GraniteGrok

Liberty has never come from government.  Liberty has always come from the subjects of government.  The history of liberty is the history of resistance.

-Woodrow Wilson, President

I find my self in complete agree with the above, but find it incongruent that it passes from the first national level politician that proudly wore the label "Progressive".  That movement, whose latest uber-proponent, is Barack Obama, believes not in the definition of liberty as espoused by the Founding Fathers but in a redefinition of that term as something given to the masses from a government composed of elites governing from the heights of an "enlightened" sense of a rational Science of Politics that would make all those silly decisions of government for us.

In this, President Wilson may well have been describing the TEA Party movement, as these "subjects" are now rebelling from that self same Progressive movement's attempts to "rule for us".

Posted by Skip at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress…. Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America.

- James Madison, President

Words of wisdon - willfully ignored by Progressives

Posted by Skip at 9:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is not because government-run health care is so effective or beloved; rather, it fosters a debilitating spirit of dependency that is fatal to a self-governing people. In short, it kills the self-reliance and individualism critical to a free-market democracy.

For Mr. Obama, that is precisely the point. Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, laid out the Marxist blueprint that has been followed by the radical left since 1917. Lenin urged that any disaster should be exploited to "hasten the destruction ... of the capitalist class." The 2008 Great Recession brought Mr. Obama to power. He has been seizing this crisis in order to overthrow the old capitalist order.

- Jeffrey Kuhner

(H/T: Washington Times)

Posted by Skip at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Steve at 7:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Skip at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Political leaders in capitalist countries who cheer the collapse of socialism in other countries continue to favor socialist solutions in their own.  They know the words, but they have not learned the tune.

- Milton and Rose Friedman

Posted by Skip at 8:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is becoming an increasingly obvious fact of economic history that the development of economic systems which concentrate on the common good depends on a determinate ethical system, which in turn can be born and sustained only by strong religious convictions.  Conversely, it has also become obvious that the decline of such discipline can actually cause the laws of the market to collapse.

-  Pope Benedict XVI

Posted by Skip at 8:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past.  Although we had been warned...that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism.  And now that we have seen a new form of slavery arise before our eyes, we have so completely forgotten the warning that it scarcely occurs to us that the two things may be connected.

-Friedrich Hayek

Posted by Skip at 8:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The reason is that economic independence, honestly come by, is the precondition of all else in a nation where inherited wealth is a rarity, and self-reliance a trait with more than economic implications.  The sturdy individualism it fosters is the backbone of the American politicial system.  But this individualism too must be led in the proper direction.  It must be wedded to a love of liberty

- Matthew Spalding

Posted by Skip at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Men are made stronger on the realization that the helping hand they need is at the end of their own arm.

- Sir Philip Sidney

Posted by Skip at 8:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The notion of a self...who exercises self-discipline, postpones gratification, curbs the sexual appetite, stops short of aggression and criminal behavior - a self that can become more intelligent and lift itself to the very peaks of life by its own bootstraps through study, practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up in the face of great odds - this old-fashioned notion...of success through enterprise and true grit is slipping away...The peculiarly American faith in the power of the individual to transform himself from a helpless cipher into a giant among men...is now as moribund as the god fro whom Nietzche wrote an obituary in 1882.

- Tom Wolfe

Posted by Skip at 8:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism; 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.  "Social democracy" is, it turns out, explicitly anti-social.

-Mark Steyn

Posted by Skip at 8:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A citizenry that reaches a certain tipping point in its dependency on government runs the risk of evolving into a society that demands an ever-expanding state that caters to group self-interest rather than pursuing the public good.

- William W. Beach

Posted by Skip at 8:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

...the Democrats are pressing ahead with health care out of a deep-seated desire to fundamentally transform the relationship between citizens and government...The aim of progressivism since at least FDR has been to turn citizens into clients. Under the conservative vision, governments depend on citizens to maintain legitimacy, not to mention revenue. Under the progressive vision, clients depend on the state for legitimacy and, increasingly, revenue.

- Jonah Goldberg (syndicated columnist, author, speaker)

The question becomes: who owns who?

(H/T: NRO)

Posted by Skip at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Self-reliance is the only road to true freedom, and being one's own person is its ultimate reward.

- Patricia Sampson

Posted by Skip at 8:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The more the State "plans," the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.

- Friedrich Hayek

Translation?  This:

Posted by Skip at 8:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It is not true that the function of law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our will, our education, our opinions, our work, our trade, our talents, or our pleasures.  The function of law is to protect the free exercise of these rights, and to prevent any person from interfering with the free exercise of these rights

- Frederic Bastiat

Posted by Skip at 8:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"It's a tax on insurance companies that offer Cadillac, or quite frankly, Rolls Royce policies that in essence people don't need."

"What we have is a sensible plan that taxes insurance companies if they continue to offer insurance policies that are greatly in excess of what people need."

- Robert Gibbs, Press Secretary for President Obama

Retort:

Does that make you stop for a second and wonder ... our own Press Secretary believes that the government should be able to determine what you "need."

- Neal Boortz (lawyer, author, and talk show host)

And Government knows what ...why?  How? The hubris of Progressives, presuming that THEY know what is best for the rest of us...

(H/T: Boortz)

Posted by Skip at 8:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"What’s really going on, I think, is that the nature of class war has changed. The old virus has mutated. The old social and political divisions have given way to two new classes — rather as on the trains. Those in economy are most of us, paying for the comforts of those in first class. And those in first class are the new political class — all those who owe their advancement and their security and their pensions and their privileges not to their backgrounds or their talents, or even necessarily their political parties, but to the state and our taxes."

- Minette Marrin

(H/T: Samizdata)

Posted by Skip at 8:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Personal responsibility is a real problem for those who want to collectivize society and take away our power to make our own decisions, transferring that power to third parties like themselves, who imagine themselves to be so much wiser and nobler than the rest of us.

-Thomas Sowell (in Real Clear Politics)

Posted by Skip at 8:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You say: "There are persons who have no money," and you turn to the law.  But the law is not a breast that fills itself with milk...Nothing can enter the public treasury for the benefit of one citizen or one class unless other citizens and other classes have been forced to send it in.

-Frederic Bastiat

Posted by Skip at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"The soft despotism will become more extensive and milder and it would degrade men without tormenting them.  It is absolute, detailed, regular, far seen and mild.   It would resemble paternal power if like that it had for its object to prepare men for manhood. But on the contrary, it seeks only to them fixed irrecoverably in childhood.  It willingly works for their happiness but it wants to be the unique agent and arbiter of that happiness. It provides for their security, for sees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principle affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estate, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living...It is that every day it renders the employment of free will   less useful and more rare. It confines the action of the will into a smaller space and little by little, it steals the very use of free will from its citizenry. It reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

- Alex de Tocqueville as quoted by George Will (CPAC 2010)

Posted by Skip at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I think we can say that the Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day, and the framers had that same blind spot...The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society...The Constitution is a chart of negative liberties, says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.  And that hasn't shifted.

- Barack Obama, 2001 interview on Chicago's WBEZ-FM, October 30, 2008 (before becoming President)

President Obama obviously understands the intent of the Constitution...and he doesn't like it.  The Constitution is intended to limit the scope of government, not to spell out a humanitarian and social agenda.  Freedom demands that individuals and societies shape their own lives and future.  This is not a role the government can or should play.

 -  Jim DeMint, Senator (R-SC), in his book ("Saving Freedom")

Posted by Skip at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When law attempts to orchestrate a social good or reshape the nature of mankind, it undertakes a goal proven throughout history to be impossible.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Swiss-born Frenchman, was one of the first modern writers to seriously attack the institution of private property and, there, is considered a forbearer of modern socialism and communism.  Rousseau believed the state should  shape the individual and society but admitted it was a difficult task:

He who would dare to undertake the political creation of a people ought to believe that he can, in a manner of speaking, transform human nature; transform each individual - who, by himself, is a solitary and perfect whole - into a mere part of a greater whole from which the individual will henceforth receive his life and being.  Thus the person who would undertake the political creation of a people should believe in his ability to alter man's constitution; to strengthen it; to substitute for the physical and independent existence received from nature, an existence which is partial and moral.  In short, the would-be creator of political man must remove man's own force and endow him with others that are naturally alien to him.

Rousseau believed the government could do what only God and a free people can do.  The substitution of the "State" for God is the foundation of secular socialism.  Secularism, for this reason, is central to the socialist agenda;  it substitutes external government values for internal, religious-based personal values.  Under socialism, government becomes the moral agent to correct injustices caused by the inherent weaknesses and differences in mankind.  But "equalizing" millions of different individuals is impossible and attempting to do it is a never-ending process that continuously expands government and leads to the loss of freedom and individuality.

- Jim DeMint (R-SC), US Senator "Saving Freedom"

Once again, we see the old socialist idea - that the State is preeminent above the individual and is merely a tiny political subdivision of a whole.  This is what Progressives ("the New Socialists") wholeheartedly believe - the subsuming of the individual.

Ask yourself - is this what the Founding Fathers, those political genius that wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, thought?  Do you know your history well enough to prove it?

Government to remake the individuals within a society - that, by definition, requires fashion of an involuntary thought police.  Before one gets up in arms, think about it - how else can Government do otherwise?

