June 14, 2013

“Governments resort to inflation with popular support because the people apparently are naïve enough to believe that they can have their cake and eat it, too.”

Leonard E. Rea

“All evidence points to the superiority of the libertarian ideal – private property, capitalism, international trade, laissez-faire – but something is keeping the world from embracing it.  That something is wrong-headed ideology, some philosophical error grown into a massive system of thought, an agenda that if unleashed would mutilate and crush civilization as we know it.”

Mises Institute

“The first requisite of a sound monetary system is that it put the least possible power over the quantity or quality of money in the hands of the politicians.”

Henry Hazlitt

“In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car.”

Lawrence Summers

“We are far too critical of the fabulous system of plenty that has brought us the highest living standards on earth.  The liberals have done a good job of undermining faith in the market system.”

James Cook

June 11, 2013

“Reason and ideas determine the course of human affairs.  What is needed to stop the trend toward socialism and despotism is common-sense and moral courage.’

Ludwig von Mises

“It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice.  I consider that the real vice is making losses.”

Winston Churchill

“The market economy needs no apologists and propagandists.  It can apply to itself the words of Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph in St. Paul’s: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. [If you seek his monument, look around.]”

Ludwig von Mises

“No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.”

Mark Twain

“People want government to solve problems, but government is often the cause of the problem.”

James Cook

June 10, 2013

“What is your fair share of what someone else has worked for?

Thomas Sowell

“The welfare state is an assault on families.”

Larry Elder

“The American Cream was not about government’s taking huge sums of money (under the label of ‘taxation’) from citizens by force.  The American Dream was about individualism and the opportunity to achieve success without interference from others.”

Robert Ringer

“The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stocking for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for a steadily decreasing amount of effort.”

Joseph Schumpeter

“It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.”

Ronald Reagan

May 22, 2013

“The crying need today is not for more laws, but for fewer.  The world must be saved from its saviors.  If the friends of liberty and law could have only one slogan it should be: Stop the remedies!”

Henry Hazlitt

“My indictment of big government is that it is bad because it attacks liberty, prosperity, progress, harmony and morality.  Thanks to big government, we have significantly less of all of those good things than we would if we had been able to keep government right-sized.  Big government is cancerous.  Like a cancer, it hurts the body and tends to spread doing more and more harm as it grows.  It is time for some radical surgery.”

George C. Leef

“A higher standard of living also brings about a higher standard of culture an civilization.”

Ludwig von Mises

“One of the beauties of an economy coordinated by price movements is that nobody has to understand it in order for it to work.”

Thomas Sowell

“It is the greatest folly of which a man can be capable to sit down with a slate and pencil to plan out a new social world.”

William Graham Sumner

May 21, 2013

“Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

H.L. Mencken

“A wealthy man can preserve his wealth only by continuing to serve the consumers in the most efficient way.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Public interest criteria does not mean criteria that the public decides are in its interest.  It means that the elite – via various appointed bodies – decide what the public’s interest is for them.”

Mark Steyn

“Do you expect the government to educate your children?  To protect you from terrorists?  To guarantee your job?  To protect you against corporate fraud?  The record speaks loudly.  It can’t.”

John A. Puglsey

“Throughout history government has seldom hesitated from robbing its citizens in a crisis.”

James Cook

May 14, 2013

“Those who create the wealth naturally want to keep it and devote it to their own purposes.  Those who wish to expropriate it look for ever more-clever ways to acquire it without inciting resistance.  One of those ways is the spreading of an elaborate ideology of statism, which teaches that the people are the state and that therefore they are only paying themselves when they pay taxes.”

Sheldon Richman

“The government doesn’t create wealth of its own; it can only take it from some and distribute it to others or dictate particular public uses of private resources.”

Joel Miller

“The entrepreneur profits to the extent he has succeeded in serving the consumers better than other people have done.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Preaching doom and gloom has been beneficial to the political class.  They use it to gain more power and control.”

Walter Williams

“Government employees move up the ladder through educational credentials rather than merit.  People are given jobs and promotions based on seniority, race and gender rather than ability or talent.  Such a system often overlooks the deserving and rewards the incompetent.  There is no payoff for achievement.”

James Cook

May 13, 2013

“Bureaucrats, even with the best of intentions, naturally tend to assume that the size of their bureaus, measured in money, staff and power, affects its ability to be effective.  Thus, there is a natural tendency to maximize and agency’s budget, staff, and power to ensure agency effectiveness.”

Reed Garfield

“Inflation has always been an important resource of policies of war and revolution and why we also find it in the service of socialism.”

Ludwig von Mises

“One might reasonably wonder whether any amount of failed results would cause liberals to reevaluate the wisdom – and even fairness – of their proposals.”

David Limbaugh

“All government programs accomplish the opposite of what they are designed to achieved.”

John A. Puglsey

“Everything government touches turns to crap.”

Ringo Starr

May 9, 2013

“The drum-fire of propaganda that the Fed is manning the ramparts against the menace of inflation brought about by others is nothing less than a deceptive shell game.  The culprit solely responsible for inflation, the Federal Reserve, is continually engaged in raising a hue-and-cry about ‘inflation,’ for which virtually everyone else in society seems to be responsible.  What we are seeing is the old ploy by the robber who starts shouting ‘Stop, thief!’ and runs down the street pointing ahead at others.”

Murray N. Rothbard

“The whole of mankind’s progress has had to be achieved against the resistance and opposition of the state and its power of coercion.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Absolute welfare corrupts absolutely.”

Mark Steyn

“Governments everywhere, including here in the Unites States, have created ever-expanding bureaucracies that regulate nearly every aspect of our lives.”

Richard Ebeling

“A monetary order created and managed by politicians and officials is bound to disappoint.”

Hanns F. Sennholz

May 8, 2013

“The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone – one which barely escapes being no government at all.”

H.L. Mencken

“The most important business of one generation is raising of the next generation.  Nothing else you do in life will be as deeply satisfying…”

George Will

“Although it seems that the political classes, along with their intellectual and journalistic allies, are unable (and unwilling) to permit themselves to received even a basic education when it comes prices, profits, and markets, many people outside those circles are not as intellectually and morally obtuse.”

William L. Anderson

“Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’”

Henry Hazlitt

“If our country is to survive and prosper, we must summon the courage to condemn and reject the liberal agenda, and we had better do it soon.”

Walter Williams

May 2, 2013

“The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone – one which barely escapes being no government at all.”

H.L. Mencken

“The most important business of one generation is the raising of the next generation.  Nothing else you do in life will be as deeply satisfying…”

George Will

“In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated.  Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.”

Thomas Sowell

“The tendency of welfare spending in the United States has been to increase at an exponential rate.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Since there is no orderly way to liquidate the federal debt, we must brace for a payment crisis.”

Hans F. Sennholz

May 1, 2013

“Most new regulations are subject to little genuine scrutiny or oversight, and the average person would be hard-pressed to stay informed about them, let alone do much to oppose them should he find them worrisome.  As Hayek insisted, the law is supposed to be simple and easily known by all who are ruled by it.  Such is not the case today.”

Joel Miller

“In the United States how did we go from having no role for the federal government in farming to having government intertwined in all aspects of farming from planting to harvesting to selling crops?”

Burton W. Folsom, Jr.

“It is a great advantage to a president, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man.”

Calvin Coolidge

“Laissez-faire does not mean: let soulless mechanical forces operate.  It means: let individuals choose how they want to cooperate in the social division of labor and let them determine what the entrepreneurs should produce.  Planning means: let the government alone choose and enforce its rulings by the apparatus of coercion and compulsion.”

Ludwig von Mises

“What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it.  When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.”

Thomas Sowell

April 23, 2013

“A stupid idea whose time had come, “bail-in marks a new phase of financial repression.”

Satyajit Das

“There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.”

F. A. Hayek

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”

Thomas Jefferson

“Government enterprise validates a kind of cult of failure, a cult that has stood human nature on its head and made incompetence a god.”

Gregory Bresiger

“The left controls the media, the institutions of higher learning and the government.  They preach against business, disparate merit, decry free enterprise and slander capitalism.”

James Cook

April 16, 2013

“Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.”

Ayn Rand

“Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own.”

Edward E. Cummings

“It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error.”

Robert H. Jackson

“If capitalism worked as the socialists think an economic system ought to work, and provided a constant equality of living conditions for all, regardless of whether a man was able or not, thrifty or not, if capitalism put no premium on resourcefulness and effort and no penalty on idleness or vice, it would produce only a n equality of destitution.”

Milton Friedman

“The economy that leads the world will be the one with the most millionaires and billionaires.”

James Cook

April 15, 2013

“Equality of opportunity is freedom, but equality of outcome is repression.”

Dick Feagler

“As soon as the economic freedom which the market economy grants to its members is removed, all political liberties and bills of rights become humbug.”

Ludwig von Mises

“”Diluting the money supply with paper is the moral equivalent of diluting the milk supply with water.”

Henry Hazlitt

“One of the wonderful things about free markets is that the path to greater wealth comes not from looting, plundering and enslaving one’s fellow man, as it has throughout most of human history, but by serving and pleasing him.”

Walter Williams

“If government goes beyond securing liberty and instead violates it through regulation, redistribution, and planning, then citizens are victims of legal plunder.”

Richard M. Eberling

April 10, 2013

“Government does not grow by seizing our freedoms, but by assuming our responsibilities.”

Michael cloud

“Many of the wonderful achievements of the 20th century were the result of the pursuit of profits.  Unfortunately demagoguery has led to profits become a dirty word.  Nonprofit is seen as more righteous, particularly when people pompously stand before us and declare, ‘We’re a nonprofit organization.’”

Walter Williams

“Liberals insist they believe as strongly in the American dream as the rest of us, but routinely demonize those who succeed in attaining it.  They loudly profess their allegiance to capitalism, but resent the inequitable money results it produces.”

David Limbaugh

“Short-sighted and impatient efforts to wipe out poverty by severing the connection between effort and reward can only lead to the growth of a totalitarian state, and destroy the economic progress that this country has so dearly bought.”

Henry Hazlitt

“When the same man, or set of men, holds the sword and the purse, there is an end of liberty.”

George Mason

April 5, 2013

“Inflation is the true opium of the people and it is administered to them by anticapitalist governments and parties.”

Ludwig von Mises

“We are ever aware that politics is an ugly struggle that determines ‘who gets what, when, and how.’  It is the favorite occupation of people who serve special interests, who have axes to grind, and public careers to advance.  It is a game in which benefits are bestowed according to political skill and connection, rather than merit.”

Hans F. Sennholz

“Except for talk radio, liberals pretty much control the culture.”

Bernard Goldberg

“Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”

Thomas Paine

“A business owner who is liberal probably inherited the business.”

James Cook

April 3, 2013

 “The way to crush the bourgeois is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”

Lenin

“There are many farm handouts; but let’s call them what they really are: a form of legalized theft.  Essentially, a congressman tells his farm constituency, ‘Vote for me.  I’ll use my office to take another American’s money and give it to you.’”

Walter Williams

“It’s I politics that men are always aggravating the hopeless tangle of their laws, obscuring the simplest principles and making a mockery of liberty.”

Joseph Sobran

“Liberty is always freedom from the government.”

Ludwig von Mises

“I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. O I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty but leading or driving them out of it.”

Benjamin Franklin

April 1, 2013

“Left-wing politicians take away your liberty in the name of children and of fighting poverty, while right-wing politicians do it in the name of family values and fighting drugs,  Either way, government gets bigger and you become less free.”

Harry Browne

“Economic progress and justice do not consist in superbly equalized destitution, but in the constant creation of more and more goods and services, of more and more wealth and income to be shared.”

Henry Hazlitt

“The government’s coercive taxing power necessarily creates two classes: those who create and those who consume the wealth expropriated and transferred by that power.”

Sheldon Richman

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

H. L. Mencken

“The tow pillars of democratic government are the primacy of the law and the budget.”

Ludwig von Mises

March 29, 2013

“Inflation is a form of tax, a tax that we all collectively must pay.”

Henry Hazlitt

“The market system makes all producers responsible to the consumer.”

Ludwig von Mises

“More than half of all people filing income tax forms use someone else to prepare the forms for them.  Then they have to sign under penalty of perjury that these forms are correct.  But if they were competent to determine that, why would they have to pay someone else to do their taxes for them in the first place?”

Thomas Sowell

“If bureaucrats are successful in reducing costs, they will likely see their budget decreased, a disincentive which has an effect contrary to bureaucratic power and prestige enhancement.”

Reed Garfield

“Inflation makes the wealthiest people richer and the masses poorer.”

James Cook

March 27, 2013

“The government and its chiefs do not have the powers of the mythical Santa Claus.  They cannot spend except by taking out of the pockets of some people for the benefit of others.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The U.S. Constitution may be flawed, but it’s a whole lot better than what we have now.”

Unknown

“No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words “no” and “not” employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of rights.”

Edmund A. Opitz

“There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please.  And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.”

PJ. O’Rourke

“If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else’s expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves.”

Thomas Sowell

March 22, 2013

“Every innovation makes its appearance as a ‘luxury’ of the few well-to-do.  After industry has become aware of it, the luxury then becomes a ‘necessity’ for all.”

Ludwig von Mises

“There is nothing so good that politicians can’t make it bad and nothing so bad that politicians can’t make it worse.”

Thomas Sowell

“The more government does, the greater chance that its efforts will be tilted toward a particular group’s good, instead of the common good.”

Joel Miller

“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.  His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.”

John Stuart Mill

“Left-wing social policies sicken our behavior and corrupt our culture.  People bend principles and sacrifice integrity to get as much as they can from the government.  Giveaway programs encourage every imaginable sort of cheating and dishonesty.  Wheeling and dealing in food stamps is a way of life.   Lying and fraud are commonplace.  Whenever you’re dependent on the money, the end justifies the means.”

James Cook

March 20, 2013

“Every step toward the elimination of profit is progress on the way toward social disintegration.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Government planning not only fails; it tends to produce outcomes that are the opposite of what its proponents say that they favor.  The only stable and productive social system is one that embraces human liberty in its totality, and defends the market economy, private property, sound money, and peaceful international relations, while opposing government intervention as economically and socially destructive.”

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

“It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequence4s of his own folly.  Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty to protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve.”

Henry George

“It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.”

Charles A. Beard

“The costs of government are bound to be much higher than those of the free market…The State cannot calculate well and therefore cannot gauge its costs accurately.”

Murray N. Rothbard

March 19, 2013

“There are always two kinds of people in the world – those who pioneer and those who plod.  The plodders always attack the pioneers.  They say that the pioneers have gobbled up all the opportunity, when, as a plain matter of fact, the plodders would have nowhere to plod had not the pioneers first cleared the way.”

Henry Ford

“Markets are nimble and efficient, gathering the collective but disbursed intelligence of the economy’s players and communicating up-to-the-minute realities of prices, product availability, etc.  Government is typically cumbersome, plodding, and slow.”

Joel Miller

“Markets work well at what they are supposed to do; governments work badly at what they are supposed to do.”

Joseph R. Stromberg

“The only way government bureaucrats know of keeping prosperity going is to inflate some more – to increase the deficit or to pump more money into the system.”

Henry Hazlitt

“The government is worst which governs most.”

James Cook

March 18, 2013

“Capitalism denies the naïve and mystic faith in the State to control wages and prices.  A fair price is the amount agreed upon by the buyer and seller.”

Perry Gresham

“In any government bureaucracy, they are not working for you but for the mythical blob called the ‘public sector,’ which is really nothing but a stash of stolen cash divided among the robber class.”

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

“Inherent in capitalism is the ability to provide freedom of choice, encourage cooperation, provide accountability, create wealth for large numbers of people and limit the exercise of excessive power.”

Peter Hill

“The crucial question for any policy is not what are its intentions but what are its effects?”

Walter Williams

“Under capitalism everybody provides for their own needs by servicing others.”

Ludwig von Mises

March 15, 2013

“If it is unnecessary to adjust the amount of expenditure to the means available, there is no limit to the spending of the great god State.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Government cannot be put on a businesslike basis because it lacks the profit-and-loss test available to businesses on the market.  Thus it doesn’t know when to stop going something, short of a disastrous setback, cannot calculate its costs, and so on.”

Joseph R. Stromberg

“Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.  There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.”

H. L. Mencken

“We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”

Winston Churchill

“Why does an illegitimate birth or a string of bad luck entitle someone to another person’s earnings?  What is the morality behind citizens being forced by the government to give the money they earn to someone who refuses to work?  Would you give your money voluntarily to drug addicts?  Would you volunteer a part of your salary to teenage AFDC mothers to have another child?  What is the moral right that anyone has to another person’s income?

James Cook

March 14, 2013

“The idea that political freedom can be preserved in the absence of economic freedom, and vice versa, is an illusion.  Political freedom is the corollary of economic freedom.”

Ludwig von Mises

“A virtue of the free enterprise system is that it offers every individual the greatest opportunity for self expression.”

Lawrence Fertig

“From the beginning, I was trained to work, to save and to give.”

John d. Rockefeller

“There is far more danger in public than in private monopoly, for when government goes into business it can always shift its losses to the taxpayers.”

Thomas Edison

“The only real cure for poverty is production.”

Henry Hazlitt

March 13, 2013

“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.”

Jonathan Swift

“Some people regard private enterprise as a cow they can milk.  Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.”

Winston Churchill

“Government welfare programs contribute to the disintegration of poor families.  They make women and children dependent on government; dependent for food, for clothing, for shelter; and reward fatherless families with extra benefits and welfare perks.”

Hans F. Sennholz

“The era of resisting big government is never over.”

Paul Gigot

“Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.”

Honore de Balzac

March 12, 2013

“The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.”

Robert A. Heinlein

“Today, the law is a crazy quilt of provisions and clauses that very often have little to do with securing general happiness but instead are designed to secure the particular happiness of various advocacy groups, politicians and bureaucrats.”

Joel Miller

“There is no such thing as a just and fair method of exercising the tremendous power that interventionism puts into the hands of the legislature and the executive.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Think about it: we went into slavery pagans; we came out Christians.  We went into slavery pieces of property; we came out American citizens.  We went into slavery with chains clanking about our wrists; we came out with the American ballot in our hands…”

Booker T. Washington

“Nothing is more difficult than to make a profit.”

James Cook

March 11, 2013

“The government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn’t first take from someone else.”

Henry Hazlitt

“The last few decades mark the first time in their history that America’s institutions of higher learning have become a haven for extremists.”

David Horowitz

“The welfare state destroys the market mechanisms – lessens free choice and willing exchange.  Simultaneously crating unnatural specializations, it must, granted statism’s premise, resort to welfarism; that is, it must assume the responsibility for the people’s welfare: their employment, their old age, their income, and the like.  As this is done, man loses his wholeness; he is dispossessed of responsibility for self, the very essence of his manhood.  The more dependent he becomes, the less dependable.”

Leonard E. Read

“If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you what it costs when it’s free.”

P. ./ O’Rourke

“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

Milton Friedman

March 8, 2013

“If people do not consume their whole incomes, the non-consumed surplus can be invested, it increases the amount of capital goods available and thereby makes it possible to embark upon projects which could not be executed before.”

Ludwig von Mises

“We must remember we are refining oil for the poor man and  he must have it cheap and good.”

John D. Rockefeller

“Political changes and reforms do not usually favor the general populace.  They benefit those who are positioned to best organize and advocate for their policies.”

Joel Miller

“Capitalism is based on self interest and self-esteem, it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues, not vices.  It is this superlative moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats and the chronic good of fear.”

Alan Greenspan

“The decline and fall of a civilization is barely noticed by most of its citizens.”

James Cook

March 7, 2013

“Freedom is not a luxury for a few wealthy nations; as many of our liberal pundits try to tell us, but a necessity for the poor and hungry.”

Edward P. Coleson

“It will be of little avail to the people that laws are made by men of their choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood…that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow.”

James Madison

“Capitalism encourages invention, innovation and technological advance.  Creativity cannot be legislated.  Only free people can bring significant discovery to society.”

Perry Gresham

“Most Americans, who think Congress has a right to do anything for which they can get a majority vote, ignore the clearly written constitutional restraints on Congress.”

Walter Williams

“We try never to forget that medicine is for the patient…It is not for the profits.  The profits follow, and if we have remembered that they have never failed to appear.  The better we have remembered it, the larger they have been.”

