GREAT QUOTES

October 10, 2008

"When the history of this debacle is written, Washington’s failure to supervise and rein in Fannie and Freddie will be seen as the original sin."

John Fund

"Obama and Biden talk incessantly about unifying us yet employ divisive class-envy tactics to demonize and alienate major producers in this country. They have to know, unless they are self-brainwashed into sheer functional incompetence, that they are lying and dividing the people they’ve promised to bring together."

David Limbaugh

"So, yes, our recent financial turmoil does suggest failure – a failure to truly practice capitalism and a failure to accept and believe in the value, appropriateness and morality of a limited government and maximum personal responsibility."

Larry Elder

"Government is no more than taxpayers hiring the most inefficient organization to do the job."

James Cook

October 9, 2008

"Barack Obama has what can only be described as a Messianic vision of his own powers. It is beyond hubris; it verges on delusional."

Linda Chavez

"Like Roosevelt, Obama would be full of clever ideas to solve the nation’s economic problems; like Roosevelt’s, his ideas would mostly be half-baked leftist panaceas that did more harm than good, prolonging the downturn and leading the nation a substantial distance further towards the nightmare of the leviathan state. His rhetoric is so good, however, that the electorate would not notice his economic failures and would happily re-elect him as they did Roosevelt in 1936."

Martin Hutchinson

"Over the longer term, U.S. equities, bonds and the greenback should suffer terribly, while gold and silver prices should boom."

John Williams

"Fannie Mae revealed it overstated earnings by $10.6 billion and that it didn’t really know what was going on. Tlhe Bush administration pushed for reforms, but those efforts were rebuffed by Congress, with Democrats Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd taking point, because Fannie and Freddie have spent millions in campaign contributions."

Jonah Goldberg

October 8, 2008

"Obama will only come clean about his liberalism when he thinks he is in safe territory, as he did at the San Francisco fundraiser where he trashed small-town Americans, thinking his words wouldn’t reach those he was belittling. Nor is Obama upfront about the liberal nature of his policy proposals, choosing instead to mask their liberalism and even disguise them as conservative."

David Limbaugh

"The mass immigration we’re experiencing by the uneducated and unskilled is having a disastrous impact on the most vulnerable of our fellow citizens: the unemployed, partially employed, the elderly still working, African American males, recent legal immigrants, young people entering the job market, and all working-class or lower-middle class Americans with no more than a high school education."

Jamie Glazov

"It is obvious that increasing capital gains taxes by a minimum of one-third and possibly doubling them, both of which Obama has proposed during his campaign, would send a clear signal to investors to keep their money under the mattress. Who would buy stock now knowing that the tax on any profits he or she will make is going to go up sharply if Obama becomes president."

Dick Morris & Eileen McGann

"The current financial crisis stems in large part from the fact that people who shouldn’t have been buying a home, or who bought more home than they could afford, now can’t pay their bills. Their bad mortgages are mixed up with the good mortgages. And thanks in part to new accounting rules set up after Enron, the bad mortgages have contaminated the whole pile, reducing the value of even stable mortgages."

Jonah Goldberg

October 7, 2008

"Endless reports and many books have been written documenting Barack Obama’s discipleship in the thug tactics of Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals.’ For Obama, community organizing was not an innocuous vehicle for assisting the needy. It was and is a cynically dangerous vehicle for the politics of extortion and intimidation and the usurpation of power by socialists, whose ideology and methods more closely resemble those of Josef Stalin than those of Mother Teresa."

David Limbaugh

"The government forced banks to prove they weren’t ‘redlining’ – i.e., discriminating against minorities – by approving loans to minorities and various left-wing ‘community group’ shakedown artists whether they were bad risks or not. (A young Barack Obama got his start with exactly these sorts of groups.)"

Jonah Goldberg

"In 1930, before Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, taxpayers paid about 12 percent of their income to all three levels of government – state, local and federal. Today we pay approximately 40 percent."

Larry Elder

"Those who resist gold ownership the longest will suffer the greatest loss."

James Cook

October 6, 2008

"It is now common knowledge that his pastor for twenty years, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, called on God to ‘damn America’ and that one of Obama’s early political allies, convicted terrorist William Ayers, expressed regret that he was unable to ‘do enough’ when it came to ‘setting bombs.’ Before Messrs. Wright and Ayers, though, there was ‘Frank,’ the name Obama gives in his memoirs to a man he describes as a formative influence during his early years in Hawaii. It turns out this Frank was none other than Frank Marshall Davis….. Cliff Kincaid reports that during the 19 years Davis was under FBI surveillance, Obama’s mentor ‘spent much of his time’ photographing Hawaii’s shorelines and beachfronts – presumably not for their scenic value."

