Notable Quote – Matt Ridley

[T]oday few people appreciate just how similar the arguments made by Smith and Darwin are.  Generally, Adam Smith is championed by the political right, Charles Darwin more often by the left.  In, say, Texas, where Smith’s emergent, decentralised economics is all the rage, Darwin is frequently reviled for his contradiction of dirigiste creation.  In the average British university, by contrast, you will find fervent believers in the emergent, decentralised properties of genomes and ecosystems who yet demand dirigiste policy to bring order to the economy and society.  But if life needs no intelligent designer, then why should the market need a central planner?  Where Darwin defenestrated God, Smith just as surely defenestrated Leviathan.  Society, he said, is a spontaneously ordered phenomenon.  And Smith faces the same baffled incredulity – How can society work for the good of all without direction? – that Darwin faces.

-Matt Ridley ( The Evolution of Everything)

And then Socialists of all spectrums, like Bernie and Hillary, come along and

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Notable Quote – Barry Goldwater

Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who … Read more

Notable Quote – Matt Ridley

You will often here people say that free markets have been discredited, as they sip cups of coffee while sitting on chairs, wearing clothes, and checking text messages – each of which was supplied by hundreds, thousands of producers whose beautifully coordinated collaboration was unplanned but achieved by ‘market forces’. -Matt Ridley ( The Evolution … Read more

Notable Quote – Henry Hazlitt

This vital consideration of incentives is almost systematically overlooked in the proposals of agitators for more and bigger government welfare schemes. We should all rightly be concerned with the plight of the poor and unfortunate. But the hard two-part question that any plan for relieving poverty must answer is: How can we mitigate the penalties … Read more

Notable Quote – Theodore Dalrymple

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

-Theodore Dalrymple

This is something that Zandra Rice-Hawkins of Granite State Progress, IMHO, seems to know well and uses this tool any time she can.  From the “hate speechers” to those that deny unborn babies are human and onward to the Left that insists that the Constitution is of no value and that all references to absolute ideas of Right and Wrong employ this form of cultural Marxism.

It’s purpose is to

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Memorial Day

Remembering all those who gave it all so that we can live in freedom. Memorial Day 2014. Speech from Ronald Reagan, 1985 at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Notable Quote – William Easterly

The other great accomplishment of markets is that they reconcile the choices people make for themselves with the choices other people are making. Back at the dinner table we find that no Planner is necessary to process the enormous amount of information that is required to decide how much pasta, rice, cheese, and takeout cuisines … Read more

Notable Quote – Ammo Grrrll

From Powerline on why Obama is so insistent on LGBT rights and now, the transgender bathroom war – and it isn’t necessarily what you think but Ammo Grrrll nails it (emphasis mine, reformatted):

And so, in a spectacular example of Life imitating Art, we see the Great Revolutionary Obama, lowerer of oceans, healer of the planet, telling the ones who have been waiting for themselves (itself a neat trick), that his legacy is going to be mandating that pretend females will have access to all real females’ bathrooms, showers and locker rooms. No matter how young and vulnerable the girls, pretend females with various dangly bits will be allowed next to them.…To object is to be smeared as supporting the same people who half a century ago would not allow black people to potty in the same bathrooms as white people.

…So, why this slap in the face to all common sense and decency? Why is Obama using this molehill upon which to make a stand, complete with draconian threats of boycotts and lawsuits?

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Notable Quote – Tom Bethell

The classical-liberal conception of rights is likely to be discomforting to any ruling class, no matter how constituted, because it reliably subtracts power from those who rule, or hope to, and distributes it among the people. Decentralized private property has had precisely that effect. -Tom Bethell (The Noblest Triumph) (H/T: Cafe Hayek)

Notable Quote – Alexis de Tocqueville

“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  

Notable Quote – Patrick Henry

Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? -Patrick (“Give me Liberty or give me Death”) Henry   Apparently, lots of Progressives/Communists (not much difference) here in NH believe so.  Isn’t that right, NH State Rep Katherine Rogers?

Notable Quote – F.A. Hayek

It is one of the great tragedies of our time that the masses have come to believe that they have reached their high standard of material welfare as a result of having pulled down the wealthy, and to fear that the preservation or emergence of such a class would deprive them of something they would … Read more

Notable Quote – Deirdre McCloskey

Or consider the emergence of a Nature-worshipping environmentalism that would have been viewed as a crazy luxury in the hardscrabble times of 1800 or even of 1933.  The economist and student of theology Robert Nelson calls environmentalism the new religion of the West (a West that nonetheless, outside of places like Poland or the United … Read more

Notable Quote – Thomas Jefferson

“The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our constitution from a co-ordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone. This will lay all things at their feet, … Read more

Notable Quote – David Boaz

Of course, in the modern world of trillion-dollar governments handing out favors like Santa Claus, it becomes harder to distinguish between the producers and the transfer-seekers, the predators and the prey. The state tries to confuse us, like the three-card monte dealer, by taking our money as quietly as possible and then handing some of it back to us with great ceremony.

-David Boaz (The Libertarian Mind)

A GREAT example of that here in NH was my Jr. Senator from NH, Kelly Ayotte (R) concerning bringing Federal tax money back to NH to fight the heroin / fentynal problem (no, it is NOT an epidemic – there are no pathogens traveling around the ether that make people addicted.  Instead, it is a personal decision to snort or stick stuff in your body that you just shouldn’t do).  I dryly note that she vote to break the Sequester bill – the bill that for the first time in a long time, cut the Federal budget and thus lowered the tax/debt level that lays across our shoulders – quietly taking more of our money.  I have YET to hear her make big big stinks about NH money leaving to trudge down to DC and doing something worthwhile in stopping that journey. But boy, is she all over the media

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Snowflakes

“Physical work without producing something is alien to my mind. By producing something I mean putting up the winter’s wood, working the garden, setting a fence. But jogging? Exercise club membership? How precious. Clean hands exercise is for people recovering from a long illness or an operation, or the elderly in an old folk’s home. … Read more

Notable Quote – Winston Churchill

“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist … Read more

Notable Quote – Ol Remus

“As for DC, it fell into a panic when the Praetorian Guard failed to notice the barbarian hordes until they were holding tailgate parties just outside the gates.”  

Notable Quote – George Will

“No. It turns out the faculty clubs and student safe spaces of American campuses are just not big enough to nominate a president. The Democratic Party’s base consists of minorities and public employees, particularly teachers and AFSCME and all the rest. They are really serious about keeping control of the government because their livelihood depends … Read more

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