Is that the proper role of Government?  To remake each and every individual?

Posted by Skip at 9:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If every person has the right to defend - even by force- his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly.  Thus the principle of collective right - its reason for existing, its lawfulness is based on individual right...Since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force - for the same reason - cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups...If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense.  It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces.  And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.

- Frederic Bastiat

Posted by Skip at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society.  As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all...We disapprove of state eduction.  Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education.  We object to a state religion.  Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all.  We object to a state-enforced equality.  Then they say that we are against equality.  And so on, and son on.  It is as if the socialist were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want hte state to raise grain.

- Frederic Bastiat

Indeed, since these words were written centuries ago, we are coming back full circle once again.  We are seeing that now with the Progressives ("the New Socialists"") demanding that the State do everything on behalf of its citizens.  And we DO hear these arguments from them - how, otherwise, can we decipher Republicans being called the "Party of No".

To me, this is the essence of the Nanny State - for when we are given everything, of what value is it?  We know by personal experience that those things that have been EARNED are of the higher value.  I have seen this upfront and personal when TMEW and I ran a daycare: those parents that had their childrens' care paid by the State very much valued our services much less than those that had multiple kids and were paying their own way.

Socialism, a la the Progressives, will engender a larger and larger entitlement mentality - "I expect you to provide for me".   And when you consider the true history of this country, nothing could be further from the truth.

When one looks at the tax code, it is easy to see that it isn't just the mugger that is saying "Give me your wallet".  Unlike Government, I know that the mugger will spend my money on himself.

Posted by Skip at 8:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the September 21, 2009 issue of National Review, he had this to say:

When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the modern British welfare state in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want,” to be accomplished by “cooperation between the State and the individual.”

In attempting to insulate the citizenry from the vicissitudes of fate, Sir William has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons and Europeans want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity. “Cooperation” between the State and the individual has resulted in a huge expansion of the former and the remorseless shriveling of the latter.

For a while, the Sun used to run a “shop-a-sponger hotline,” fingering chaps like Alan Kenyon, who quit his last job in November 1974 and has lived since then on the government’s weekly “jobseeker’s allowance,” notwithstanding that, as the decades have rolled by, he has never attempted to seek any job. He passes his days playing his taxpayer-subsidized collection of 3,000 videos and 12,000 records. “Westerns are my favorite films,” he told the Sun. “I love Clint Eastwood.” Who doesn’t? A man of action, quick on the draw. A man of inaction, quick on the drawing of benefits, can happily watch that stuff decade in, decade out.

It happens so quickly. The “abolition of want” starts with the abolition of stigma. Once you’ve done that, it’s very hard to go back even if you want to — and there’s no indication Britain’s millions of non-working households do. But if, say, you happen to be the one Western nation not yet fully drugged into inertia by cradle-to-grave welfarism, you might want to pause before embracing the same fate. 

(H/T: YesFans)

Posted by Skip at 8:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

One of NH's best pundits is Mark Steyn (as I have oft stated).  The following was written in National Review (to which I subscribe) in the January 25, 2010 issue (abstracted from SteynOnline):

Is that so hard to imagine? Every time I retail the latest indignity imposed upon the “citizen” by some or other Continental apparatchik, I receive e-mails from the heartland pointing out, with much reference to the Second Amendment, that it couldn’t happen here because Americans aren’t Euro-weenies. But nor were Euro-weenies once upon a time. Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road To Serfdom is psychological: “There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought,” he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944. “It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel.

 The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, non-interference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.” Two-thirds of a century on, almost every item on the list has been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (40 per cent of people receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and authority” – the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something”, the cost to individual liberty be damned. American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government and not witness, in enough of the populace, the same descent into dependency and fatalism. As Europe demonstrates, a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two. Look at what the Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population: That’s what happened in Britain. 

-Mark Steyn

Posted by Skip at 8:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

On philanthropy and the old saying "give a man a fish, you feed him for a day.  Teach him how to fish, you feed him forever":

"You have to take it one step further.  Teaching a man to fish presupposes that you have a right to fish and a right to keep the fish you catch.  It assumes that you can take your fish to market and sell it, and use the proceeds to buy clothes for your kids. Too many philanthropists don't even consider that in a just and functioning society, you must have individual liberty with property rights, the rule of law, and limited constitutional government."

- Art Pope, philanthropist

Posted by Skip at 8:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It was a spiritual wind that drove the Americans irresistibly ahead from the beginning.  What was behind their compulsion to improve a man's lot was an all-pervading religious sense of duty, the submission to a God-given imperative, to a God-given code of personal behavior, the willing acceptance of all the necessary sacrifices, including death in battle.  Few foreigners understand this, even today.

- Luigi Barzini

Posted by Skip at 8:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The law has been perverted by the influence of two entirely different causes: stupid greed and false philanthropy.

- Frederic Bastiat

Posted by Skip at 8:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?  That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?  Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that His justice cannot sleep for ever.

- Thomas Jefferson, President

Posted by Skip at 8:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From George Washington to Abraham Lincoln, Eisenhower, and beyond, the sense of the sovereignty of God above history has been a recurring theme in American self-understanding, a genuine point of consensus despite obvious dissent.

-Os Guinness

Posted by Skip at 8:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth -- that God governs the affairs of men.  And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probably an empire can rise without His aid?  We have been assured, sir, the sacred writings that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.

-Benjamin Franklin

Posted by Skip at 8:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If everything is endlessly up for question and open for change, then everything is permitted and nothing is forbidden...nothing is unthinkable.

- Os Guinness

Posted by Skip at 8:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We have no government armed with powers capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.  Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.  Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

- John Adams, President

Posted by Skip at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Without God, there could be no American form of Government, nor an American way of life.  Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, the most basic, expression of Americanism.  

- Dwight Eisenhower, President

Posted by Skip at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ultimately, our choice is to give up Utopian quests or give up our freedom. This has been recognized for centuries by some, but many others have not yet faced that reality, even today. If you think government should "do something" about anything that ticks you off, or anything you want and don't have, then you have made your choice between Utopia and freedom.

- Thomas Sowell, Professor, economics, George Mason University

Posted by Skip at 8:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Government in general can never be trusted: that is one of the reasons why the US constitution is such a subversive document. It says that people can criticize the government, that the government can't disarm them, that the government has only those rights explicitly given to them and all other rights belong to the people, not the government.

... the US Constitution is the most subversive document ever published. With it, citizens can deny tyrants and the corrupt from taking over the system, and the system of checks and balances has, as we've recently seen, even worked when only one part of the system refuses to countenance the sins of the other two.

- Shrinkwrapped blog

Posted by Skip at 8:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation deserts the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice?  And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.  Whatever may be conceeded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

-George Washington, President

Posted by Skip at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government which actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with soveriegn reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should "make no law respect an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of sepearation between church and state.

- Thomas Jefferson, President

Posted by Skip at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This all leads to my belief that I’ve been wrongly defining liberalism for years. I think a new definition of the liberal is in order: A liberal is someone who only wants to be free from the consequences of freedom.  This tendency to seek freedom from the consequences of one’s free choices is seen in a lot of areas of liberal policy making.

- Professor Mike Adams, UNC

I have often said that Progressives want us all to be free from necessity and responsibility.  The problem is that the first means dependence on someone or something else - how can that be called freedom? 

The second, freedom from responsibility, means that not only the costs of bad decisions (from a lack of responsibility for them) is pushed onto everyone else - how is that freedom for the rest of us?  And, having no responsibility still means a dependence on someone else to make "the important decisions" - and how is that freedom for the irresponsible?

Freedom is nice, it is great, but it absolutely requires responsibility on the part of the free man to make decisions and to accept the consequences of those decisions - anything less is to be enslave to someone else.

Posted by Skip at 8:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Among the props of order in democratic societies, the chief is religion; and Tocqueville found in his American observations some reassurance on this score.  Democratic peoples simplify religion, certainly, but it may remain with them as an abiding force, helping to counteract that materialism which leads to democratic despotism.

- Russell Kirk

Posted by Skip at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

And let me say this, with respect to those who wish to harm us, I believe that our Constitution and laws exist to protect this nation - they do not grant rights and privileges to enemies in wartime. In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them."

- Scott Brown, Senator (R-MA)

Amen!

(H/T: Powerline for reminding me of what Senator Brown said)

Posted by Skip at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This isn't the Democratic party of our fathers and grandfathers. This is the party of Woodstock hippies.  I was at Woodstock — I built the stage. And when everything fell apart, and people were fighting for peanut-butter sandwiches, it was the National Guard who came in and saved the same people who were protesting them. So when Hillary Clinton a few years ago wanted to build a Woodstock memorial, I said it should be a statue of a National Guardsman feeding a crying hippie."

- John Ratzenberger ("Cliff Claven" from the TV show "Cheers"), spoken at the Scott Brown rally (Senatorial race, MA)

(H/T: NRO)

Posted by Skip at 8:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Congress does not draw to its halls those who love liberty. It draws those who love power.