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.

"When we strip away all the complexity, we discover that social planning largely led to this debacle. Government politicians and bureaucrats forced lending institutions to make un-creditworthy loans and helped create unnatural demand in the housing market by priming the pump on bad loans. This created an unnatural price bubble in real estate, which was securing these ill-advised loans. When the bubble inevitably burst, the mortgages secured by the artificially inflated real estate plummeted in value, which left us with an epidemic of grossly under-secured loans."

David Limbaugh

"Franklin Raines, the Clinton-appointed former head of Fannie Mae from 1998 to 2004, made it his top priority to make mortgages easier to get for people with poor credit, few assets and little money for a down payment."

Jonah Goldberg

"In 1980 there were fewer than 100 talk shows nationwide. Today there are more than 1,400 stations entirely devoted to talk formats. Liberals, not satisfied with their domination of academia, Hollywood and most of the mainstream media, want to kill talk radio, where liberals have been unable to dent conservatives’ dominance."

George Will

October 3, 2008

"And, guess what this liberal will be about? This liberal will be about socializing… uh, will be about, basically taking over and the government running all of your companies."

Rep. Maxine Waters

"The further left you go, the more insular you get. Americans on the left tend to talk only to one another; study only under left-wing teachers; and read only fellow leftists. That is why it is a shock to so many liberals when a Republican wins a national election – where do all these Republican voters come from?

Dennis Prager

"Many of our health care problems can be traced to increased government control and the reduction of market forces. Yet the liberal solution is full-blown nationalized health care. Never mind that it doesn’t work anywhere in the world and always leads to waiting lines and inferior health care. Never mind that the United States has the best health care in the history of the world, notwithstanding admittedly serious problems."

David Limbaugh

"The further that currencies are removed from gold the closer they are to requiring it."

James Cook

October 2, 2008

"Over the longer term, U.S. equities, bonds and the greenback should suffer terribly, while gold and silver prices should boom."

John Williams

"History has shown that liberal prescriptions don’t work, but when they fail, liberals invariably not only deny responsibility for their do-gooder manipulation but also insist on even more government intrusion. Think of it as ‘the hair of the dog’ remedy on steroids."

David Limbaugh

"We created the phony populist creed that everyone deserved to own a house. So lawmakers got the message to relax lending standards in service to ‘fairness.’ But Americans forgot that historically nearly four in 10 of us aren’t ever ready, or able, to sacrifice for a down payment, monthly mortgage bills, home maintenance and yearly taxes – and so should stick to renting."

Victor Davis Hanson

"The beautiful thing about our economic system is that bad decisions are punished in the marketplace."

Jonah Goldberg

October 1, 2008

"Free Market conservatives understand that many problems have been caused by government’s officious intermeddling in the private sector. The subprime mortgage crisis is no exception."

David Limbaugh

"Whatever is left of the economy after the current round of crisis interventions by the Fed could go down the drain if Obama is elected and carries out his plans for sharp increases in taxation."

Dick Morris & Eileen McGann

"In 1999, liberals were bragging about extending affirmative action to the financial sector. Los Angeles Times reporter Ron Brownstein hailed the Clinton administration’s affirmative action lending policies as one of the ‘hidden success stories’ of the Clinton administration, saying that ‘black and Latino homeownership has surged to the highest level ever recorded.’ Meanwhile, economists were screaming from the rooftops that the Democrats were forcing mortgage lenders to issue loans that would fail the moment the housing market slowed and deadbeat borrowers couldn’t get out of their loans by selling their houses. A decade later, the housing bubble burst and, as predicted, food-stamp-backed mortgages collapsed. Democrats set an affirmative action time-bomb and now it’s gone off."

Ann Coulter

"The proposed bailout of financial institutions enables the Fed to create hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air. The cost is greater inflation – a stealth tax on us all."

Larry Elder

September 30, 2008

"Let’s be vigilant in not allowing our politicians to succumb to the siren song of those enemies of free enterprise who would exploit the current financial crisis to further their socialistic objectives for the health care industry and other key sectors of our economy."

Joseph A. Klein

"Why do liberals believe that if Obama loses it will be due to white racism? One reason is the liberal elite’s contempt for white Americans with less education – even if they are Democrats."

