This is a video from Prager University about the original purpose of the constitution and what it has morphed into. Just remember as the power of the State grows the liberty of the individual shrinks.
Alexander Hamilton and James Madison had concerns when other founders wanted to add the Bill of Rights to the constitution. Hamilton stated his concerns in Federalist 84. He thought that individual rights could be limited if they were listed. He asked how could congress infringe on a particular right if the constitution gives congress no power to do so?
To compromise with other founders like Thomas Jefferson, they had the ninth and tenth amendments added to the Bill of Rights. These amendments just restated Hamilton’s position when it came to the enumerated powers of the newly created government.
9th.- The enumeration in the constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Put differently: The listing of certain rights in the constitution, does not mean that the people’s rights are limited to those listed. The people’s rights are many and unprescribed.
10th.- The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Put differently: The United States can only claim the powers listed in the constitution, all powers not listed are reserved for the several states or the people. The United States powers are few and defined.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Looking at it with 20/20 hindsight I guess you could say both sides were correct to fear government power in the hands of imperfect human beings. That is why our founders put a governor on the Corvette, so whoever got in the drivers set couldn’t go over the speed limit.
Even with all of their warnings, look at how big government has gotten. We have no one to blame but ourselves. Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, and we’ve been asleep for a long time. Reigning in government now will have a high cost. Are we willing to pay that price?
“GOVERNMENT IS NOT REASON, IT IS NOT ELOQUENCE, IT IS FORCE, LIKE FIRE IT IS A DANGEROUS SERVANT, AND A FEARFUL MASTER.” George Washington
This quote is from George Washington, who was uniquely qualified to state the truth about what Government truly is at its core. He fought for the British in the French and Indian War. He signed the Declaration of Independence which spelled out abuses of power that the founders were declaring their independence from. He was the commander of the Colonial army during the Revolutionary War. He was at the Constitutional Convention that set up our Constitutional Republic which the founders thought would give individuals, freedom from government force. He was the first President of the United States, a position he could have held for life. But he walked away from power after two terms, setting a precedent followed by all Presidents, until FDR thought he was more important than “the indispensable man”.
The wisdom of our founders in general, and George Washington in particular, when it came to understanding what government was and what it could and would become unless individuals remained “eternally vigilant”, can’t be questioned. There life experiences gave them a deeper understanding about this subject than any individual could glean from reading and studying their writings. As great as their writing skills were, they probably couldn’t completely communicate in writing their total understanding on the subject of government force.
“FEW MEN HAVE VIRTUE TO WITHSTAND THE HIGHEST BIDDER.” – George Washington.
This is another quote from George Washington which reveals a keen insight into the nature of man. This insight goes hand in hand with his knowledge of what Government truly is. Few if any man can be trusted with the reigns of power. And many times the highest bidder is not an outsider, but the person himself.
“THE TWO ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE ARE CRIMINALS AND GOVERNMENT, SO LET US TIE THE SECOND DOWN WITH THE CHAINS OF THE CONSTITUTION SO THE SECOND WILL NOT BECOME THE LEGALIZED VERSION OF THE FIRST.” – Thomas Jefferson.
Our founders not only understood that virtuous men would be tempted by the highest bidder, they knew that the worst could and would get to the top. This is why they wanted a limit on the power of government so that there would be a limit on the damage government “criminals” could do to individuals while in a position of power.
We are responsible for our present state of big abusive Government. We haven’t been eternally vigilant in keeping the chains of the constitution firmly tied around its neck. Trying to get the chain back around the neck of government is going to take a lot of time and effort. Are we willing to do this now, or are most of us still to comfortable and ignorant to act. The longer we put this off the more costly it will be.
WISCONSIN D.A. USES LAW TO PUNISH OPPONENTS
YOU MUST READ this article titled, Wisconsin’s Shame: “I Thought It Was A Home Invasion”, at nationalreview.com. It is about the abuse of power by Milwaukee County district attorney John Chisholm. He used what are called John Doe investigations, in a clear abuse of power, to harass people who were supporters of Governor Scott Walker. Chisholm was on the side of the unions and government employees. His wife was a teachers union shop steward and wasn’t happy about the union reforms passed under Walker. Chisholm felt it “was his duty to stop them”. He illegally used the power of Government to fight political fights. Here is an excerpt from the article.
