 "The seminal error is to insist on exceptions to the principle that government – assuming, of course, that one should be permitted to exist – must be strictly limited to protecting the life, liberty, and property of every individual."
William Norman Grigg
the blog Pro Libertate
"Every invasion of individual rights happens with the eager support of people acting in the sincere and thoroughly mistaken confidence that what they permit the state to do to others will never be done to them."
William Norman Grigg
author of the blog Pro Libertate
Government exists to secure our rights, not to make us morally good, whether as this is understood by modern liberals or by modern conservatives.
Tibor R. Machan
Anti-Libertarian Point Refuted
"I've long had a theory that most people don't find libertarianism so much as it happens to them. They find themselves on the receiving end of some sort of government incompetence or abuse, or they know someone who is, and it starts them on the road to a generally more skeptical view of state power."
Radley Balko
Reason.com "I used to be somebody that trusted the government. Now I really don’t trust anything."
"Minarchists such as [Tibor Machan] are libertarians with regard to all goods and services except those they arbitrarily label as “governmental.” Regarding those, they are socialists pure and simple, conceptually indistinguishable from their fellow socialists, in this one arena."
Walter Block
Anarchism and Minarchism; No Rapprochement Possible: Reply to Tibor Machan
Few combinations are more poisonous than race and politics. That combination has torn whole nations apart and led to the slaughters of millions in countries around the world.
Thomas Sowell
Race and Politics: Part I
A terrible thing happened to America on Sunday, March 21, 2010. The country took its biggest step ever down a road diametrically opposed to its original intent of keeping the state small so that the individual can be free and great.
Dennis Prager
It's a Civil War: What We Do Now
To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.
Ayn Rand
Facebook | Ayn Rand
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.
C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity
Rand is not going to save you from your insecurities. If you don't move beyond her into creation in the real world you won't go anywhere. You can talk about the "story," but what is the solution? Rappers are better than Objectivists. They are the real capitalists. They don't talk about it. They live it.
Anonymous
Our tax system is fairly complex. And complexity is what makes it work. If Jane Taxpayer figures out she spends more than three months of her year working for Joe Biden, well, she might be annoyed. Fact is she should feel blessed. As our vice president once posited, paying taxes is patriotic. So it's worrisome that fewer and fewer Americans are asked to participate in the ethical work of paying off General Motors' $4.3 billion second-half losses or subsidizing wind farms in Montana.
David Harsanyi
Glory to the Taxpayer
My view is simply this when it comes to the blessing of same sex unions; as someone who has been having the same sex for the last 15 years, the last thing I want to see the church doing about it is blessing it.
John McKillop
The Gay Fast Lane
There was no order in his reading; but there was order in what remained of it in his mind.
Ayn Rand
—of the self-educated youth Stretch Wynand
The moonbat motto is: Do as I say, not as I do. Consider the charitable deductions (or lack thereof) of the most sanctimonious liberal politicians: Obama, Biden, Kerry. They throw around quarters - their own, anyway - like they were manhole covers. But they would gladly give you the shirt off somebody else’s back.
Howie Carr
Moonbats wing it when it comes to paying more taxes
If you're one of those who have spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically-elected governments into submission, then hear this: We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work. And we be many, but you be few.
GREENPEACE Climate Rescue Weblog
http://weblog.greenpeace.org/climate/2010/04/will_the_real_climategate_plea_1.html
If an uncompromising stand is to be smeared as 'extremism,' then that smear is directed at any devotion to values, any loyalty to principles, any profound conviction, any consistency, any steadfastness, any passion, any dedication to an unbreached, inviolate truth -- any man of integrity.
Ayn Rand
." -- Ayn Rand in " 'Extremism' or The Art of Smearing", Chapter 17 of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.
Most people can't think quantitatively to save their skins.
