"Why?"
-anonymous-
"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."
-Henry David T!ioreau-
"Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals render the goals themselves despicable."
-Anton Chekhov-
"Gun manufacturers can be sued for manufacturing defects but vaccine manufacturers cannot.
Injuring someone with a gun or a knife or even a car, is a serious crime, but injuring someone with a vaccine isn't even a misdemeanor.
This is not justice."
-Thomas Massie-
"The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State."
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945) Italian dictator during WW2, founder of Italian Fascism, 'Il Duce'
Source: Benito Mussolini, 1935, The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze: Vallecchi Editore, (p. 41)
"... it was the calculated 'shearing' of the public by the World-Money powers triggered by the planned sudden shortage of call money in the New York Market."
-Curtis Dall-
son-in-law of FDR and a syndicate manager for Lehman Brothers, an investment firm
Source: was on the N.Y. Stock Exchange floor the day of the crash. In "FDR: My Exploited Father-In-Law"
"For the first time in its history, Western Civilization is in danger of being destroyed internally by a corrupt, criminal ruling cabal which is centered around the Rockefeller interests, which include elements from the Morgan, Brown, Rothschild, Du Pont, Harriman, Kuhn-Loeb, and other groupings as well. This junta took control of the political, financial, and cultural life of America in the first two decades of the twentieth century."
-Carroll Quigley-
(1910-1977) Professor of International Relations, Georgetown University Foreign Service School, Washington, D.C., member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), mentor to Bill Clinton
Source: No source found. Supposedly from 'Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time' (1966)
"Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"We are in danger of being overwhelmed with irredeemable paper, mere paper, representing not gold nor silver; no sir, representing nothing but broken promises, bad faith, bankrupt corporations, cheated creditors and a ruined people."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
Source: speech in the Senate, 1833
"Those who create and issue money and credit direct the policies of government and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people."
-Reginald McKenna-
(1863-1943) British Secretary to the Treasury (1903), President of the Board of Education (1907–08) First Lord of the Admiralty (1908–1911), Home Secretary (1911–1915) and Chancellor of the Exchequer (1915–1916), and Chairman of the Midland Bank (1918)
"American money was never more sound, or banking more free, than 200 years ago. Since then, it’s been a long steady decline from the gold standard and competitive banking to our Fed-run system of inflated paper currency, deposit insurance, and perpetually shaky banks on the dole."
-Lew Rockwell-
[Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.] (1944- ) Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
Source: Banks On The Dole, The Free Market, November 1995.
"It was not accidental [the 1929 stock-market 'crash']. It was a carefully contrived occurrence. ... The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as rulers of us all."
-Louis McFadden-
(1876-1936) US Congressman (R-PA) (1915-1935), Chairman of House Banking and Currency Committee. Poisoned in 1936.
"Are you entitled to the fruits of your labor or does government have some presumptive right to spend and spend and spend?"
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"I saw in States’ rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic [i.e., the Confederate Constitution] have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo."
-Lord Acton-
letter to Robert E. Lee after the War Between the States
"While I have considered the preservation of the constitutional power of the General Government to be the foundation of our peace and safety at home and abroad, I yet believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people, not only are essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of a free government. I consider it as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it."
-Robert E. Lee-
response to Lord Acton
"The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender."
-Proverbs-
Source: Proverbs 22:7 (KJV)
"The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Source: Reflections on the Revolution in France
"To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education."
-John Ruskin-
... and the end of their political career...
"The greatest threat facing America today is the disastrous fiscal policies of our own government, marked by shameless deficit spending and Federal Reserve currency devaluation. It is this one-two punch -- Congress spending more than it can tax or borrow, and the Fed printing money to make up the difference -- that threatens to impoverish us by further destroying the value of our dollars."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
"The decrease in purchasing power incurred by holders of money due to inflation imparts gains to the issuers of money..."
-Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis-
Source: Review, Nov. 1975, p.22, Published by The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
"A recent poll showed that nearly half the American public believes that the government should redistribute wealth. That so many people are so willing to blithely put such an enormous and dangerous arbitrary power in the hands of politicians -- risking their own freedom, in hopes of getting what someone else has -- is a painful sign of how far many citizens and voters fall short of what is needed to preserve a democratic republic."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"No state shall emit bills of credit, make any thing but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts, coin money..."
