Social Economics 101

Thought for Today

"I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature."

~~~~~ Sidney Hook

Thought for Today

"I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back."

~~~~~ Leo Tolstoy

Thought for Today

"One who works for his own profit is likely to work hard. One who works for the use of others, without profit to himself, is likely not to work any harder than he must."

~~~~~ B. Carroll Reece

Thought for Today

"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

Thought for Today

"The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens."

~~~~~ John Maynard Keynes

They've told us exactly what they're about, yet here we sit watching them do it like sheep awaiting the shearing.

Thought for Today

"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."

~~~~~ Winston Churchill

Thought for Today

"History will remember how often and adamantly President Barack Obama insisted that the socialized medicine law he signed last week would reduce the federal deficit. It will be his defining lie."

~~~~~ Terence Jeffrey

Thought for Today

"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. ... Now, the American people, if you put it to them about socialized medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would unhesitatingly vote against it."

~~~~~ Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

"While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care 'summit,' thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen - because they're part of the same story. It's just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They're at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided, instead, that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe."

~~~~~ Mark Steyn

Thought for Today

"The problem is not the 'crises' Obama inherited. It's the ones he's creating. He has lived in such a socialist policy shell all his life that he doesn't have a clue that he's on a different planet than most of us. If he were just slightly less narcissistic, he might be able to figure this out. But ... no matter what adjustments he promises to make following the Boston Massacre, he still intends to govern like a socialist. He only wants to do a better job of figuring out how to do it less visibly, hoping we won't 'get it' before it's too late."

~~~~~ David Limbaugh

Thought for Today

"The special deals and payoffs are incidental to the [health care] bill in one sense; if they were all removed it would still be a bad bill. But in another sense, they reveal something essential about a government takeover of health care: it is all about looting, about how one group of people can tax and regulate others in an attempt to get something for nothing. All statist programs are rife with this kind of scheming, and they have to be, because whenever wealth is seized by force, there is a battle among the looters over how to divide the spoils."

~~~~~ Robert Tracinski

Thought for Today

"Authoritarian socialism has failed almost everywhere, but you will not find a single Marxist who will say it has failed because it was wrong or impractical. He will say it has failed because nobody went far enough with it. So failure never proves that a myth is wrong."

~~~~~ Jean-Francois Revel

Thought for Today

"I doubt whether there are many Americans who think Congress has either the right or competency to choose where they live, what clothes they wear or what cars they drive. Yet many Americans stand ready to allow Congress to decide what doctors they go to and what treatments they receive. We forget that once we have government-sponsored health care, it can be used to justify almost any restraint on liberty."

~~~~~ Walter E. Williams

Thought for Today

"The economic freedom which is the prerequisite of any other freedom cannot be the freedom from economic care, which the socialists promise us and which can be obtained only by relieving the individual at the same time of the necessity and of the power of choice; it must be the freedom of our economic activity which, with the right of choice, inevitably also carries the risk and the responsibility of that right."

~~~~~ Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992)

Thought for Today

"It is as useless to argue with those that have renounced the use and authority of reason as to administer medication to the dead."

~~~~~ Thomas Paine

Mark Steyn: Live Free or Die

This month's Imprimis from Hillsdale College features an essay adapted from a March, 2009 lecture by the indispensable Mark Steyn. For the title of his lecture, Mark used the famous motto of his adopted home state, "Live Free or Die."

Reading his lecture is a very sobering experience. As a native of Canada who has traveled widely all over the world, Mark has a greater appreciation of United States exceptionalism than most native-born Americans. He has seen first-hand the rapid decline of the once-great civilizations of Great Britain, France, Germany, and even, to a disturbing extent, Canada.

For several years now, Mark has been trying his considerable best to warn us that we, the last bastion of true freedom in the world, are headed down the exact same path as the formerly great powers of Europe. He sees us heading at breakneck speed for a cliff, and is attempting to warn us to change course before it is too late.

In his vitally important book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, Mark discusses the disturbing demographic trends which, if unchecked, will leave us friendless and isolated in a hostile world. In this lecture, he points out that our new administration is trying its best to drive us over the same cliff over which our European and Canadian friends have already fallen.

Here's how he begins:

MY REMARKS are titled tonight after the words of General Stark, New Hampshire's great hero of the Revolutionary War: "Live free or die!" When I first moved to New Hampshire, where this appears on our license plates, I assumed General Stark had said it before some battle or other—a bit of red meat to rally the boys for the charge; a touch of the old Henry V-at-Agincourt routine. But I soon discovered that the general had made his famous statement decades after the war, in a letter regretting that he would be unable to attend a dinner. And in a curious way I found that even more impressive. In extreme circumstances, many people can rouse themselves to rediscover the primal impulses: The brave men on Flight 93 did. They took off on what they thought was a routine business trip, and, when they realized it wasn't, they went into General Stark mode and cried "Let's roll!" But it's harder to maintain the "Live free or die!" spirit when you're facing not an immediate crisis but just a slow, remorseless, incremental, unceasing ratchet effect. "Live free or die!" sounds like a battle cry: We'll win this thing or die trying, die an honorable death. But in fact it's something far less dramatic: It's a bald statement of the reality of our lives in the prosperous West. You can live as free men, but, if you choose not to, your society will die.

My book America Alone is often assumed to be about radical Islam, firebreathing imams, the excitable young men jumping up and down in the street doing the old "Death to the Great Satan" dance. It's not. It's about us. It's about a possibly terminal manifestation of an old civilizational temptation: Indolence, as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a republic. When I ran into trouble with the so-called "human rights" commissions up in Canada, it seemed bizarre to find the progressive left making common cause with radical Islam. One half of the alliance profess to be pro-gay, pro-feminist secularists; the other half are homophobic, misogynist theocrats. Even as the cheap bus 'n' truck road-tour version of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, it made no sense. But in fact what they have in common overrides their superficially more obvious incompatibilities: Both the secular Big Government progressives and political Islam recoil from the concept of the citizen, of the free individual entrusted to operate within his own societal space, assume his responsibilities, and exploit his potential.

To read the rest, go here. You can also download the entire issue as a PDF here.

Night of the Living Government

Andrew Klavan has made a masterful video for Pajamas TV. Sissy Willis watched it, then wrote an equally masterful post about it with an – umm – interesting title, "Let me devour your flesh because I know how to use it better than you do". Go read it, then watch Andrew's video, Night of the Living Government. Once you've seen it, you'll never think of government in quite the same way again.

4/20/09 1:28 PM UPDATE: Sissy Willis points out that Andrew's video is now also available on YouTube: Klavan on the Culture: Night of the Living Government. Thanks, Sissy!

Thought for Today

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the rights of the people by the gradual & silent encroachments of those in power than by violent & sudden usurpations."

~~~~~ James Madison

Bailout – Obama-Style

Hat tip: Roger Hollander