War is the health of the state
— Randolph Bourne
Guys, you’re doing it wrong. The whole point of propaganda is to make yourself look good.
I apologize in advance for posting this
It troubles me when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad, for when our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it conveniently ignores the fact in our democracy, government is us.
With the rise of democracy, the identification of the State with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense such as, “we are the government.” The useful collective term “we” has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If “we are the government,” then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also “voluntary” on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that “we owe it to ourselves”; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is “doing it to himself” and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have “committed suicide,” since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or lesser degree.
We must, therefore, emphasize that “we” are not the government; the government is not “us.” The government does not in any accurate sense “represent” the majority of the people. But, even if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority. No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that “we are all part of one another,” must be permitted to obscure this basic fact.
Our adversaries consider that an activity which is neither aided by supplies, nor regulated by the government, is an activity destroyed. We think just the contrary. Their faith is in the legislator, not in mankind; ours is in mankind, not in the legislator.
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
Bizarro Peace Prize Awarded to Obama →
From AntiWar.com:
Let’s say you’re the President of the United States — okay? And you’re on the brink of escalating what promises to be a wider, more intense war than that which George W. Bush launched in Iraq. You’ve already sent in reinforcements, but you’re undecided about just how many more troops you’re going to send to Afghanistan – could be 20,000, could be 40,000, or even 60,000. But, in any case, you’ve ruled out withdrawal and diplomacy: the only option you have left is more war.
This just plain freaks me out, but maybe I’m paranoid.
It's not a tax, it's just the government taking your money →
From Reason Magazine:
“I don’t think I’m making it up,” Mr. Stephanopoulos said […] He cited the dictionary’s definition of “tax”—”a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.”
Mr. Obama: “George, the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now…”
Because only the dishonest or clinically insane believe that “words” have a “real meaning”.
I’m sorry, I have to go read that again, because I still can’t believe he actually said that.
Government is the only institution that can take a perfectly good piece of paper, print some noble words on it, and make it perfectly worthless.
— Ludwig von Mises
Against Intellectual Monopoly →
Interesting (and free!) book about Intellectual Property. PDF here.
It is a long and dangerous jump from the assertion that innovators deserve compensation for their efforts to the conclusion that patents and copyrights, that is monopoly, are the best or the only way of providing that reward.