-United States Constitution-
Source: United States Constitution, Article One, Section Ten
"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value -- zero."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
1729
"The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist knows it."
-J. Robert Oppenheimer-
"To beat the bureaucracy, make your problem their problem."
-Marshall L. Smith-
"A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom."
-Woodrow Wilson-
(1856-1924) 28th US Presidentnt
1913
"The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself."
-Plato-
"Far from trying to rig the system, I have spent decades opposing cronyism and all political favors, including mandates, subsidies and protective tariffs -- even when we benefit from them. I believe that cronyism is nothing more than welfare for the rich and powerful, and should be abolished."
-Charles Koch-
(1935-) American businessman and philanthropist
Source: Koch, Charles (April 3, 2014). 'Instead of welcoming free debate, collectivists engage in character assassination.' "Charles Koch: I'm Fighting to Restore a Free Society". The Wall Street Journal
"Free lunch strategies have a habit of self-destructing. The Swiss economist Eugene Boehler had the context of such false and unsustainable images in mind when he noted that the 'modern economy is as much a dream factory as Hollywood.' It is based only a small part on real needs, and for the greatest part on fantasy and myth, he claimed. The stock exchange, far from ruling economic life, is at the mercy of tides of collective make-believe. Depressions come about when there is a loss of economic myth - (Eugene Boehler 'Der Mythus in der Wirtschaft,' Industrielle Organization, XXXI, 1962.)"
-J. Orlin Grabbe-
Source: 'The Collapse of the New World Order'
"Fiat-money systems tend to make people insatiable in their quest for ever higher monetary returns on their investments."
-Jorg Guido Hulsmann-
Economist
"It is the very essence of despotism that it can never afford to fail. This is what distinguishes it most vitally from democracy. In a despotism there is no organized opposition which can take over the power when the Administration in office has failed. All the eggs are in one basket. Everything is staked on one coterie of men. When the going is good, they move more quickly and efficiently than democracies, where the opposition has to be persuaded and conciliated. But when they lose, there are no reserves. There are no substitutes on the bench ready to go out on the field and carry the ball. That is why democracies with the habit of party government have outlived all other forms of government in the modern world. They have, as it were, at least two governments always at hand, and when one fails they have the other. They have diversified the risks of mortality, corruption, and stupidity which pervade all human affairs. They have remembered that the most beautifully impressive machine cannot run for very long unless there is available a complete supply of spare parts."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"The Federal Reserve System is treated by nearly all economists with reverence. On no matter is their instruction of the young in the subtlety and benignity of established institutions more admiring - or, in broad effect, more successful. Corporations are flawed by an instinct for monopoly. Trade unions interfere with the market, urge trade restrictions, resist new technology and thus obstruct progress, and they can fall victim to extortionists and racketeers. The regulatory agencies of the government are notably imperfect instruments of economic guidance. The Federal Reserve System is not totally above criticism. It makes many mistakes but these are always interesting errors of judgment. They are examined not critically but respectfully to discover why men of insight went wrong. That for such error anyone should be sacked or even seriously rebuked is, for economists, nearly unthinkable. This approval goes back to the origins and can be highly negligent of circumstance. The most widely read account of the genesis of the System tells glowingly of its birth in the closing weeks of 1913 when the Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Wilson."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
(1908-2006) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
Source: "Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went"
"When you pay social security taxes, you are in no way making provision for your own retirement. You are paying the pensions of those who are already retired. Once you understand this, you see that whether you will get the benefits you are counting on when you retire depends on whether Congress will levy enough taxes, borrow enough, or print enough money..."
-W. Allen Wallis-
former Chairman of the 1975 Advisory Council on Social Security
Source: May 27, 1976
"Public educators, like Soviet farmers, lack any incentive to produce results, innovate, to be efficient, to make the kinds of difficult changes that private firms operating in a competitive market must make to survive."
-Carolyn Lochhead-
American journalist
"Never — and I mean never — blindly trust the statistics you read [or hear] about the economy."