- Unknown

(H/T: Boortz, listening to Judge Napolitano on Fox News)

Posted by Skip at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”  

- Calvin Coolidge, President

Posted by Skip at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Every thinking man, when he things, realizes that the teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and entwined with our whole civic and social life that it would be literally - I do not mean figuratively, but literally - impossible for us to figure what the loss would be if these teachings were removed.  We would lose almost all the standards by which we now judge both public and private morals.

- Theodore Roosevelt, President

Posted by Skip at 8:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It was religion that gave birth to the English colonies in America.  One must never forget that...I think I can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on those shores, as that of the whole human race in the first man...Despotism may be able to do without faith, but freedom cannot...When a people's religion is destroyed...then not only will they let their freedom be taken from them, but often they actually hand it over themselves.

- Alexis de Tocqueville

Posted by Skip at 8:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In an amzing display of historic ignorance, economic destructiveness, and ideologically driven dishonesty, Washington politicians are int he process of combining the worst of the 1970s bad economic policies with the worst of Detroit's economic and (America's) educational decay.  We are in grave danger of turning all of America into the kind of declining ecomony and bureaucratic mess which Detroit became over the last forty years.

- Newt Gingrich (former Speaker of the US House of Representatives)

Posted by Skip at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Statesmen my dear sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand...The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure virtue.

-President John Adams

So much for secularism and relative moralism - the hallmarks of Progressivism.

Posted by Skip at 8:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The maintenance of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing.  And it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind.  It requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you step in to try to do something about them, you not only may make them worse, but you will spread your tentacles and get bad results elsewhere.

- Milton Friedman, free market economist

Posted by Skip at 8:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The principle that has been lost by today's politicians is limited government.  When our legislators ignore the limits established by the Constitution, there is no limit to government at all.  When we laugh at champions of a balanced budget (which all states have to adhere to), we throw off all restraints on spending.  The government then becomes the instrument of compassion and the means for every good deed dreamed up by our politicians.  The only solution is for the American people to stop asking more from their "genie" - the federal government - and force it back into its "cage" - the Constitution.

- Senator Jim DeMint, South Carolina (from "Saving Freedom")

Posted by Skip at 9:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.

- Thomas Jefferson, President

Posted by Skip at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“The record of history is absolutely clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activity that is unleashed by the free enterprise system.”

- Milton Friedman

(H/T: Terry Paulson)

Posted by Skip at 9:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“It becomes increasingly clear that the pattern of American fiscal policy is being brought into consonance with the Karl Marx communist theory that through a division of the existing wealth, mankind will be brought to a universal standard of life - a degree of mediocrity to which the Communists and their fellow travelers seek to reduce the people of this great nation.

Whether it be by accident or design, such policy, formulated with reckless indifference to the preservation of constitutional liberty and our free enterprise economy, coupled with rapid centralization of power in the hands of a few, is leading us toward a communist state with as dreadful certainty as though the leaders of the Kremlin themselves were charting our course.”

- General Douglas McArthur, 1952

(H/T: Howard W. Houchen)

Posted by Skip at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Among the most pathetic letters and e-mails I receive are those from people who ask why I don't write more "positively" about Obama or "give him the benefit of the doubt."

No one-- not even the President of the United States-- has an entitlement to a "positive" response to his actions. The entitlement mentality has eroded the once common belief that you earned things, including respect, instead of being given them.

- Thomas Sowell

Posted by Skip at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Political correctness is a cancer that many Americans, government institutions, businesses and even many individual citizens have willfully embraced and now serve as hosts who intentionally spread this horrible disease.
 
Let me be clear: political correctness is a form of cowardice that leads to brain damage.  It concerns itself with feeling good instead of thinking clearly and actually doing good. It masks the truth because the truth is too uncomfortable for the intellectually and spiritually weak in our society. To others, political correctness serves as a useful smokescreen. Political correctness is ultimately about stepping on the throat of common sense and strangling the life out of it. Logic be damned.

- Ted Nugent

(H/T: Human Events)

Posted by Skip at 8:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are...[a] National Department of Education...the studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic, and other features of the bourgeois ideology. The students will be taught the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and the general ethics of the new Socialist society."

- William Z. Foster, Toward Soviet America, 1932 National Chairman of the American Communist Party (1933-44, 1945-57)

Posted by Skip at 8:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

- Thomas Jefferson

Posted by Skip at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The system under which people make their own choices - and bear most of the consequences of their decisions - is the system that has prevailed for most of our history.

- Milton and Rose Friedman

Posted by Skip at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

- Thomas Jefferson, President

Posted by Skip at 8:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If anyone thought U.S. Treasury bonds are a riskless investment, think again.  Am I suggesting the U.S. government will default on its obligations?  In my opinion, no other outcome is imaginable.  If you doubt this conclusion, try to imagine federal, state, and local government paying off $10 trillion.  It's not going to happen, as the readiest method of default open to government is the debasement of the national currency.  This means an end to American international power - financial and military.  It means an end to the old international order, which has existed since 1945.  it means global revolutionl.

Wave hello to socialism.

- J. R. Nyquist

Posted by Skip at 8:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

He is free who knows how to keep in his own hand the power to decide, at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power.

- Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo

Posted by Skip at 8:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.

- James Baldwin

Posted by Skip at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master.  The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

- Frank Herbert

Posted by Skip at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessing of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?"

- James Madison, President

(H/T: Allen,  http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa62.htm)

Posted by Skip at 8:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

-Albert Einstein

Posted by Skip at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When freedom prevails, the ingenuity and inventiveness of people creates incredible wealth.  This is the source of the natural improvement of the human condition.

- Brian S. Wesbury

Posted by Skip at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulare their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.  This is the sum of good government.

- President Thomas Jefferson

Posted by Skip at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action, according to our will, within limits drawn around it by the equal rights of others.

- President Thomas Jefferson

Posted by Skip at 8:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The argument for collectivism, for government doing something, is simple.  Anybody can understand it.  "If there's something wrong, pass a law".  if somebody is in trouble, get Mr. X to help them out." 

The argument for voluntary cooperation, for a free market, is not nearly so simple.  It says, "You know, if you allow people to cooperate voluntarily and don't intefere with them, indirectly, through the operation of the market, they will improve matters more than you can improve it directly by appointing somebody."  That's a subtle argument, and it's hard for people to understand.  Moreover, people think that when you argue that way you're arguing for selfishness, for gree. 

That's utter nonsense.

- Milton Friedman

Posted by Skip at 8:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Once said to an assembled group of scholars in the White House:

I thnk this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

- John F. Kennedy, President

(H/T: Don)

Posted by Skip at 8:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

- President John Adams

Posted by Skip at 8:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Loss of freedom seldom happens overnight.  Oppression doesn't stand on the doorstep with toothbrush, moustache, and swastika armband - it creeps up insidiously...step by step, and all of a sudden the unfortunate citizen realizes that it is gone.

- Baron Geoffrey Lane

Posted by Skip at 8:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.  They are eager to barter their independence for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding, and being responsible for inevitable failure.  They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command, and shoulder all responsiblity.

- Eric Hoffer

Posted by Skip at 8:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom.

- Friedrich Hayek, economist

Posted by Skip at 8:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purposes of their daily lives and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom.

- President John F. Kennedy

Posted by Skip at 8:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It may be that a free society...carries within itself the forces of its own destruction, that once freedom is achieved it is taken for granted and ceases to be valued...Does this mean that freedom is valued only a dark phase of cosialist totalitarianism befor eht forces of freedom can gather strength anew?  It may be so, but I hope it need not be.

-Friedrich Hayek, economist

Posted by Skip at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land."

2 Chronicles 7:14

Posted by Skip at 8:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(emphasis mine)

...children must be taught this over and over again: an effective person must incorporate discipline into his or her life, and a just society must demand responsibility from its citizens.

- Bill O'Reilly, "A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity"

Posted by Skip at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Rather, I classify this as an ignoble one:

"A new initiative is being piloted where 'green' patents are given special priority over other patents in the backlogged system. Every day an important green tech innovation is hindered from coming to market is another day we harm our planet and another day lost in creating green businesses and green jobs. Applications in this pilot program will see a significant savings in pendency, which will help bring green innovations to market more quickly."

- David Kappos

(Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO)

I place this in the same category as this is (now that history shows the utter idiocy of it):

"Everything that can be invented has been invented.” **

Opportunity cost - the time spent on "saving the world"? At the cost of evaluating that could transform the world - like penicillin, the transistor, or the laser?

Ugh....

(H/T: Slashdot)

** - Although attributed to Charles Duell but has never been verified, by the way....

Posted by Skip at 8:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.

 - Richard Rorty

(H/T: NRO)

Posted by Skip at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You know it is bad for Al Gore when this happens....hoisted on his own petard, as it were

Poor Al Gore. Global warming completely debunked via the very Internet you invented. OH. OH the irony.

- Jon Stewart, host of the Daily Show

 

(H/T: NewsBusters)

Posted by Skip at 8:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Since this is an era when many people are concerned about "fairness" and "social justice," what is your "fair share" of what someone else has worked for?

-Thomas Sowell, conservative economic Professor

Posted by Skip at 8:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From an email sent to me yesterday morning:

"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed, as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States."