George Merck II

March 6, 2013

“I think the terror most people are concerned with is the IRS.”

Malcolm Forbes

“Soaking the rich would not only be profoundly immoral, it would drastically penalize the very virtues: thrift, business foresight, and investment, that have brought about out remarkable standard of living.  It would truly be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.” 

Murray N. Rothbard

“Would-be income guarantors ignore or despise the capitalistic system that makes their dreams dreamable and gives their redistribute-the-income proposals whatever plausibility they have.”

Henry Hazlitt

“No one should expect that any logical argument or any experience could ever shake the almost religious fervor of those who believe in salvation through spending and credit expansion.”

Ludwig von Mises

“There is no use whatever trying to help people who do not help themselves.  You cannot push anyone up a ladder.”

Andrew Carnegie

March 5, 2013

“Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves.  God Himself will not save men against their wills.”

Thomas Jefferson

“An active policy of government intervention in a free-market business system is a contradiction in terms.  Trades of private property are either voluntary or they are not; one cannot legislate the free market or create competition.  To have a free market the government must leave the markets alone; to have the state make free markets ‘free’ is again a contradiction in terms.”

Dominick T. Armentano

“The government transfers income and wealth according to the rules of politics, which make politicians the primary beneficiaries of the system, and the poor and needy the primary victims.”

Hans. F. Sennholz

“What governments call international monetary cooperation is concerted action for the sake of credit expansion.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Never underestimate the incompetence of government.”

March 1, 2013

“Free trade, one of the greatest blessings that a government can confer on a people is in almost every country unpopular.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay

“Consumption never creates wealth.”

Kurt Richebacher

“To best serve the public happiness, government shouldn’t do things it cannot do well – anymore than Wal-Mart should provide goods and services that people don’t like.”

Joel Miller

“The better an entrepreneur succeeds, the more is he vilified and themore is he soaked by taxation.”

Ludwig von Mises

“When politics is elevated over business, economic disaster follows.”

James Cook

February 28, 2013

“A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death.  A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between tow social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society.  Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The love of lucre, though sometimes carried to a ridiculous excess, a vicious excess, is the grand cause of prosperity to all States.”

Edmund Burke

“When any welfare scheme is being proposed, its political sponsors always dwell on what a generous and compassionate government should pay to Paul; they neglect to mention that this additional money must be seized from Peter.”

Henry Hazlitt

“One of the happiest consequences of the absence of government…is the development of individual strength that inevitably follows.”

Alexis de Tocqueville

“All the forms of double taxation in the current system are punitive and self-destructive because they are literally destroying people’s incentive to provide that seed corn for future economic growth.”

Daniel J. Mitchell

February 27, 2013

“One of the bitter ironies of the 20th century was that communism, which began as an egalitarian doctrine accusing capitalism of selfishness and calloused sacrifices of others, became in power a system whose selfishness and callousness toward others made the sins of capitalism pale.”

Thomas Sowell

“If there is to be no loss whatever of dignity or self-respect in getting and staying on relief, then there can be no gain in dignity or self-respect in makings some sacrifices to keep off.”

Henry Hazlitt

“There is no other planning for freedom and general welfare than to let the market system work.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Government does some things very well, things that are a benefit to the entire community.  When Jefferson aired his opinions about what was ‘necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people’ in his first inaugural, he limited government’s duties to just three basic things:

• Restrain men from injuring one another
• Leave then otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement
• Not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned”

Joel Miller

“Redistribution divided society into two social classes: the beneficiaries of transfer, who are calling for ever more; and the victims, who submit unwillingly.  It could hardly fail to injure social peace and harmony.”

February 19, 2013

“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”

Benjamin Franklin

“Beware the greedy hand of government, thrusting itself into every corner and cre4vice of industry.”

Thomas Paine

“If the practice persists of covering government deficits with the issue of notes, then the day will come without fail, sooner or later, when the monetary systems of those nations pursuing this course will break down completely.  The purchasing power of the monetary unit will declined more and more, until finally it disappears completely.”

Ludwig von Mises

“No longer are Republicans arguing with Democrats about whether government should be big or small.  Instead they are at odds over what kind of big government the U.S. should have.”

Janet Hook

“The foremost corporate responsibility is to serve others so well you produce a profit.”

James Cook

February 15, 2013

“The political left has been weak on protecting society from criminals for more than two centuries.”
           
Thomas Sowell

“The essence of Keynesianism is its complete failure to conceive the role that saving and capital accumulation play in the improvement of economic conditions.”
             
Ludwig von Mises

“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
           
James Madison

“[I]t is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low—and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now.”
           
John F. Kennedy

“Capitalism denies the right of government to take the property of a private citizen at will, or to tax away his livelihood at will, or to tell him when and where he must work or how and where he must live.  Capitalism is built on the firm foundation of individual liberty.”
           
Perry Gresham

February 14, 2013

“It is possible to increase paper-money income to any amount by debasing the currency.  But real income can only be increased by working harder or more efficiently, saving more, investing more, and producing more.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Free trade or the free market means the sovereignty of the consumer.”

Faustino Ballve

“The bad consequences of a government program usually don’t show up immediately.  And the delay may be long enough to hide the connection between the program and its results.  So government never has to say it’s sorry—never has to take responsibility for the misery it causes.  Instead, it can blame everything on personal greed, profit-hungry corporations, and the ‘private sector.’  And the government’s cure for the problems is to impose bigger programs, more regulation, and higher taxes.”

Harry Browne

“American authors or scientists are prone to consider the wealthy businessman as a barbarian, as a man exclusively intent upon making money.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Liberals believe an inexhaustible fund exists that can be tapped endlessly to pay for government social programs.  Tax the rich and give it to a long line of moochers, pork barrel hustlers and ne’er-do-wells.  These funds would otherwise have been employed as additional capital indispensable to economic progress.”

James Cook

February 13, 2013

“What makes small business develop into big business is not spending, but saving and capital accumulation.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Advocacy groups, politicians, and bureaucrats use the government to advance their private good instead of the common good.”

Joel Miller

“The essence and the glory of the free market is that individual firms and businesses, competing on the market, provide an ever-changing orchestration of efficient and progressive goods and services: continually improving products and markets, advancing technology, cutting costs, and meeting changing consumer demands as swiftly and as efficiently as possible.”

Murray N. Rothbard

“When

Frederic Bastiat

“The purer the application of socialism, the worse the results, the purer the application of capitalism, the better the results.”

James Cook

February 12, 2013

“Nothing keeps a company honest and efficient like the threat of other companies coming along and taking its business away.”

John Stossel

 “Most of the people in the upper income brackets are not rich and do not have wealth sheltered offshore.  They are typically working  people who have finally reached their peak earning years after many years of far more modest incomes—and now see much of what they have worked for siphoned off by politicians, to the accompaniment of lofty rhetoric.”

Thomas Sowell

“The capitalist system has lifted mankind out of mass poverty.  It is this system that in the last century, in the last generation, even in the last decade, has acceleratively been changing the face of the world, and has provided the masses of mankind with amenities that even kings did not possess or imagine a few generations ago.”

Henry Hazlitt

“There is no equality without coercion.”

Gonzalo Fernandez de la Mora

“If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal.  If you want government to intervene overseas you’re a conservative.  If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate.  If you don’t want government to intervene anywhere, you’re an extremist.”
           
Joseph Sobran

February 11, 2013

“Universal health care is a great way of implementing one of socialism’s main objectives through the back door: equalization of incomes through redistribution of wealth.”

Jane M. Orient

“The key question for many voters is: How much is the candidate offering for my vote?”

James Bovard

“Private ownership means that individuals control their own persons, their own energies, and the products of their energies.”
.
Orval Watts

“I realize that the New York Times is probably not written for the express purpose of driving me mad; I think of it as liberalism’s daily bulletin board.”

Joseph Sobran

“The sharper the competition, the better it serves its social function to improve economic production.”

Ludwig von Mises

February 8, 2013

“Modern ‘public health’ initiatives have moved well beyond what could reasonably be classified as public goods.  Today, government undertakes all sorts of policies in the name of public health that are aimed at regulating personal behavior.”

Radley Balko

“Inflation makes the extension of socialism possible by providing the financial chaos in which it flourishes.  The fact is that socialism and inflation are cause and effect, they feed on each other!”

Henry Hazlitt

“Big business always serves—directly or indirectly—the masses.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The many woes that afflict our nation are rooted in the morally bankrupt paradigms of socialism, interventionism, and empire that have held our nation in their grip for decades and that the only real solution to such woes is libertarianism.”

Jacob G. Hornberger

“Liberals fostered the subsidies that have converted so many citizens to helplessness.  They have made high taxes and big government a way of life.  They have corrupted the politicians into believing that in order to be elected to office, they must dispense benefits.”

James Cook

February 7, 2013

“What is called the ‘private sector’ of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and what is called the ‘public sector’ is, in fact, the coercive sector.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Universities have failed in their function of the pursuit of academic excellence by having dumbed down classes and granting degrees to students who are just barely literate and computationally incompetent.”
Walter Williams

“The market is not an invention of capitalism.  It has existed for centuries.  It is an invention of civilization.”

Unknown

“The alternative to the market process is government control, and we know where that principle leads.”

Sheldon Richman

“The root source of wealth is human ingenuity.  This has no known bounds, so the amount of wealth in existence can always be increased.  That’s why capitalism is called ‘making money.”

Marc Geddes

February 6, 2013

“Liberalism had come to mean spending more on everything—speech police, failed poverty programs that reward dependence, a bigger nanny state telling us we cannot eat fatty foods, workplace roles that stifle opportunity, and absurd environmental regulations.”

John Stossel

“Assistance granted to the unemployed does not dispose of unemployment.  It makes it easier for the unemployed to remain idle.”

Ludwig von Mises

“If the history of welfare teaches us anything, it teaches us that government money is as addictive as any narcotic.”

Michael D. Tanner

“If citizens wish to retain their liberty, they cannot assume that those who seek power over them are honest.  Skepticism of government is one of the most important—and most forgotten—bulwarks of freedom.”

James Bovard

“It is impossible to manage the health care requirements of tens of millions of American citizens at the federal level.  It is impossible to manage all of the permutations of people’s economic aspirations and lives through a complex tax code.  It is impossible to try to second-guess the market.  It is impossible, from a managerial standpoint, for the federal government to do the things it is trying to do today.”

Frederick W. Smith

February 5, 2013

“Not only is patriotism disdained, the very basis for pride in one’s country and culture is systematically undermined in our educational institutions at all levels.  The achievements of western civilization are buried in histories that portray every human sin found here as if they were peculiarities of the west.”               

Thomas Sowell

“What a government system can accomplish is to destroy the art and science of medicine in these United States of America.”               

Jame M. Orient

“Business has only two functions—marketing and innovation.”              

Peter Drucker

“The more people expect from government, the more biased they become against limiting government power.”                

James Bovard

“There is in government a living impulse to extend itself indefinitely; and there is in freedom a necessity to resist that impulse.”

Garet Garrett

February 4, 2013

“Inflation is not only unnecessary for economic growth.  As long as it exists it is the enemy of economic growth.” 

Henry Hazlitt

“All present-day governments are fanatically committed to an easy money policy.” 

Ludwig von Mises

“Wealth comes from the production and exchange of goods and services.  If someone efficiently produces  a good that many people willingly trade their money for, he becomes wealthy.”               

Sheldon Richman

“What do intellectuals and opinion makers get from big government?  An increasing number of cushy jobs in the bureaucracy, or in the government-subsidized sector, staffing the welfare-regulatory state, and apologizing for its polices, as well as propagandizing for them among the public.  To put it bluntly, intellectuals, theorists, pundits, media elites, etc. Get to live a life which they could not attain as the free market, but which they can gain at taxpayer expense.”             

Murray N. Rothbard

“The market performs miracles so routinely that we take it for granted.  Supermarkets provide 30,000 choices at rock-bottom prices.  We take it for granted that when we stick a piece of plastic in a wall, cash will come out; that when we give the same plastic to a stranger, he will rent us a car, and the next month, VISA will have the accounting correct to the penny.  By contrast,  ‘experts’ in government can’t even count the vote accurately.”

John Stossel

January 30, 2013

“By the very nature of government schooling, the matter of what goes into school textbooks must necessarily be a political matter, to be decided by those I political power.”

Jacob G. Hornberger

“In an unmolested market economy – one where all dealings are consensual – the ‘allocation’ of wealth and income is the result of transactions.” 

Sheldon Richman

“The great Depression came about because of government intervention into the economy through monetary policies, short-sighted trade policies, and huge tax increases.”

William L. Anderson

“The tendency of government-supported education must be finally to achieve a government monopoly of education.”

Henry Hazlitt

It is certain that many intellectuals envy the higher income of prosperous businessmen and that these feelings drive then toward socialism.  They believe that the authorities of a socialist commonwealth would pay them higher salaries than those that they earn under capitalism.”

Ludwig von Mises

January 28, 2013

“The philosophy underlying the system of progressive taxation is that the income and wealth of the well-to-do classes can be freely tapped.  What the advocates of these tax rates fail to realize is that the greater part of the incomes taxed away would not have been consumed but saved and invested.”

Ludwig von Mises

“It is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand.”

John Maynard Keynes

“As taxpayers, we have quietly accepted the fact that our taxes will be spent to pay big bucks for all sorts of ugly, twisted metal to be displayed in front of or inside government buildings, in the name of ‘art’ – art that was obviously never meant to give the public any enjoyment and often represented a thumbing of the artist’s nose at the public.”

Thomas Sowell

“Most of what Congress does fits the description of forcing one American to serve the purposes of another American.  That description differs only in degree, but not in kind, from slavery.”

Walter Williams

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Thomas Jefferson

January 24, 2013

“Once congress establishes that one person can live at the expense of another, it pays for everyone to try to do so.”

Walter Williams

“Under such a socialist mode of production all personal incentives which selfishness provides under capitalism are removed, and a premium is put upon laziness and negligence.  Whereas in a capitalist society selfishness incites everyone to the utmost diligence, in a socialist society it makes for inertia and laxity.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

Thomas Jefferson

“We still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping at the spoil of the multitude…It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without a tribute.”

Thomas Paine

“There is no way to turn off this global economy, nor should one try.  Every previous expansion of global capitalism has led to greater prosperity across the world.”

Fareed Zakaria

January 21, 2013

“It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession.  I have learned that bears a striking resemblance to the first.”

Ronald Reagan

“The alternative to the market process is government control, and we know where that principle leads.”

Sheldon Richman

“The income tax has spawned an intrusive bureaucracy, creating so much complexity and red tape that millions of ordinary citizens have to go get some accountant to fill out the forms for them – and then sign under penalty of perjury that it was done right.  If you knew how to do it right, you wouldn’t have to go to somebody else to have it done, would you?”

Thomas Sowell

“Government today, far from protecting property, is its main threat.”

Roger Pilon

“When your money is taken by a thief, you get nothing in return.  When your money is taken through taxes to support needless bureaucrats, precisely the same situation exists.  We are lucky, indeed, if the needless bureaucrats are mere easy-going loafers.  They are more likely today to be energetic reformers busily discouraging and disrupting production.”

Henry Hazlitt

January 18, 2013

“Progress of any kind is always at variance with the old and established ideas and therefore with the codes inspired by them.  Every step of progress is a change involving heavy risks.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The State, of course, is absolutely indispensable to the preservation of law and order, and the promotion of peace and social cooperation.  What is unnecessary and evil, what abridges the liberty and threatens the true welfare of the individual, is the State that has usurped excessive powers and grown beyond its legitimate function – the super-State, the socialist State, the redistributive State, in brief, the ironically misnamed ‘Welfare State.’”

Henry Hazlitt

“The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, say to a man: ‘Your money, or your life.’ And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.”

Lysander Spooner

“Money spent in complying with a regulation cannot be spent again on marketing or product research.”

Joel Miller

“Government regulators are another name for police.”

James Cook

January 17, 2013

“No matter what federal program one selects – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the drug war, the income tax and the IRS, education, foreign interventions and wars – they are all a giant mess.”

Jacob G. Hornberger

“The government was set to protect man from criminals – and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government.”

Ayn Rand

“Governments harangue about deficits to get more revenue so they can spend more.”

Allah H. Meltzer

“It is the free market and competition among employers for the services of wage earners that make workers independent of arbitrary discretion on the part of the employer.”

Paul L. Poirot

“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.  There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.  The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

John Maynard Keynes

January 16, 2013

“The taxpayer: That’s someone who works for the federal government but doesn’t have to take the civil service examination.”

Ronald Reagan

“If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.”

Winston Churchill

“Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.”

Charles Peguy

“All almsgiving inevitably tends to pauperize the recipient.”

Ludwig von Mises

“I recall asking the late eminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, in a public forum in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, if he would say that America was, all things considered a better, i.e., more moral, society than Soviet society.  He said he would not.”

Dennis Prager

January 9, 2013

“The modern welfare state, highly touted as soaking the rich to subsidize the poor, does no such thing.  In fact, soaking the rich would have disastrous effects, not just for the rich but for the poor and middle classes themselves.  For it is the rich who provide a proportionately greater amount of saving, investment capital, entrepreneurial foresight, and financing of technological innovation that has brought the Unites States to by far the highest standard of living – for the mass of the people – of any country in history.”

Murray N. Rothbard

“I place economy among the first and most important virtues and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared…We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.  We must make our choice between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude.”

Thomas Jefferson

“A nation cannot prosper if its members are not fully aware of the fact that what alone can improve their condition s is more and better production.  And this can only be brought about by increased saving and capital accumulation.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The surest way for a poor nation to stay poor is to harass, hobble, and straitjacket private enterprise or to discourage or destroy it by subsidized government competition, oppressive taxation, or outright expropriation.”

Henry Hazlitt

“What is especially disturbing about the political left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition.  Instead, they tend to see the problems of the world as due to other people not being as wise or as noble as themselves.”

Thomas Sowell

January 8, 2013

“Everything brought forward in favor of Socialism during the last hundred years, in thousands of writings and speeches, all the blood which has been spilt by the supporters of Socialism cannot make socialism workable.”

Ludwig von Misses

“A ‘social justice’ society is a conflict society which locks beneficiaries and victims alike in a struggle without end.  It becomes a society torn apart by resentment over the wealth of capitalists.”

Hans Sennholz

“The quickest and surest way to production, prosperity, and economic growth is through private enterprise.  The best way for governments to encourage private enterprise is to establish, to enforce contracts, to insure domestic peace and tranquility, to protect private property, and to secure the blessings of liberty, including economic liberty – which means to stop putting obstacles in the way of private enterprise.”

Henry Hazlitt

“A fine is a tax for doing something wrong.  A tax is a fine for doing something right.”

Unknown

“To write about business one should be in business, just as in writing about Tasmania one should visit Tasmania.”

James Cook

January 7, 2013

“Fortunes cannot grow; someone has to increase them.”

Ludwig von Mises

“I get a kick out of all these central bank governors, both here and overseas, constantly warning us about the ‘terrible danger of inflation.’  What a bunch of snake-oil salesmen these guys are.  It’s the central banks, themselves, who are pumping out all that extra fiat money that is creating simultaneously warning about the spread of the disease.”

Richard Russell

“The future of private enterprise capitalism is also the future of a free society.  There is no possibility of having a politically free society unless the major part of its economic resources are operated under a capitalistic private enterprise system.”

Milton Friedman

“The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program.”

Ronald Reagan

“Once a fellow’s enjoying the fruits of government health care and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and if it’s going to bankrupt the state a generation hence, well, as long as they can keep the checks coming till he’s dead, it’s fine by him.”

Mark Steyn

January 4, 2013

“The consequences of inflation are malinvestment, waste, a wanton redistribution of wealth and income, the growth of speculation and gambling, immorality and corruption, disillusionment, social resentment, discontent, upheaval and riots, bankruptcy, increased government controls, and eventual collapse.”

Henry Hazlitt

“There is no remedy for the inefficiency of public management.”

Ludwig von Mises

“American democracy is capsizing as a result of the vast increase in the number of government dependents and government employees.”

James Bovard

“Civil liberties, once so easily and thoughtlessly surrendered,  will be harder by orders of magnitude for our children and grandchildren to reclaim.” 

James R. Muhm

“To succeed in business, put the interest of the customer ahead of your own.”

James Cook

January 02, 2013

“All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their constitution or confederation, not from a want of honor or virtue so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.”