-Don Luskin-
(1954-) American columnist
"We can't spend more than we have. ... This is no longer a matter of right versus left, liberal versus conservative, we can prove our conclusion on this by basic mathematics. The United States Federal Government from all sources, for all purposes, takes in $2.2 trillion a year. Keep that number in mind. $2.2 trillion a year. We have total unfunded liabilities of $65 trillion, $2.2 trillion in revenue, $65 trillion in total unfunded liabilities. That is more than 30 to 1 leverage. If the United States Federal Government were a bank regulated by itself, they would shut themselves down. We live in a nation where not long ago our United States Secretary of State [Hillary Clinton] was on rhetorical bended knee in communist China pleading with the Chinese to continue to buy our debt, because if they don't buy our debt and other foreign sovereign wealth funds don't buy our debt our beloved United States of America can't pay its bills. The United States of America my friends is not a beggar nation."
-Gov. Tim Pawlenty-
(1960-) 39th Governor of Minnesota (2003-2011)
Source: http://www.conservative.org/cpac/archives/cpac-2010-tim-pawlenty
"Politicians say they're beefing up our economy. Most don't know beef from pork."
-Harold Lowman-
"With the monetary system we have now, the careful saving of a lifetime can be wiped out in an eyeblink."
-Larry Parks-
Executive Director, Foundation for the Advancement of Monetary Education (FAME)
"For the sake of humanity it is devoutly to be wished, that the manly employment of agriculture and the humanizing benefits of commerce, would supersede the waste of war and the rage of conquest; that the swords might be turned into plough-shares, the spears into pruning hooks, and, as the Scripture expresses it, 'the nations learn war no more.'
-George Washington-
"Property is a central economic institution of any society, and private property is the central institution of a free society."
-David D. Friedman-
(1945- ) American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and libertarian theorist
"[T]he only security men can have for their political liberty, consists in keeping their money in their own pockets ..."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
"Sir Walter Raleigh declared in the early 17th century that 'whoever commands the sea, commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.' This principle is as true today as when uttered, and its effect will continue as long as ships traverse the seas."
-Chester W. Nimitz-
Now consider the implications if you controlled (only) your own trade -- no manipulative tariffs, no fiat prohibitions, no arbitrary mandates. As if you had an unalienable unilateral right to set the acceptable terms of your own private contracts in a competitive free market, and to pursue voluntary commerce with willing partners wherever you found them (to the extent that their servants "permitted" them, anyway)...
"Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
"Money is the sign of liberty. To curse money is to curse liberty -- to curse life, which is nothing, if it be not free."
-Remy de Gourmont-
(1858-1915) French poet, novelist, and critic
"Why be thrifty when your old age and health care are provided for, no matter how profligate you act in your youth? Why be prudent when the state insures your bank deposits, replaces your flooded-out house, buys all the wheat you can grow? ... Why be diligent when half of your earnings are taken from you and given to the idle?"
-David Frum-
(1960-) Canadian-American journalist
Source: Dead Right, 1994
"Welfarism and excessive spending and deficits and socialism divide us, because everybody has to go to Washington. Those who have the biggest clout, those who are the best lobbyists, those who go and they grab. And whether it's the medical industrial complex, or the banking industry, or the military industrial complex, that's who ends up controlling our government... For so long, conservatives and constitutionalists have lost the argument, they lost the moral high ground. Because those who want to give things away, not talking about where they steal it from, but they want to give things and take care of people, they get the moral high ground and they come by as being compassionate. And we who believe in liberty, we lack compassion. But the truth is, there's only one compassionate system known to man, and that is freedom and personal responsibility, then there's enough wealth, and then we will all have personal responsibility to use this compassion that we have, first to take care of our families and friends and neighbors, and there would be so much wealth that we could spread this wealth around the world."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: New Hampshire Homeschool Meet and Greet, September 30, 2007
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple. Were we directed from Washington when to sow, when to reap, we should soon want bread."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:122
"He that goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: from his writings, 1758
"No one spends someone else's money as carefully as he spends his own."
-Mark Skousen-
(1947-) American economist, investment analyst, newsletter editor, college professor and author
Source: Economics in One Page
"A depression is a large-scale decline in production and trade... there is nothing in the nature of a free-market economy to cause such an event."
-Nathaniel Branden-
(1930- ) Canadian psychotherapist, writer
Source: essay "Common Fallacies About Capitalism"
-anonymous-
"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."