--Noah Webster (An Examination of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, 10 October 1787)

=====================================================================

The above was also accompanied by this:

In 1991 servicemen of Japan, the USA, and our allies were invited to Pearl Harbor for the 50th anniversary of Japan’s surprise attack which crippled our Navy on December 7, 1941. The final afternoon was set aside for a question and answer period. Former U.S. servicemen were allowed to ask questions of a World War II Japanese Admiral, and Japanese veterans were given the chance to ask questions of a World War II American general.

Although all the questions were interesting, one stood out above all. An American veteran of World War II posed this question to the Japanese Admiral: "After your surprise attack at Pearl  Harbor, why didn't you attack our west coast mainland? We were so ill-prepared that  your Armies could have swept over half our country before we could even catch our breath; we just were not ready for war."

The Admiral answered with this: "You forget one important point: Your constitution, unlike almost any other in the world, plainly states all citizens can own weapons. We knew we could take on your military, but those of us who had lived in the USA and studied your people also knew that we would have had to fight your entire population, so our high commend refused to attack your mainland.”

When and if politicians and bureaucrats finally make the move to disarm the U.S. population, it will be time to fight. It's notable that open carry without license is the law in New Hampshire, and that concealed weapons permits are required to be issued in the absence of legal grounds to deny. Consider the very first two articles of the NH State Constitution, especially Article 2-A.

(H/T: Tim)

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I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.

I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother's race.

- President Barack Obama, "Dreams of My Father"

Posted by Skip at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports."

- George Washington, First President of the United States, General of the Revolutionary War Army

(H/T: Star Parker)

Posted by Skip at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

- Dr. Adrian Rogers, "Ten Secrets for a Successful Family"

 

"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

- Gary North

Posted by Skip at 8:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“In America, the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion: within these barriers, an author may write what he pleases; but woe to him if he goes beyond them. Not that he is in danger of an auto-da-fe, but he is exposed to continued obloquy and persecution. His political career is closed forever, since he has offended the only authority that is able to open it. Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. Before publishing his opinions, he imagined he held them in common with others; but no sooner has he declared them, than he is loudly censured by his opponents, whilst those who think like him, without having the courage to speak out, abandon him in silence. He yields at length, overcome by the daily effort he has to make, and subsides into silence, as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth.”

-Alexis DeTocqueville

Posted by Skip at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Sound familiar to our current situation?

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

- ∑ Cicero, 42 B.C.

(H/T: Sue - she just keeps finding ALL this stuff!)

Posted by Skip at 8:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From the LOTR:

"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve..."

- Bilbo Baggins

Slipping on the Ring, he disappeared from sight.  Onward on his next journey, his Hobbit feet began; left following right. 

For not even half as long as once thought...

Fair winds and Godspeed, Bilbo.

Posted by Skip at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

"They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours."

- Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister, United Kingdom

(H/T: NRO)

Posted by Skip at 10:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ed Morrissey, blogger extraordinaire over at Hot Air (and formerly of Captain's Quarters) has this to say about the extraordinary efforts by Nancy Pelosi to get the US House Democrats to support her PelosiCare:

So either they have to face down their constituents or their Speaker.  It says something about the power of Congress that a lawmaker fears a party boss more than the people who elected him or her.  Somehow, I’m sure that’s not what the founders had in mind for a citizen legislature and the people’s branch of government.

Yes, democracy in action is often akin to making sausages (or me doing a woodworking project - not a pretty sight). This, however, is sad.

This is a perfect reason for term limits - I have waffled about this for a number of years, and I often fall into the category of "mine's OK; your's is the worst".  Yet, I am swinging back to supporting them for what is almost now an overriding reason:

professional politicians

Of any stripe.  And add their handlers as well.  I am more and more convinced that while a Socialist leaning politician has to get the boot ASAP, it is the often the hanger-on'ers that have grown accustomed to the trappings of such associated power are almost a larger part of the problem.

Posted by Skip at 6:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Indeed:

What is most frightening about the political left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition. All problems seem to them to be due to other people not being as wise or as noble as they are.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "Think things, not words." In words, many see a need for "social justice" to override "the dictates of the market." In reality, what is called "the market" consists of human beings making their own choices at their own cost. What is called "social justice" is government imposition of the notions of third parties, who pay no price for being wrong.

Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Muammar Qaddafi and Vladimir Putin have all praised Barack Obama. When enemies of freedom and democracy praise your president, what are you to think?

-Thomas Sowell

Progressives, with a far-overstated notion of their own brilliance and good intentions, have this need to remove choice from the ordinary person "for their own good".

Remember - freedom is choice (even if your choice turns out to a negative outcome).  Removing choices to "protect them" is just this - Tyranny.

Add this (emphasis mine:

Today's leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from Nazism. However, there's little or no distinction between Nazism and socialism. Even the word Nazi is short for National Socialist German Workers Party. The origins of the unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism did not begin in the '20s, '30s and '40s. Those horrors were simply the end result of long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for "social justice." It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans, like many of today's Americans, who would have cringed at the thought of genocide, who built the Trojan horse for Hitler to take over.

Few Americans have the stomach or ruthlessness to do what is necessary to make their governmental wishes come true. They are willing to abandon constitutional principles and rule of law so that the nation's elite, who believe they are morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us, can have the tools to implement "social justice." Those tools are massive centralized government power. It just turns out last century's notables in acquiring powerful central government, in the name of social justice, were Hitler, Stalin, Mao, but the struggle for social justice isn't over yet, and other suitors of this dubious distinction are waiting in the wings.

-Walter E. Williams

So ask yourself - are you willing to follow in the steps of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao for "social justice"?  Always ask yourself - "what is it that I must take from some by force to give to others?  What is it that should allow me to that?"

Posted by Skip at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Paule Rahe points out words of Walther Lipmann (emphasis mine):

the partisans who are now fighting for the mastery of the modern world wear shirts of different colors, their weapons are drawn from the same armory, their doctrines are variations of the same theme, and they go forth to battle singing the same tune with slightly different words. . . .

Throughout the world, in the name of progress, men who call themselves communists, socialists, fascists, nationalists, progressives, and even liberals, are unanimous in holding that government with its instruments of coercion must by commanding the people how they shall live, direct the course of civilization and fix the shape of things to come. . . . The premises of authoritarian collectivism have become the working beliefs, the self-evident assumptions, the unquestioned axioms, not only of all the revolutionary regimes, but of nearly every effort which lays claim to being enlightened, humane, and progressive.

So universal is the dominion of this dogma over the minds of contemporary men that no one is taken seriously as a statesman or a theorist who does not come forward with proposals to magnify the power of public officials and to extend and multiply their intervention in human affairs. Unless he is authoritarian and collectivist, he is a mossback, a reactionary, at best an amiable eccentric swimming hopelessly against the tide. It is a strong tide. Though despotism is no novelty in human affairs, it is probably true that at no time in twenty-five hundred years has any western government claimed for itself a jurisdiction over men's lives comparable with that which is officially attempted in totalitarian states. . . .

But it is even more significant that in other lands where men shrink from the ruthless policy of these regimes, it is commonly assumed that the movement of events must be in the same direction. Nearly everywhere the mark of a progressive is that he relies at last upon the increased power of officials to improve the condition of men.

Modern politics from the Democrats, the Liberals, the Conservatives, is always about control - the social agenda, the financial agenda, and the regulatory agenda. What drives people, I ask, to believe that they are so superior to anyone else to DARE believe that they know better how I should live (that anyone else should live) than I?

Yes, government is necessary for an ordered society and all must consent to give some of their liberties for it.  But Progressives wish to take that which is not theirs.  Not only that, they BELIEVE it is their Right to take from some to give to others.

No, not from their own personal time, talent, or wealth - that would be too easy (one only has to review the words of Obama and Biden vs. their actions - their willingness to take to give, and their horrible personal charitable giving).  

Go to the lefty blogs - see what they say.  Do they say "I will give up, or I will individually persuade other to voluntarily give up T,T, and $ to help others?".  Some do, and they are to be applauded.  In the general scheme of things, however, they expect Government to do their work for them - their ideas but leave the heavy lifting, the actual sacrifice to others. 

Actually, that is not the right wording.  They don't "leave" it to others - they FORCE others to do for them. 

They complain and rant when others refuse to bow to their demands.  They attempt to place their agenda as a "moral agenda" as if Government has a soul.  They comfortably forget that morality is an individual imperative and not a collective one.  Choice is by the individual at the most important level - and choice is what they wish to revoke from their fellow citizen under the rubric of superior knowledge (and morality).

Yet, from this all too oppressive regime the TEA Party participants are proving Mr. Lippman wrong.  No, not that the Progressives will stop in their peculiar brand of slavery of imposing their will upon others.  Rather, people are standing up and saying "No further".

(H/T: Powerline from a guest post by Hillsdale College Professor Paul Rahe)

Posted by Skip at 8:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"To take from one," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father's has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association--'the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.'"

It was on this foundation that Abraham Lincoln objected to slavery, and it is on this foundation that one can object to the health care reform proposed by our President. For this proposal is designed to take from those who have earned and to give to those who have not bothered to do so; and, by way of constraining "incentives," it will take from us the right to manage our own lives in a matter most dear to each and every one of us, and it will confer this responsibility on experts empowered to decide whether, given the cost of care, it is of greater value to society that we suffer or are cured, that we live or die.