John Adams

“All those evils which the [liberals] interpret as evidence of the failure of capitalist are the necessary outcome of interference with the market.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Whatever happened to Warren Buffett, the world’s their-richest man?  Guilt, a feeling of being blessed by luck, forgotten lessons – who knows?  In any case, Buffett now believe that government should redistribute the wealth earned by others to those who did not earn it.”

Larry Elder

“The more powerful government becomes, the more abuses it commits and the more lies it must tell.”

James Bovard

“In the course of human events it is necessary, now and again, to dissolve our political bands with the ninnies who keep abandoning our founding principles.  It used to be self-evident that our government’s role was primarily to protect certain unalienable rights, such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  It used to be that our government did the bidding of the people -0 that any power it derived was solely through the consent of the governed.  It used to be our country believed in limited government – that government at its best was a necessary evil and should be aggressively restrained.”

Tom Purcelol

December 31, 2012

“The New York times’ long-standing motto, ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print,’ should be changed to reflect today’s reality: ‘Manufacturing News to Fit an Ideology.’”

Thomas Sowell

“Socialism destroys the incentive to produce, dampens the human spsirit and results, ultimately , in less for everyone.”

David Limbaugh

“Government welfarism, with its ever-increasing army of pensioners and other beneficiaries, is fatally easy to launch and fatally easy to extend, but almost impossible to bring to a halt – and quite impossible politically to reverse, no matter how obvious and catastrophic its consequences become.”

Henry Hazlitt

“The Founding Fathers set up a system that heavily relied upon self-reliance and competition, with only a small dose of government intrusion.”

Bill O’Reilly

“If one regards inflation as an evil, then one has to stop inflating.  One has to balance the budget of the government.”

Ludwig von Mises

December 27, 2012

“The past 70 years have shown that government has not prudently handled, and cannot prudently handle, the plight of the poor.  Rather than help those in need of assistance during times of trouble, the federal government has imprisoned them in a political power game, resulting in increased dependence.”

Jude Blanchette

“Bureaucrats denounce private enterprise for the consequences of their own reckless policies and demand still more governmental controls.”

Henry Hazlitt

If people come to believe that government will act in their place, they are less likely to become involved themselves.  Indeed, we already see substantial evidence that private charitable giving tends to decline when government welfare increases.”

Michael D. Tanner

“Nothing has value in itself.  The consumer confers value on it by seeking to acquire it.  Hence, the value of a thing is never objective, but always subjective.”

Faustino Ballve

“The essence of an individual’s fr4edom is the opportunity to deviate from traditional ways of thinking and doing things.”

December 20, 2012

“Government aid programs have been endlessly expanded, and the government has sought to maximize the number of people willing to accept handouts…Roughly half of all Americans are dependent on the government, either for handouts, pensions, or paychecks.”

James Bovard

“There is a long history of monetary experience.  It tells us that government is at heart a counterfeiter and therefore cannot be trusted to control money, and that this is true of both autocratic and popular government.”

Garet Garrett

“The most important business of one generation is the raising of the next generation.  Nothing else you do in life will be as deeply satisfying…”

George Will

“For Al Gore and Paul Ehrlich and Co., whatever the problem, the solution is always the same.  Whether it’s global cooling, global warming, or overpopulation, we need bigger government, more regulation, higher taxes, and a massive transfer of power from the citizens to some unelected self-perpetuating crisis lobby.”

Mark Steyn

“The market steers the capitalistic economy.  It directs each individual’s activities into those channels in which he best serves the wants of his fellow-men. The market alone puts the whole social system of private ownership of the means of production and free enterprise in order and provides it with sense and meaning.”

Ludwig von Mises

December 19, 2012

“The key ingredient of politics is the idea that all of society’s ills can be cured politically.  It’s like a cookbook where the recipe for everything is to fry it.  The fruit cocktail is fried.”

P.J. O’Rourke

“Government is in the business of misdirected incentives.  Take poverty.  Years ago LBJ unleashed a flurry of government programs to eliminate it.  We’ve spent well over a trillion dollars since and all our good intentions got us is more poverty.”

Tom Purcell

“There is nothing like widespread poverty to boost a country’s equality index.”

Bob Tyrrell

“Never before in the history of the modern research university have entire departments and fields been devoted to purely ideological pursuits.”

David Horowitz

“Most activists on the Left believe that they, not only their values, are morally superior to their adversaries.  Therefore, coercing people to adhere to ‘progressive’ values is morally acceptable, even demanded.”

Dennis Prager

December 18, 2012

“The housing and financial crisis could not have occurred in the absence of government housing and monetary policies.”

Sheldon Richman

“Continued dependence on relief inducers a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.”

Franklin Roosevelt

“Throughout history, politicians have used other people’s property to buy themselves power.  That is the primary achievement of the welfare state.”

James Bovard

“The long-run historical tendency of capitalism has not only been to increase real incomes more or less proportionately nearly all along the line, but to benefit the masses even more than the rich.”

Henry Hazlitt

“The more noteworthy a person’s achievements, the more government agents are attracted to investigating that person.”

James Cook

December 14, 2012

“A nation that encourages its people to spend more and save less promotes economic backwardness, social decay and its own financial doom.”

Kurt Richebacher

“To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”

James Madison

“Once the idea is accepted that money is something whose supply is determined simply by the printing press, it becomes impossible for the politicians in power to resist the constant demands for further inflation.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.  It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”

William Pitt

“Money could never have originated as paper.”

James Cook

December 13, 2012

“Everyone wants to live at the expense of the State.  They forget that the State lives at the expense of everyone.”

Frederic Bastiat

“Government intervention into nearly every aspect of our lives is so common that people often lose sight of how things would operate absent the intervention.”

William L. Anderson

“The growing size of the government debt should be of real concern to every creditor and especially to every taxpayer with any interest whatsoever in private property and personal freedom.”

Paul L. Poirot

“Statism, which forces all of us within its orbit, is nothing but a political system of organized plunder, managed by every conceivable type of pressure group.”

Leonard E. Read

“We cannot restore traditional American freedom unless we limit the government’s power to tax.”

Frank Chodorov

December 11, 2012
                                                                                      
“Libertarians are learning to their sorrow that big businessmen cannot necessarily be relied upon to be their allies in the battle against extension of governmental encroachments.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Free markets are economically optimal, but partially free markets, with endless creation of fiat money and implicit government guarantees of the big boys, can produce perverse and dangerous results.”

Martin Hutchinson

“By definition, the moment one crosses from center to left, one accepts more government control of people’s lives.  Therefore, the further left society moves, the more there is government control over its citizens’ lives.  It is astonishing that this obvious fact is not universally acknowledged and that the Left has somehow successfully portrayed itself as preoccupied with personal liberty.”

Dennis Prager

“The sheer number of government employees and welfare recipients effectively transforms the purpose of government from maintaining order to confiscating as much as possible from vulnerable taxpayers.”

James Bovard

“Once a person comes to rely on the government for support, that person becomes a socialist through and through.”

December 10, 2012 

“The characteristic mark of economic history under capitalism is unceasing economic progress, a steady increase in the quantity of capital goods available and a continuous trend toward an improvement in the general standard of living.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The facts of life are conservative.”

Margaret Thatcher

“It’s people seeking more for themselves that has produced a better life for all Americans.”

Walter Williams

“Inflationism is a dreadful cancer that is gnawing at the backbone of the civilized order.”

Hans F. Sennholz

“What the American worker needs is more of what WalMart offers and less of what the government offers.”

Llewellyn Rockwell Jr.

December 7, 2012

“A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have, starting with your sense of self-reliance.”

Mark Steyn

“If, as is generally the case, the heirs are not equal to the demands which life makes on an entrepreneur, the inherited wealth rapidly vanishes.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Government is not peaceful; it is inherently coercive.”

Edward H. Crane

“Popular culture, in all its crudeness, is the output of liberals.  It is liberalism that for decades has rejected any protest as ‘censorship’ or ‘McCarthyism.’”

Mona Charen

“Whatever you subsidize you get more of.”

James Cook

December 6, 2012

“No government can print wealth.  A government can get away with the illusion that paper is wealth, but in the end too much paper is always created, and with that action the illusion falls apart.”

Richard Russell

“The standard of living of the common man is highest in those countries which have the greatest number of wealthy entrepreneurs.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The end of the law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.”

John Locke

“The solution to our problems is not more paternalism, laws, decrees, and controls, but the restoration of liberty and free enterprise, the restoration of incentives, to let loose the tremendous constructive energies of 300 million Americans.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Prices impose the most effective kind of rationing – self-rationing.  Why is rationing necessary?  Because what everybody wants always adds up to more than there is…Resources are limited but desires are not.  That is the basic and defining problem of economics.”

Thomas Sowell

December 5, 2012

“To judge by what my children are learning in school, you’d think American history was 75% slavery and 25% everything else (and that 25% includes a large dollop of imperialism, racism, sexism an homophobia, leaving little time for Lincoln, Edison, Clay, Holmes, Alcott, Dickinson, Adams, Longfellow or Fulton).”

Mona Charen

“The Libertarian Party remains captive to ideological absolutists who argue, for example, for the abolition of all taxes, rather than presenting a realistic and obtainable program for reducing the size of government.”

Michael D. Tanner

“A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.”

G. Gordon Liddy

“It is not the responsibility of the government or the legal system to protect a citizens from himself.”

Justice Casey Percel

“Precisely because the State has the monopoly of coercion it can be allowed the monopoly only of coercion.  Only if the modern State can be held within a strictly limited agency of duties and powers can it be prevented from regimenting, conquering, and ultimately devouring the society which gave it birth.”

Henry Hazlitt

November 27, 2012

“Without the efforts of the makers, the takers and their enablers are dead in the water.”

Arnold Ahler

“Government aid impedes success and creates dependence, while entrepreneurs create success and independence.”

Cal Thomas

“The fall of a great nation is always a suicide.”

Arnold Toynbee

“In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty.”

Henry Hazlitt

“You can’t think in sound bytes.”

James Cook

November 21, 2012 

“The fundamental law of the market is: the customer is always right.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Modern capitalism benefited the masses in a double way – both by greatly increasing the wages of the masses of workers and greatly reducing the real prices they had to pay for what was produced.”

Henry Hazlitt

“George Washington might have become our king, but chose not to.  His governing idea was that government is our servant because we are inherently free.  It is an idea too many in government today forget.”

Dick Armey

“The truth is the committed left press in America is not longer interest in reporting the news.  Anything that hinders a favorable view of the far left will be ignored; anything that advances liberal causes will be celebrated.  News reporting today is largely about ideology and shaping the culture, not about informing the public.”

Bill O’Reilly

“To finance ‘entitlement’ programs, the government threatens force against the taxpayers who provide the money.  Why are people who favor compulsion called humanitarians, while those who favor freedom are stigmatized as greedy?”

John Stossel

HAVE A BLESSED THANKSGIVING

November 19, 2012

“The state is no organism capable of bringing either moral or material improvements to the populace, but merely a vehicle of power for the men and party in power.”

Niccolo Machiavelli

“Within a society that permits a free market, power lies within the market itself, and ‘is dispersed among so much of [the] population rather than concentrated solely in a governing elite.”

Mark Steyn

“The characteristic feature of modern capitalism is mass production of goods destined for consumption by the masses.  The result is a tendency towards a continuous improvement in the average standard of living, a progressing enrichment of the many.”

Ludwig von Mises

“It is impossible to find a single example of a monopoly that has ever existed without official protection.”

Faustino Ballve

“Liberty is not a means to a political end.  It is itself the highest political end.”

Lord Acton

November 16, 2012

“Big government conservatism will simply bring us ever more government intervention in and control over our lives, greater regulation, mounting debt that threatens the nation’s future economic health, and less freedom for every American.”

Michael D. Tanner

“If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all.”

Jacob G. Hornberger

“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”

P.J. O’Rourke

“Not since the days of the Hitler You have young people been subjected to more propaganda on more politically correct issues.  At one time, educators boasted that their role was not to teach students what to think but how to think.  Today, their role is far too often to teach students what to think on everything from immigration to global warming to the new sacred trinity of ‘race, class and gender.”

Thomas Sowell

“Bureaucracy by its nature resists change and nullifies progress.”

James Cook

November 15, 2012

“The true danger is when Liberty is nibbled away, for expedients.”

Edmund Burke

“Entrepreneurs do not simply do business the way everyone else does; instead, they find new resources or take existing resources and change them to create new goods or to enhance existing services.  Over time, in a free-market setting, entrepreneurs lower real costs to customers.”

William L. Anderson

“In the public sector, incentives lead bureaucrats to provide their services at maximum cost.”

Reed Garfield

“Political power intoxicates the best hearts.  No man is wise enough, nor good enough, to be trusted with much political power.”

Hans F. Sennholz

“Depression is the aftermath of credit expansion.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Unchecked, government social programs are a security threat because they weaken the ultimate line of defense: the free-born citizen whose responsibilities are not subcontracted to the government.”

Mark Steyn

November, 14, 2012

“Government relief tends constantly to get out of hand.  And even when it is kept within reasonable bounds it tends to reduce the incentives to work and to save both of those who receive it and of those who are forced to pay it.  It may be said, in fact, that practically every measure that governments take with the ostensible object of ‘helping the poor’ has the long-run effect of doing the opposite.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Big-government conservatives share a common arrogance with contemporary liberalism.  They are convinced that they know what is best for every American and because they know best, they should guide the rest of us in the proper directions.”

Michael D. Tanner

“Man is not free unless government is limited…As governments expands, liberty contracts.”

Ronald Reagan

“I’ve repeated over a number of years a lesson learned repeatedly throughout history: Inflationism is a ‘Road to Ruin.’  This road has become all too visible.”

Doug Noland

“Inflation is essentially antidemocratic.”

November 13, 2012

“Monetary expansion is a massive scheme of hidden redistribution.”

Murray N. Rothbard

“Government intervention in the economy – through taxes, regulation and, most importantly, currency inflation – causes distortions and misallocations of capital that must eventually be unwound.  The distortions degrade the general standard of living, and the economy goes into a recession (call that an incomplete cleansing).  Or it goes into a depression – wherein the entire sickly structure comes unglued.”

Doug Casey

“We know that welfare is a failure.  It has neither reduced poverty nor made the poor self-sufficient.  It has torn at the social fabric of the country and been a significant factor in increasing out-of-wedlock births with all of their attendant problems.  It has weakened the work ethic and contributed to rising crime rates.  Most tragically of all, the pathologies it engenders have been passed on from parent to child, from generation to generation.”

Michael D. Tanner

“The concept of a ‘just’ or ‘fair’ price is devoid of any scientific meaning; it is a disguise for wishes, a striving for a state of affairs different from reality.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Government is not using modern technology so much to modernize and improve services as it is to regulate, punish, collect taxes and keep an eye on us.  They’d rather rule than serve.”

James Cook

November 12, 2012

“All government operation is wasteful, inefficient, and serves the bureaucrat rather than the consumer.”

Murray N. Rothbard

“Public works are not accomplished by the miraculous power of a magic wands.  They are paid for by funds taken away from the citizens.”

Ludwig von Mises

“One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.”

Thomas B. Reed

“America needs fewer laws, not more prisons.”

James Bovard

“Once we realize that government doesn’t work, we will stop dreaming that this or that social problem can be solved by passing a law – or by creating a new government program – or by electing someone who will make Washington more efficient or cost-conscious.”

John Browne

November 7, 2012

“Every businessman enjoying customer patronage, whether he be a baker, banker, or barber is conferring a public benefit, raising production, and reducing unemployment; businessmen earn their livelihood by producing products and rendering services where ever they are needed.”

Hans F. Sennholz

“The more government dependents, the more likely that democracy will become a conspiracy against self-reliance.”

James Bovard

“Socialism (modern liberalism) is not in the least what it pretends to be.  It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created.  It does not build; it destroys.  For destruction is the essence of it.  It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Relief, or redistribution of income, voluntary or coerced, is never the true solution of poverty, but at best a makeshift, which may mask the disease and mitigate the pain, but provides no basic cure.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Compassion is good but politicians have turned compassion into the welfare state.”

Thomas Sowell

November 2, 2012

“If it be taught that all who are born have a right to support on the land, whatever be their number, and that there is no occasion to exercise any prudence in the affair of marriage so as to check this number, the temptations, according to all the known principles of human nature, will inevitably be yielded to, and more and more will gradually become dependent on parish assistance.”

Thomas Malthus

“Capitalists have the tendency to move toward those countries in which there is plenty of labor available and at which labor is reasonable.  And by the fact that they bring capital into these countries, they bring about a trend toward higher wage rates.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The typical local government agenda has these goals: finding ways to get more tax dollars, improving the pay and benefit packages of those who work for government, hiring more staff, securing additional powers for those who run the government, implement more rules that dictate how citizens can live while reducing the number of rules that govern those who run the government.”

Steven Greenhut

“Government provided free tuition tends more and more to produce a uniform conformist education, with college faculties ultimately dependent for their jobs on the government, and so developing an economic interest in profession and teaching a statist, pro-government, and socialist ideology.”

Henry Hazlitt

“If everyone had to start up their own business, socialism would soon die.”

James Cook

November 1, 2012

“When have handouts ever worked?  In the United States, we learned that welfare for our own citizens not only turned into a debilitating crutch, it created a more or less permanent underclass.”

Linda Chavez

“Anyplace market forces have been artificially removed by the government there is a total absence of incentives, competition, effective oversight, cost controls and so on.”

Ann Colter

“Government doesn’t work.  That’s the first lesson we must learn if we want to improve society.”

Harry Browne

“The essential quality of a free economy is that I cannot be planned.  It leaves the solution of problems to the inspiration of the individual in the untrammeled population.  When something approaching a free economy has existed, it has always worked better than the schemes of any planners.”

Thomas H. Barber

“Capitalists have the tendency to move towards those countries in which there is plenty of labor available and at which labor is reasonable.  And by the fact that they bring capital into these countries, they bring about a trend toward higher wage rates.”

Ludwig von Mises

October 30, 2012

“In a game there are winners and losers.  But a business deal is always advantageous for both parties.  If both the buyer and the seller were not to consider the transaction as the most advantageous action they could choose under the prevailing conditions, they would not enter into the deal.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude.”

Jonah Goldberg

“Capitalism is a belief that nobody is wise enough and knows enough to control the lives of other people.  When each person buys, sells, consumes, produces, saves, and spends at will, ‘the miracle of the market’ enables everyone to benefit.”

Perry Gresham

“Government bailouts are like potato chips:  You can’t stop with just one.”

Thomas Sowell

“Better to build orphanages than prisons.”

James Cook

October 29, 2012

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Adam Smith

“Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.”

George Washington

“Sometimes any issue that hits the television news seems to become an issue that must be addressed by the federal government.  And like busybodies everywhere, Congress can’t help peering in our windows and telling us how to live our lives.”

Michael D. Tanner

“The envious are more likely to be mollified by seeing others deprived of some advantage than by gaining it for themselves.  It is not what they lack that chiefly troubles them, but what others have.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Unlike every other person and institution in society, government obtains its revenue fron coercion, from taxation.”

Murray N. Rothbard

October 26, 2012

“Work is not a curse; it is the prerogative of intelligence, the only means to manhood, and the measure of civilization.”

Calvin Coolidge

“The envious are not satisfied with equality; they secretly yearn for superiority and revenge.  In the French Revolution of 1848, a woman coal-heaver is said to have remarked to a richly dressed lady: ‘Yes, madam, everything’s going to be equal now; I shall go in silks and you’ll carry coal.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Socialism is the renunciation of rational economy.”

Ludwig von Mises

“In many places around the world, the government runs everything (Cuba, for instance) and the people have nothing – because the government runs everything.”

Tom Purcell

“Love of country is nowhere the same as love of government.”

James Cook

October 23, 2012

“We are so accustomed to the miracle of private enterprise that we habitually take it for granted.  But how does private industry solve the incredibly complex problem of turning out tens of thousands of different goods and services in the proportions in which they are wanted by the public?...It solves these problems through the institutions of private property, competition, the free market, and the existence of money – through the interrelations of supply and demand, costs and prices, profits and losses.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Capitalism is what people do if you leave them alone.”

Kenneth Minogue

“Social Security is a fraudulent scheme in which the government collect money from you for your retirement – and immediately spend the money on something else.”