“For dozens of conservatives, the years since Scott Walker’s first election as governor of Wisconsin transformed the state – known for pro-football championships, good cheese, and a population with a reputation for being unfailingly polite – into a place where conservatives have faced early morning raids, multi-year secretive criminal investigations, slanderous and selective leaks to sympathetic media, and intrusive electronic snooping. Yes, Wisconsin, the cradle of the progressive movement and home of the “Wisconsin idea” – the marriage of state governments and state universities to govern through technocratic reform – was giving birth to a new progressive idea, the use of law enforcement as a political instrument, as a weapon to attempt to undo election results, shame opponents and ruin lives.”
IRS TARGETS OPPONENTS OF BIG GOVERNMENT
This is what the IRS targeting to tea party and liberty minded groups was all about. Using the force of Government to intimidate political opposition into ceding ground. Going through the legal process when falsely charged, or going through the process of complying with government regulations, is too high of a price for most people. The entrenched government status quo will use all their power, legally or illegally, to win. And we reach a point where the process itself becomes a punishment for getting involved.
ANOTHER EXAMPLE
Power is being abused at every level of government. We have shown many videos on this sight showing this abuse. Watch the video from this article, Caught On Tape: Cop Grabs, Smashes, Phone Of Women Recording Him, at zerohedge.com. You are allowed to film the police when they are on the job with this stipulation, you can’t interfere with their work. Some cops try to intimidate people from recording their activity by stating , “you are interfering with our work”, but they can’t take away your phone or delete your recording. I know it doesn’t say anything about smashing the phone, but isn’t that a violent attempt to delete the recording, or is it the destruction of property, or both.
This short video from Learn Liberty, gives us a humorous insight into how a persons thought process changes when he gets a chance to wield power.
CONCLUSION
In one of my recent articles titles, As The Number Of Laws Increase, Individual Freedom Decreases, we talk about how the increase in the amount of laws gives Government officials the ability to prosecute literally anyone for violating some obscure law. The process of defending yourself is your punishment, but the government official usually pays no cost for abusing his power. We have to roll back big abusive government because, as I’ve written previously, Individual Liberty Is The Least Contentious Way Of Settling Differences.
This article, Was Benghazi a Scandal? by Victor Davis Hanson, answers this question. The President has gone about ignoring the rule of law in so many cases it is hard to remember them all. Dr. Hanson catalogues many of these in his article. The President said he was going to fundamentally transform the United States of America, on the campaign trail in 08.
He is moving closer toward keeping his promise every day, as each new scandal/transformation comes and goes. We are being conditioned to accept this as the new normal because of the sheer volume of his usurpations of power. Why should anyone be surprised by anything he has done, if you consider his progressive radical back ground that anyone could have uncovered with a small amount of effort. Our founders said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom“. In retrospect eternal vigilance seems like a bargain compared to the price, in time and effort, we are going to have to pay to get this ever-growing Government back inside of its constitutional borders.
Here are some excerpts from the article.
“In sum, what many Americans see as scandals are not scandals to the Obama administration. Our president believes instead that the law is fluid. Statutes are mere constructs dressed up by those with inordinate power to paper over race, class, and gender biases.”
“For the nobly progressive, the desired equality of result at home and greater fairness toward nations abroad require a sort of deconstruction of “settled law.” Liberal elites may be forced to emasculate their enemies, if need be, by politicizing the IRS, or by ignoring the law through executive orders, or by sending out officials to peddle untruths, or by doing almost anything necessary to enact social justice here and abroad. Some call it scandalous, but others see it as empowering and long overdue.”
“The more such scandals occur in the next two years, the more they will not be seen as scandals, but as mere bothersome hurdles to fundamentally changing America. In the age of Obama, you win the race not by playing by the fossilized rules of jumping over the track’s hurdles — but instead by running right through them to reach the finish line first.”
"THE COORDINATION OF MENS ACTIVITIES THROUGH CENTRAL PLANNING OR THROUGH VOLUNTARY COOPERATION ARE ROADS GOING IN VERY DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS, THE FIRST TO SERFDOM AND POVERTY THE SECOND TO FREEDOM AND PLENTY."
