Notable Quote

for the “Progressive,” to insist on spending your own money, and only your own money, is considered to be greedy and shallow, but to insist on spending other people’s money is considered to be selfless and enlightened. Truly strange. – Prof. Dan Boudreaux

Ultimately, the health of the republic rested on civic virtue – that is, on the willingness of individuals to sacrifice private interests to the common good. This school of thought, which sought to revive the classical virtues of the Roman republic, has become known as republicanism…. The dark side of republicanism is its potentially totalitarian … Read more

Government should not be assumed to command more knowledge than the individuals affected. The latter, at least in the absence of the free-rider problem, have every incentive to inform themselves. Government – politicians and bureaucrats – will do so only if votes are at stake. In general, government may prove to be willing to intervene, … Read more

On the commenting of Progressives that if you are not “for community” you must be for isolated individualism: Ours has never been a vision of isolated, atomized loners. It is a vision of husbands and wives; parents and children; neighbors and neighborhoods; volunteers and congregations; bosses and employees; businesses and customers; clubs, teams, groups, associations … Read more

“When government expands, it’s often at the expense of alternative expressions of community, alternative groups that seek to serve the common good.” – Russ Douthat, author, NY Times Columnist

I’ve never agreed with the meme that ‘companies FORCE us to buy their products’: This charge – that corporations own customers – is another example of the lie that freedom is slavery. We are free to make choices, however. Insisting upon anything else demeans us. It is because we are free that corporations need to … Read more

For a democratic state to have any meaning, it must ‘belong’ to existing citizens. They must have special rights over non-citizens. Immigration must be managed with their interests in mind. – David Goodhart, British author

Even when they have not lent their energies to promoting schemes for human betterment that depend on the mass coercion of real human beings, the intellectuals’ overdependence on ideas, and their consequent detachment from reality, have often turned them into little demons of ignorant subtlety. – Joseph Epstein   (H/T: Cafe Hayek)

If our vision is to better manage the disaster that is the federal government, you can count me out. I won’t sign up for that. (I don’t want to) slow-manage the decline of America. That’s why we have Democrats. – Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana (R) at CPAC