame posthumously after her diary was published. It documents her experiences hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. Quote from her diary, 'The Diary of a Young Girl', often published as 'The Diary of Anne Frank'.
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| [Quote No.43214] Need Area: Friends > General
"[On ancient Athens and the danger of paternalistic governments and dependent citizens:] In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again." - Edward Gibbon
English historian and Member of Parliament. Quote from his most important work, 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire', which was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788.
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"The government was set to protect man from criminals – and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government." - Ayn Rand
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"It is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or any number of men, at the entering into society, to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights; when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection and defense of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty and Property!" - Samuel Adams
Quoted in 1772.
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"[There is always danger in allowing any government to become too powerful, non-transparent and unaccountable, as the political power can then be misused, as it has been many times throughout history and around the world. The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner, US] President [Barack] Obama, who came to office promising transparency and adherence to the rule of law, has become the first president to claim the legal authority to order an American citizen killed without judicial involvement, real oversight or public accountability." - The New York Times
Quote from an editorial article entitled, 'The Power to Kill', published in 'The New York Times' Sunday Review edition on March 10, 2012. [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/the-power-to-kill.html]
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"My own basic perspective on the history of man... is to place central importance on the great conflict that is eternally waged between liberty and power." - Murray N. Rothbard
Austrian economist and author.
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"Your Privacy Is Yours:
...The right to privacy rests largely on a presumption of innocence. It assumes that - in the absence of evidence of wrongdoing - an individual has a right to shut his front door and tell other people (including government) to mind their own business.
Today, this assumption has been twisted inside out so that a desire for privacy means you have something to hide. You are expected to prove your innocence by revealing every financial transaction, by filling in pages of government paperwork, by allowing state agents to frisk your person and property when you board a plane or enter a public building. These invasions rest upon the presumption of guilt.
Privacy is also the single most effective means of preserving freedom against an encroaching state. The act of closing your front door expresses the key distinction between the private and public spheres.
The private sphere consists of the areas of life over which you, as a peaceful human being, exert absolute authority and into which the government or any other uninvited party cannot properly intrude. Traditionally, the home or family is viewed as the private sphere. But it also includes the food you eat, your sex life, the books you read, your opinions of life.
The public sphere consists of the civic duties you owe to others. In a free society, these duties include paying your bills, respecting the equal rights of all and living up to contracts...
[Unfortunately these days if anyone wishes the state to respect their privacy, they may find the state becomes very curious.] The first line of statist attack is to accuse them of being 'suspicious' - that is, of having criminal or shameful reasons for refusing to answer questions.
'If you have nothing to hide...' the remark begins; it always ends with a demand for compliance. Invoking privacy has gone from being the exercise of a right to an indication of guilt.
This is a sleight of hand by which privacy is redefined as 'concealment' or 'secrecy'; of course, it is neither. It is merely a request for the personal to remain personal. As well as enabling freedom, privacy is part of a healthy, self-reflecting life...
If a neighbor took it upon himself to read letters in your mailbox or copy down the details of deposits in a bankbook he 'encountered' in your desk drawer, you would feel violated and enraged by the invasion. What is wrong for your neighbor to do is also wrong for a government agent to do, because there is only one standard of morality. Theft is theft; invasion is invasion. You have the right to slam the door on the face of anyone who says differently. A peaceful human being owes no debt to any other person.
Hold the state up to the same standard as your neighbors... because there are no double standards of right and wrong. Privacy is a right, not an admission of guilt. Your identity properly belongs to you... not to the state." - Wendy McElroy
[http://lfb.org/today/your-identity-is-yours/ ]
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"[The] purpose of a jury [in a legal case] is to...make available the common sense judgment of the community as a hedge against the overzealous or mistaken prosecutor and in preference to the professional or perhaps over conditioned or biased response of a judge." - U.S. Supreme Court
Source: Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522, 530 (1975)
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"No one [whether child or adult] is more truly helpless, more completely a victim, than he who can neither choose nor change nor escape his protectors [whether parent or government]." - John Holt
(1923 - 1985), American author and educator, proponent of homeschooling, and pioneer in youth rights theory. Quote from his book, 'How Children Learn', (1967).