-Henry David T!ioreau-
"Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals render the goals themselves despicable."
-Anton Chekhov-
"Gun manufacturers can be sued for manufacturing defects but vaccine manufacturers cannot.
Injuring someone with a gun or a knife or even a car, is a serious crime, but injuring someone with a vaccine isn't even a misdemeanor.
This is not justice."
-Thomas Massie-
"The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State."
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945) Italian dictator during WW2, founder of Italian Fascism, 'Il Duce'
Source: Benito Mussolini, 1935, The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze: Vallecchi Editore, (p. 41)
"... it was the calculated 'shearing' of the public by the World-Money powers triggered by the planned sudden shortage of call money in the New York Market."
-Curtis Dall-
son-in-law of FDR and a syndicate manager for Lehman Brothers, an investment firm
Source: was on the N.Y. Stock Exchange floor the day of the crash. In "FDR: My Exploited Father-In-Law"
"For the first time in its history, Western Civilization is in danger of being destroyed internally by a corrupt, criminal ruling cabal which is centered around the Rockefeller interests, which include elements from the Morgan, Brown, Rothschild, Du Pont, Harriman, Kuhn-Loeb, and other groupings as well. This junta took control of the political, financial, and cultural life of America in the first two decades of the twentieth century."
-Carroll Quigley-
(1910-1977) Professor of International Relations, Georgetown University Foreign Service School, Washington, D.C., member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), mentor to Bill Clinton
Source: No source found. Supposedly from 'Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time' (1966)
"Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"We are in danger of being overwhelmed with irredeemable paper, mere paper, representing not gold nor silver; no sir, representing nothing but broken promises, bad faith, bankrupt corporations, cheated creditors and a ruined people."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
Source: speech in the Senate, 1833
"Those who create and issue money and credit direct the policies of government and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people."
-Reginald McKenna-
(1863-1943) British Secretary to the Treasury (1903), President of the Board of Education (1907–08) First Lord of the Admiralty (1908–1911), Home Secretary (1911–1915) and Chancellor of the Exchequer (1915–1916), and Chairman of the Midland Bank (1918)
"American money was never more sound, or banking more free, than 200 years ago. Since then, it’s been a long steady decline from the gold standard and competitive banking to our Fed-run system of inflated paper currency, deposit insurance, and perpetually shaky banks on the dole."
-Lew Rockwell-
[Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.] (1944- ) Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
Source: Banks On The Dole, The Free Market, November 1995.
"It was not accidental [the 1929 stock-market 'crash']. It was a carefully contrived occurrence. ... The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as rulers of us all."
-Louis McFadden-
(1876-1936) US Congressman (R-PA) (1915-1935), Chairman of House Banking and Currency Committee. Poisoned in 1936.
"Are you entitled to the fruits of your labor or does government have some presumptive right to spend and spend and spend?"
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"I saw in States’ rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic [i.e., the Confederate Constitution] have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo."
-Lord Acton-
letter to Robert E. Lee after the War Between the States
"While I have considered the preservation of the constitutional power of the General Government to be the foundation of our peace and safety at home and abroad, I yet believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people, not only are essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of a free government. I consider it as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it."
-Robert E. Lee-
response to Lord Acton
"The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender."
-Proverbs-
Source: Proverbs 22:7 (KJV)
"The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Source: Reflections on the Revolution in France
"To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education."
-John Ruskin-
... and the end of their political career...
"The greatest threat facing America today is the disastrous fiscal policies of our own government, marked by shameless deficit spending and Federal Reserve currency devaluation. It is this one-two punch -- Congress spending more than it can tax or borrow, and the Fed printing money to make up the difference -- that threatens to impoverish us by further destroying the value of our dollars."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
"The decrease in purchasing power incurred by holders of money due to inflation imparts gains to the issuers of money..."
-Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis-
Source: Review, Nov. 1975, p.22, Published by The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
"A recent poll showed that nearly half the American public believes that the government should redistribute wealth. That so many people are so willing to blithely put such an enormous and dangerous arbitrary power in the hands of politicians -- risking their own freedom, in hopes of getting what someone else has -- is a painful sign of how far many citizens and voters fall short of what is needed to preserve a democratic republic."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"No state shall emit bills of credit, make any thing but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts, coin money..."