Dennis Prager

"Franklin Raines, CEO of the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) from 1999-2004, is the individual most responsible for the subprime mortgage crisis. It was on Mr. Raines’ watch that Fannie Mae went bankrupt. He was accused of manipulating earnings statements so he could be paid bonuses to which he was not entitled."

Jack Kelly

"In a market economy the effects of bad economic policy may take a lifetime to unfold."

James Cook

September 29, 2008

"Part of the problem is the ‘multicultural’ ideology that says all cultures are equally valid. It is hard even to know what that means, much less take it seriously as a guide to living in the real world."

Thomas Sowell

"It is not likely that the systemic solvency crisis is behind us, and it is too late to prevent a recession. The inflationary recession was well underway before the housing/mortgage crisis, and little can be done to stimulate economic activity, to contain inflation or to provide a long-term prop to equity values. The government, however, does have the ability to support depositor safety, to prevent a collapse of the related financial services industry and to prevent a deflation in the prices of goods and services. Indeed, the cost of systemic salvation is price inflation."

John Williams

"The real reason to own gold is that governments are in the process of debasing their currencies in order to alleviate the pain of souring economies that were built on a fundamentally flawed principal – that more easy money can solve the problems created by prior easy money."

Tim Iocono

"The Left is exulting in the near melt-down of our free market financial system. Socialists see the housing credit catastrophe – and the role of the federal government in trying to right what they consider to be the sinking capitalistic ship – as vindication of their belief that all key industries in our economy should be nationalized. The free market is dead, they proclaim. Long live central planning and control."

Joseph Klein

September 26, 2008

"Racism is about 18^th on a list of problems that black America faces."

Shelby Steele

"We have a radical elite, an elite that believes in climate change, gay marriage, unrestricted abortions, and the United Nations. We have an elite that intends to make massive, liberal changes to every aspect of American life. This elite ruins almost everything it touches - from the schools, to the media, to the universities. Giving more power to the elites means watching the United States become more and more like Europe."

Laura Ingraham

"The credit crunch and foreclosure problems are failures of government policy. In fact, what we see now is a market correction to foolhardy government policy. Congress’ move to bailout lenders and borrowers who made poor decisions will simply create incentives for people to make unwise decisions in the future. English philosopher Herbert Spencer said, ‘The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."

Walter Williams

"The economic policy that generally prevails is the one where half measures are employed."

James Cook

September 25, 2008

"Time and again, experience has shown that while private enterprise, carried on in an environment of open competition, delivers the best products and services at the best price, government intervention stifles initiative, subsidizes inefficiency, and raises costs."

Burton W. Folsom, Jr.

"The gold and currency markets, in particular, remain subject to jawboning and both covert and overt central bank intervention, aimed at discouraging investors from seeking safety in gold or outside the greenback."

John Williams

"This isn’t a failure of capitalism; the Fed isn’t a capitalist institution, and the United States hasn’t had a capitalist financial system since it abandoned the link to gold in 1933. It is instead a failure of government."

Martin Hutchinson

September 24, 2008

"The problems that plague the Venezuelan economy transcend Chavez and his misrule. Chavez himself is a consequence of the unsurprising failure of socialism and mercantilism that were implanted gradually in Venezuela."

Hugo J. Faria

"An honest examination of our economic history – going back long before the twentieth century – reveals that, more often than not, when government programs and individual enterprise have gone head to head, the private sector has achieved more progress at less cost with greater benefit to consumers and the economy at large."

Burton W. Folsom, Jr.

"The academic feminist left has scared the dickens out of mainstream men and women for so long, the liberal establishment is terrified to contradict feminists’ nigh-upon-theological conviction that female authenticity is measured by one’s blind loyalty to left-wing talking points. This is a version of the Marxist doctrine of ‘false consciousness,’ which holds that you aren’t an authentic member of the proletariat unless you agree with Marxism."

Jonah Goldberg

"After the $85 billion bailout announced recently for AIG, the Fed and the U.S. Treasury today began creating serious new money in the system, a process that eventually will end in a hyperinflation and complete debasement of the U.S. dollar."

John Williams

September 23, 2008

"When people leave it to others to stop the national government from taking unconstitutional actions that threaten liberty, they are free riding on other people’s efforts to preserve liberty. The difficulty, as with all public goods, is that everyone faces incentives to free ride. If most people free ride, liberty will perish. No one should be surprised, then, that officeholders at the highest levels of all three branches of the national government now behave with impunity in stretching the Constitution to suit their personal predilections or political objectives."