Dr. Peter Zimmerman, Physicist
Hydrino Study Group Discussion of the "Dinner Party Problem"
A few weeks ago, The New York Times ran an editorial noting the amazing fact that, by the middle of this year, there will be an estimated 6.8 billion people on Earth -- and 5 billion will have cell phones! (Even more astounding, at least one of them is seated directly behind me every time I go to the movies.) How did that happen without a Democrat president and Congress using bribes, parliamentary tricks and arcane non-voting maneuvers to pass a massive, hugely expensive National Cell Phone Reform Act?
Ann Coulter
Prescription For Disaster Now Covered Under Obamacare
We honored the vows of our founders who in the Declaration of Independence talked about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We believe the legislation that we have gives all people in our country the liberty to have healthier lives.
Nancy Pelosi
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/health/policy/23health.html?src=me
If we can not solve all problems in Universe, hell with it, let's get drunk - that's the Russian way. Let's do whatever we can, as much as we can - that's American way. Compare the results - America still wins.
Maria Feht
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/NewsDiscussions/2788.shtml#19
Enjoy your life to the fullest, if only to spite them
Steve Wolfer
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/Jokes/0408.shtml#16
Here's the thing about monogamy. It only works if you cheat.
Denny Crane
Boston Legal Beauty and the Beast
What happened to Canada? How did the country that gave us Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, Martin Short, Dan Aykroyd and Catherine O'Hara suddenly become a bunch of whining crybabies?
Ann Coulter
Oh, Canada!
The Fedopus has far more than eight tentacles.
Victor Davis Hanson
We’ve Crossed the Rubicon
Nancy Pelosi wants the House to say the Senate bill is 'deemed passed,' so they can pass the bill without voting on it. Can the American people then say that Obama, Biden, Pelosi, and Reid are 'deemed impeached'?
Ron Chandler
from TIA Daily quoted in Pamela Gellar's Atlas Shrugs blog
There is a perfect likeness between Christian and anarchist: their object, their instinct, points only toward destruction.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche and the Nazis
The whole point about homosexuality is that it was supposed to be wilder and crazier, and instead the leftist politicized gays have made homosexuality totally boring. . . . If Oscar Wilde and Cole Porter came back today they'd be straight.
Mark Steyn
ricochet.com
The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.
Oscar Wilde
If you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it's free.
P. J. O'Rourke
Scrap the Health-Care Bill!
At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God.
Mosab Hassan Yousef
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703915204575103481069258868.html
There is no first strike in karate.
Master Shoshin Nagamine
The Essence of Okinawan Karate-Do
Government health care is not about health care, it's about government. Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.
Mark Steyn
Obamacare worth the price to Democrats
We were told that when we had a president, we'd see a giant global political figure - the man that would be the political leader for 500 million people. The man that would represent all of us on the world stage. The man whose job was so important that of course you're paid more than President Obama. Well, I'm afraid what we've got was you. And I'm sorry, but after that performance, earlier, that you gave - and I don't want to be rude - but, you know, really, you have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk. And the question that I want to ask . . . the question that I want to ask is: Who are you? I'd never heard of you; nobody in Europe has ever heard of you. I would like to ask you, president, who voted for you? And what mechanism? Oh, I know democracy is not popular with you lot . . . and what mechanism do the peoples of Europe have to remove you? Is this European democracy? Well, I sense though that you're competent and capable and dangerous, and I have no doubt that it's your intention to be the quiet assassin of European democracy and of the European nation states. You appear to have a loathing for the very concept of the existence of nation states - perhaps that's because you come from Belgium, which of course is pretty much a non-country. But since you took over, we've seen Greece reduced to nothing more than a protectorate - Sir, you have no legitimacy in this job, at all, and I can say with confidence, that I can speak on behalf of the majority of the British people in saying: We don't know you, we don't want you, and the sooner you're put out to grass, the better
Nigel Farage
British Member of European Parliament tells off the European President
What's happening in the developed world today isn't so very hard to understand: The 20th century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they've reached the next stage in social democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over.