...Never for a moment does a Barack Obama stop to ask whether depriving us of responsibility for our own well-being is demeaning. 

- Paul Rahe

That is Socialism - using the force of Government to take from one to give to another for the "common good".   And what is Obama's policies doing?  Accelerating that process - argue with me if you can.  If you dare.

Socialism = Slavery

to the Government.

(H/T: Powerline)

Posted by Skip at 8:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it."

- Frederic Bastiat

Now, go read this for a definition of plunder.  Bottom line - if you think there is a problem, stop calling for Government to take from everyone else to fund your "brilliant" idea or need.  Get off your butt, do the hard work, and either earn it by yourself or convince others to donate to your cause. 

The last two actions are voluntary and extremely charitable and noble.  Hawking for the former is nothing more than laziness and sloth, and show an attitude that you know better than the people whose time (for money = time) you are stealing from them for your purposes.

(H/T: Boortz)

Posted by Skip at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cap-and-Trade legislation will do nothing but make America one of the cleanest Third World economies"

-Marco Rubio

If you have never heard of him, Marco Rubio is a young, up and coming Conservative in Florida who became the Speaker of the House in the Florida Legislature.  Forced out by term limits, he is now running against the NRSC's "annointed Senator to be", centralist squish (and past Governor) Crist.

Speaking from a conservative viewpoint, he had this great line - pretty much on the mark in my eyes.

Posted by Skip at 8:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Consider this our obligatory "Ted Kennedy's passing" post and that you can almost always find something that is good from even your ideological foes:

The problems of our economy have occurred not as an outgrowth of laissez-faire, unbridled competition.  They have occurred under the guidance of federal agencies, and under the umbrella of federal regulations.

- Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA)

If only his other legislative ideas and successes had been in the same vein....

(H/T: Steve Hayward via Instapundit)

Posted by Skip at 8:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Socialism is a philosophy of failure,
the creed of ignorance,
and the gospel of envy,
its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

- Winston Churchill

(H/T: Dennis)

Posted by Skip at 8:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

"On a more serious front, I sincerely hope that when the president goes in for his annual check-up, the doctors at Bethesda will do a brain scan.   Surely something must be terribly wrong with a man who seems to be far more concerned with a Jew building a house in Israel than with Muslims building a nuclear bomb in Iran."  

--Columnist Burt Prelutsky

(H/T: Bob)

Posted by Skip at 6:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In amidst this lousy economy, there are places where things are doing alright:

"...There are certain truths that have to be agreed to.  One is that economies grow when they are free from over-taxation, over-regulation, over-litigation, and they have a skilled work force.  Government isn't difficult in theory - don't spend all the money, keep taxes low, have a fair and predictable regulartoyr climate, keep frivolous lawsuits to a minimum, and fund an accountable education system so that you have a skilled work force available. 

Then get the hell out of the way and let the private sector do what the private sector does best.  It's simple in theory, but it's difficult to accomplish.  In Texas, we've implemented that theory, and it's produced an economy that has no match in America."

-Texas Governor, Rick Perry

(H/T: National Review)

Posted by Skip at 2:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Our friend Sue Peterson sends the following which is worthy of note:

Heard this on Fox...a reader emailed this question...

President Obama - you took 6 months to find the right dog for your children, but you want Congress to make a decision on health care in less than 2 weeks???

 

Posted by Doug at 9:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"I come from the labor movement and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, and I was a student leader in the 1960s," Perez explains. "I am the most progressive person in the organization. People try to label you to control you but we cannot allow that. I am a union person, but the NJEA (New Jersey Education Association) is killing the teaching profession. Being a teacher is a calling. You're not working in a factory. You're not making chairs. I'm pro-choice, both in education and when it comes to abortion. But I tell Democrats all the time, you're willing to give my 16-year old daughter the choice to get an abortion, but not which high school she wants to go to? I am pro-choice on both things."

-Martin Perez, president of the Latino Leadership Alliance of New Jersey.

(H/T: Jorge)

Posted by Skip at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

 "To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father's has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association--'the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.'"

-Thomas Jefferson

Posted by Skip at 9:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

World of Warcraft is a huge multi-player online fantasy game with various kinds of roles.  Not exactly where I would have expected a Notable Quote to originate from.  However, TMEW (The Most Esteemed Wife) forwarded this over to me:

Maturity is knowing  you were an idiot in the past, wisdom is knowing you will be an idiot in the future and common sense is knowing you should not be an idiot right know.

-Unknown

Posted by Skip at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

- CS Lewis

(H/T: John)

Posted by Skip at 7:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From George Will's column:

"If all the folks in the United States would do the few simple things they know they ought to do, most of our big problems would take care of themselves."

"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, 30th President of the United States

 

Posted by Skip at 6:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In answering a question from a student about how Pelosi was going to get Americans to cut back on their carbon emissions, the leading Democratic lawmaker said it was important to educate children on how to conserve energy and for citizens to build more environmentally friendly homes. "We have so much room for improvement," she said. "Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory ... of how we are taking responsibility."

SOURCE

"Account must be taken of every single article, every pound of grain, because what socialism implies above all is keeping account of everything"

SOURCE

Posted by Skip at 8:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This one is for Jorge!

"In the market of a capitalistic society the common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines what should be produced and in what quantity and quality."

- Ludwig von Mises

(The Anti-Capitalism Mentality, Ludwig von Mises, 1956, p. 1.)

Each person in a capitalistic society, in a truly free market, has the right to trade with another - to his or her benefit, or not.  It is the free market, the crowd acting as judge and jury, that decides winners and losers.

I will admit that Government is necessary to ensure some amount "orderliness" in the marketplace - it can and should set some safety standards and ensure the Right to Private Property and the sanctity of contracts.

What people agree to pay, and the terms thereof, should be between the parties. It is when Government decides that it needs to intrude further than the role it should play (to wit: Obama's move to limit our mobility by severely limiting our choice of automobiles starting in the near future to the vision of what HE believes WE should have.  He has already started this by artificially raising the price of energy (oil, via taxes) and limiting supply (via where drilling can occur) as well as now determining the cars we can purchase (by his Administration's controlling the factors of production (by controlling GM and Chrysler), and their financing (using the TARP banks to squelch pesky contract bondholders and the financial terms of loans via a government controlled GMAC).

The result - The Statist is in control of one's freedom in these areas instead of the common man acting in his own self-interest.

Posted by Skip at 4:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(emphasis mine):

All communities are apt to look to government for too much.  Even in our own country, where its powers and duties are so strictly limited, we are prone to do so, especially at periods of sudden embarrassment and distress.  But this ought not to be.  The framers of our excellent Constitution and the people who approved it with calm and sagacious deliberation acted at the time on a sounder principle.  They wisely judged that the less government interferes with private pursuits the better for the general prosperity.  It is not its legitimate object to make men rich or to repair by direct grants of money or legislation in favor of particular pursuits losses not incurred in the public service.  This would be substantially to use the property of some for the benefit of others.  But its real duty—that duty the performance of which makes a good government the most precious of human blessings—is to enact and enforce a system of general laws commensurate with, but not exceeding, the objects of its establishment, and to leave every citizen and every interest to reap under its benign protection the rewards of virtue, industry, and prudence.

- Martin Van Buren, President of the United States (1837-1841) - Democrat

I wish Obama would listen to this

Posted by Skip at 8:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So, when your kids come home from college, don't be surprised that you can't talk to them anymore because they think you are mere dolts (emphasis mine):

Candid Admission: We Do Want to Reprogram Your Kids

Sometimes you come across a truthful statement by a leftist who admits that he wants to reprogram students, discrediting old, bigoted ideas and replacing them with fresh, wonderful, enlightened progressive ones. The late Richard Rorty was one of them. Consider the following from Rorty and His Critics:

The late Richard Rorty, the philosopher and devout atheist, is refreshingly honest. He argued that secular professors like himself need to “arrange things” so that incoming students who enter college “as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists” will “leave college with views more like our own.” The goal of education, said Rorty, is to help these youth “escape the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.” Rorty was bracingly candid in his message to parents: “We are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable.”

(H/T: Phi Beta Cons)

Posted by Skip at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On speaking about Obama offering security in lieu of freedom:

Our would-be soft despots are offering Americans money and the promise of security against economic distress. The vastly increased cost of government will nonetheless nearly leave half of households free from the burden of paying federal income tax and eligible for occasional rebates. As the CNN reporter Susan Roesgen said to a Tea Party protester, “Don’t you realize that you’re eligible for a $400 tax cut?”

In other words, take the money and shut up. Which brings to mind Tocqueville’s warning: “Every measure which establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives to it an administrative form creates thereby a class unproductive and idle, living at the expense of the class which is industrious and given to work.”

-Michael Barone

Sort of a play on "pay me now, or pay me later"; pay the piper now to cover over the "bad things"  or REALLY having to pay the price later.  It will indeed, to keep the cliches going, the devil we don't know that will come to collect the highest price of all - loss of freedom.

Posted by Skip at 3:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Most nights lately I've taken to listening to the talk radio program hosted "the Great One," Mark Levin, author of the important book sweeping the Nation: Liberty and Tyranny- A Conservative Manifesto. About halfway through, I can attest that I have not read anything quite like it with regards to his description of the ongoing battle against the "statists" in every aspect of our lives.