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"[In physical and political conflict, including war...] The fiercest serpent may be overcome by a swarm of ants." - Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto
(1884 - 1943), Japanese Naval Marshal General and commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet during World War II, a graduate of the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy and a student of Harvard University (1919–1921).
Source: Statement in opposition of the planned construction of the Yamato class battleships, as quoted in 'Scraps of Paper: the disarmament treaties between the world wars' (1989) by Harlow A. Hyde.
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"The less government [force, coercion and fraud] we have the better. " - Ralph Waldo Emerson
world-renowned individualist writer
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| [Quote No.43265] Need Area: Friends > General
"...the reality of central planning and socialism [is] ...the national variety (Nazism) or the international variety (communism). Rather than create an orderly society, the attempt to central plan has precisely the opposite effect. By short-circuiting the price mechanism and forcing people into economic lives contrary to their own chosing, central planning [and government intervention in markets] destroys the capital base and creates economic randomness that eventually ends in killing prosperity [human rights, individual freedom and self-chosen happiness]." - Ludwig von Mises
Austrian School economist. Quoted summary from his book, 'Planned Chaos'. [http://mises.org/document/2714 ]
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"Tyranny is yielding to the lust of the governing." - Lord Moulton
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"In a healthy nation there is a kind of dramatic balance between the will of the people and the government, which prevents its degeneration into tyranny." - Albert Einstein
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"Man is an ape with possibilities." - Roy Chapman Andrews
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"It is interesting and important to note that capitalism and socialism, along with its more extreme version - communism, use the same terms 'freedom' and 'equality' in their rhetoric but mean different, mutually exclusive things. In capitalism 'freedom' means 'freedom from initiated force, coercion and fraud', while in socialism and communism 'freedom' means 'freedom from want of basic needs'. And in capitalism 'equality' means 'equality of treatment', while in socialism and communism 'equality' means 'equality of opportunity' and more importantly 'equality of outcome'." - Seymour@imagi-natives.com
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| [Quote No.43323] Need Area: Friends > General
"Well, I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do." - John Pierpont Morgan
Famous American banker at the beginning of the 20th century.
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| [Quote No.43328] Need Area: Friends > General
"[Lawyers have a poor reputation with ordinary people as it appears their job is to spin the facts in any direction depending on who is paying them, regardless of the 'real facts'. Ordinary people see this as close to fraud although lawyers actually have an ethical responsibility to present the case or the contract in the best interests of their client within the limits of the law. This admittedly looks a lot like the worst type of intellectual deception for money and prestige but it is their appropriate role in an adversarial legal system as we presently have it in most legal jurisdictions. Still ordinary peoples' poor opinion of lawyers however has a long history as the following example from several centuries ago suggeats:] God works wonders now and then; Behold a lawyer, an honest man." - Benjamin Franklin
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| [Quote No.43329] Need Area: Friends > General
"[Good moral ethics give the quiet pleasure of a good conscience and avoids the pain of feeling...] My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, and every tale condemns me for a villain." - William Shakespeare
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| [Quote No.43330] Need Area: Friends > General
"The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected." - Will Rogers
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| [Quote No.43336] Need Area: Friends > General
"[Freedom, individuality, authenticity and being yourself so long as it doesn't hurt another's physical person or property:] It took me a long time not to [only] judge myself through someone else's eyes." - Sally Field
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| [Quote No.43351] Need Area: Friends > General
"[Beware:] Where vice is vengeance follows." - Scottish Proverb
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| [Quote No.43360] Need Area: Friends > General
"[Inequality, in the form of unequal treatment - due to racism and legal but immoral segregation:] You have to be taught to be second class; you're not born that way [no-one is or should be]." - Lena Horne
(1917 - 2010), American singer, actress, dancer and civil rights activist - due to her experiences of racism. Both sides of her family were a mixture of European American, Native American, and African American descent, and each belonged to what W. E. B. Du Bois called 'The Talented Tenth', the upper stratum of middle-class, well-educated blacks, some of whom were mixed race.
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| [Quote No.43370] Need Area: Friends > General
"[Freedom of religion of course also includes the freedom to choose not to have any religious faith:] I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels." - Pearl S. Buck
(1892 - 1973), writer who spent the first forty years of her life in China. Her second novel, 'The Good Earth', was the best selling book of both 1931 and 1932 and won her the Pulitzer Prize. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938.