Charlotte Twight

"If government is so bad, why do we have so much of it?…the democratic system itself can be used to redistribute income from one group of voters to another. Once that process has taken place a large proportion of the electorate can pay nothing towards the costs of the state, but can vote for others to hand over money for their benefit, while a minority of the electorate pays a quite disproportionate share of the costs of the state."

David B. Smith

"Once we recognize that attitudes to borrowing in the US economy have been pathological for the last decade or more, the true culprit for our coming troubles becomes clear. The Federal Reserve, by expanding the money supply at a 4% faster annual rate than output for the 13 years since 1995, has made borrowing both excessively cheap and excessively easy to obtain."

Martin Hutchinson

"Government is socialism."

James Cook

September 22, 2008

"The creation of the world – said Plato – is the victory of persuasion over force… Civilization is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals…"

Alfred North Whitehead

"The mortgages owned or guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie are over $5 trillion and thus are of an equivalent order of magnitude to the U.S. Treasury Securities outstanding. In other words, Fannie and Freddie’s obligations are equivalent to approximately 100% of the Treasury’s outstanding debt. What foreign investor in his right mind (and China alone owns over $1 trillion of U.S. Treasury Securities) would continue to view Treasury Securities (not to mention the U.S. Treasury has taken on an additional liability of $5 trillion – an amount equal to all the Treasury Securities already outstanding?"

Deepcaster

"It should be noted that people in the free market rarely bear false witness; integrity is the rule. The morning milk, phone calls, planes the airlines buy, autos by the millions – no one could list the instances – are as represented. We have daily, eloquent, enormous testimony that the Ten Commandments can be and are observed by fallible human beings. Contemporary politics is the most glaring of all exceptions."

Leonard E. Read

September 19, 2008

"The debt-based paper money of the Federal Reserve will not only be responsible for a deflationary collapse as it was in the 1930s, its continued excessive printing will be responsible for the hyperinflation that will succeed the present inflation now in motion around the world. Currently, inflation in Turkey is 12.1%, Vietnam is 28.3% (Vietnam was the world’s largest importer of gold in January as investors bought gold as a protection against inflation but since June 23^rd, Vietnam has prohibited the importation of gold.) South Africa inflation is at 13% and as per the calculations of John Williams at ShadowStats.com, the rate of inflation in the US is 13.64%."

Darryl Schoon

"The U.S. government can pay its obligations only by further borrowing or further printing of money, either which means that a long-term disaster for the U.S. Dollar is ensured."

Deepcaster

"Capitalism corrects negative political and social beliefs."

James Cook

September 18, 2008

"In the economic sphere an act, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge on subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them. There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen. Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil."

Frederic Bastiat

"The Fed will doubtless continue to inflate the money supply which should further weaken and likely destroy the U.S. Dollar in the long-term."

Deepcaster

"Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure."

Mark Skousen

September 17, 2008

"The Fed and the Treasury will do whatever is necessary to save any entity that might otherwise implode the system. They will create and spend any money needed, they will arm-twist anyone they have to, they will manipulate any market, financial statistic or news medium that will help contain the still-intensifying crisis. Failure here is not an acceptable option."

John Williams

"The tale of how the two GSE’s [Fannie & Freddie] got to this point is a long and sorry one. It is a story of quite staggering ineptitude on the part of company management, the financial regulators, the Federal Reserve, the US Treasury, and the US Congress."

Rob Lee

"Do not be deluded by Official or quasi-Official assurances that Taxpayer losses may be $200 billion at most. The fact is that the U.S. Government (i.e. U.S. Taxpayers) are on the hook to provide Fannie and Freddie with as much Equity Capital as needed to cover all future losses from mortgage defaults. In fact, those future losses are likely to be a minimum of ONE TRILLION Dollars."

Deepcaster quoting Patrick Heller

September 16, 2008

"Our government officials create too many laws and spend too much money. It’s all because they claim to have the best interests of the people at heart when in fact, knowingly or unknowingly, they do not."

Jack Crooks

"When the left tires of hurling whore insults, it turns conservative women in the public eye into nefarious creatures. Bill Maher called Laura Bush ‘Hitler’s dog.’ George Carlin attacked Barbara bush as ‘the silver douche bag.’ A Huffington Post website member wrote of Nancy Reagan: ‘Like her evil husband, she has lived far too long. Here’s hoping the hag suffers for several weeks, then croaks in the tub.’"