-United States Constitution-
Source: United States Constitution, Article One, Section Ten
"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value -- zero."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
1729
"The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist knows it."
-J. Robert Oppenheimer-
"To beat the bureaucracy, make your problem their problem."
-Marshall L. Smith-
"A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom."
-Woodrow Wilson-
(1856-1924) 28th US Presidentnt
1913
"The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself."
-Plato-
"Far from trying to rig the system, I have spent decades opposing cronyism and all political favors, including mandates, subsidies and protective tariffs -- even when we benefit from them. I believe that cronyism is nothing more than welfare for the rich and powerful, and should be abolished."
-Charles Koch-
(1935-) American businessman and philanthropist
Source: Koch, Charles (April 3, 2014). 'Instead of welcoming free debate, collectivists engage in character assassination.' "Charles Koch: I'm Fighting to Restore a Free Society". The Wall Street Journal
"Free lunch strategies have a habit of self-destructing. The Swiss economist Eugene Boehler had the context of such false and unsustainable images in mind when he noted that the 'modern economy is as much a dream factory as Hollywood.' It is based only a small part on real needs, and for the greatest part on fantasy and myth, he claimed. The stock exchange, far from ruling economic life, is at the mercy of tides of collective make-believe. Depressions come about when there is a loss of economic myth - (Eugene Boehler 'Der Mythus in der Wirtschaft,' Industrielle Organization, XXXI, 1962.)"
-J. Orlin Grabbe-
Source: 'The Collapse of the New World Order'
"Fiat-money systems tend to make people insatiable in their quest for ever higher monetary returns on their investments."
-Jorg Guido Hulsmann-
Economist
"It is the very essence of despotism that it can never afford to fail. This is what distinguishes it most vitally from democracy. In a despotism there is no organized opposition which can take over the power when the Administration in office has failed. All the eggs are in one basket. Everything is staked on one coterie of men. When the going is good, they move more quickly and efficiently than democracies, where the opposition has to be persuaded and conciliated. But when they lose, there are no reserves. There are no substitutes on the bench ready to go out on the field and carry the ball. That is why democracies with the habit of party government have outlived all other forms of government in the modern world. They have, as it were, at least two governments always at hand, and when one fails they have the other. They have diversified the risks of mortality, corruption, and stupidity which pervade all human affairs. They have remembered that the most beautifully impressive machine cannot run for very long unless there is available a complete supply of spare parts."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"The Federal Reserve System is treated by nearly all economists with reverence. On no matter is their instruction of the young in the subtlety and benignity of established institutions more admiring - or, in broad effect, more successful. Corporations are flawed by an instinct for monopoly. Trade unions interfere with the market, urge trade restrictions, resist new technology and thus obstruct progress, and they can fall victim to extortionists and racketeers. The regulatory agencies of the government are notably imperfect instruments of economic guidance. The Federal Reserve System is not totally above criticism. It makes many mistakes but these are always interesting errors of judgment. They are examined not critically but respectfully to discover why men of insight went wrong. That for such error anyone should be sacked or even seriously rebuked is, for economists, nearly unthinkable. This approval goes back to the origins and can be highly negligent of circumstance. The most widely read account of the genesis of the System tells glowingly of its birth in the closing weeks of 1913 when the Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Wilson."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
(1908-2006) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
Source: "Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went"
"When you pay social security taxes, you are in no way making provision for your own retirement. You are paying the pensions of those who are already retired. Once you understand this, you see that whether you will get the benefits you are counting on when you retire depends on whether Congress will levy enough taxes, borrow enough, or print enough money..."
-W. Allen Wallis-
former Chairman of the 1975 Advisory Council on Social Security
Source: May 27, 1976
"Public educators, like Soviet farmers, lack any incentive to produce results, innovate, to be efficient, to make the kinds of difficult changes that private firms operating in a competitive market must make to survive."
-Carolyn Lochhead-
American journalist
"Never — and I mean never — blindly trust the statistics you read [or hear] about the economy."