Harry Browne

“He who saves money does not keep it under a mattress, as people did in the mercantilist era, but invests it to produce a profit or to yield interest.  Either he puts it into real property or into mortgages, and thereby favors the expansion of housing and the employment of construction workers; or he invest it in equities and buys shares of productive enterprises, which are also thus enabled to expand; or he lends it at interest to entrepreneurs, with the same result for the general well-being.  Saving and capital accumulation, then, are the great factors making for an increase in production and a consequent abundance of jobs and a lowering of prices.”

Faustino Ballve

“Self interest feeds more people than self-sacrifice.”

James Cook

October 22, 2012

“Peace and prosperity are inversely proportional to the level of taxation.”

John A. Pugsley

“The most important thing to remember is that inflation is not an act of God, that inflation is not a catastrophe of the elements or a disease that comes like the plague.  Inflation is policy.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Throughout history governments have been chronically short of revenue.  The reason should be clear: unlike you and me, governments do not produce useful goods and services that they can sell on the market; governments rather than producing and selling services, live parasitically off the market and off society.”

Murray N. Rothbard.

“The trouble with the social-democratic state is that, when government does too much nobody else does much of anything.”

Mark Steyn

“The state always poses a greater threat to society than whatever problem it purports to solve.”

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

October 18, 2012

“Government income redistribution programs produce the same result as theft.  In fact, that’s what a thief does; he redistributes income.  The difference between government and thievery is mostly a matter of legality.”

Walter Williams

“The greatest threat facing America today is the disastrous fiscal policies of our own government, marked by shameless deficit spending and Federal Reserve currency devaluation.  It is the one-two punch – Congress spending more than it can tax or borrow, and the Fed printing money to make up the difference – that threatens to impoverish us by further destroying the value of our dollars.”

Ron Paul

“Capitalism gives a poor person an opportunity to become rich.  It does not lock people into the condition of poverty.”

Perry Gresham

“There is no reason why capitalists and entrepreneurs should be ashamed of earning profits.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Government is so big today that more than half the population gets a major part of its income from the state.”

John Stossel

October 17, 2012

“The brutality of communism was quickly swept under history’s rug, in large part because so many on the left had embraced it as the solution to humankind’s problems.”

Cal Thomas

“The institution of taxation is not a civilized but a barbaric method to fund anything…it amounts to…a gross violation of human liberty.”

Tibor Machan

“To concede that there are social problems that cannot be corrected without the state is to give up the entire argument over the future of liberty itself.”

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

“Competition always tends to bring about the most economical and efficient method of production.  Those who are most successful in this competition will acquire more capital to increase their production still further; those who are least successful will be forced out of the field.  So capitalist production tends constantly to be drawn into the hands of the most efficient.”

Henry Hazlitt

“In many fields of the administration of interventionist measures, favoritism simply cannot be avoided.”

Ludwig von Mises

October 16, 2012

“A fact rarely suspected, let alone understood, is that businessmen are by no means the chief beneficiaries of the free market, private ownership, limited government way of life.  Many business ventures fail entirely.  Who then are the beneficiaries?  The masses!”

Leonard E. Read

“On the unhampered market there prevails an irresistible tendency to employ every factor of production for the best possible satisfaction of the most urgent needs of the consumers.  If the government interfered with this process, it can only impair satisfaction; it can never improve it.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Every day Big Government heaps demands and restrictions upon businesses that sink some enterprises, cause others to direct resources away from serving customers and instead toward jumping through hoops of lawyers and regulators, and prevent other operations from ever getting off the ground.”

Joel Miller

“If people cannot limit government they will not long be free.”

Garet Garrett

“The government endangers us with our own money.”

James Cook

October 5, 2012

“The cheap but simple human emotion of envy is the driving force of all socialism, of all anti-capitalist philosophy.  It is the mark of the intellectual.”

Andrew J. Galambos

“Falling prices through increased production is a wonderful long-run tendency of untrammeled capitalism.”

Murray N. Rothbard

“A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcome – ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.”

Milton Friedman

“The guiding purpose of the government regulator is to prevent rather than to create something.”

Alan Greenspan

“Nations that embrace the free market to the greatest extent prosper the most.”

James Cook

October 4, 2012

“Whether it’s called ‘compassionate conservatism’ or ‘big government Republicanism,’ after years of record increases in federal spending, more government is now the accepted Republican philosophy in Washington.”

Mike Pence

“Nobody can be at the same time a correct bureaucrat and an innovator.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The private economy, not government, creates opportunity.  Government should just deliver basic services well and then get out of the private sector’s way.”

Steve Malanga

“Monetary inflation not only raises prices and destroys the value of the currency unit; it also acts as a giant system of expropriation.”

Murray N. Rothbard

“Competition always tends to bring about the most economical and efficient method of production.  Those who are most successful in this competition will acquire more capital to increase their production still further; those who are least successful will be forced out of the field.  So capitalist production tends constantly to be drawn into the hands of the most efficient.”

Henry Hazlitt

October 3, 2012

“If he wins, President Obama will have succeeded in pitting Americans against each other – never a good thing.  Once politicians divided us based on race.  Mr. Obama divides us based on money.  He plays the envy card and turns us against each other based on how much we have in the bank.”

Bernard Goldberg

“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”

James Madison

“The sad fact is that today most of the heads of big businesses in America have become so confused or intimidated that, so far from carrying the free market argument to the enemy, they fail to defend themselves adequately even when attacked.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Man’s envy is at its most intense where all are almost equal; his calls for redistribution are loudest when there is virtually nothing to redistribute.”

Helmut Schoeck

“Statism is the disease that prescribes itself as the cure.”

Barry Loberfeld

October 2, 2012

“Society is best served when the means of production are in the possession of those who know how to use them best.”

Ludwig von Mises

“This vital consideration of incentives is almost systematically overlooked in the proposals of agitators for more and bigger government welfare schemes.  We should all be concerned about the plight of the poor and unfortunate.  But the hard two-part question that any plan for relieving poverty must answer is:  How can we mitigate the penalties of failure and misfortune without undermining the incentives to effort and success.”

Henry Hazlitt

“We have but to remember man’s natural tendency to satisfy his desires with the minim8um of effort to realize how political power will be utilized.”

Frank Chodorov

“Whether we want to own up to it or not, the welfare state has done what Jim Crow, gross discrimination and poverty could not have done.  It has contributed to the breakdown of the black family structure and has helped establish a set of value alien to traditional values of high moral standards, hard work and achievement.”

Walter Williams

“Government charity gives the most to those who refuse to help themselves; private charity gives less.”

James Cook

October 1, 2012

“When people leave it to others to stop the national government from taking unconstitutional actions that threaten liberty, they are free riding on other people’s efforts to preserve liberty.  The difficulty, as with all public goods, is that everyone faces incentives to free ride.  If most people free ride, liberty will perish.”

Charlotte Twight

“If any behavior needs to be reined in, it should be the propensity of people to use the political system to take other people’s money.”

“If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left.”

Thomas Sowell

“No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions.  He had money as well.”

Margaret Thatcher

“The more numerous public instrumentalities become, the more is there generated in citizens the notion that everything is to be done for them, and nothing by them.  Every generation is made less familiar with the attainment of desired ends by individual actions or private agencies; until. Eventually, governmental agencies come to be thought of as the only available agencies.”

Herbert Spencer

September 27, 2012

“There can be little doubt that many egalitarians are motivated at least partly by envy.”

Henry Hazlitt

“The worship of the state is the worship of force.  There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men.  The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.  The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The best reason to diminish social programs is not to put more money in people’s pockets but to put more responsibility in people’s pockets.”

Mark Steyn

“No warning can save a people determined to grow rich suddenly.”

Samuel Lloyd

“That government is best which governs not at all…and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they have.”

Henry David Thoreau

September 26, 2012

“Liberalism’s fatal flaw,…is that it has no permanent norms, only a succession of enthusiasms espoused by minor prophets.  Each of these seems like a hot new idea to liberals, but soon goes to irksome and destructive extremes.”

Joseph Sobran

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”

Edward Abbey

“The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition…is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration.”

Adam Smith

“Our government officials create too many laws and spend too much money.  It’s all because they claim to have the best interests of the people at heart when in fact, knowingly or unknowingly, they do not.”

Jack Crooks

“It is always and everywhere the province of the central bank to monetize any spending, the government’s or the private sector’s, by printing enough money to pay for it in depreciated dollars.”

Caroline Baum

September 24, 2012

“The more ‘adequate’ we make relief, the more people we are going to find willing to get on it and stay on it indefinitely.  The more we try to make sure that everybody really in need of relief gets it, the more certain we can be that we are also giving it to people who neither need nor deserve it.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Government has no wealth of its own.  Before it gives anything to anyone, it must take from those who produced it.”

John Stossel

“Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe.”

Ludwig von Mises

“He who cannot by his labor suffice for his own support has no claim to the privilege of helping himself to the money of others.  By becoming dependent on the remaining members of the community for actual subsistence, he abdicates his claim to equal rights for them in other respects.”

John Stuart Mill

“One of the worst features of all the plans for sharing the wealth and equalizing or guaranteeing incomes is that they lose sight of the conditions and institutions that are necessary to create wealth and income in the first place.”

Henry Hazlitt

September 21, 2012

“Taxes are necessary.  But the system of discriminatory taxation universally accepted under the misleading name of progressive taxation of income and inheritance is not a mode of taxation.  It is rather a mode of disguised expropriation of the successful capitalists and entrepreneurs.”

Ludwig von Mises

“A government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have.”

Barry Goldwater

“When individual enterprise is free and unhampered, profit-and-loss calculations set precise limits to a businessman’s temptations to expand his services…a government agency or bureau faces no such limitation.  Its services, mo matter how valuable they may be, have no market price and, therefore, cannot be subjected to profit-and-loss accounting.”

Hans F. Sennholz

“The customer is God, and the market decides everything.”

Chinese Slogan

“Governments institutionalize something for nothing.”

James Cook

September 20, 2012

“If we cannot return to fiscal integrity because the public prefers profusion and prodigality over balanced budgets, we cannot escape paying the price, which is ever lower incomes and standards of living for all.”

Hans F. Sennholz

“Those politicians, professors and union bosses who curse big business are fighting for a lower standard of living.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Once we realize that government doesn’t work, we’ll know that the only way to improve government is by reducing its size – by doing away with laws, by getting rid of programs, by making government spend and tax less, by reducing government as far as we can.”

Harry Browne

“We have more than a century of experience to show that ever bigger, ever more expensive, ever more intrusive government simply doesn’t work.  Big government has not eliminated or even significantly reduced poverty.  It has not made our health care or retirement systems better. It has not improved education.  It has not solved any of the myriad problems our society faces.  Indeed, more often than not it has made those problems worse.”

Michael D. Tanner

“The world has always been betrayed not by scoundrels but by decent men with bad ideas.”

Sydney J. Harris

September 19, 2012

“The interventionist policy [big government] provides thousands and thousands of people with safe, placid, and not too strenuous jobs at the expense of the rest of society.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The lower-class individual lives from moment to moment.  If he has nay awareness of a future, it is of something fixed, fated, beyond his control: things happen to him, he does not make them happen.  Impulse governs his behavior either because he cannot discipline himself to sacrifice a present for a future satisfaction or because he has no sense of the future.  He is therefore radically improvident: whatever he cannot consume immediately he considers valueless.  His bodily needs (especially for sex) and his taste for ‘action’ take precedence over everything else – and certainly over any work routine.”

Edward C. Banfield

“The social and racial conflict, which springs from the redistribution ideology, may deepen as economic output is shrinking and transfer ‘entitlements’ cause budget deficits to soar.  The U.S. dollar, which has become a mere corollary of government finance, is unlikely to survive the soaring deficits.”

Hans F. Sennholz

“The resources that government extracts from the private sector to pay for itself are resources that are not available for the private sector to use in producing more goods and services.  When the federal government takes money out of our pockets, we have less money to spend or save.  When the federal government takes money from business, it has less money to use for investment, research, or payroll.”

Michael D. Tanner

“To the progressive mind, the very concept of ‘the enemy’ is obsolescent: there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven’t yet accommodated.”

Mark Steyn

September 18, 2012

“History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided.”

Konrad Adenauer

“To end cronyism we must end government’s ability to dole out favors and rig the market.”

Charles G. Koch

“The Freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never was, and is not now, the normal state of human affairs.  The normal state for the ordinary person is tyranny, arbitrary control and abuse mainly by their own government.”

Walter Williams

“In a market, goods and services are exchanged through a myriad complex of voluntary transactions, each made to the mutual benefit of those engaging in the transaction.  The costs of bad choices are borne by those who make them.”

Jeffrey A. Singer

“There are only two questions about government.  How much do you want?  How much can you stand?”

James Cook

September 17, 2012

“There are now businesses and entire industries that exist solely as a result of federal patronage.  Profiting from government instead of earning profits in the economy, such businesses can continue to succeed even if they are squandering resources and making products that people wouldn’t ordinarily buy.”

Charles G. Koch

“The increase of social wealth is not accompanied by a diminishing number of capitalist magnates, but by an increasing number of capitalists of all degrees.”

Eduard Bernstein

“I deny the power of the general government to making paper money, or anything else a legal tender.”

Thomas Jefferson

“The prerequisite for more economic equality in the world is industrialization.  And this is possible only through increased capital investment, increased capital accumulation.”

Ludwig von Mises

“There is a profound contrast between the effects of foreign aid and of voluntary private investment: Foreign aid goes from government to government.  It is therefore almost inevitably statist and socialist.”

Henry Hazlitt

September 14, 2012

“We are on dangerous terrain when government picks winners and losers in the economy by subsidizing favored products and industries.”

Charles G. Koch

“Liberty in the United States will never be reestablished so long as elites and masses alike look to the president to perform supernatural feats and therefore tolerate a virtually unlimited exercise of presidential power.  Until we can restore limited, constitutional government in this country, God save us from great presidents.”

Robert Higgs

“Time and again, experience has shown that while private enterprise, carried on in an environment of open competition, delivers the best products and services at the best price, governmental intervention stifles initiative, subsidizes inefficiency, and raises costs.”

Burton W. Folsom, Jr.

“Democracy is not a good that people can enjoy without trouble.  It is, on the contrary, a treasure that must be daily defended and conquered anew by strenuous effort.”

Ludwig von Mises

“People who never seem to learn claim the government can be made more efficient.”

James Cook

September 13, 2012

“When currying favor with Washington is seen as a much easier way to make money, businesses inevitably begin to compete with rivals in securing government largess, rather than in winning customers.”

Charles G. Koch

“The direction and rhythm of human progress do not depend on the masses, even when they add up to hundreds of millions; they depend on superior minorities.”

Gonzalo Fernandez de la Mora

“In public administration there is no connection between revenue and expenditure.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The more power government has to provide things, the more power it has to dictate terms.”

Sheldon Richman

“During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed  to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model – all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food.”

Thomas Sowell

September 12, 2012

“The role of business is to provide products and services that make people’s live better – while using fewer resources – and to act lawfully and with integrity.  Businesses that do this through voluntary exchanges not only benefit through increased profits, they bring better and more competitively priced goods and services to market.  This creates a win-win situation customers and companies alike.”

Charles G. Koch

“Racism accusations are delivered by white people speaking on behalf of black people and black people speaking on behalf of white people for an agenda that is not about race, but about power and wealth.  These accusations have become increasingly ludicrous as they have become disconnected from actual racism and even from race.”

Daniel Greenfield

“The president of the United States is a socialist.”

Stanley Kurtz

“The first socialists were the intellectuals; they, and not the masses, are the backbone of Socialism.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The promise of American capitalism is that it makes people richer, freer and more independent.  But since the introduction of the Fed, the currency in which Americans keep score has so addled the figures, we scarcely know if we are winning or losing.  The dollar we knew as a child – in the 1950s – is only worth a tenth as much today.”

Bill Bonner

September 11, 2012

“Far too many businesses have been all too eager to lobby for maintaining and increasing subsidies and mandates paid by taxpayers and consumers.  This growing partnership between business and government is a destructive force, undermining not just our economy and our political system, but the very foundations of culture.”

Charles G. Koch

“The first (lesson) which we meet again and again in history, is that once the dole or similar relief programs are introduced, they seem almost inevitably – unless surrounded by the most rigid restrictions – to get out of hand.  The second lesson is that once this happens the poor become more numerous and worse off than they were before, not only because they have lost –self-reliance, but because the sources of wealth and production on which they depended for either doles or jobs are diminished or destroyed.”

Henry Hazlitt

“The issue is always the same: the government or the market.  There is no third solution.”

Ludwig von Mises

“There is no question that if one were to ask whether we Americans are moving towards more liberty or more government control over our lives, the answer would unambiguously be the latter – more government control over our lives.  We might have reached a point where the trend is irreversible and that is a true tragedy for if liberty is lost in America, it will be lost for all times and all places.”

Walter Williams

“It is said that government is a necessary evil, but it is far more evil than it is necessary.”

James Cook

September 7, 2012

“Most change in America doesn’t come from politicians.  It comes from people inventing things and creating.  The telephone, the telegraph, the computer, all those things didn’t come from government.  Our world is going to get better and better, as long as we keep the politicians from screwing it up.”

David Boaz

“Do the American voters know that the unprecedented improvement in their standard of living that the last hundred years brought was the result of the steady rise in the per-head quota of capital invested?  Do they realize that every measure leading to capital decumulation jeopardizes their prosperity?

Ludwig von Mises

“The same government that requires a taxpaying citizen to document every statement on his tax return decrees that question a welfare applicant demeans and humiliates him.”

Ronald Reagan

“The ability of the market to serve society has been and is continually being undermined by the attacks leveled by its ideological opponents.”

Israel M. Kirzner

“Apparently there’s nothing more dangerous than a religious criminal.”

James Cook

September 5, 2012

“In talking about equality and asking vehemently for its realization, nobody advocates a curtailment of his own present income.”

Ludwig von Misses

“The entitlement mentality so carefully cultivated by liberal academics, politicians, clergymen, and journalists continues to corrode the self-sufficiency that once defined the American character.”

Mona Charen

“The sad truth is that one of the reasons people have to go on relief in the first place is that they have been as incompetent or heedless in spending money as in earning it.  The worst thing one can give a spendthrift, a drunkard, a drug addict, or a compulsive gambler is cash.”

Henry Hazlitt

“What ‘eminent domain’ laws mean in practice is that politicians have a right to seize your property and turn it over to someone else, in order to gain campaign contributions and win votes.”

Thomas Sowell

“The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”

August 30, 2012

“The greater the power, the more the dangerous the abuse.”

Edmund Burke

“…the greatest political problem facing the world today is…how to curb the oppressive power of government, how to keep it within reasonable bounds.”

Leonard E. Read

“By substituting the judgment of bureaucrats and political interests for the private knowledge of millions of entrepreneurs seeking the most productive use of labor and capital, government misallocates scarce resources that would be better spent increasing private-sector productivity – and along with it private incomes.”

Jason Lewis

“Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty.”

Ludwig von MIses

“Those whose hardships are set forth in pamphlets and proclaimed in sermons and speeches which echo throughout society, are assumed to be all worthy souls, grievously wronged; and none of them are thought of as bearing the penalties of their misdeeds.”

Herbert Spencer

August 24, 2012

“Big business depends entirely on the patronage of those who buy its products: the biggest enterprise loses its power and its influence when it loses its customers.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Government doesn’t work.  You work, I work, Federal Express works, Microsoft works, the Salvation Army works, Alcoholics Anonymous works, but government doesn’t work.”

Harry Browne

“Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Can anyone recall the last time a government bureaucracy declared that it had fulfilled its mission and now should be abolished?”

Michael D. Tanner

“When the government tries to make people more equal, it makes them more unequal.”

August 23, 2012

“Under capitalism men provide for themselves, while under Socialism they are provided for.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Government-to-government aid rests on socialistic assumptions and promotes socialism and stagnation, whereas private foreign investment rests on capitalistic assumptions and promotes private enterprise and maximum economic growth.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Once a bureau is created, its staff becomes a tenacious political interest group, well placed to defend its budget and to make a case for expanding its activities.”

Robert Higgs

“The most politically painless way to hand out goodies, without taking responsibility for their costs, is to pass a law saying that somebody else must provide those goodies at their expense, while the politicians take credit for generosity and compassion.”