Michelle Malkin

"You don’t have to be rich to be skeptical when a candidate argues that the top 1 percent of taxpayers, who already pay 40 percent of federal income taxes, aren’t being taxes enough. Nor do you have to be an economist to wonder about the grasp of a nominee who tells 95 percent of the public that they can have something for nothing."

Jeff Jacoby

"Your kids either learn your philosophy or they learn someone else’s."

James Cook

September 15, 2008

"If the history of welfare teaches us anything, it teaches us that government money is as addictive as any narcotic."

Michael D. Tanner

"What both the left and the right overlook is our Founders’ wisdom about the limits and dangers of government."

Ed Crane

"The way to maximize production is to maximize the incentives to production. And the way to do that, as the modern world has discovered, is through the system known as capitalism – the system of private property, free markets, and free enterprise."

Henry Hazlitt

"It is impossible to maintain a free society when more and more people look to the state to provide what Americans used to provide for themselves."

Warren Pollock

September 12, 2008

"ACORN’s political arm endorsed Obama in February and has ramped up efforts to register voters across the country. In the meantime, completely ignored by the mainstream commentariat and clean-election crusaders, the Obama campaign admitted failing to report $800,000 in campaign payments to ACORN. They were disguised as payments to a front group called ‘Citizen Services, Inc.’ for ‘advance work.’"

Michelle Malkin

"If any behavior needs to be reined it, it should be the propensity of people to use the political system to take other people’s money."

Jeffrey A. Singer

"The private economy, not government, creates opportunity. Government should just deliver basic services well and then get out of the private sector’s way."

Steve Melanga

"Life is always directing us towards finding a simple faith."

James Cook

September 11, 2008

"The broad outlook remains the same: further intensification of the inflationary recession and a deepening systemic and banking solvency crisis."

John Williams

"Last month, a New Mexico TV station reported on the child rapists, drug offenders and forgery convicts on ACORN’s payroll. In July, Pennsylvania investigators asked the public for help in locating a fugitive named Luis R. Torres-Serrano, who is accused ‘of submitting more than 100 fraudulent voter registration forms he collected on behalf of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now to county election officials.’ Also in July, a massive, nearly $1 million embezzlement scheme by top ACORN officials was exposed."

Michelle Malkin

"His [Obama] dreamy certitude that ‘alternative’ fuels will quickly become real alternatives is an energy policy akin to an old vaudeville joke: ‘If we had some eggs, we could have ham and eggs, if we had some ham.’"

George Will

"The more self involved you are the more miserable you are."

James Cook

September 10, 2008

"Last week, Milwaukee’s top election official announced plans to seek criminal investigations of 37 ACRORN employees accused of offering gifts to sign up voters (including prepaid gas cards and restaurant cards) or falsifying driver’s license numbers, Social Security numbers or other information on voter registration cards."

Michelle Malkin

"According to a recent study by the Media Research Center, ‘NBC Nightly News’ has the most lopsided pro-Obama coverage among national TV news operations. The MRC found that pro-Obama reports outnumber anti-Obama reports by 10 to one on ‘NBC Nightly News’ – an amazing statistic. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how NBC News might look sometime soon. ‘Hi, I’m Brian Williams. Thank you for joining us tonight. Before we get to our lineup this evening, I should tell you that I am wearing the same kind of suit Sen. Obama had on yesterday, and I like it very much. The fabric is soft and has an air of authority. I want to thank the senator for his good taste."

Bill O’Reilly

"Over the longer term, U.S. equities, bonds and the greenback should suffer terribly, while gold and silver prices should boom."

John Williams

"In this year’s campaign, soggy with environmental messianism, deranged self-importance and delusional economics, the question is: Where is the derisive laughter?"

George Will

September 9, 2008

"When it comes to the liberals’ treatment of Sarah Palin, it’s business as usual – and then some. For the past three decades, these guardians of the sacred codes of political correctness have been lecturing us about the patronizing treatment of women, telling us that any whiff of disparaging or discriminatory innuendo is evidence of full-blown sexism and actionable in the court of public opinion. Yet when Sarah Palin comes along and injects her pretty conservative countenance into the public square, she and her family are immediately fair game for the liberal talking class… their mission is to destroy Sarah Palin, whom they recognize as a threat to their grandiose plans for the coming political order under Barack Obama."

