End the War on Freedom

From Classical Liberalism: Fail:

"People create orderly markets through cooperation, and are eager to do so. Where there is no free market, people will risk a great deal to create a black market - called black by those scum in government who aren't getting their cut. But really a golden market, a market of free and equal sovereigns cooperating in finding market clearing prices." -- Jim Davidson

From lew:

"The state is a coercive monopoly managed by a huge committee (of parasites) and populated by those who consume looted wealth and produce bads (e.g. murder, disorder, war, victimless criminal statutes) instead of goods." --David Calderwood

"The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects -- his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity." -- Henry Hazlitt

From tmm:

"... it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state." -- Bruce Schneier

From this speech on receiving the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism at Harvard University's Memorial Church:

"Faith is something we have to embrace. Faith in God means believing, absolutely, in something, with no proof whatsoever. Faith in humanity means believing absolutely in something with a huge amount of proof to the contrary. We are the true believers."

-- Joss Whedon

From Twitter:

"A depression is a recession that the government tried to fix." -- Grover Norquist

From Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand:

"Are we to understand," asked the judge, " that you hold your own interests above the interests of the public?"

"I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals."

From Ceres, by L. Neil Smith:

Visitors from Earth often ask me why Pallatians have no flag. We have no flag for the same reason West America, the Moon, and Mars have no flag, for the same reason Ceres never will. Flags are the calling-card of plunderers, rapists, and murderers in funny hats and clown-suits, pretending to be benefactors, protectors, and healers. If history demonstrates anything more clearly than that, I don’t know what it is.

We would no more have a flag than we would have a king, a President, a Prime Minister, or any of the stuff that comes with them. If you ever hear that Pallas has adopted a flag, you will understand that Pallatians are no longer a free people.

—The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

From tle:

"You know, the socialists who think they should own the world aren't aware of the simple fact that when it appears they have won, that just means the War of Liberation is about to start." -- Ken Holder

From Twitter:

"President Obama, I'm gonna let you finish... but Beyonce brought more peace to the world than you done." -- Kyle Bennett

"We anarchists have a secret weapon. Children are natural anarchists. It takes many years of constant oppression to squeeze it out of them." -- Bill St. Clair

From The Drugs of John Gray:

"It is neither the job of government nor the business of any individual to prohibit, regulate, restrict, or otherwise control what a man desires to eat, drink, smoke, inject, absorb, snort, sniff, inhale, swallow, or otherwise ingest into his body." -- Laurence M. Vance

From Center for a Stateless Society:

"... we should bear in mind that Washington, DC and Wall Street are not 'our country.' The real America is the host organism, not the glorified corporate-state tapeworms living in our colon." -- Kevin Carson

From grabbe:

The “uSA” used to be a Republic not a corporatist democracy. The people were truly the sovereigns and everything was just peachy back then (well, at least for white male property owners). Like most myths, it’s b.s. Look up the Alien and Sedition Acts, passed during the Adams administration. Or read up on the incredible games played by Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s Treasury Secretary, with Continental war bonds. Find out why the District of Columbia got situated where it is. Consider the blatant, abysmal tyranny of the Lincoln Administration. Look at the almost complete restriction of freedom of expression under Wilson during WWI. Research the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, and Operation Keel Haul. There has never been a time when government was not corrupt, mendacious, deceitful, duplicitous, and actively conspiring against the rights and property of the people. It’s highly organized crime, after all. Today they just have more tools and a bigger budget, while the public has a higher tolerance for despotism. There exists no great disconnect in American history that one can point to and say, “There is where we crossed the Rubicon and it all went wrong.” It’s merely a long continuum where, as Thomas Jefferson sagely observed, it is the tendency of government to grow and liberty to yield.

- Wilkerson via GSC

From Ceres, by L. Neil Smith:

Social scientists have determined that, far more than religion, race, nationality, or sex, people tend to identify with one another on the basis of what they do for a living. A West American plumber tends to identify with an Azerbaijani plumber more than he does with his own countrymen who are not plumbers.

That certainly agrees with my experience, and I think it explains perfectly why politicians, who derive their income from legalized plunder, are inclined to go soft and squishy when it comes to dealing with muggers, rapists, thieves, and murderers.

—The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

From Twitter:

"Keynesianism endures because the urge of pols to fuck the economy is even more intense than the urge of teen boys to fuck teen girls." -- Scott Bieser

From tmm:

"We've built a world safe for fools, and are overrun by them." -- Scarmig

From Samizdata:

"America has 'Czars' because there are still a few respectable people using the titles of 'Capo' and 'Don'" -- CJF

From gsc:

"Barack Hussein Obama is a financial pedophile" -- R.A. Hettinga

From Revolt in 2100 via Surly Curmudgeon: [tmm]

"I believe very strongly in freedom of religion -- but I think that that freedom is best expressed as freedom to keep quiet." -- Robert A. Heinlein