"THERE IS NO SUBTLER, NO SURER MEANS OF OVERTURNING THE EXISTING BASIS OF SOCIETY THAN TO DEBAUCH THE CURRENCY. THE PROCESS ENGAGES ALL THE HIDDEN FORCES OF ECONOMIC LAW ON THE SIDE OF DESTRUCTION, AND DOES IT IN A MANNER WHICH NOT ONE MAN IN A MILLION IS ABLE TO DIAGNOSE."
Most Recent Quote
F.A. Hayek - "Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunity it provides for unforseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom."
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Matthew McCaffrey - "Building a freer society means winning the battle of ideas, not the empty contests put on by the central Government every four years. Freedom is never obtained by endorsing the least offensive applicant for the position of chief villain."
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Ludwig von Mises - "The middle system of property that is hampered, guided, and regulated by government is in itself contradictory and illogical. Any attempt to introduce it in earnest must lead to a crisis from which either Socialism or Capitalism alone can emerge."
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F. A. Hayek - "While it may not be difficult to destroy the spontaneous formations which are the indispensable bases of a free civilization. It may be beyond our power deliberately to reconstruct such a civilization once these foundations are destroyed."
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Murray Rothbard - "The market promotes and rewards the skills of production and voluntary cooperation. The Government enterprise promotes the skills of mass coercion and bureaucratic submission...and those who get to the top will be those with the most skill in that particular task."
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John Adams - "Government is instituted for the common good: for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people. And not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men..."
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Milton Friedman - "Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."
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Chris Rossini - "The state is a monster that destroys. Those who gain control of the levers, choose the targets."
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Murray Rothbard -"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics...but it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."
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Murray Rothbard -"Democracy can be only a possible route toward a free society rather than an attribute of it. In a purely free society there would be nothing for democratic electors to vote about."
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Robert Bradley Jr. - "When Government tries to pick winners and losers, it typically picks losers. Why? Because the Free market consumers pick winners to leave the losers for Government."
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Benito Mussolini - "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Men must choose between the market economy and socialism....some agency must determine what should be produced. If it is not the consumer by means of demand and supply on the market, it must be the Government by compulsion."
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F. A. Hayek - "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know, about what they imagine they can design."
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Detlev Schlichter - "Any intervention in the market (by the state) must direct resources away from how private owners would have employed them and toward how state officials and their economic advisers would like to see them employed."
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Henry Hazlitt - "The question is not whether we wish to see everybody as well off as possible....the real question concerns the proper means of achieving it. And in trying to answer this we must never lose sight of a few elementary truisms. We cannot distribute more wealth than is created. We cannot in the long run pay labor as a whole more than it produces."
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Murray Rothbard - "Whether or not man lives at the level of poverty or abundance depends upon the success that he and his ancestors have had in grappling with nature and in transforming naturally given resources into capital goods and consumers goods.... Free markets tend to lead to abundance for all of its participants.... violent intervention in the market and a hegemonic society tend to lead to general poverty."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Inflation and credit expansion are the means to obfuscate the fact that there prevails a nature-given scarcity of the material things on which the satisfaction of human wants depends. The main concern of capitalists private enterprise it to remove this scarcity as much as possible and to provide a continuously improving standard of living for an increasing population.....but however remarkable these improvements may be, there will always be a strict limit to the amount that can be consumed without reducing the capital available for the continuation and, even more, the expansion of production."
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Ludwig von Mises - " It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of Governments. Ideologically, it belongs in the same class with political constitutions and bills of rights."
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Murray Rothbard - "To reduce the working population while the consuming population remains undiminished is to lower the standard of living."
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Murray Rothbard - "Increasing the money supply confers no social benefit. It relieves no economic scarcity. It simply benefits some at the expense of others."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Political ideas that have dominated the public mind for decades cannot be refuted through rational arguments, they must run their course in life and cannot collapse otherwise than in great catastrophe."
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Milton Friedman - "A society that puts equality- in the sense of equality of outcome- ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests."
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F. A. Hayek - "It has already been suggested that it is not necessary, for the working of this free market capitalist system, that anybody should understand it. But people are not likely to let it work if they do not understand it."