Mark Steyn
face down in the ouzo
"[Bypassing the filibuster via reconciliation] would change the character of the Senate forever ... you would essentially have still two chambers, the House and the Senate, but you have simply majoritarian, absolute power on either side, and that's just not what the Founders intended."
Barack Hussein Obama
Investors.com via RealClearPolitics.com about an Obama quote from 4-25-2005
In town halls and tea parties across the nation, Obama lost the argument with Americans. So now he wants a debating partner who will be less challenging: elected Republicans.
Ann Coulter
What Part of "Party of No" Don't You Understand?
When somebody who has never owned a slave apologizes for slavery to somebody who has never been a slave, then what began as mushy thinking has degenerated into theatrical absurdity-- or, worse yet, politics.
Thomas Sowell
Too many apologies
Slavery is another matter - the most vicious habit humans fall into and the hardest to break... After a culture falls ill of it, it gets rooted in the economic system and laws, in men's habits and attitudes. You abolish it; you drive it underground - there it lurks, ready to spring up again, in the minds of people who think it is their 'natural' right to own other people. You can't reason with them; you can kill them but you can't change their minds.
Robert A. Heinlein
Citizen of the Galaxy
Altruism does not tell you to abstain from pursuing values. It tells you to pursue values in order to sacrifice them.
Nathaniel Branden
The Vision of Ayn Rand
The difference between America and Europe is that, when the global economy nosedived, everywhere from Iceland to Bulgaria mobs took to the streets and besieged Parliament, demanding to know why government didn't do more for them. This is the only country in the developed world where a mass movement took to the streets to say we can do just fine if you control-freak statists would just stay the hell out of our lives, and our pockets.
Mark Steyn
Getting our groupthink on
Obama's NASA budget perfectly captures the difference in spirit between Kennedy's liberalism and Obama's. Kennedy's was an expansive, bold, outward-looking summons. Obama's is a constricted inward-looking call to retreat. Fifty years ago, Kennedy opened the New Frontier. Obama has just shut it.
Charles Krauthammer
Closing the New Frontier
The palpable whiff given off by the White House inner circle is that they're the last people on the planet still besotted by Barack Obama, and that they're having such a cool time starring in their own reality-show remake of "The West Wing," they can only conceive of the public — and indeed the world — as crowd-scene extras in "The Barack Obama Show."
Mark Steyn
If 'Unsustainable' Is New Normal, Collapse Is Closer Than We Think
Today's tax system was shaped by sadists who were trying to be nice.
George Will
Charting Our Way to Solvency
Obama . . . has apparently confused what people say with what nations do.
Victor Davis Hanson
America Rides Off Into the Sunset
Functioning societies depend on agreed rules. If you want to open a business, you do it in Singapore or Ireland, because the rules are known to all parties. You don't go to Sudan or Zimbabwe, where the rules are whatever the state's whims happen to be that morning.
Mark Steyn
In Obama's America you'll all work for the government
At its essential level, a political party is an extra-governmental conspiracy to control the government.
Jay Cost
Could Nancy Pelosi Lose Control of the House? RealClearPolitics HorseRaceBlog
I love wealthy people. They've always kept me employed, dry, warm, fed, safe, even entertained. The arrangement is mutually beneficial. My life is pretty much all about me. Who is your life about? Is there a "you" in there, or do you live for everyone else but you?
Teresa Summerlee Isanhart
The Scourge of Public Libraries
Briefly, a metaphor is an affair between a predicate with a past and an object that yields while protesting.
Nelson Goodman
Languages of Art; in Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor
Shockingly, half of all Americans have IQs below the median. But intelligence is not the same thing as wisdom or sense. Very intelligent people have been known to advance very compelling arguments on behalf of very bad ideas.
James Taranto
Barack Obama, the Angry Left and the politics of intellectual contempt.
There is a simple way to get corporate money out of politics: get the government out of our lives and economic affairs. If government has no favors to sell, no one will spend money trying to win them.
John Stossel
http://www.theatlasphere.com/columns/100126-stossel-free-speech.php
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