Thomas Sowell

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

Frederic Bastiat

August 21, 2012

“We live in a world where Democrats can show a commercial of an old lady being pushed over a cliff by a ‘heartless’ Republican, without ever having to acknowledge that their own, politically-calculated indifference to our impending national catastrophe will lead to every American being pushed over the cliff of national insolvency.”

Arnold Ahlert

“Here in the United States, we’ve seen the failure of mass programs of redistribution and the fiscal crises to which they give rise.  And yet many continue to defend and promote them.”

Robert A. Sirico

“In assuming any office besides its essential one, the State begins to lose the power of fulfilling its essential one.”

Herbert Spencer

“Assume that a surgeon has discovered how to do a brain surgery, that he can do only one a month, that 1,000 persons a year need such an operation if they are to survive.  How is the surgeon’s scarce resource to be allocated?  Charge whatever price is necessary to adjust supply to demand, say $50,000!  ‘For shame,’ some will cry.  ‘Your market system will save only wealthy people.’  For the moment, yes.  But soon there will be hundreds of surgeons who will acquire the same skill; and, as in the case of the once scarce and expensive ‘miracle drugs,’ the price then will be within the reach of all.”

Leonard E. Read

“To enslave a people, given them money they didn’t earn.”

James Cook

August 17, 2012

“Whenever possible, the left and the Democrats have de-stigmatized irresponsible behavior.”

Dennis Prager

“Here in the United States, we’ve seen the failure of mass programs of redistribution and the fiscal crises to which they give rise.  And yet many continue to defend and promote them.”

Robert A. Sirico

“In assuming any office besides its essential one, the State begins to lose the power of fulfilling its essential one.”

Herbert Spencer

“The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.”

Edmund Burke

“With socialized medicine, the trick is not to die while waiting for treatment.”

James cook

August `16, 2012

“Obama can’t win on the economy.  He can’t win on foreign policy.  He can’t win on any aspect of his administration.  All he can do is stir up violence and then promise t heal the country in his second term while winking to all the representatives of the grievance groups.  It’s not a new game, but the Democratic Party has never played I quite this baldly in a national election.”

Daniel Greenfield

“The political mirage of something for nothing, from leaders who ‘care,’ has ruined many a nation.”

Thomas Sowell

“The left and Democrats are relying on the decline f the American character that left-wing policies have produced.”

Dennis Prager

“Politicians, bureaucrats, editors, news commentators, ‘economists’ teachers,’ and other word artists who denounce private enterprise and praise socialism are their own worst enemies…these attacks are unwittingly destroying the sources of their own livelihood.  They kill the geese that lay the golden eggs – and don’t know it!”

Leonard E. Reed

“Highly graduate taxation realizes most completely the supreme danger of democracy, creating a state of things in which one class imposes on another burdens which it is not asked to share, and impels the State into vast schemes of extravagance, under the belief that the whole costs will be thrown upon others.”

W.E.H. Lecky

August 15, 2012

“While sabotaging our reliable energy sources, Obama is also throwing as much federal money as he can at failed green energy projects, which are so ill-conceived that a reasonable person might conclude this goal is to waste money.  Solyndra wasn’t the only such failed enterprise, as we’ve shown.  There were a dozen others, and despite these failures and the unconscionable waste, he has revealed nothing but a defiant determination to double down and spend more on other such projects.  It’s mind-blowing.”

David Limbaugh

“No matter whether it is their intention or not, almost anything that the rich can legally do tends to help the poor.  The spending of the rich gives employment to the poor.  But the saving of the rich, and their investment of these savings in the means of production, gives just as much employment, and in addition makes that employment constantly more productive and more highly paid, while it also constantly increases and cheapens the production of necessities and amenities for the masses.”

Henry Hazlitt

“The state, by relieving idleness, improvidence, or misconduct from the punishment, and depriving abstinence and foresight of the reward, which have been provided for them by nature, may indeed destroy wealth, but most certainly will aggravate poverty.”

Nassau Senior

“The welfare state has bred a generation of obnoxious, drug-addled criminals and ne’er-do-wells.  It has also, incidentally, burdened what was once the world’s biggest, most dynamic economy with the dead weight of an obstructive and vastly expensive state machine.”

Martin Durkin

“The market is color-blind.”

W. H. Hutt

August 13, 2012

“Between 2008 and 2012, 247 left-wing environmental groups received almost $569 million in federal grants.”

Jacob Laskin

“What can Americans learn from the Olympics spectacle?  According to the IMF, China will succeed America as the dominant economic power in the course of the next presidential term, so Howard Fineman, editorial director of the Huffington Post and MSNBC mainstay, was anxious to pick up tips.  ‘Brits long ago lost their empire,’ he tweeted, ‘but overall show us how to lose global power gracefully.’  So there’s that.”

Mark Steyn

“In a world dependent on international trade and commerce, and staggering under a heavy load of international debt, no policy is more destructive than protectionism.  It cuts off markets, eliminates trade, causes unemployment in export industries all over the world, depresses the prices of export commodities, especially farm products of the United States.  It is the crowning folly of government intervention.”

Hans F. Seenholz

“No one is empowered by free market procedures to enslave any other person, or to compel him to buy or sell anything.”

Paul L. Poirot

August 9, 2012

“You are much surer that you are doing good when you pay money to those who work, as a recompense of their labor, than when you give money merely in charity.”

Samuel Johnson

“The liberals say they are for civil liberties and personal freedom, but they continue to advocate government regulation of business, redistribution of wealth, and various forms of social engineering t manipulate human relationships and attitudes.”

Richard M. Eberling

“It is amazing how many people think that the government’s role is to give them what they want by overriding what other people want.”

Thomas Sowell

“As crisis after crisis torments the American people, each gives ample opportunity to reiterate what we have been sharing all along: do not look to your oppressor, the government, for solutions to the very problems it created.”

Christine Smith

“Under capitalism the common man enjoys amenities which in ages gone by were unknown and therefore inaccessible eve to the richest people.”

Ludwig von Mises

August 8, 2012

“The modern campus is deeply obsessed by race and gender, and not much else.”

John Leo

“Big-government conservatives display a great naiveté about the way government works.  They appear to believe that limited programs will not grow or see their original purposes corrupted.  But little I the history of government justifies such faith.”

Michael D. Tanner

“The essential function of the State is to maintain peace, justice, law, and order, and to protect the individual citizen against aggression, violence, theft, and fraud.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Tyranny is a political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.”

Ludwig von Mises

“In a world dependent on international trade and commerce, and staggering under a heavy load of international debt, no policy is more destructive than protectionism.  It cuts off markets, eliminates trade, causes unemployment in the export industries all over the world, depresses the prices of export commodities, especially farm products of the United States.  It is the crowning folly of government intervention.”

Hans F. Sennholz

August 3, 2012

“If any behavior needs to be reined in, it should be the propensity of people to use the political system to take other people’s money.”

Jeffrey A. Singer

“The only source from which an entrepreneur’s profits stem is his ability to anticipate better than other people the future demand of the consumers.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The way to maximize production is to maximize the incentives to production.  And the way to do that, as the modern world has discovered, is through the system known as capitalism – the system of private property, free markets, and free enterprise.”

Henry Hazlitt

“It is impossible to maintain a free society when more and more people look to the state to provide what Americans used to provide for themselves.”

Warren Pollock

“If you care about people, don’t give them money they didn’t earn.”

James Cook

August 2, 2012

“Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.”

Robert Nozick

“Even as government dominates the headlines, private entrepreneurs are busy every day working to improve products and services that improve our lives.  They do it without taxing us or regulating us, or making us suffer through tedious elections or political debates.  They make their products and offer them to us in a way that pleases the consuming public the most.  We can choose whether we want them or not.”

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

“Who can dispute that the governments of the United States constitute the most voracious tax system in the history of mankind?  In the year 2000, those governments succeeded in laying hands on more than $3 trillion – almost $11,000 each for the 275 million men, women, and children resident in the country.  No other nation-state rakes in an amount even close to the U.S. total.”

Robert Higgs

“Liberals cling to the idea that critics of welfare are motivated by greed or callous disregard for the less fortunate.  In fact, during the twenty-five years that followed Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of war on poverty, U.S. taxpayers spent $3 trillion providing every conceivable support for the poor, the elderly, and the infirm.  Private foundations spent scores of billions more, and private and religious charities even more.  Nevertheless, as Ronald Reagan later quipped, ‘In the war on poverty, poverty won.’”

Mona Charen

“Our Founding Fathers set up a constitutional framework for government that strictly limited government power.  They set in place barriers to the exercise of government power, devising an intricate system of checks and balances, dividing power between national and state governments as well as among three independent branches of government.  And, most important, they established a government of enumerated powers, carefully spelling out those few things that the federal government could do and reserving those powers not specified to the states and the people.”

Michael D. Tanner

August 1, 2012

“Thoughtful Americans must face a sobering reality: the ideological bankruptcy of progressivism leads directly to the economic bankruptcy of the nation.”

Arnold Ahlert

“If you want a glimpse of where this relentless campaign to increase dependence will lead, cast your eye to Europe – whose metastasizing welfare state is devouring the last remnant of the continent’s substance.  The result there?  An increase, not a diminution, of human suffering.”

A. Barton Hinkle

“Free human beings may be counted upon to care well for themselves and for their fellow men, voluntarily.”

Paul L. Poirot

“Government is the natural enemy of freedom.”

Garet Garrett

“The able bodied poor don’t want or need charity…All they need is financial capital.”

Muhammad Yunus

July 31, 2012

“In a nutshell, despite all the progressive blather about ‘wealth re-distribution’ and ‘fairness’ without the wealth-producers, Barack and Co., and their socialist utopian dreams, are deader than dead.  Only an idiot or a progressive can possess that breath-taking combination of unmitigated gall and enduring stupidity that enables one to undermine those upon whom they completely depend to underwrite their schemes.  As another aside, this is why progressives absolutely despise Ayn Rand.  If the producers ever do decide to go on strike far more than they have already – and make no mistake, many of them have – the looters have nothing to loot, and their bankrupt notion of ‘social justice’ would be revealed for the utter fraud it truly is.”

Arnold Ahlerts

“Last month, 80,000 Americans signed on to new jobs, but 85,000 Americas signed on for Social Security disability checks.  Most of these people are not ‘disabled’ as that term is generally understood.  Rather, it’s the U.S. economy that’s disabled, and thus Obama incentivizes dependency.”

Mark Steyn

“If Americans want prosperity, we need a grand reawakening to the incontrovertible fact that its source is entrepreneurs unfettered by meddling politicians.” 

Star Parker

“A virtuous and industrious people may be cheaply governed.”

Benjamin Franklin

“The Hollywood left insists on painting business persons as arch criminals, even though it’s ridiculous.  They like to depict free enterprise, capitalism and business leaders as a source of evil and criminality.  Somehow they think that will influence enough people to further their left-wing agenda.” 

James Cook

July 24, 2012

“Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state.  They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone.” 

Frederic Bastiat

“This administration is the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime.”

Steve Wynn

“The Statist has constructed a Rube Goldberg array of laws and policies that have institutionalized his objectives.  His success breeds confidence in the limitlessness of his endeavors.”

Mark R. Levin

“No man is competent to manage another.”

Edmund A. Opitz

“Subsidies have changed the way the nation behaves.”

James Cook

July 20, 2012

“There is nothing new in state interventionism.  It is as old and reactionary as societal organization itself.”

Spruille Braden

“The proliferation of bureaucrats and its invariable accompaniment, much heavier tax levies on the productive part of the population, are the recognizable signs, not of a great, but of a decaying society.”

William Chamberlin

“A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Business is society’s change agent.”

Peter Drucker

“Social welfare is the most corrosive behavioral force ever unleashed by man.”

James Cook

July 19, 2012

“There is no such thing as a good tax.”

Winston Churchill

“A limited government is a contradiction in terms.”

Robert LeFevre

“Private enterprise creates; government destroys.  That is the great economic lesson of our times and all times.”

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

“The most destructive thing governments do is divide people against each other, all in competition over the reins of the state.”

Anthony Gregory

“The Santa Claus principle liquidates itself.”

Ludwig von Mises

July 18, 2012

“What…can the government do to help the poor?  The only answer is the liberation answer: Get out of the way.”

Murray N. Rothbard

“The best guarantee against all exploitation is the market.”

Henry LePage

“He [the Statist] is unmoved by reason, evidence, and history.”

Mark R. Levin

“Politicians never accuse you of ‘greed’ for wanting other people’s money – only for wanting to keep your own money.”

Joseph Sobran

“The liberal agenda is the blueprint for national ruin.”

James Cook

July 16, 2012

“Democrats have a vested interest in making as many Americans as possible wards of the state and have aggressively worked to break down self-sufficiency ethic.   It is their principal pathway to amplifying their political power, even if individual ambition, dignity and self-reliance – or the nation itself – is destroyed in the process.” 

Arnold Ahlert

“Economic freedom is positively correlated with per-capita income, economic growth, greater life expectancy, lower child mortality, the development of democratic institutions, civil and political freedoms, and other desirable social and economic outcomes.”

James Gwartney and Robert Lawson

“There ain’t no rules around here!  We’re trying to accomplish something.”

Thomas Edison

“Capitalism, and capitalism alone, has rescued the human race from degrading poverty, rampant sickness and early death.”

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

“A limited government is a contradiction in terms.”

Robert LeFevre

July 13, 2012

“No debate regarding taxes or tax rates can be considered serious until Obama addresses the one issue he and his fellow Democrats have studiously avoided: out-of-control spending.”

Arnold Ahlert

“Only in America does ‘health’ ‘care’ ‘reform’ begin with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents tasked with determining whether your insurance policy merits a fine.”

Mark Steyn

“If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled.”

Ayn Rand

“Capitalism begins with giving.”

George Gilder

“From an economic standpoint, liberalism is a greater threat to America than communism ever was.”

James Cook

July 10, 2012

“Today we are rapidly becoming a collective in which government penalizes achievement and subsidizes failure, thus producing less of the former and more of the latter.”

Cal Thomas

“Winston Churchill once said, ‘American will always do the right thing… after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.’  We’ve got one last chance to do the right thing, literally and figuratively, in November.  The choices are quite stark:  we either remain a nation where every meaningful decision in our lives will be increasingly usurped by our Democrat ‘betters’ in Washington, D.C. – the very people knowingly leading us to Greek-style oblivion – or we hand the keys over to Republicans, who themselves get one last chance to prove they are something other than collaborators aiding and abetting Democrats.”

Arnold Ahlert

“Fed officials have been frustrated in the past year that low interest rate policies haven’t reached enough Americans to spur stronger growth, the way economics textbooks say low rates should.  By reducing interest rates – the cost of credit – the Fed encourages household spending, business investment and hiring, in addition to reducing the burden of past debts.  But the economy hasn’t been working according to script.”

Jon Hilsenrath

“Unemployment is particularly vicious among youngsters below the age of 25, where I understand unemployment is as high as 40%.  In fact, it is now so difficult for a teenager or a youngster below 25 years to find a job, that millions of youngsters have applied to go back to school or college.  In many cases, Universities are filled to capacity and cannot accept more students.  Many students are graduating with loans of $100,000 or more.  The total of student loans owed to the U.S. government has now surpassed one trillion dollars.”

Richard Russell

“If you get a job or promotion because of your race or gender, it is no different than a subsidy.  You get something that you didn’t earn, ‘something for nothing.’”

James Cook

July 9, 2012

“Immigrants used to come to America seeking freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom from government.  Now they come looking for free heath care, free education, and a free lunch.”

Harry Browne

“Some critics accuse capitalism of being a selfish system, but the selfishness is not in capitalism – it is in human nature.”

Dinesh D’Souza

“Profit is a signal that valuable services are being rendered to people on a voluntary basis.”

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

“Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

Milton Friedman

“For liberals, supposedly good intentions always trump results.”

David Limbaugh

July 5, 2012

“There is no justice, and great harm, in diminishing the whole array of future opportunity to save a few people now from a regrettable fate.”

Will Wilkinson

“Governing a large country is like frying a small fish.  You spoil it by too much poking.”

Lao Tzu

“If you really want to help the poor, help the rich.  They’re the ones who will invest, build more factories, create more jobs.”

William E. Simon

“No nation has ever been ruined by trade.”

Benjamin Franklin

“The profit motive promotes economic growth by creating better products at cheaper prices.”

Mark Skousen

July 3, 2012

“Capitalism has been one of the most dynamic forces in human history, transforming one society after another, and today it has become established as an international system determining the economic fate of most of mankind.”

Peter L. Berger

“Any time you read that your government is erecting tariff barriers, supporting threatened industries with subsidies, or interfering in any way with free trade between individuals or nations, you must realize that your standard of living is being lowered as a result.”

John A. Pugsley

“Once empowered, socialism refused to yield its promised rewards.  The more dogged the effort to achieve it, the more the outcome mocked the humane ideals it proclaimed.”

Joshua Muravchik

“An essential point in the social philosophy of interventionism is the existence of an inexhaustible fund which can be squeezed forever.  The whole system of interventionism collapses when the fountain is drained off:  The Santa Clause principle liquidates itself.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Liberals believe an inexhaustible fund exists that can be tapped endlessly to pay for government social programs.  Tax the rich and give it to a long line of moochers, pork barrel hustlers and ne’er-do-wells.  These funds would otherwise have been employed as additional capital indispensable to economic progress.”

James Cook

June 27, 2012

“There is no equality without coercion.”

Gonzalo Fernandez de la Mora

“An active policy of government intervention in a free-market business system is a contradiction in terms.  Trades of private property are either voluntary or they are not; one cannot legislate the free market or create competition.  To have a free market the government must leave the markets alone; to have the state make free markets ‘free’ is again a contradiction in terms.”

Dominick T. Armentano

“I think the terror most people are concerned with is the IRS.”

Malcolm Forges

“What governments call international monetary cooperation is concerted action for the sake of credit expansion.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Would-be income guarantors ignore or despise the capitalistic system that makes their dreams dreamable and gives their redistribute-the-income proposals whatever plausibility they have.”

Henry Hazlitt

June 26, 2012

“So whence this fanatical devotion to higher taxes…for the sake of expanding statism and collectivism as contrasted with the private sector.”

Murray N. Rothbard

“We need to keep a very keen eye on our own government.  It’s getting too rich and redistributing wealth is a sure way of robbing us of our private property rights and other rights along with them.”

Richard Pipes

“Unemployment doles can have no other effect than the perpetuation of unemployment.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Even as government dominates the headlines, private entrepreneurs are busy every day working to improve products and services that improve our lives.  They do it without taxing us or regulating us, or making us suffer through tedious elections or political debates.  They make their products and offer them to us in a way that pleases the consuming public the most.  We can choose whether we want them or not.”

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

“The Hollywood left insists on painting business persons as arch criminals, even though it’s ridiculous.  They like to depict free enterprise, capitalism and business leaders as a source of evil and criminality.  Somehow they think that will influence enough people to further their left-wing agenda.”

James R. Cook

June 25, 2012

“Victimhood and a ‘can’t do’ spirit is what the Democratic Party has mostly been about since the Great Depression.”

Cal Thomas

“Though the people support the government the government should not support the people.”

Grover Cleveland

“What the government gives, it must first take away.”

John S. Coleman

“The fact is that the New Deal was, overall, a dismal failure.”

Mark R. Levin

“For liberals, supposedly good intentions always trump results.”

David Limbaugh

June 22, 2012

“Liberals want the government to be your mommy.  Conservatives want the government to be your daddy.  Libertarians want it to treat you like an adult.”

Andre Marrou

“The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence. Because it’s so rare.”

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

“When taxes are too high, people go hungry.”

Lao Tzu

“There ain’t no rules around here!  We’re trying to accomplish something.”

Thomas Edison

“The welfare system is the breeding ground of crime, addiction and radical politics.”

James Cook

June 21, 2012

“Liberalism’s key principle is to redistribute wealth from the haves to the have nots.  That takes money from the entities with the greatest potential to improve society (for example, corporations that create jobs, invest life-saving medicines, etc) and redistributes it to the people, whom on average, will never contribute more to society than to hold a menial job.”

Marty Nemko

“Few policies are more calculated to destroy the existing basis of a free society than the debauching of its currency.  And few task, if any, are more important to the champion of freedom than creation of a sound monetary system.”

Hans F. Sennholz

“’Live and let life’ used to be a noble approach to life.  Now you’re considered compassionate if you demand that government impose your preferences on others.”