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C. S. Lewis - "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 barons 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."
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Ludwig von Mises - "For the naive mind there is something miraculous in the issuance of fiat money. A magic word spoken by the Government creates out of nothing a thing which can be exchanged against any merchandize a man would like to get."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Many think that governments are free to achieve all they aim at without being restrained by an inexorable regularity in the sequence of economic phenomena....they maintain that the state is God."
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George Gilder - "Under capitalism, economic power flows not to the intellectual, who manipulates ideas and basks in their light, but to men who gives himself to his ideas and tests them with his own wealth and work."
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Thomas Sowell - "Perhaps the greatest achievement of market economies is in economizing on the amount of knowledge needed to produce a given economic result. That is also their greatest political vulnerability."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Anti capitalistic policies sabotage the operation of the capitalist system of the market economy. The failure of interventionism does not demonstrate the necessity of adopting socialism. It merely exposes the futility of interventionism. All those evils which the self-styled "progressives" interpret as evidence of the failure off capitalism are the outcome of their allegedly beneficial interference with the market."
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F.A. Hayek - "The battle for freedom must be won over and over again, the socialists of all parties must be persuaded or defeated if they and we are to remain free men."
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F. A. Hayek - "Planning, or central direction of economic activity, presupposes the existence of common ideals and common values; and the degree to which planning can be carried is limited to the extent to which agreement on such a common scale of values can be obtained or enforced."
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Thomas Sowell - "In political competition accurate knowledge has no decisive competitive advantage, because what is being sold is not an end result but a plausible belief about a complex process"
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Thomas Sowell - " Taxing away what other people have earned, in order to finance one's own moral adventures via social programs, is often depicted as a humanitarian endeavor, while allowing others the same freedom and dignity as oneself, so that they can make their own choices with their own earnings is considered pandering to greed. Greed for power is no less dangerous than greed for money, and has historically shed far more blood in the process."
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Peter Earle - "In a world of infinate desires and limited means, choices must be made; a study of history and economics reveals that, while markets make no promises, they never lie. The only choice is whether distribution, or redistribution as the case may be, is to be accomplished by the organic, apportioning hand of the price system, or by the corrupt, spoilative claw of states."
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Thomas Jefferson - "....To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with public debt....we must make our choice between economy and liberty or confusion and servitude....if we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labor and in our amusements.... if we can prevent the Government from wasting the labor of the people under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy."
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F. A. Hayek - "The democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans."
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Jean Baptiste Say - "...The encouragement of mere consumption is no benefit to commerce, for the difficulty lies in supplying the means, not in stimulating the desire of consumption; and we have seen that production alone, furnishes those means. Thus, it is the aim of Good Government to stimulate production, of bad Government to encourage consumption."
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Ludwig von Mises - "The middle-of-the-road policy is not an economic system that can last. It is a method for the realization of socialism by installments."
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Thomas Sowell - "What is politically defined as economic planning is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by Government officials."
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Thomas Sowell - "The market is simply the freedom to choose among many existing or still to be created possibilities. The Government establishes an army or a post office as the answer to a given problem.... The diversity of personal tastes insures that no given institution will become the answer to a human problem in the market."
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Thomas Sowell - "Just as a poetic discussion of the weather is not meteorology, so an issuance of moral pronouncements or political creeds about the economy is not economics."
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Paul Craig Roberts - "We should all be thankful to the Soviets, because they have proved conclusively that socialism doesn't work. No one can say they didn't have enough power or enough bureaucracy or enough planners or they didn't go far enough."
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Alexis de Tocqueville - "Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man, socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. 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."
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George Gilder - "The Real Issue is between the rule of law and the rule of leveler egalitarianism, between creative excellence and covetous "fairness", between admiration of achievement versus envy and resentment of it'.
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Thomas Jefferson - "The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite."
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Judge Leonard Hand - "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; if it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Modern civilization is a product of the philosophy of laissez faire, it cannot be preserved under the ideology of Government omnipotence."
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Ludwig von Mises - "The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution."
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H.L. Menken - "Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is an advance auction on the sale of stolen goods"
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F.A. Hayek - "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."