Our buddy John Hawkins was fortunate enough to get to interview Mark Levin for RightWingNews.com. As you would expect, nearly every word is worth pondering and thought-provoking. Answering John's question of how we can push back against the statists in the schools, Hollywood, and the mainstream media, he tells us

We need to fight back on all levels. We need to become smarter and more numerous. We need to explain to our children and our grandchildren, regardless of what they learned from television and their schools, that America is a magnificent place -- that when we wake up every morning, we should thank God that we're here and that unlike the statists, we are here to preserve and better our society -- not to destroy it and then transform it. These are the over-arching principles that we need to spread. We need to spread the word about the greatness of America. We need to start in our homes and in our own communities.

Click here to read the entire interview. Says Levin:

When the government can dictate what kind of light bulbs and toilets you can have and who's going to run GM and talks about redistributing wealth, that's not exactly a totally free society.

You should try to listen to Mr. Levin some evening when you get a chance. He airs weeknights from 6pm till 9. Click here to listen live.

Posted by Doug at 7:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By government giveaway programs, individuals are often hurt far more than they are helped. The recipients of these programs become dependent on the government and their dignity is destroyed. Is it compassionate to enslave more and more people by making them a part of the government dependency cycle? I think compassion should be measured by how many people no longer need it. Helping people to become self-sufficient is much more compassionate than drugging them with the narcotic of welfare.

-- Rush Limbaugh

(H/T: RightWingNews) 

Posted by Skip at 6:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

-- George Washington

(H/T: RightWingNews)

Posted by Skip at 6:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”

-- Alexis de Tocqueville

Posted by Skip at 8:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Compassion is defined not by how many people are on the government dole but by how many people no longer need government assistance.

The world's biggest problem is the unequal distribution of capitalism. If there were capitalism everywhere, you wouldn't have food shortages.

- Rush Limbaugh

(H/T: RightWingNews)

Posted by Skip at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm just the byline. The real heroes are the Navy, the Seals, those who have brought me home.

- Captain Richard Phillips (captain of the MV Maersk Alabama, who traded his life for those of his crew)

The 'Grok thanks the Captain for being a humble hero.  The 'Grok also thanks those who will never be known but whose actions will never forgotten.  We thank them also for the actions that will never see the light of day but keep us safe in ways we can't even dream about.

Posted by Skip at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From NoLookingBackwards:

A free society is a society, wherein the rights of the many are not taken away based on the unlawful or reckless behavior of an amoral minority.

Note: I said "free" society, not "civil" society, for I know of no such place.

-Bruce

Posted by Skip at 8:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Welfare State mentality of the '60s that created the conditions for 1980 and 1994 systemically excused bad behavior at an individual level, creating millions of individual tragedies. Obamanomics systematically excuses bad behavior at the wholesale macroeconomic level, creating a vicious circle of irresponsibility with major consequences for every American.

- Patrick Ruffini, The NextRight (and leading conservative leader in the New Media)

Welfare saps the soul; why be responsible for yourself when it is so easy to let others care for you.  This is bad enough at the individual level!  Now, Obama wants to recreate that time that ruined so many families and put it on steroids.

Thus, it won't just be just individuals that will be hurt, nor families.  Obama is aiming high - his target is society in the all together.

Posted by Skip at 7:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

JERRY POURNELLE on democracy and tyranny (emphasis mine):

“The sad truth is that democracy itself is often unstable. Intellectuals lose faith. Democracy is not flashy. It falls out of fashion. The intelligentsia feel scorned, unappreciated, and turn to new theories. There are other pressures. Republics stand until the citizens begin to vote themselves largess from the public treasury. When the plunder begins, those plundered feel no loyalty to the nation—and the beneficiaries demand ever more, until few are left unplundered. Eventually everyone plunders everyone, the state serving as little more than an agency for collecting and dispensing largess. The economy falters. Inflation begins. Deficits mount. Something must be done. Strong measures are demanded, but nothing can be agreed to.”

- Jerry Pournelle (noted Science Fiction writer and engineer)

(H/T: Instapundit)

Posted by Skip at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

“I am for socialism, disarmament, and ultimately for abolishing the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion,” wrote one particularly ambitious contributor in his 1935 Harvard 30th anniversary classbook. “I seek social ownership of all property, the abolition of the propertied class, and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal.”

- Roger Baldwin

  Founder of the American Civil Liberties Union

And then you wonder why most Conservatives are, at best, leery about the ACLU?  When the overriding philosophy is to undermine that which has made us still the envy of the world, there is ample evidence for concern.

(H/T: Townhall)

Posted by Skip at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Liberty requires autonomy & responsibility. Remove one or both, and you lose Liberty.

-greenbacker

Actually, Charlie Greenbacker.  I follow him on Twitter.  Is he famous?  No, not really - but that doesn't make what he said any less true.  In fact, it is the word "responsibility" that caught my eye as it seems that anything in today's world that might cause sorrow or hurt or uncomfortable has to be verboten.

Charlie is right - but I'd add knowledge as the third leg of the triad.  But Charlie had it right.  Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/greenbacker

Heck, follow the 'Grok and Meet The New Press radio on Twitter too:  twitter.com/GraniteGrok

#TCOT - Top Conservatives On Twitter (hash tag = #)

Posted by Skip at 7:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"The people cannot look to legislation generally for success.  Industry, thrift, character, are not conferred by act of resolve. Government cannot relieve from toil."

-Calvin Coolidge (aka - "Silent Cal")

Imagine that - a former President saying that it is individual hard work that breeds success and not government largesse!  Yet, this is what Obama is wishing to do - let government provide and be the source for all of our needs?  Lots of money being flashed - and as the financial and auto industries are finding out, lots of strings attached.  One of the banks that has already received TARP money is giving it back, upset at the onerous strings attached to it. 

TANSTAAFL

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch" - one of the most basic of economic laws, yet Obama wants us all to focus on the front end ("Give me the money!") and to forget about the back end ("er, whaddya mean, I gotta pay it back?").  Like many politicians, I bet he's hoping that he's long gone from the scene before the piper has to be paid.

(H/T: NRO)

Posted by Skip at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over at Pajamas Media, Roger Kimball put these together (emphasis mine):

Reagan on the campaign trail: “This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them for ourselves.”

The current President of the United States on the campaign trail: “Generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Reagan: “Back in 1927, an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket, said that the American people would never vote for socialism but he said under the name of liberalism the American people they would adopt every fragment of the socialist program ”

The current President of the United States, at the end of October: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Reagan: “One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.”

The current President of the United States: “As President, I will sign a universal health care plan into law by the end of my first term in office.”

Reagan: “The doctor begins to lose freedom. . . . First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then doctors aren’t equally di­vided geographically. So a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him, you can’t live in that town. They already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it’s only a short step to dictating where he will go. . . . All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man’s working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it’s a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay. And pretty soon your son won’t decide, when he’s in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.”

The current President of the United States: “John McCain and Sarah Palin call this socialistic. I don’t when they decided they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness.”

Reagan: “Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.”

The current President of the United States: “We are going to roll up our sleeves and we are going to remake this country, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, county by county, state by state.”

Reagan: “Senator Fulbright has said at Stanford University that the Constitution is outmoded. He referred to the president as our moral teacher and our leader, and he said he is hobbled in his task by the restrictions in power imposed on him by this antiquated document. He must be freed so that he can do for us what he knows is best.”

The current President of the United States: The Warren Court “wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution. . . . [G]enerally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you but it doesn’t say what the the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.”

Reagan: “James Madison in 1788 speaking to the Virginia convention said, ‘Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.’”

Tell me, who would you prefer if you had a choice to be TODAY'S President?  Ask yourself:

• Who was for the individual and who wants to magnify government?
• Who wants you to have your Rights and who wants government to have precedence?
• Who believes in the Constitution and who thinks it needs to be tossed?
• Who wants you and your doctor to decide your health plan and who wants a Federal bureau to do that? 
• So, who is for you and who is for the State?  Tell me, which is better if you had to pick ONE?
  

Yeah, I thought so...

Posted by Skip at 8:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means.  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

I agree with the sentiment - it seems that a larger and larger percentage of our population, especially at the lower end, that have no problem in being taken care of.  Think I'm wrong?  Did you miss yesterday's Obama's lovefest where the hands were out saying "Big Government, what are you going to do for me?"

There is a small percentage that truly needs care by society all the time. But that, IMHO, is a much smaller percentage than many Liberals think (although perhaps, a tad larger than most conservatives think).  We should take care of them.

Some only need a helping hand up, and then they will take themselves further. We should do that.

Some need leading, and then more, and a bit more.  Most will get the idea - some will need more.  We should do that.

Some, indeed, need to be driven from their poverty.  1996 proved that to be true. 

And yes, we should do that.

Posted by Skip at 9:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So, you think that the New New Deal will fair better?

THOSE WHO DO NOT REMEMBER HISTORY, YADA YADA: How Government Prolonged the Depression. Just remember, the nostalgia now isn’t based on the New Deal helping the country. It’s based on the New Deal helping politicians.

- Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Name not familiar?  Then you are new to the blogosphere.  One of the the earliest bloggers on the 'Net, he is the owner of Instapundit (one of the largest blogsites around) and is often often called the Blogfather, as he inspired and gave rise to many of the well known bloggers that you may have read.

(H/T: Instapundit)

Posted by Skip at 7:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is my fear with the advent of this new Presidential Administration that they are going to come up against this truism...

"The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money"

-former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

...hard, fast, and have no clue what to do next.

Heck, given the amount we are borrowing to stimulate our economy, are we not already there?

(H/T: Instapundit)

Posted by Skip at 3:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dr. Walter E. Williams is one of my most favorite people to read.  Plainly spoken, he get across points with a veiled point.  His latest Townhall column has a few:

A reader suggests that members of Congress should wear uniforms, like NASCAR drivers, so that we will know who their corporate sponsors are. Many of those in Congress should also wear logos representing the teachers' unions, environmentalist extremists and other special interests.

They say we live and learn. Often what we learn is what damn fools we have been.

The fact that sales at Starbucks are going down, while sales at McDonald's are going up, shows that people are adjusting to economic adversity by cutting back their spending. Only in Congress do people adjust to economic adversity and growing deficits by spending more money.

Wal-Mart has done more for poor people than any ten liberals, at least nine of whom are almost guaranteed to hate Wal-Mart.

As American incomes have risen over the years, liberals have kept changing the definition of "poverty." Otherwise, the dwindling numbers of people who could be called "poor" would take away the liberals' main claim to influence and power.

An e-mail from a reader whose job requires him to take urine tests, to make sure he is drug-free, wonders why he is taxed to provide money to people on welfare who are also on drugs. He thinks they should have to take urine tests too, before they get his money.

- Dr. Walter E. Williams

Posted by Skip at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

When one reviews the released tapes from a thuggish Gov. Blagojevich, or remembers what Richard Fuld was doing at Lehman Brothers, recalls the base Wall Street criminality of a Bernard Madoff, or hears the latest December 7th sermon of ignorance and hate from Rev. Wright, and then tries to come up with some overarching (and secular) reason for such failure in our present generation of both ethics and common decency at so many different levels of our society, at least one common denominator seems to be the collapse of the liberal arts at all levels in our education system. We long ago abandoned non-ideological courses on civics, ethics, history, literature, and philosophy, and introduced in their place both a relativist and therapeutic curriculum, and a vocational one aimed only at acquiring the material good life.

I am not suggesting that the failure of K-12, and the greater failure of our universities, created ipsis factis such moral obtuseness in our popular culture, only that it did not produce enough citizens who knew right from wrong to stop the general madness swirling around them.

And so we get Rev. Wright spouting venomous banalities to standing ovations, a Blago being tolerated as "that's just the Chicago way," and near worship of those who squandered billions of hard-earned savings and investments from millions who could ill afford to lose them.

-Victor Davis Hanson, PhD

Dr. Hanson is a Professor of Military History and Classics. 

(H/T: NRO)

Posted by Skip at 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As we blog about politics, one of the defining principles that we have here at the 'Grok is Liberty - as a people, in current society, as individuals.  Too often, we blithely go about our day and are unobservant of the swirls of politics around us.  These swirls, sometimes begun by people who do wish to seize power and some by people that are simply "well intentioned" but are not familiar with the Law of Unintended Consequences, pass laws and regulations that restrict such Liberties as we now have (or had).

I ran across the below over at The Radio Patriot - a collection of some of Thomas Jefferson's Notable Quotes.  Consider a few of them while contemplating current events and see if our elected officials are paying attention to them (or justifing their positions).

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.

It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.

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.

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.

And to think, as the post reminds me, he was but 33 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence...

Posted by Skip at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

"The thing that sets the American Christian apart from all other people in the world is that he will die on his feet rather before he will live on his knees."

-George Washington.

It is an easy thing for a husband to step in front of his wife and children in times of extreme danger - that is easily recognized in that split second of it happening.  But what about the incrementally slow creep that can go unseen and unrecognized?

Are we still the same people, the same Americans, that will live up to that credo as our forefathers did?  Are we willing to value freedom over servitude?  The answer from those that are serving, and many that have served, the answer is an unqualified "YES!"; the same from many more who have not doffed the uniform of our military forces as well.

Sadly, many others are quietly saying "no", not understanding that servitude is not merely an aquiescence to a foreign power - it can be a willingness to submit to anything that incrementaly requires an incremental abdication of our responsibilities and of our liberties as idealized by the writers of our founding documents.  I am afraid that many in our society have truly forgotten what real freedom is - the willingness to be alone, to stand alone, to rely on oneself.  Instead, as government has grown ever larger during the last few decades, the enemies of this philosophy, this singularly American expression of freedom, have not just been those far from our shores but also those from within.  That wispy cotton cocoon of the ever enlargening and enveloping government can be one such entity as it portends a slow yielding of one's spirit of self-resolve and independence to the security "Mommy" of the bureaucracy.  The failure is in not recognizing that this siren song, that allure of "don't worry, we'll take care of you and your family" is much more costly than any financial consideration meted out in gold.  What Faustian compact is it to be protected from all of life's risk and viccitudes and to have lost that most precious of gifts from our Founding Fathers - individual liberty for an over-reliance on government to provide for every need.

The video that quotes George Washington above can be seen here.  It is about 11 minutes long.

The Star Spangled Banner, like you've never heard it

Posted by Skip at 6:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There is no doubt that I am a limited government kind of guy; too often, people want government to do for them before doing for themselves.  And there are a lot of people out there that are too often too quick to say "hey, go down to the gummint office, they'll help ya".  So often, I throw my hands up in disgust at the general attitude of "why bother - government will take care of it!".  And then I quote President John Kennedy:

"...ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country..."

Fine words; good words, as they seem to say to me "government is not a Nanny".  Or so I thought.

I've made a habit of going over to Greg Mankiw's place fairly often - I'm thinking that I need to revise my thinking on the above quote and think about this one by Milton Friedman's book Capitalism and Freedom instead (emphasis mine):

In a much quoted passage in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country." It is a striking sign of the temper of our times that the controversy about this passage centered on its origin and not on its content. Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic "what your country can do for you" implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man's belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, "what you can do for your country" implies that government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary. To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served. He recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the citizens severally serve. He recognizes no national purpose except as it is the consensus of the purposes for which the citizens severally strive.

The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather "What can I and my compatriots do through government" to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom? And he will accompany this question with another: How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect?

Posted by Skip at 9:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This quote from Michelle Obama creeps me out. She's talking about a guy that, when you really think about it, has never done ANYTHING in life, save run his mouth and point fingers...

"There's this beautiful thing about my husband," she said. "He thinks he can really do everything, he does, with his own power and will."

And don't forget the big rally in Grant Park. Here's a sneak preview of what you can expect:

As you can see, no expense will be spared...

[And next comes the civilian defense corps. And then we'll get Obama truths. For those that can't get with the program, well... you KNOW what follows...]

Posted by Doug at 8:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As reported:

"The change we need won’t come from government alone," Obama said to a crowd of an estimated 80,000. "It will come from each of us doing our part in our own lives, in our own communities. It will come from each of us looking after ourselves and our families but also looking after each other. You know I – it’s been awhile now – we’ve made a virtue out of selfishness, there’s no virtue in that. We made a virtue of irresponsibility and we need to usher in a new spirit of service and sacrifice and responsibly."

- Barack H. Obama

Well, I have said that he should be leading from the front, and in showing us a demonstration of making a "virtue out of selfishness", he has succeeded - first with his charitable giving, helping his brother, and helping his aunt. 

So much for helping out "the least of us" and his family, eh?  And he's got the chutzpah to tell us to do what he won't do?  Just another example of the job Americans won't do, I guess....

Notable for its hypocrisy!

Posted by Skip at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Saw the reference over at BlackFive:

I believe a self-righteous liberal with a cause is more dangerous than a Hell's Angel with an attitude.

-Chuck

Having met both, I would agree!

Read the rest of his Declaration ("I'm Your Worst Nightmare.  I am a BAD Republican") - it is a stitch!

Posted by Skip at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Thoughts for Tuesday:

"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. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

- C. S. Lewis

Posted by Skip at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

OK, a bit of a different one here for a Notable Quote (H/T: NRO) - how could a refuse a Robert Heinlein quote when I get smacked in the face with it?

First, that uber-Liberal congressman Barney Frank (you know, one of the Dems that forced Fannie and Freddie and whose ex-lover was partially responsible for Fannie's sub-prime products)?

This morning's WSJ editorial on "Obamanomics" starts with this quote from Barney Frank (and as you read it, note how confident the Left is:  One of the main culprits of the credit crisis, saying this sort of stuff already, just before we vote and before they are even fully in power):

I think at this point there needs to be a focus on an immediate increase in spending and I think this is a time when deficit fear has to take a second seat . . . I believe later on there should be tax increases. Speaking personally, I think there are a lot of very rich people out there whom we can tax at a point down the road and recover some of the money.