John Stossel

“Only the naïve inflationists could believe that government could enrich mankind through fiat money.”

Ludwig von Mises

“That the political left, even in democratic countries, share is the notion that knowledgeable and virtuous people like themselves have both a right and a duty to use the power of government to impose their superior knowledge and virtue on others.”

Thomas Sowell

June 20, 2012

“Under capitalism everybody is the architect of his own fortune.”

Ludwig von Mises

“…the crucial role of the rich in a capitalist economy is…to invest; to provide unencumbered and unbureaucratized cash.”

George Gilder

“The suspicion and antagonism of academics, clerics and intellectuals towards the market…go hand in hand with their disdain for the preference and habits of ordinary people.”

Lord Peter T. Bauer

“What was distinctively Western was not slavery but the moral crusade to end slavery.”

Dinesh D’Souza

“America is the first country where people go to the poor house in their car.”

Will Rogers

June 19, 2012

“The decision last week by French President Francois Hollande to reverse the single modest reform carried out by his predecessor and allow the French retirement age to revert from 62 to 60 is symptomatic of the self-defeating attitude of the European political class.   They will subsidize the unproductive at every point, even when there is no possible actuarial justification for doing so, while imposing wealth taxes, ultra-high rates of income tax and innumerable pointless and costly regulations on the productive sectors.”

Martin Hutchinson

“Civil rights are not necessarily best protected by endlessly extending our definitions of oppression and discovering new classes of victims.  The way back to sanity is clear enough: The weight of the law should be brought to bear against individuals acts of discrimination rather than used to create blanket group entitlements.”

Charles J. Sykes

“It is no longer a question of whether there is a tendency or a tilt to the left; the faculties of American universities and colleges are overwhelmingly leftist.”

Martin Anderson

“Killing the goose that lays the golden egg is a viable political strategy, so long as the goose does not die before the next election.”

Thomas Sowell

“Why is it so hard to see that when America had high savings, low taxes and minimal government, the economy grew like a week, and today when we have just the opposite, the economy is shrinking?”

James Cook

June 13, 2012

“America’s obsession with litigation has proven an onerous burden on the nation’s enterprise; the proliferation of lawyers and causes of action threatens to strangle the economy while further fraying out already tattered social fabric.”

Charles J. Sykes

“No government can provide social security.  It is not in the nature of government to be able to provide anything.  Government itself is not self-supporting.  It lives by taxation.  Therefore, since it cannot provide for itself but by taking toll of what the people produce, how can it provide social security for the people?”

Garet Garrett

“An economy oriented toward production for market exchange provides the optimal conditions for long-lasting and ever-expanding productive capacity based on modern technology.”

Peter L. Berger

“Without the rich – without those who accumulated capital – those poor who could exist at all would be very much poorer indeed, scratching a livelihood from marginal lands on which every drought would kill most of the children they would be trying to raise.”

Friedrich Hayek

“Any time you read that your government is erecting tariff barriers, supporting threatened industries with subsidies, or interfering in any way with free trade between individuals or nations, you must realize that your standard of living is being lowered as a result.”

John A. Pugsley

June 12, 2012

“No one has more than scratched the surface when it comes to understanding and explaining the miracle of the market.”

Leonard E. Read

“Whatever men live for, today most live only because of the market order.”

Friedrich Hayek

“Size of industry, concentration of market, or production notwithstanding, the co0nsumer is best served when the businessman is completely free to pursue his profit goals.”

John A. Pugsley

“If a socialist economy is opened up to increasing degrees of market forces, a point will be reached at which democratic governance becomes a possibility.”

Peter L. Berger

“The more welfare, the more crime.”

James Cook

June 11, 2012

“There’s only one thing to do with politics, and that is to survive it.”

Andrew J. Galambos

“What is worth anything but as much money as it will bring?”

Samuel Butler

“Socialism constitutes a threat to the present and future welfare of the human race, in the sense that neither socialism nor any other known substitute for the market order could sustain the current population of the world.”

Friedrich Hayek

“If government will pay for my health care, rent, food and retirement, why should I worry about paying my own bills?”

Roger Fritz

“The consumer gets the best deal when the product is cheapest, and the product is cheapest when people can freely compete in the market place.”

June 8, 2012

“’Need” now means wanting someone else’s money.  ‘Greed’ means wanting to keep your own. ‘Compassion’ is when a politician arranges the transfer.”

Joseph Sobran

“The object and practice of liberty lies in the limitation of governmental power.”

Douglas MacArthur

“The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.”

James Madison

“No nation was ever ruined by trade.”

Benjamin Franklin

“The purer the application of socialism, the worse the results; the purer the application of capitalism, the better the results.”

James Cook

June 7, 2012

“In Europe and America alike, voters increasingly recognize that the benefits of the green revolution aren’t worth the costs, particularly when the revolutionaries don’t have a clue what they’re doing.”

Jonah Goldberg

“I don’t want to do business with those who don’t make a profit, because they can’t give the best service.”

Richard Bach

“The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

Thomas Paine

“The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay

“Profit is a signal that valuable services are being rendered to people on a voluntary basis.”

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

June 5, 2012

“There is profound self-deception at work in people who luxuriate in the fruits of worldly success while disdaining the personal habits and cultural conditions that make such success possible.”

Wilfred M. McClay

“In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city – except for bombing.”

Assar Lindbeck

“Now, as individuals differ greatly from each other, in intelligence, sagacity, energy, perseverance, skill, habits of industry and economy, physical power, position and opportunity, the necessary effect of leaving all free to exert themselves to better their condition, must be a corresponding inequality between those who may possess these qualities and advantages in a high degree, and those deficient in them…It is, indeed, this inequality of condition between the front and rear ranks, in the march of progress, which gives so strong an impulse to the former to maintain their position, and to the latter to press forward into their files.  This gives to progress its greatest impulse.”

John C. Calhoun

“What both the left and the right overlook is our Founders’ wisdom about the limits and dangers of government.”

Edward H. Crane

“Once trapped in the belief that you are a victim, you surrender your birthright to compete for the prizes of life.”

James Cook

June 1, 2012

“The dogma of cultural relativism is challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists established it in the first place.  The complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that they are being westernized, but that the westernization is proceeding too slowly.”

Claude Levi-Strauss

“The growing role that government has played in financing and administering schooling has led not only to enormous waste of taxpayers’ money but also to a far poorer educational system.”

Milton & Rose Friedman

“We must not cast away riches which can benefit our neighbor.  Possessions were made to be possessed; good are called goods because they do good, and they have been provided by God for the good of men: they are at hand and serve as the material, the instruments for a good use in the hand of him who knows how to use them.”

Clement of Alexandria

“The best guarantee against all exploitation is the market.”

Henri Lepage

“Taxes cause the most bad business decisions.”

James Cook

May 31, 2012

“America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to ‘the common good,’ but by the productive genius of free men.”

Ayn Rand

“…human being always have and always will seek havens where we are free to be productive and to keep the property we create.”

John A. Pugsley

“Because adoption meets the needs of children so successfully, and because there have long been waiting lists of couples hoping to adopt babies and children, it would seem that the solution for abused or neglected kids was obvious.  But not to the do-gooders.  To remove a child from an abusive parent, sever the parent’s parental rights, and permit the child to be adopted by a couple who would give the child a loving home began to seem too ‘judgmental…’”

Mona Charen

“The idea that even the brightest person or group of bright people, much less the U.S. congress, can wisely manage an economy has to be the height of arrogance and conceit.”

Walter Williams

“There exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality I slavery to inequality with freedom.”

Akexis de Tocqueville

May 30, 2012

“America’s abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.”

Ayn Rand

“Civilization and profits go hand-in-hand.”

Calvin Coolidge

“Business decisions are built on three pillars – cost, value and price.”

Shlomo Maital

“The evidence is thus crystal-clear.  Modern welfare destroys.  It does not build competence; it creates dependence…”

Peter Drucker

“Capitalism begins with giving.”

George Gilder

May 29, 2012

“Capitalism created the possibility of employment.”

Friedrich Hayek

“Monopoly power is an illusion in any system in which free competition is allowed.”

John A. Pugsley

“Government central planning means over-riding other people’s plans.

Thomas Sowell

“Any attempt to expand the public sector beyond a certain point will backfire:  if the private sector is squeezed too hard, government revenues will dry up.”

Joshua Muravchik

“The purer the application of socialism, the worse the results; the purer the application of capitalism, the better the results.”

James Cook

May 25, 2012

“What makes for the good society is a sound economy.  Without it, all the rest falls apart.”

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

“There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently occupied than in getting money.”

Samuel Johnson

“The Fed has been arbitrarily experimenting with artificial money and artificial interest rates with no corrections in basic theory or function for 95 years.  At least three generations of financial adventures in policy have displaced long standing traditions of probity and accountability.”

Bob Hoye

“No arbitrary regulation, no act of the legislature, can add anything to the capital of the country; it can only force it into artificial channels.”

J. R. McCulloch

“At the very least, people who get subsidies should have to get up in the morning and so something, even if it’s a make work job.  But most liberals would oppose even this simple test of responsibility.”

James Cook

May 24, 2012

“If we as a society want to cure unemployment, raise real wages, and in other ways improve our economy, we will base public policy on private property rights, the non-aggression principle and the law of free association.  In the free and prosperous society, everyone may do precisely as he pleases, provided only that he does not initiate violence against non-aggressors.”

Walter Block

“Liberal hostility to the traditional family helped to undermine centuries of accumulated wisdom and experience about what was best for children and adults.  Far from benefiting only men, marriage confers enormous advantages on women and children as well – a fact that has been thrown into sharp relief by its breakdown over the past forty years.”

Mona Charen

“Things in our country run in spite of government, not by aid of it.”

Will Rogers

“Envy is always referred to by its political alias, ‘social justice.’”

Thomas Sowell

“The best guarantee against all exploitation is the market.”

Henri Lepage

May 23, 2012

“There is nothing the state can do, which society needs done, that cannot be done far better by the market.”

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

“One thing is certain.  At some point global investors will lose confidence in our (U.S.) easy dollars and debt-financed prosperity, and then the chickens will come home to roost.”

David A. Stockman

“The enemy and his allies are not at the gates of the capitalists’ fortress.  Is there any hope that the businessman will finally sense the danger to himself and the system of which he is a part and rise to meet the challenge?”

Benjamin A. Rogge

“The road to a higher wage level is through savings and investment in the tools of production.  There is no other.”

W. M. Curtiss

“Government central planning means over-riding other people’s plans.”

Thomas Sowell

May 22, 2012

“Whether in the arts, entertainment, or academia, the dominant players are talented people who believe that they are wiser and better than the masses.  They are appalled that capitalism permits a B-school dropout to become a billionaire while they scrape by for a measly raise when promoted from assistant to associate professor.  They set out to cripple the system that brings this about.”

Lewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

“He is base – and that is the one base thing in the universe – to receive favors and render non.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There prevails on a free labor market a tendency toward full employment.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”

Peter Drucker

“Animosity towards the merchant class has been around for centuries.  Why?  The goal of making a profit is quite obviously a self-serving motive.  Other occupations, while equally self-serving, are better able to hide their motives.”

James Cook

May 18, 2012

 “When democracies start to devolve into tyranny, unscrupulous leaders arise to foment class hatred by pandering to those who, as the Greek historian Polybius wrote, are ‘habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have [their] hopes of a livelihood in the property of [their] neighbors.’  That is what the ‘Buffet Rule’ is all about.”

Bruce Thorton

“It’s not as if socialism is a new idea.  It was tried in the 20th Century.  It produced economic stagnation and despair.  In its purest form, it extinguished more than one hundred million people.”

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

“The greed and envy of the nonproducer is insatiable, so that eventually nothing short of 100% taxation will appease him.”

Robert Ringer

“True, the free market ignores the poor precisely as it does not recognize the wealthy – it is ‘no respecter of persons.’”

Leonard E. Read

“The more welfare, the more crime.”

James Cook

May 17, 2012

“The fact that among advanced economies the U.S. already has the most progressive income taxes and the highest corporate taxes – even as nearly half of taxpayers pay nothing while an equal number receive some sort of government largesse – can’t penetrate the fog of clichés befuddling the liberal brain.”

Bruce Thornton

“Find out just what people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.  The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

Walter Williams

“Those who automatically say that the social pathology of the ghetto is due to poverty discrimination and the like cannot explain why such pathology was far less prevalent in the 1950s, when poverty and discrimination were worse.  But there were not nearly as many grievance mongers and race hustlers then.”

Thomas Sowell

“Markets help people pursue their happiness more efficiently and effectively.  Because they are so effective, markets provide benefits right here and right now, even while government is buys botching the protection of happiness.”

Joel Miller

“Government spending reduces the capital that could be invested to serve consumers and to produce new employment opportunities.”

Sheldon Richman

May 15, 2012

“The quality of a society depends on its capacity to produce eminent personalities.”

Gonzalo Fernandez de la Mora

“If individuals can take from a common pot regardless of how much they put in it, each person has an incentive to be a free rider, to do as little as possible and take as much as possible because what one fails to take will be taken by someone else.”

John Stossel

“There is no – let me repeat – no example in the last quarter-century of a large complex economy that has been successful with high taxes.”

Jonah Goldberg

“Our educational system, from the schools to the universities, are actively undermining any sense of loyalty to the t6raditions, institutions and values of American society.”

Thomas Sowell

“Our contemporary brand of socialism has one fatal flaw.  It’s too expensive.  When you try to shower benefits on so many recipients, you eventually must resort to subterfuge.  Foremost among those tricks is money and credit expansion.  Inevitably, you debase your currency.”

James Cook

May 14, 2012

 “Though liberals have portrayed themselves throughout the past several decades as champions of the homeless, they are actually guilty of having created and perpetuated their condition.”

Mona Charen

“The Statist veils his pursuits in moral indignation, intoning in high dudgeon the injustices and inequities of liberty and life itself, for which only he can provide justice and bring a righteous resolution.”

Mark R. Levin

“Apparently the only people who are supposed to be responsible are the taxpayers – and they are increasingly made responsible for other people’s irresponsibility.”

Thomas Sowell

“You can’t increase prosperity by taxing success”

Calvin Coolidge

“The government does not add value to the economy.  It removes value from the economy by imposing taxes on one citizen and providing cash to another;

Mark R. Levin

May 10, 2012

“The only way to effectively secure the common good is for government to remain small.”

Joel Miller

“The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates.”

Tacitus

“The real solution to the problem of poverty consists in finding how to increase the employment and earning power of the poor.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.  It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.”

C.S. Lewis

“Immigrants used to come to America seeking freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom from government.  Now they come looking for free health care, free education, and a free lunch.”

Harry Browne

May 9, 2012

“While big-business leaders and firms can be highly productive servants of consumers in a free-market economy, they are also, all too often, seekers after subsidies, contracts, privileges, or cartels furnished by big government.   Often, business lobbyists and leaders are the sparkplugs for the statist, interventionist system.”

Murray N. Rothbard

“The truly free market is the worker’s best friend.”

Sheldon Richman

“Both the liberal and the conservative are in agreement: it is all very well to let people alone, but only if they do what you want them to do.”

Bill Bonner

“Government debt signifies that government has made certain claims upon private property above and beyond the ‘due processes’ of authorized taxation.”

Paul L. Poirot

“Chesterton spoke of ‘the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.’  It would be hard to sum up liberalism more succinctly.”

Joseph Sobran

May 4, 2012

“Doing well is the result of doing good.  That’s what capitalism is about.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The business of America is business.”

Calvin Coolidge

“The effect of capitalism is to steer human selfishness so that, through the invisible hand of competition, the energies of the capitalist produce the abundance from which the whole society benefits.”

Dinesh D’Souza

“Business is society’s change agent.”

Thomas Sowell

“Welfare corrupts the lower class much faster than the middle class.”

James Cook

May 3, 2012

“The solution to this problem [welfare-statism] must take a positive form: the restoration of a faith in what free men can accomplish.”

Leonard E. Read

“Free market economists must be given the same opportunity in our faculties which only the advocates of socialism and interventionism enjoy today.  This is surely not too much to ask as long as this country has not yet gone totalitarian.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Ideologues who rant against WalMart do not understand economics.  In a market economy, success goes to those businesses that best and most efficiently serve consumer needs.”

John Semmens

“Those who would administer [charity] wisely must, indeed, be wise, for one of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity.  It were better for mankind that the millions of the rich were thrown into the sea than spent to encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy.  Of every thousand dollars spent in so-called charity today, it is probable that nine hundred and fifty dollars is unwisely spent – so spent, indeed, as to produce the very evils which it hopes to mitigate or cure.”

Andrew Carnegie

“This system, in which the state extracts large amounts of resources from the populace to subsidize favored corporate interest, is what most people think capitalism is.  This deception has led to a double injustice: the vilification of market entrepreneurs whose wealth came from solving the problems of millions within the capitalist system and the hailing as the ‘saviors of capitalism’ politicians who conjure up phony problems or phony solutions to real problems.”

Robert Batemarco

May 2, 2012

“Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.”

Ayn Rand

“The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.”

John Stuart Mill

“Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.”

Thomas Jefferson

“Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The market economy has created unfathomable prosperity and, decade-by-decade, century-by-century, miraculous feats of innovation, production, distribution, and social coordination.  To the free market, we owe all material prosperity, all leisure time, our health and longevity, our large and growing population and nearly everything we call life itself.”

Lewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

May 1, 2012

“The basic nature of our money assures it will lose value over time.  It can be created nearly at will and it is left in the hands of government officials, who routinely spend more than they have.  In such a state, a nation’s paper money has a shelf life like a fresh egg or a jar of mayonnaise.  It doesn’t last forever.”

Chris Mayer

“There would not be any profits but for the eagerness of the public to acquire the merchandise offered for sale by the successful entrepreneur.  But the same people who scramble for these articles vilify the businessman and call his profit ill-got.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings.   The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”

Winston Churchill

“Less than seventy-five years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won.”

Robert Heilbroner

“Government does the least good and the most harm through subsidies.”

James Cook

April 30, 2012

“The truly free market is the worker’s best friend.”

Sheldon Richman

“Both the liberal and the conservative are in agreement:  it is all very well to let people alone, bit only if they do what you want them to do.”

Bill Bonner

“Government debt signifies that government has made certain claims upon private property above and beyond the ‘due processes’ of authorized taxation.”

Paul L. Poirot

“The only way to effectively secure the common good is for government to remain small.”

Joel Miller

“Chesterton spoke of ‘the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.’  It would be hard to sum up lib realism more succinctly.”

Joseph Sobran

April 26, 2012

“When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.”

Frederic Bastiat

“Free trade or the free market means the sovereignty of the consumer.”

Faustino Ballve

“The bad consequences of a government program usually don’t show up immediately.  And the delay may be long enough to hide the connection between the program and its results.  So government never has to say it’s sorry – never has to take responsibility for the misery it causes.  Instead, it can blame everything on personal greed, profit-hungry corporations, and the private sector.  And the government’s cure for the problems is to impose bigger programs, more regulation, and higher taxes.”

Harry Browne

“If the practice of covering government deficits with the issue of notes, then the day will come without fail, sooner or later, when the monetary systems of those nations pursuing this course will break down completely.  The purchasing power of the monetary unit will decline more and more, until finally it disappears completely.”

Ludwig von Mises

“One of the bitter ironies of the 20th century was that communism, which began as an egalitarian doctrine accusing capitalism of selfishness and calloused sacrifices of others, became in power a system whose selfishness and callousness towards others made the sins of capitalism pale.”

Thomas Sowell

April 25, 2012

“What is called the ‘private sector’ of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and what is called the ‘public sector’ is, in fact, the coercive sector.”

Henry Hazlitt

“The market performs miracles so routinely that we take it for granted.  Supermarkets provide 30,000 choices at rock-bottom prices.  We take it for granted that when we stick a piece of plastic in a wall, cash will come out; that when we give the same plastic to a stranger, he will rent us a car, and the next month, BISA will have the accounting correct to the penny.  By contrast, ‘experts in government can’t even count the vote accurately.”

John Stossel

“Big business always serves – directly or indirectly – the masses.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The key question for many voters is:  How much is the candidate offering for my vote?”

James Bovard

“Advocacy groups, politicians, and bureaucrats use the government to advance their private good instead of the common good.”

Joel Miller

April 24, 2012

“Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive.  A nation that takes Barack Obama’s current rhetorical flourishes seriously is certainly well advanced along that dismal path.”