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Detlev Schlichter - "Economics is the science of how we use social institutions such as private property and voluntary exchange on free markets to make the best use of scarce resources. The printing press tries to do away with scarcity."
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Thomas Sowell - "The God like approach to social policy ignores the diversity of values and the cost of agreement among human beings."
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Henry Hazlitt - "Whenever men are allowed liberty, and freedom of choice, they will make mistakes. Liberty is not a guarantee of omniscience. But neither are the mistakes of free men a valid excuse to take away their liberty, and impose Government controls in its stead, on the ground that all wisdom and disinterestedness resides in the people who are going to do the controlling."
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Thomas Sowell - "Nothing is easier than to confuse broader powers with deeper insight. But almost by definition, those with the broadest powers are the most remote from the specific knowledge needed for either deciding, or for knowing, the actual consequences of their decisions."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Credit expansion is the Government's foremost tool in their struggle against the market economy. In their hands it is the magic wand designed to conjure away the scarcity of capital goods, to lower the rate of interest or to abolish it altogether to finance lavish Government spending."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Economic history is a long record of Government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics."
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Chaderov - "Since the State thrives on what it expropriates, the general decline in production that it induces by it's avarice foretells its own doom. Its source of income dries up. Thus in pulling society down it pulls itself down."
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Thomas Sowell - "If an informed citizenry is the foundation of democratic Government, than an uninformed citizenry is a danger."
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Thomas Sowell - "The free market works best when there is a level playing field but politicians win more votes by tilting the playing field to favor particular groups."
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Thomas Sowell - "However dramatic or attractive a particular vision may be, ultimately everyone must live in the world of reality. To the extent that reality has been filtered to fit a vision, this filtered information is a misleading guide to making decisions in an unforgiving reality, to which we must all adjust because it is not going to adjust to us."
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Thomas Sowell - "Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name "Social Justice"."
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Murray Rothbard - "Bureaucracy incompetent enough to plan a stationary system, is vastly more incompetent at planning a progressing one."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Freedom is incompatible with equality of wealth and income. Men are born unequal and it is precisely their inequality that generates social cooperation and civilization."
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Murray Rothbard - "Government subsidy systems promote inefficiency in production and efficiency in coercion and subservience, while penalizing efficiency in production and inefficiency in predation (plundering)."
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Francisco Capella - "The right of property is a negative right of noninterference. Humans do not have natural positive rights that imply that others must do something for them, and there is no natural duties towards others (present and future). Positive rights and duties arise by means of contracts."
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Victor Davis Hanson - "Social justice sees the Government's proper moral obligation not as ensuring equality out of the starting gate, but as guaranteeing that we will all reach the finish line at the same exact moment."
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F.A. Hayek - "A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a Government with totalitarian powers."
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Thomas Sowell - "People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together. In this situation, for the intelligentsia to impose their notions on ordinary people is essentially to impose ignorance on knowledge."
"Credentialed ignorance is still ignorance."
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Thomas Sowell - "People have to be aware of the dangers in letting economic decisions be made through political processes."
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Winston Churchill - "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery."
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George Gilder - "Socialist and totalitarian Governments are doomed to support the past, because creativity is unpredictable, it is also uncontrollable. If the politicians want to have central planning and command, they can not have dynamism and life. A managed economy is almost by definition a barren one.
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George Gilder - "The ambitious agenda of contemporary liberalism simply ensures that Government will do nothing well, except to expand itself as an obstacle of growth and innovation. Government best supports the future by refraining as much as possible from trying unduly to shape it."
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Francisco Capella - "Markets are never perfect because human beings are limited in their abilities; proposing state fixes to alleged problems that individuals cannot solve freely seems to forget that the state is also made up of humans; and perhaps not the best ones. ( Bureaucrats are not disinterested angels, and the worst might get to the top.)"
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George Washington - "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force, like fire it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master."
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Thomas Jefferson -- "I think we have more machinery of Government than is necessary, to many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."
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Thomas Jefferson -- "I sincerely believe with you that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, it's but swindling futurity on a large scale."
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Thomas Jefferson -- "The two enemies of the people are criminals and Government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first."
AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS ADDICT 