-Don Luskin-
(1954-) American columnist
"We can't spend more than we have. ... This is no longer a matter of right versus left, liberal versus conservative, we can prove our conclusion on this by basic mathematics. The United States Federal Government from all sources, for all purposes, takes in $2.2 trillion a year. Keep that number in mind. $2.2 trillion a year. We have total unfunded liabilities of $65 trillion, $2.2 trillion in revenue, $65 trillion in total unfunded liabilities. That is more than 30 to 1 leverage. If the United States Federal Government were a bank regulated by itself, they would shut themselves down. We live in a nation where not long ago our United States Secretary of State [Hillary Clinton] was on rhetorical bended knee in communist China pleading with the Chinese to continue to buy our debt, because if they don't buy our debt and other foreign sovereign wealth funds don't buy our debt our beloved United States of America can't pay its bills. The United States of America my friends is not a beggar nation."
-Gov. Tim Pawlenty-
(1960-) 39th Governor of Minnesota (2003-2011)
Source: http://www.conservative.org/cpac/archives/cpac-2010-tim-pawlenty
"Politicians say they're beefing up our economy. Most don't know beef from pork."
-Harold Lowman-
"With the monetary system we have now, the careful saving of a lifetime can be wiped out in an eyeblink."
-Larry Parks-
Executive Director, Foundation for the Advancement of Monetary Education (FAME)
"For the sake of humanity it is devoutly to be wished, that the manly employment of agriculture and the humanizing benefits of commerce, would supersede the waste of war and the rage of conquest; that the swords might be turned into plough-shares, the spears into pruning hooks, and, as the Scripture expresses it, 'the nations learn war no more.'
-George Washington-
"Property is a central economic institution of any society, and private property is the central institution of a free society."
-David D. Friedman-
(1945- ) American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and libertarian theorist
"[T]he only security men can have for their political liberty, consists in keeping their money in their own pockets ..."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
"Sir Walter Raleigh declared in the early 17th century that 'whoever commands the sea, commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.' This principle is as true today as when uttered, and its effect will continue as long as ships traverse the seas."
-Chester W. Nimitz-
Now consider the implications if you controlled (only) your own trade -- no manipulative tariffs, no fiat prohibitions, no arbitrary mandates. As if you had an unalienable unilateral right to set the acceptable terms of your own private contracts in a competitive free market, and to pursue voluntary commerce with willing partners wherever you found them (to the extent that their servants "permitted" them, anyway)...
"Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
"Money is the sign of liberty. To curse money is to curse liberty -- to curse life, which is nothing, if it be not free."
-Remy de Gourmont-
(1858-1915) French poet, novelist, and critic
"Why be thrifty when your old age and health care are provided for, no matter how profligate you act in your youth? Why be prudent when the state insures your bank deposits, replaces your flooded-out house, buys all the wheat you can grow? ... Why be diligent when half of your earnings are taken from you and given to the idle?"
-David Frum-
(1960-) Canadian-American journalist
Source: Dead Right, 1994
"Welfarism and excessive spending and deficits and socialism divide us, because everybody has to go to Washington. Those who have the biggest clout, those who are the best lobbyists, those who go and they grab. And whether it's the medical industrial complex, or the banking industry, or the military industrial complex, that's who ends up controlling our government... For so long, conservatives and constitutionalists have lost the argument, they lost the moral high ground. Because those who want to give things away, not talking about where they steal it from, but they want to give things and take care of people, they get the moral high ground and they come by as being compassionate. And we who believe in liberty, we lack compassion. But the truth is, there's only one compassionate system known to man, and that is freedom and personal responsibility, then there's enough wealth, and then we will all have personal responsibility to use this compassion that we have, first to take care of our families and friends and neighbors, and there would be so much wealth that we could spread this wealth around the world."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: New Hampshire Homeschool Meet and Greet, September 30, 2007
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple. Were we directed from Washington when to sow, when to reap, we should soon want bread."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:122
"He that goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: from his writings, 1758
"No one spends someone else's money as carefully as he spends his own."
-Mark Skousen-
(1947-) American economist, investment analyst, newsletter editor, college professor and author
Source: Economics in One Page
"A depression is a large-scale decline in production and trade... there is nothing in the nature of a free-market economy to cause such an event."
-Nathaniel Branden-
(1930- ) Canadian psychotherapist, writer
Source: essay "Common Fallacies About Capitalism"