Mark Steyn

“Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“What is called ‘capitalism’ might more accurately be called consumerism.  It is the consumers who call the tune, and those capitalists who want to remain capitalists have to learn to dance to it.”

Thomas Sowell

“The inequality of income and fortunes is essential in capitalism.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The American people have come to rely on the government for their security.  They will find out how incompetent the government is when they no longer have security.”

James Cook

April 18, 2012

“What can prevent the coming of totalitarian socialism is only a thorough change in ideologies.  What we need is an open positive endorsement of that system to which we owe all the wealth that distinguishes our age from the conditions of ages gone by.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Most Marxist intellectuals were heirs to fortunes or had rich fathers, for example, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxumburg, Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, and Herbert Marcuse.”

Carl H. Middleton

“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.”

H. L. Mencken

“A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.”

George Bernard Shaw

“What was distinctively Western was not slavery but the moral crusade to end slavery.”

Dinesh D’Souza

April 17, 2012

“When your money is taken by a thief, you get nothing in return.  When your money is taken through taxes to support needless bureaucrats, precisely the same situation exists.  We are lucky, indeed, if the needless bureaucrats are mere easy-going loafers.  They are more likely today to be energetic reformers busily discouraging and disrupting production.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Government enterprise is a hopelessly flawed model.”

Gregory Bresiger

“Liberalism has come to mean spending more on everything – speech police, failed poverty programs that reward dependence, a bigger nanny state telling us we cannot eat fatty foods, workplace roles that stifle opportunity, and absurd environmental regulations.”

John Stossel

“What a government system can accomplish is to destroy the art and science of medicine in the United States of America.”

Jane M. Orient

“Government is no more than taxpayers hiring the most inefficient organization to do the job.”

April 16, 2012

“The idea that the extra revenues generated by the Buffet Rule would be used to lower the deficit flies in the face of history, which shows that every dollar of increased revenues leads to at least $1.17 of government spending.”

Bruce Thornton

“Politicians will always spend every penny of tax raised and whatever else they can get away with.”

Milton Friedman

“Saying that government is not the way to solve problems is not saying that humanity cannot solve its problems.  What I’ve finally learned is this: Despite the obstacles created by governments, voluntary networks of private individuals – through voluntary exchange – solve all sorts of challenges.”

John Stossel

“Modern ‘public health’ initiatives have moved well beyond what could reasonably be classified as public goods.  Today, government undertakes all sorts of policies in the name of public health that are aimed at regulating personal behavior.”

Radley Balko

“Private ownership means that individuals control their own persons, their own energies and the products of their energies.”

April 12, 2012

“American authors or scientists are prone to consider the wealthy businessman as a barbarian, as a man exclusively intent upon making money.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The political left has been weak on protecting society from criminals for more than two centuries.”

Thomas Sowell

“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”

James Madison

“It is possible to increase paper-money income to any amount by debasing the currency.  But real income can only be increased by working harder or more efficiently, saving more, investing more, and producing more.” 

Henry Hazlitt

“Free trade or the free market means the sovereignty of the consumer.”

Faustino Ballve

April 11, 2012

“The 2012 election will reveal whether we are a nation where most people are willing to stand on their own two feet and meet life head-on, or one where legions of Americans will continue to demand a government-underwritten lifestyle, buttressed by a self-entitlement mentality that drives us inexorably towards national bankruptcy.”

Arnold Ahlert

“People vastly overestimate the ability of central planners to improve on the independent action of diverse individuals.  What I’ve learned watching regulators is that they almost always make things worse.  If regulators did nothing, the self-correcting mechanisms of the market would mitigate most problems with more finesse. And less cost.”

John Stossel

“In market terms, one is entitled to what others will offer in willing exchange.   That is all!”

Leonard E. Read

“After order and liberty, economy is one of the highest essentials of a free government.”

Calvin Coolidge

“For every alleged benefit that the politicians confer upon us, they must necessarily deprive us of something else.”

April 10, 2012

“The truth is that the government cannot give if it does not take from somebody…It is not in the power of the government to make everybody more prosperous.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Inflation is not only unnecessary for economic growth.  As long as it exists it is the enemy of economic growth.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Not only is patriotism disdained, the very basis for pride in one’s country and culture is systematically undermined in our educational institutions at all levels.  The achievements of western civilization are buried in histories that portray every human sin found here as if they were peculiarities of the west.”

Thomas Sowell

“The root source of wealth is human ingenuity.  This has no known bounds, so the amount of wealth in existence can always be increased.  That’s why capitalism is called ‘making money.’”

Marc Geddes

“The purer the application of socialism, the worse the results; the purer the application of capitalism, the better the results.”

James Cook

April 9, 2012

“The philosophy underlying the system of progressive taxation is that the income and the wealth of the well-to-do classes can be freely tapped.  What the advocates of these tax rates fail to realize is that the greater part of the incomes taxed away would not have been consumed but saved and invested.”

Ludwig von Mises

“It is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand.”

John Maynard Keynes

“In an unmolested market economy – one where all dealings are consensual – the ‘allocation’ of wealth and income is the result of transactions.”

Sheldon Richman

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Thomas Jefferson

“In a social democracy with a fiat currency, all roads lead to inflation.”

Bill Fleckenstein

April 6, 2012

“Money spent in complying with a regulation cannot be spent again on marketing or product research.”

Joel Miller

“The alternative to the market process is government control, and we know where that principle leads.”

Sheldon Richman

“Government today, far from protecting property, is its main threat.”

Roger Pilon

“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground”

Thomas Jefferson

“Bureaucracy by its nature resists change and nullifies progress.”

James Cook

April 4, 2012

“The death of fiat money will be the best thing to happen to human freedom and liberty in over 100 years.”

Brian Rogers

“Depression is the aftermath of credit expansion.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The past 70 years have shown that government has not prudently handled, and cannot prudently handle, the plight of the poor.  Rather than help those in need of assistance during times of trouble, the federal government has imprisoned them I a political power game, resulting in increased dependence.”

Jude Blanchette

“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.  There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.  The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

John Maynard Keynes

“The State, of course, is absolutely indispensable to the preservation of law and order, and the promotion of peace and social cooperation.  What is unnecessary and evil, what abridges the liberty and threatens the true welfare of the individual, is the State that has usurped excessive powers and grown beyond its legitimate functions – the super-State, the4 socialist State, the redistributive State, in brief, the ironically misnamed ‘Welfare State.’”

Henry Hazlitt

April 3, 2012

“Fiat currencies are immoral because they are forced on people against their will and contrary to their self interest and because they are a mechanism for legalized theft through currency debasement.”

Ron Hera

“Lenin was certainly right.  There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.  The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

John Maynard Keynes

“By the very nature of government schooling, the matter of what goes into school textbooks must necessarily be a political matter, to be decided by those in political power.”

Jacob G. Hornberger

“The tendency of government-supported education must be finally to achieve a government monopoly of education.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Government regulators are another name for police.:

James Cook

March 28, 2012

“Government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.”

Ayn Rand

“A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcome – ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.”

Milton Friedman

“The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.”

Andrew Carnegie

“The idea that jobs, businesses and wealth follow low tax rates is widely accepted.”

Stephen Moore

“Capitalism has been one of the most dynamic forces in human history, transforming one society after another, and today it has become established as an international system determining the economic fate of most of mankind.”

Peter L. Berger

March 27, 2012

“Never before in the history of the modern research university, have entire departments and field been devoted to purely ideological pursuits.”

David Horowitz

“The Market is colorblind.”

W. H. Hutt

“Government funding combined with university tenure leads to the distortion of science and bad public policy.”

Roy Cordato

“The New York Times’ long-standing motto, ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print,’ should be changed to reflect today’s reality: ‘Manufacturing news to Fit an Ideology.’”

Thomas Sowell

“Money could never have originated as paper.”

James Cook

March 23, 2012

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.  It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”

William Pitt

“No increase in the welfare of the member of society can result from the availability of an additional quantity of money.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The facts of life are conservative.”

Margaret Thatcher

“The long-run historical tendency of capitalism has not only been to increase real incomes more or less proportionately nearly all along the line, but to benefit the masses even more than the rich.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Taxes are a penalty on progress.”

James Cook

March 22, 2012

“Governments harangue about deficits to get more revenue so they can spend.”

Allan H. Melzer

“The taxpayer:  That’s someone who works for the federal government but doesn’t have to take the civil service examination.”

Ronald Reagan

“Progress of any kind is always at variance with the old and established ideas and therefore with the codes inspired by them.  Every step of progress is a change involving heavy risks.”

Ludwig von Misses

“The income tax has spawned an intrusive bureaucracy creating so much complexity and red tape that millions of ordinary citizens have to go get some accountant to fill out the forms for them – and then sign under penalty of perjury that it was done right.  If you knew how to do it right, you wouldn’t have to go to somebody else to have it done, would you?”

Thomas Sowell

“The alternative to the market process is government control, and we know where that principle leads.”

Sheldon Richman

March 21, 2012 

“Statism, which forces all of us within its orbit, is nothing but a political system of organized plunder, managed by every conceivable type of pressure group.”

Leonard E. Read

“To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”

James Madison

“It’s people seeking more for themselves that has produced a better life for all Americans.”

Walter Williams

“We cannot restore traditional American freedom unless we limit the government’s power to tax.”

Frank Chodorov

“What the American worker needs is more of what Wal-Mart offers and less of what the government offers”

Llewellyn Rockwell Jr.

March 20, 2012 

“If it be taught that all who are born have a right to support on the land, whatever be their number, and that there is no occasion to exercise any prudence in the affair of marriage so as to check this number, the temptations, according to all the known principles of human nature, will inevitably be yielded to, and more and more will gradually become dependent on parish assistance.”

Thomas Malthus

“In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Free markets are economically optimal, but partially free-markets, with endless creation of fiat money and implicit government guarantees of the big boys, can produce perverse and dangerous results.”

Martin Hutchinson

“It’s people seeking more for themselves that has produced a better life for all Americans.”

Walter Williams

“Love of country is nowhere the same as love of government.”

James Cook

March 19, 2012

“The solution to our problems is not more paternalism, laws, decrees, and controls, but the restoration of liberty and free enterprise, the restoration of incentives, to let loose the tremendous constructive energies of 300 million Americans.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Prices impose the most effective kind of rationing – self-rationing.  Why is rationing necessary?  Because what everybody wants always adds up to more than there is…Resources are limited but desires are not.  That is the basic and defining problem of economics.”

Thomas Sowell

“If, as is generally the case, the heirs are not equal to the demands which life makes on an entrepreneur, the inherited wealth rapidly vanishes.”

Ludwig von Mises

“By definition, the moment one crosses from center to left, one accepts more government control of people’s lives.  Therefore, the further left society moves, the more there is government control over its citizens’ lives.  It is astonishing that this obvious fact is not universally acknowledged and that the Left has somehow successfully portrayed itself as preoccupied with personal liberty.”

Dennis Prager

“It’s people seeking more for themselves that has produced a better life for all Americans.”

Walter Williams

March 16, 2012

“Inflationism is a dreadful cancer that is gnawing at the backbone of the civilized order.”

Hans F. Sennholz

“The growing size of the government debt should be of real concern to every creditor and especially to every taxpayer with any interest whatsoever in private property and personal freedom.”

Paul L. Poirot

“Once the idea is accepted that money is something whose supply is determined simply by the printing press, it becomes impossible for the politicians in power to resist the constant demands for further inflation.”

Henry Hazlitt

“A nation that encourages its people to spend more and save less promotes economic backwardness, social decay and its own financial doom.”

Kurt Richebacher

“Government is no more than taxpayers hiring the most inefficient organization to do the job.”

James Cook

March 14, 2012

“I’ve repeated over a number of years a lesson learned repeatedly throughout history:  Inflationism is a ‘Road to Ruin.’  This road has become all too visible.”

Doug Noland

“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”

P.J. O’Rouke

“It is impossible to find a single example of a monopoly that has ever existed without official protection.”

Faustino Ballve

“The state is no organism capable of bringing either moral or material improvements to the populace, but merely a vehicle of power for the men and party in power.”

Niccolo Machiavelli

“Liberty is not a means to a political end.  It is itself the highest political end.”

Lord Acton

March 9, 2012

“The typical local government agenda has these goals: finding ways to get more tax dollars, improving the pay and benefit packages of those who work for government, hiring more staff, securing additional powers for those who run the government, implementing more rules that dictate how citizens can live while reducing the number of rules that govern those who run the government.”

Steven Greenhut

“When have handout ever worked?  In the United States, we learned that welfare for our own citizens not only turned into a debilitating crutch, it created a more or less permanent underclass.”

Linda Chavez

“The essential quality of a free economy is that it cannot be planned.  It leaves the solution of problems to the inspiration of the individuals in the untrammeled population.  When something approaching a free economy has existed, it has always worked better than the schemes of any planners.”

Thomas H. Barber

“The state is no organism capable of bringing either moral or material improvements to the populace, but merely a vehicle of power for the men and party in power.”

Niccolo Machiavelli

“Better to build orphanages than prisons.”

James Cook

March 7, 2012

“The State, by relieving idleness, improvidence, or misconduct from the punishment, and depriving abstinence and foresight of the reward, which have been provided for them by nature, may indeed destroy wealth, but most certainly will aggravate poverty.”

Nassau Senior

“The welfare state has bred a generation of obnoxious, drug-addled criminals and ne’er-do-wells.  It has also, incidentally, burdened what was once the world’s biggest, most dynamic economy with the dead weight of an obstructive and vastly expensive state machine.”

Martin Durkin

“Politicians, bureaucrats, editors, new commentators, ‘economists’ teachers,’ and other word artists who denounce private enterprise and praise socialism are their own worst enemies…these attackers are unwittingly destroying the sources of their own livelihood.   They kill the geese that lay the golden eggs – and don’t know it!”

Leonard E. Read

“Highly graduated taxation realizes most completely the supreme danger of democracy, creating a state of things in which one class imposes on another burdens which it is not asked to share, and impels the State into vast schemes of extravagance, under the belief that the whole costs will be thrown upon others.”

W. E. H. Lecky   

“Capitalism is what people do if you leave them alone.”

Kenneth Minogue

March 6, 2012

“The modern welfare state, highly touted as soaking the rich to subsidize the poor, does not such thing.  In fact, soaking the rich would have disastrous effects, not just for the rich but for the poor and middle classes themselves.  For it is the rich who provide a proportionately greater amount of saving, investment capital, entrepreneurial foresight, and financing of technological innovation that has brought the united States to by far the highest standard of living – for the mass of the people – of any country in history.”

Murray N. Rothbard

“It is the free market and competition among employers for the services of wage earners that make workers independent of arbitrary discre5tion on the part of the employer.”

Paul L. Poirot

“Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.”

Charles Peguy

“The surest way for a poor nation to stay poor is to harass, hobble, and straitjacket private enterprise or to discourage or destroy it by subsidized government competition, oppressive taxation, or outright expropriation.”

Henry Hazlitt

“The more noteworthy a person’s achievements, the more government agents are attracted to investigating that person.”

James Cook

March 5, 2012

“He who saves money does not keep it under a mattress, as people did in the mercantilist era, but invests it to produce a profit or to yield interest.  Either he puts it into real property or into mortgages, and thereby favors the expansion of housing And the employment of construction workers; or he invests it in equities and buys shares of productive enterprises, which are also thus enabled to expand; or he lends it at interest to entrepreneurs, with the same result for the general well-being.  Saving and capital accumulation, then, are the great factors making for an increase in production and a consequent abundance of jobs and a lowering of prices.”

Faustino Ballve

“The envious are not satisfied with equality; they secretly yearn for superiority and revenge.  In the French Revolution of 1848, a woman coal-heaver is said to have remarked to a richly dressed lady: ‘Yes, madam, everything’s going to be equal now; I shall go in silks and you’ll carry coal.’”

Henry Hazlitt

“In many places around the world, the government runs everything (Cuba, for instance) and the people have nothing – Because the government runs everything.”

Tom Purcell

“Sometimes any issue that hits the television news seems to become an issue that must be addressed by the federal government.  And like busybodies everywhere, Congress can’t help peering in our windows and telling us how to live our lives.”

Michael D. Tanner

“Inflation is essentially antidemocratic.”

Ludwig von Mises

March 2, 2012

“The greatest threat facing America today is the disastrous fiscal policies of our own government, marked by shameless deficit spending and Federal Reserve currency devaluation.  It is this one-two punch – Congress spending more than it can tax or borrow, and the Fed printing money to make up the difference – that threatens to impoverish us by further destroying the value of our dollars.”

Ron Paul

“We are so accustomed to the miracle of private enterprise that we habitually take it for granted.  But how does private industry solve the incredibly complex problems of turning out tens of thousands of different goods and services in the proportions in which they are wanted by the public?...It solves these problems through the institutions of private property, competition, the free market, and the existence of money – through the interrelations of supply and demand, costs and prices, profits and losses.”

Henry Hazlitt

“The most important thing to remember is that inflation is not an act of God, that inflation is not a catastrophe of the elements or a disease that comes like the plague.  Inflation is a policy.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The state always poses a greater threat to society than whatever problem it purports to solve.”

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

“Those who help the poor the most also hurt them the most.”

James Cook

March 1, 2012

“If people cannot limit government they will not for long be free.”

Garet Garrett

“The institution of taxation is not a civilized but a barbaric method to fund anything…it amounts to…a gross violation of human liberty.”

Tibor Machan

“To concede that there are social problems that cannot be corrected without the state is to give up the entire argument over the future of liberty itself.”

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

“In many fields of the administration of interventionist measures, favoritism simply cannot be avoided.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The greatest threat facing America today is the disastrous fiscal policies of our own government, marked by shameless deficit spending and Federal Reserve currency devaluation.  It is this one-two punch – Congress spending more than it can tax or borrow, and the Fed printing money to make up the difference – that threatens to impoverish us by further destroying the value of our dollars.”

Ron Paul

February 29, 2012       

“A fact rarely suspected, let alone understood, is that businessmen are by no means the chief beneficiaries of the free market, private ownership, limited government way of life.  Many business ventures fail entirely.  Who then are the beneficiaries?  The masses!”

Leonard E. Read

“Nobody can be at the same time a correct bureaucrat and an innovator.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Every day Big Government heaps demands and restrictions upon businesses that sink some enterprises, cause others to direct resources away from serving customers and instead toward jumping through hoops of lawyers and regulators, and prevent other operations from ever getting off the ground.”

Joel Miller

“The brutality of communism was quickly swept under history’s rug, in large part because so many on the left had embraced it as the solution to humankind’s problems.”

Cal Thomas

“Monetary inflation only raises prices and destroys the value of the currency unit; it also acts as a giant system of expropriation.”

Murray N. Rothbard

February 24, 2012

“Society is best served when the means of production are in the possession of those who know how to use them best.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Whether it’s called ‘compassionate conservatism’ or ‘big government Republicanism,’ after years of record increases in federal spending, more government is now the accepted Republican philosophy in Washington.”

Mike Pence

“The private economy, not government, creates opportunity.  Government should just deliver basic services well and then get out of the private sector’s way.”

Steve Malanga

“A fact rarely suspected, let alone understood, is that businessmen are by no means the chief beneficiaries of the free market, private ownership, limited government way of life.  Many business ventures fail entirely.  Who then are the beneficiaries?  The masses!”

Leonard E. Read

“Governments institutionalize something for nothing.”

James Cook

February 23, 2012

“We know that welfare is a failure.  It has neither reduced poverty nor made the poor self-sufficient.  It has torn at the social fabric of the country and been a significant factor in increasing out-of-wedlock births with all of their attendant problems.  It has weakened the work ethic and contributed to rising crime rates.  Most tragically of all, the pathologies it engenders have been passed on from parent to child, from generation to generation.”

Michael D. Tanner

“Government provided free tuition tends more and more to produce a uniform conformist education, with college faculties ultimately dependent for their jobs on the government, and so developing an economic interest in profession and teaching a statist, pro-government, and socialist ideology.”

Henry Hazlitt

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Adam Smith

“In a game there are winners and losers.  But a business deal is always advantageous for both parties.  If both the buy and the seller were not to consider the transaction as the most advantageous action they could choose under the prevailing conditions, they would not enter into the deal.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Capitalism is a belief that nobody is wise enough and knows enough to control the lives of other people.  When each person buys, sells, consumes, produces, saves, and spends at will, ‘the miracle of the market’ enables everyone to benefit.”