And then the truth of the matter from the 'Grok's favorite science fiction author, Robert Heinlein:

It reminded me of this passage a reader sent me a few days ago, from the late, great science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein's To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987):

The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a "warm body" democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction.... [O]nce a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader — the barbarians enter Rome.

Yes folks, very similar to this.

Posted by Skip at 4:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just found this over at ARRA News Service where they had a post on Dr. Walter E. Williams (I just LOVE listening to this guy!):

Americans demand that Congress spend trillions of dollars on farm subsidies, business bailouts, education subsidies, Social Security, Medicare and prescription drugs and other elements of a welfare state. The problem is that Congress produces nothing. Whatever Congress wishes to give, it has to first take other people's money. Thus, at the root of the welfare state is the immorality of intimidation, threats and coercion backed up with the threat of violence by the agents of the U.S. Congress. In order for Congress to do what some Americans deem as good, it must first do evil. It must do that which if done privately would mean a jail sentence; namely, take the property of one American to give to another. . . .

-Dr. Walter E. Williams, Ph.D

Posted by Skip at 6:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

"We are not led to undo the work of creation or to rectify the Fall. The duty of the Christian is not to leave the world a better place. His duty is to leave this world a better man."

- Monsignor Gilbey

No matter how hard we try, nor how compelling the argument for, we cannot create Heaven here on Earth.  Because of the Fall, we are morally corrupt.  While many of us strive to be better, there are those whose corruptness morphs into absolute evil, thus making Heaven on Earth impossible.

God is interested in us helping others, yes.  He is more interested, however, in our individual heart and soul.  With the sacrifice of Christ, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, yes, I can leave this ball of mud a better person. 

As my Pastor (Pastor Jeff Owen) says,

"I'm not yet the person that God wants me to be, but I'm a long ways from the person I used to be."

Amen to both.

Posted by Skip at 4:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just got this from a 'Grok reader

"The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward." 

-Amelia Earhart

Again, showing up and stick-to-it-iveness are often the keys for success.  Remember, you CAN choose to do something (or choose to lay on the couch!).

(H/T: Eleanor)

Posted by Skip at 3:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

No, I don't always just pull out a book and find these gems; sometimes people send them over (much appreciated!) and sometimes I just stumble upon them.  Like this one from Powerline):

I Once Read A Book...

...by Robert Heinlein. It was appallingly bad [Note: I liked it and have read it a number of times  -Skip]. I don't remember anything about it, actually, except that people were going around "groking" things. But this dialogue between Glenn Reynolds and his readers on the subject of energy, electrical, nuclear and otherwise, is characteristically intelligent.

The only connection between these observations is that Glenn offers this quote from Heinlein, which I like. Glenn introduces it:

[I]ntelligent power management is key. And as for vilifying and taxing success -- that's what government is for. Otherwise the rest of the citizenry might develop self esteem problems. This was all addressed by Robert Heinlein, natch:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

          This is known as "bad luck."

Must have been from a different book.

Of course I had to post a reference to "Grok" - just look at the banner!

It also brings up a good point that I often am saying nowadays given the quantity of slipshod pronouncements from Liberals, from the Left, and politicians of most stripes that the world is going down the toilet.

Actually, compared to the vast majority of human history, we have it made in the shade, folks!  Life is better now than ever before.  Sure, there is disease, accidents, bad people, bad weather, bad happenings, and poverty.  The amazing thing is not that some are still living subsistence style lives as if we were in the Stone Age, Iron Age, or Bronze Age (you get the idea), but that we are not!

Judeo-Christian theology changed the hearts and minds of the West and magnified the individual's worth in relationship to his or her God, that God cares about each and every one of us.  Capitalism built upon that philosophy by recognizing that each of us has our own self interest at heart, but by providing goods and services that are wanted by others, the self effort to produce that will result in betterment for the person doing the inventing and producing of that good.  Thus, not only does the producer benefit, but all those around him benefit too!

I just wish the Libs would understand and accept these two simple truths and take them more to heart:

• You can legislate morality, but the more you legislate it, the less moral people become.  Which requires more laws (a negative feedback cycle here, folks!).
  
• Hamstring the producers and those in society dependent on them (I'm not talking family here) become poorer both now and in the future. 

Posted by Skip at 8:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

(H/T: Eric)

Since Mr. Heinlein was one of my favorite authors growing up, and his "word" (grok) is part of our name, it is appropriate to have one of his quotes grace our site (especially as we are under siege as a society from those that do not understand what he is saying):

"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."

– Robert Heinlein

Posted by Skip at 5:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

From Ronaldus Maximus (1964 – A Time for Choosing):

Are you willing to spend time studying the issues, making yourself aware, and then conveying that information to family and friends? Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community? Realize that the doctor's fight against socialized medicine is your fight. We can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients. Recognize that government invasion of public power is eventually an assault upon your own business. If some among you fear taking a stand because you are afraid of reprisals from customers, clients, or even government, recognize that you are just feeding the crocodile hoping he'll eat you last.

-Ronald Reagan

44 years ago today; these words have turned out to be prescient, haven't they?  They show that human nature does not change - "something for nothing" is neither free or cheap.  It fosters a mentality that it is socially acceptable, even looked for, to live and prosper from the work of others.  It doesn't matter if the public welfare is directed to an individual or a community; when it comes as a "natural state of doing basis" vs "help in a time of need", no good can come from it.

And of course, this election will be the greatest decision point by this country on this issue.  Just remember - right now, services and goods are rationed by price but at least moderated by free markets (and that market would be cheaper at a higher level of quality if government would stop distorting it). 

Instead, if we go down the alluring path of socialized medicine, services and goods will continue to be rationed by price but add to that the bureaucracy similar to that of your DMV....

Posted by Skip at 7:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"A democracy cannot survive as a permanent form of government. It can last only until its citizens discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority (who vote) will vote for those candidates promising the greatest benefits from the public purse, with the result that a democracy will always collapse from loose fiscal policies, always followed by a dictatorship."

---Lord Thomas MacCauley

(H/T: Doug Welch, proprietor of Stix Blog ) 

Posted by Skip at 9:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."

           - Plato

(H/T: Karen) 

You know, like this lady (I'll jog your memory - the SEIU sponsored Purple People? that appeared at almost all the NH Prez Primary events? Like this one that wants you all to pay for their healthcare?).

Make no doubt about it, one of the political objectives of the SEIU is to have us all pay for Universal Healthcare.

Posted by Skip at 8:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A taxpayer voting for Obama is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.

Posted by Doug at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies.

– William O. Douglas, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1952

Posted by Skip at 8:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A FEW WISE WORDS During this political season:

*You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

*You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

* You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.

* You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.

* You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.

* You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and
   independence.

* You cannot help men permanently by doing for them, what they could and should
   do for themselves.

- Abraham Lincoln

I look upon these truths as being self-evident.  Yet, when I look around the political landscape, under the guise of "helping our fellow man", I see the Liberals violating each and every one of these.  By taxing one to give to the other, the above are broken.  By having government supplying all one's basic needs ad infinitum, the above are broken.  By legislating and regulating "for our own good", the above are broken.

Government's aim should be to ensure independance and not a sense of beholdeness back to government.   

(H/T: Bill Smith at ARRA) 

Posted by Skip at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong"

- Thomas Sowell

(H/T: John) 

And I would have to agree.  Many political decisions are made to satisfy the immediate and urgent problem - and it may not be important.  Further, the political class is wont to show themselves to be relevant and to show that they care to the public at large - whether the decision is a good one or a bad one.  Too often, the ramifications of a decision are not contempleted or that the "next steps" are not fully fleshed out, thus bringing in the Law of Unintended Consequences into play.

Such as we see now with the Congressional mandate on the domestic manufacture of huge amounts of ethanol.  Who pays the price of their wrong decision?

• The poor of the world, as food prices go up as food stock is shuffed over to energy stock.
• The environment suffers, as ethanol (and other biofuels) are now being shown to be net negatives.
• And of course, as always, the American taxpayer.

Rather than the politicians that came up with this looney tune idea - all in the attempt to save the planet and financially starve the holders of usable oil reserves (after all, we cannot be allowed to use our own, can we?). 

Posted by Skip at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Skip at 8:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Heh!  Dilbertisms!

Methinks productivity is going to is going to experience a sharp downward trend for a while....

"As of tomorrow, employees will only be able to access the building using individual security cards. Pictures will be taken next Wednesday, and employees will receive their cards in two weeks."  (This was the winning quote from Fred Dales, Microsoft Corp. in Redmond WA )   

Judgement call?  A a self imposed self-importance disease?

"This project is so important we can't let things that are more important interfere with it."  (Advertising/Marketing manager, United Parcel Service)

In short - don't make the rest of us look stooopid... 

"No one will believe you solved this problem in one day! We've been working on it for months.  Now go act busy for a few weeks and I'll let you know when it's time to tell them."  (R&D supervisor, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing/3M Corp.)

"I" in "teamwork"?

Quote from the Boss: "Teamwork is a lot of people doing what I say." (Marketing executive, Citrix Corporation)

A company that was dedicated to communications....notice the use of the word "was".... 

"We know that communication is a problem, but the company is not going to discuss it with the employees."   (Switching supervisor, AT&T Long Lines Division)

Posted by Skip at 5:20 PM |