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| [Quote No.43372] Need Area: Friends > General
"To [altruistically help others with charity donations of needed things and money or the desire to] serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy, a whole heart, and a free mind [- not if there is force, coercion or fraud by others or even a well-meaning government involved]." - Pearl S. Buck
(1892 - 1973), writer who spent the first forty years of her life in China. Her second novel, 'The Good Earth', was the best selling book of both 1931 and 1932 and won her the Pulitzer Prize. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938.
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| [Quote No.43381] Need Area: Friends > General
"Lawsuit, n. A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage." - Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce
Author of the famously witty but cynical 'The Devil's Dictionary'.
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| [Quote No.43393] Need Area: Friends > General
"[It is always dangerous to give anyone but especially a government too much power, especially secret power. An example of this, underscoring Lord Acton's warning, 'Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,' was the June, 1972, Watergate scandal where the sixth floor of the Watergate Hotel and Office Building, 2600 Virginia Avenue, Washington City, was allegedly broken-into on orders by the US President Richard Nixon that eventually lead to his resignation in office before he could be impeached (although he was later controversially pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford):] You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I'm innocent. You've got to believe I'm innocent. If you don't, take my job. [He also later famously said in a televised press conference:] I am not a crook!" - Richard Nixon
(1913 - 1994), the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961.
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| [Quote No.43409] Need Area: Friends > General
"No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable." - Adam Smith
(1723 - 1790), philosopher famous for writing the first book on economics, 'The Wealth of Nations'.
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| [Quote No.43436] Need Area: Friends > General
"The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude and perseverance. Let us remember that 'if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.' It is a very serious consideration ... that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event." - Samuel Adams
Quote from a speech he gave 1771.
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| [Quote No.43437] Need Area: Friends > General
"[All governments everywhere, throughout history, regardless of socio-economic political philosophy, have always tried, in every way possible, legal or otherwise, to grow their authority and power over their people's individual freedom and increase the number of people and assets they control, while all the time either trying to hide or justify this encroachment on their citizens' eternal natural individual human birthrights and powers as well as pacify and punish any dissent. This understanding should be the starting self-evident axiom in any rational discussion about government, anywhere, anytime.] The Romans did not have a master plan for the creation of an empire; as it had been in Italy, much of their continued expansion was opportunistic, in response to perceived threats to their security. The more they expanded, the more threats to their security appeared on the horizon, involving them in yet more conflicts. Indeed, the Romans liked to portray themselves as declaring war only for defensive reasons or to protect allies. That is only part of the story, however. It is likely, as some historians have recently suggested, that at some point a group of Roman aristocratic leaders emerged who favored expansion both for the glory it offered and for the economic benefits it provided. Certainly, by the second century B.C., aristocratic senators perceived new opportunities for lucrative foreign commands, enormous spoils of war, and an abundant supply of slave labor for their growing landed estates. By that same time, the destruction of Corinth and Carthage indicate that Roman imperialism had become more arrogant." - Jackson J. Spielvogel
Quote from his book, 'Western Civilization: A Brief History', published 1991.
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| [Quote No.43438] Need Area: Friends > General
"Governments need armies [and spies] to protect them from their enslaved and oppressed subjects [just as much as they need them to protect them from foreign invasion and to project economic and political influence on neighboring nation states]." - Leo Tolstoy
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| [Quote No.43439] Need Area: Friends > General
"If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the general welfare, the government is no longer a limited [small, low-taxing] one possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite [unlimited, large, big-taxing] one subject to particular exceptions. [This is dangerous to the people because as Lord Acton so wisely said, '(Limited) Power corrupts (moral-ethical intent-action) and absolute (unlimited) power corrupts (moral-ethical intent-action) absolutely!']." - James Madison
Letter to Edmund Pendleton, January 21, 1792.
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| [Quote No.43440] Need Area: Friends > General
"Men live their lives within a framework of customary relations and patterns for achieving their ends and solving their problems. In the absence of positive force, they have worked out and accepted these patterns voluntarily, or they submit to them willingly. Any alteration of these by government involves the use or threat of force, for that is how governments operate. The old order must be replaced by a new order for the reform to be achieved. The result of the forceful effort to do this is disorder." - Clarence B. Carson
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