Perry Gresham

February 22, 2012

“Socialism is always wrong.”

George B. N. Ayittey

“Every socialist is a disguised dictator.”

Ludwig von Mises

“This is not a conservative-liberal conflict.  This is a libertarian-totalitarian conflict.”

T.J. Rodgers

“Foreign aid breeds kleptocracies, or governments of thieves.”

James Brovard

“There can be no reasonable right to live on sidewalks. Society needs order, and hence has a right to a minimally civilized ambiance in public spaces.  Regarding the homeless, this is not merely for aesthetic reasons because the anesthetic is not merely unappealing.  It presents a spectacle of disorder and decay that becomes a contagion.”

George Will

February 21, 2012

“If we want something, we should pay for it, with our labor or our cash.  We shouldn’t beg it, steal it, sit around wishing for it, or euchre the government into taking it by force.”

P.J. O’Rourke

“Whenever the government tells you to do something, it’s generally a good idea to do the opposite.”

Pierre

“To live beyond our means today is to live below them tomorrow.”

Hans F. Sennholz

“The key role of entrepreneurs, like the most crucial role of scientists, is not to fill in the gaps in an existing market or theory, but to generate entirely new markets or theories…They stand before a canvas as empty as any painter’s’ a page as blank as any poet’s.”

George Gilder

“Private charity discourages poverty while public subsidies encourage it.”

James Cook

February 16, 2012

“The last time the Greeks promised to fire 30,000 employees in the fourth quarter, they ended up firing 1,000 instead of 30,000.  They first talked about privatization of 60 billion Euros, then they cut back the plan and talked about 15 billion and finally they delivered not even one billion…Greece is bust.  We know that.  And they will eventually default on 90 to 100 percent.”

Felix Zulauf

“According to the INS/Census Bureau & Zogby International, the top one percent of U.S. taxpayers are leaving at the highest rate in history…In the first quarter of 2011 499 ex-pats bid America a permanent adios.”

Arnold Ahlert

“Prolonged inflation never ‘stimulates’ the economy.  On the contrary, it unbalances, disrupts, and misdirects production and employment.”

Henry Hazlitt

“Taxing profits is tantamount to taxing success.”

Ludwig von Mises

“It’s a vain hope to believe that people will voluntarily turn their back on government subsidies.”

James Cook

February 8, 2012

“We have but to remember man’s natural tendency to satisfy his desires with the minimum of effort to realize how political power will be utilized.”

Frank Chodorov

“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”

James Madison

“Government income redistribution programs produce the same result as theft.  In fact, that’s what a thief does; he redistributes income.  The difference between government and thievery is mostly a matter of legality.”

Walter Williams

“On the unhampered market there prevails an irresistible tendency to employ every factor of production for the best possible satisfaction of the most urgent needs of the consumers.  If the government interfered with this process, it can only impair satisfaction; it can never improve it.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Competition always tends to bring about the most economical and efficient method of production.  Those who are most successful in this competition will acquire more capital to increase their production still further; those who are least successful will be forced out of the field.  So capitalist production tends constantly to be drawn into the hands of the most efficient.”

Henry Hazlitt

February 7, 2012

“When people leave it to others to stop the national government from taking unconstitutional actions that threaten liberty, they are free riding on other people’s efforts to preserve liberty.  The difficulty, as with all public goods, is that everyone faces incentives to free ride.  If most people free ride, liberty will perish.”

Charlotte Twight

“If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left.”

Thomas Sowell

“Experience shows that nothing is operated with less economy and with more waste of labor and material of every kind than public services and undertakings.  Private enterprise on the other hand naturally induces the owner to work with the greatest economy in his own interest.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Statism is the disease that prescribes itself as the cure.”

Barry Loberfeld

“There are only two questions about government.  How much do you want?  How much can you stand?”

February 6, 2012

“Liberalism’ s fatal flaw,…is that it has no permanent norms, only a succession of enthusiasms espoused by minor prophets.  Each of these seems like a hot new idea to liberals, but soon goes to irksome and destructive extremes.”

Joseph Sobran

“The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition…is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration.”

Adam Smith

“Our government officials create too many laws and spend too much money.  It’s all because they claim to have the best interests of the people at heart when in fact, knowingly or unknowingly, they do not.”

Jack Crooks

“It is always and everywhere the province of the central bank to monetize any spending, the government’s or the private sector’s, by printing enough money to pay for it in depreciated dollars.”

Caroline Baum

“No warning can save a people determined to grow rich suddenly.”

Samuel Lloyd

February 3, 2012

“No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions.  He had money as well.”

Margaret Thatcher

“The vital consideration of incentives is almost systematically overlooked in the proposals of agitators for more and bigger government welfare schemes.  We should all be concerned about the plight of the poor and unfortunate.  But the hard two-part question that any plan for relieving poverty must answer is:  How can we mitigate the penalties of failure and misfortune without undermining the incentives to effort and success.”

Henry Hazlitt

“The worship of the state is the worship o force.  There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men.  The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.  The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.”

Ludwig von Mises

“If any behavior needs to be reined in, it should be the propensity of people to use the political system to take other people’s money.”

Jeffrey A. Singer

“Government charity gives the most to those who refuse to help themselves; private charity gives less.”

James Cook

February 2, 2012

“Those politicians, professors and union bosses who curse big business are fighting for a lower standard of living.”

Ludwig von Mises

“We have more than a century of experience to show that ever bigger, ever more expensive, ever more intrusive government simply doesn’t work.  Big government has not eliminated or even significantly reduced poverty.  It has not made our health care or retirement systems better.  It has not improved education.  It has not solved any of the myriad problems our society faces.  Indeed, more often than not is has made those problems worse.”

Michael D. Tanner

“There can be little doubt that many egalitarians are motivated at least partly by envy.”

Henry Hazlitt

“The best reason to diminish social programs is not to put more money in peoples’ pockets.”

Mark Steyn

“That government is best which governs not at all… and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. ‘

Henry David Thoreau

February 1, 2012

“The interventionist policy [big government] provides thousands and thousands of people with safe, placid, and not too strenuous jobs at the expense of the rest of society.”

Ludwig von Mises

The lower-class individual lives from moment to moment.  If he has any awareness of a future, it is of something fixed, fated, beyond his control:  things happen to him, he does not make them happen.   Impulse governs his behavior, either because he cannot discipline himself to sacrifice a present for a future satisfaction or because he has no sense of the future.  He is therefore radically improvident: whatever he cannot consume immediately he considers valueless.  His bodily needs (especially for sex) and his taste for ‘action’ take precedence over everything else – and certainly over any work routine.”

Edward C. Banfield

“The Customer is God, and the market decides everything.”

Chinese Solgan

“One of the worst features of all the plans for sharing the wealth and equalizing or guaranteeing incomes is that they lose sight of the conditions and institutions that are necessary to create wealth and income in the first place.”

Henry Hazlitt

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”

Edward Abbey

January 31, 2012

“The first socialists were the intellectuals; they, and not the masses, are the backbone of Socialism.”

Ludwig von Mises

The world has always been betrayed not by scoundrels but by decent men with bad ideas.”

Sydney J. Harris

“A government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have.”

Barry Goldwater

“When individual enterprise is free and unhampered, profit-and-loss calculations set precise limits to a businessman’s temptations to expand his services…A government agency or bureau faces no such limitation.  Its services, no matter how valuable they may be, have no market price and, therefore, cannot be subjected to profit-and-loss accounting.”

Hans F. Sennholz

“The government tries to make people more equal, it makes them more unequal.”

James Cook

January 30, 2012

“The issue is always the same: the government or the market.  There is no third solution.”

Ludwig von Mises

“There is no question that if one were to ask whether we Americans are moving towards more liberty or more government control over our lives.  We might have reached a point where the trend is irreversible and that is a true tragedy for if liberty is lost in America, it will be lost for all times and all places.”

Walter Williams

“Liberty in the United States will never be reestablished so long as elites and masses alike look to the president to perform supernatural feats and therefore tolerate a virtually unlimited exercise of presidential power.  Until we can restore limited, constitutional government in this country, God save us from great presidents.”

Robert Higgs

“In a market, goods and services are exchanged through a myriad complex of voluntary transactions, each made to the mutual benefit of those engaging in the transaction.  The costs of bad choices are borne by those who make them.”

Jeffrey A. Singer

“The social and racial conflict, which springs from the redistribution ideology, may deepen as economic output is shrinking and transfer ‘entitlements’ cause budget deficits to soar.  The U.S. dollar, which has become a mere corollary of government finance, is unlikely to survive the soaring deficits.”

Hans F. Sennholz

January 27, 2012

“The first (lesson) which we meet again and again in history, is that once the dole or similar relief programs are introduced, they seem almost inevitably – unless surround by the most rigid restrictions – to go out of hand.  The second lesson is that once this happens the poor become more numerous and worse off than they were before, not only because they have lost self-reliance, but because the sources of wealth and production on which they depended for either doles or jobs are diminished or destroyed.”

Henry Hazlitt

“In public administration there is no connection between revenue and expenditure.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The direction and rhythm of human progress do not depend on the masses, even when they add up to hundreds of millions; they depend on superior minorities.”

Gonzalo Fernandez de la Mora

“Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.”

Leo Tolstoy

“To enslave a people, give them money they didn’t earn.”

James Cook

January 26, 2012

“The sad truth is that one of the reasons people have to go on relief in the first place is that they have been as incompetent or heedless in spending money as in earning it.  The worst thing one can give a spendthrift, a drunkard, a drug addict, or a compulsive gambler is cash.”

Henry Hazlit

“Both fact and logic seem to me to support the view that savings invested in privately owned economic tools of production amount to an act of charity.  And further, I believe it to be – as a type – the treated economic charity of all.”

F.A. Harper

“The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”

Louis Brandeis

“The ability of the market to serve society has been and is continually being undermined by the attacks leveled by its ideological opponents.”

Israel M. Kirzner

“The same government that requires a taxpaying citizen to document every statement on his return decrees that questioning a welfare applicant demeans and humiliates him.”

Ronald Reagan

January 25, 2012

“The same media that reaches down to the atomic level and back to the year zero for every bit of dirt they can find on the Republican candidates, retains a pathological level of incuriosity regarding substantial portions of Barack Obama’s past.”

Arnold Ahlert

“Intellectuals and celebrities venerated monsters like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, & Ho Chi Minh.  The New Left of the 1960s didn’t have a change of heart, just a change of icons from Stalin to third world tyrants.  The homicidal and sadistic Che Guevara is still held up as a hero…”

Jamie Glazov

“The singular achievement of the baby boomers is that they have swallowed more absolute economic and financial nonsense without a hint of protest for a much longer period than any other generation in modern history.  The hook has sunk very deep indeed.  The best proof of this is the fact that in all the polls, the only sane Republican candidate – Ron Paul – does worst among those Americans who are over 45 years of age.  To a vastly greater extent than their descendants, the boomer’s’ run and hide from a voice of reason.”

Bill Buckler

“Marxism is the opiate of the intellectuals.”

Raymond Aron

“…social engineering has been the salient delusion and the greatest curse of the modern age…In the twentieth century it has killed scores of millions of innocent people in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Communist China…”

Paul Johnson

January 24, 2012

“Government welfarism, with its ever-increasing of pensioners and other beneficiaries, is fatally easy to launch and fatally easy to extend, but almost impossible to bring to a halt – quite impossible politically to reverse, no matter how obvious and catastrophic its consequences become.”

Henry Hazlitt

“The Founding Fathers set up a system that heavily relied upon self-reliance and competition, with only a small dose of government intrusion.”

Bill O’Reilly

“Fortunes cannot grow; someone has to increase them.”

Ludwig von Mises

“For Al Gore and Paul Ehrlich and Co., whatever the problem, the solution is always the same.  Whether it’s global cooling, global warming, or overpopulation, we need bigger government, more regulation, higher taxes, and a massive transfer of power from the citizen to some unelected self-perpetuating crisis lobby.”

Mark Steyn

“Once a person comes to rely on the government for support, that person becomes a socialist through and through.”

James Cook

January 20, 2012

“The prerequisite for more economic equality in the world is industrialization.  And this is possible only through increased capital investment, increased capital accumulation.”

Ludwig von Mises

“The more numerous public instrumentalities become, the more is there generated in citizens the notion that everything is to be done for them, and nothing by them.  Every generation is made less familiar with the attainment of desired ends by individual actions or private agencies; until, eventually, government agencies come to be thought of as the only available agencies.”

Herbert Spencer

“Man’s envy is at its most intense where all are almost equal; his calls for redistribution are loudest when there is virtually nothing to redistribute.”

Helmut Schoeck

“Whether it’s called ‘compassionate conservatism’ or ‘big government Republicanism,’ after years of record increases in federal spending, more government is now the accepted Republican philosophy in Washington.”

Mike Pence

“The government endangers us with our own money.”

James Cook

January 19, 2012

“Here in the United States, we’ve seen the failure of mass programs of redistribution and the fiscal crises to which they give rise.  And yet many continue to defend and promote them.”

Robert A. Sirico

“The most politically painless way to hand out goodies, without taking responsibility for their costs, is to pass a law saying that somebody else must provide those goodies at their expense, while the politicians take credit for generosity and compassion.”

Thomas Sowell

“…the greatest political problem facing the world today is…how to curb the oppressive power of government, how to keep it within reasonable bounds.”

Leonard E. Read

“Those whose hardships are set forth in pamphlets and proclaimed in sermons and speeches which echo throughout society are assumed to be all worthy souls, grievously wronged; and none of them are thought of as bearing the penalties of their misdeeds.”

Herbert Spencer

“Most change in America doesn’t come from, politicians.  It comes from people inventing things and creating.  The telephone, the telegraph, the computer, all those things didn’t come from government.  Our world is going to get better and better, as long as we keep the politicians from screwing it up.”

David Boaz

January 18, 2012

“The present struggle seems less about abolishing big government than about who gets to use it.”

William Greider

“Spurred on by the demagogues who are trying to control us by pretending to take care of us, we’re rejecting the original American idea of rewarding each person according to his merit.”

Dean Russell

“The cheap but simple human emotion of envy is the driving force of all socialism, of all anti-capitalistic philosophy.  It is the mark of the intellectual.”

Andrew J. Galambos

“Whether ancient or modern, monarchy or republic, coin or paper, each nation descends pretty much the same slippery slope, expanding government to address perceived needs, accumulating too much debt, and then repudiating its obligations by destroying its currency.”

James Turk and John Rubino

“Social justice rests on the hate towards those that enjoy a comfortable position, namely, upon envy.”

Friedrich Hayek

January 13, 2011

“Every political creation of new money transfer wealth from workers and savers to those who are spending in the market place newly created monetary units which no one has earned.”

Percy L. Greaves, Jr.

“East Asia confirms the superior capacity of industrial capitalism in raising the material standard of living of large masses of people.”

Peter L. Berger

“You can travel from one end of the industrialized world to the other and almost the only people you will find engaging in backbreaking toil are people who are doing it for sport.  To find people whose day’s toil has not been lightened by mechanical invention, you must go to the non-capitalist world.”

Milton Friedman

“All the impoverishing effects of socialism are

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Gold In America

Jim Cook

 

RUNAWAY SOCIAL SYMPATHY

Every once in a while I switch the TV channel from Fox to CNBC to see what the liberals are saying.  After listening awhile I get a deep sense of hopelessness and foreboding for our country.  The most important thing for the left is giving money to people.  They are happy to see the growth of food stamps, disability payments, housing subsidies, free healthcare and all the other welfare benefits.  They utterly fail to see the damage it is doing to the recipients.  Whole cities that once flourished have deteriorated into rotting eyesores populated with shambling hulks of chemically dependent drones.  These people are no longer employable.  They have become incompetent and helpless and the liberals can’t see that it’s their doing.

..Read More »

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with us in the U.S.: reduced levels of investment and saving, the misallocation of resources, the overutilization and vandalization of factors of production, and the inferior quality of products and services.”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

“The eyes of the owner can see what no one else can see.”

James Cook

January 11, 2012

“Governments, attempting to please a small percentage of their citizens by protecting them from foreign competition, push their populations toward poverty.  A country that protects farmers does so at the expense of all who eat.  A country that protects auto workers does so at the expense of all who drive.  Free trade, on the other hand, enlarges markets and creates prosperity everywhere it is tried.”

Thomas G. Donlan

“The dangers of war in the modern era have encouraged the state and its intellectual allies to look for more trumped-up emergencies and ‘moral equivalents of war’ to rally the citizenry and persuade them to give up more of their liberty and their property to the state’s plans.  Thus we’ve had the War on Poverty, and the War on Drugs, and more crises and national emergencies than a planner could count on a super-computer.  One advantage of these ‘moral equivalents of war’ is that real wars eventually end, while the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs can go on for generations.  And thus does the alliance between the state and its compliant intellectuals reach its zenith in war or its moral equivalent.”

David Boaz

“There is in the theory of the free society nothing which militates against associations of working men, [however,] trade unions as we know them are incompatible with a free society and could become one of the foremost destructive forces we have ever encountered, if indeed they have not already become such.”

Sylvester Petro

“Capitalism has been one of the most dynamic forces in human history, transforming one society after another, and today it has become established as an international system determining the economic fate of mankind.”

Peter L. Berger

“Democratic government has this fundamental problem: In broad terms, 20 percent of the people do most of the productive work and create most of the nation’s wealth, but the other 80 percent command a heavy majority of votes.”

Thomas G. Donlan

 

January 10, 2012

“The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.”

Herbert Spencer

“Welfare reform has not been successful in significantly reducing levels of out-of-wedlock births, nor has it enabled people to become truly self-sufficient.”

Michael D. Tanner

“To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.”

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

“Government ‘help’ to business is just as disastrous as government persecution…the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.”

Ayn Rand

“If you want the best results in an organization, you must rely solely on merit.”

James Cook

 

January 6, 2012

“There is no moral distinction between the act of a pickpocket and the progressive income tax.”

Leonard E. Read

“Capital formation is the greatest charity of all.”

F. A. Harper

“The state has no wealth it hasn’t stolen, and the state has no assets whatsoever, except those which individuals have created in the first place and the state has taken.”

Andrew J. Galambos

“There is an intrinsic linkage between socialism and economic inefficiency.”

Peter L. Berger

“Government is full of people who think they know what’s best for others and can rationalize compelling them to accept it.”

James Cook

January 5, 2012

“Any attempt to expand the public sector beyond a certain point will backfire: if the private sector is squeezed too hard, government revenues will dry up.”

Joshua Muravchik

“The intellectual finds it reassuring to say that the businessman gets his money by luck; or monopoly, or dishonesty, or what have you.  As a matter of fact, the truly dishonest man will last longer in college teaching or the ministry than he will in the business world.”

Benjamin A. Rogge

“Government employees cannot consistently and simultaneously serve both the public and their union leaders.”

Sylvester Petro

“The national budget must be balanced.  The public debt must be reduced: the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled.  Payments to foreign governments must be reduced, if Rome doesn’t want to become bankrupt.  People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero

“The dangers of war in the modern era have encouraged the state and its intellectual allies to look for more trumped-up emergencies and ‘moral equivalents of war’ to rally the citizenry and persuade them to give up more of their liberty and their property to the state’s plans.  Thus we’ve had the War on Poverty, and the War on Drugs, and more crises and national emergencies than a planner count on a super-computer.  One advantage of these ‘moral equivalents of war’ is that real wars eventually end, while the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs can go on for generations.  And thus does the alliance between the state and its compliant intellectuals reach its zenith in war or its moral equivalent.”

David Boaz

January 4, 2012

“He is enslaved and debased who either volunteers or is forced to look to the taxing power of government for his livelihood.”

Paul L. Poirot

“There is nothing the state can do, and which society needs done, that cannot be done far better by the market.”

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

“Eventually economic growth reaches the point at which the accumulation of wealth in the families of achievers becomes so significant that the hatred and envy of success become stronger than the desire for continued economic growth, and a period dominated by resentment begins.”

Robert Sheaffer

“Instead of promoting a rational society of competent adults who solve the problems of living through voluntary cooperation, the modern liberal agenda creates an irrational society of child-like adults who depend upon governments to take cre of them.”

Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr.

“It is only the novice in political economy who thinks it is the duty of government to make its citizens happy – government has no such office.”

Walt Whitman