David Limbaugh

"Obama’s community organizing days involved training grievance-mongers from the far-left ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). The ACORN mob is infamous for its bully tactics (which they dub ‘direct actions’); Obama supporters have recounted his role in organizing an ambush on a government planning meeting about a landfill project opposed by Chicago’s minority lobbies. With benefactors like Obama in office, ACORN has milked nearly four decades of government subsidies to prop up chapters that promote the welfare state and undermine the free market, as well as some that have been implicated in perpetuating illegal immigration and voter fraud. Since I last detailed ACORN’s illicit activities in this column in June (see "The ACORN Obama knows,’ June 19, 2008), the group continues to garner scrutiny from law enforcement."

Michelle Malkin

"Why is it reporters who were willing to pursue Bristol Palin, who isn’t on the ballot, somehow think it is unseemly to ask Sen. Obama tough questions about his drug use? Oh, that was a long time ago, they’ll argue. But a 1986 arrest for driving while impaired by Gov. Palin’s husband – not the candidate – is somehow worthy of extensive front-page coverage?"

Linda Chavez

"Cockroaches scatter when shocked by a flipped light switch. Grizzly bears attack when startled. And when caught napping by big news, the press corps floods the zone. Editors scream at underlings who missed the story. Networks fret they’ll be scooped. And all of a sudden, the norms and standards become a blur in the race to be first. In the case of Palin, the press vaulted over every principle and standard they’d established about what is and isn’t fair game, like O.J. Simpson leaping over luggage in the old Hertz commercials. It required the Jaws of Life to pry news of John Edwards’ affair out of the mainstream press. But when it came to the personal drama of Palin’s 17-year old daughter, the press clawed for morsels like they were golden tickets from Wonka Bars."

Jonah Goldberg

September 8, 2008

"The biggest story to emerge from the Republican National Convention was the media’s effort to destroy Gov. Sarah Palin. Members of the Fourth Estate behaved more like a Democratic fifth column this week than they did like honest reporters. Palin’s stunningly effective speech Wednesday night showed they will not easily take her down – but their malicious attacks on Gov. Palin’s family prove that they will stop at nothing to achieve their aim."

Linda Chavez

"Nobody is mocking community organizers in church basements and community centers across the country working to improve their neighbors’ lives. What deserves ridicule is the notion that Obama’s brief stint as a South Side rabble-rouser for tax-subsidized, partisan nonprofits qualifies as executive experience you can believe in. What deserves derision is ‘community organizing’ that relies on a community of homeless people and ex-cons to organize for the purpose of registering dead people to vote, shaking down corporations and using the race card as a bludgeon."

Michelle Malkin

"If you are a liberal darling, like Bill Clinton was for a decade and a half, you can exploit, abuse and sexually harass women and still be considered a champion of women’s rights."

David Limbaugh

"The Democratic nominee, who has been in steady retreat from his crowd-pleasing vows never to abandon conviction and principle, Thursday said nice and even grateful things about the war in Iraq. He conceded that John McCain’s advocacy of the surge was right and his own skepticism was wrong. ‘I think the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated,’ he told interviewer Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. ‘I’ve already conceded that it’s succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.’"

Wesley Pruden

September 5, 2008

"The Fed and the Administration will do whatever has to be done, create whatever money has to be created, in order to prevent a systemic collapse."

John Williams

"There never is a shortage of nonsensical political rhetoric, but really: Has there ever been solemn silliness comparable to today’s politicians tarting up their agendas as things designed for, and necessary to, ‘saving the planet,’ and promising edicts to ‘require’ entire industries to reorder themselves?"

George Will

"If you think the thing through, precedent to the global monetary crisis, the euro first had to stumble. Well, it now has. The next stage – and given the volatility of the situation, I don’t think we’ll have to wait long for it – will be the realization that there is no safe fiat currency. It is at that point that the massive hurricane, a crisis of confidence in the entire fiat system, will begin ravaging the global economy in earnest."

David Galland

"Without doubt there is no certainty."

James Cook

September 4, 2008

"Exxon Mobil does make $1,400 a second in profits – hear the sharp intakes of breath from liberals with pursed lips – but pays $4,000 a second in taxes and $15,000 a second in operating costs."

George Will

"When the trading herd wakes up to the fact that neither the U.S. dollar nor the euro, nor any other fiat currency, will protect them against the monetary storm that will soon begin tearing the roofs off their cozy offices, they’ll fall all over themselves in the rush for something that will: gold and other tangibles."

David Galland

"In the distance, I see a frightful storm brewing in the form of untethered government debt. I choose the words – ‘frightful storm’ – deliberately to avoid hyperbole. Unless we take steps to deal with it, the long-term fiscal situation of the federal government will be unimaginably more devastating to our economic prosperity than the subprime debacle and the record debauching of credit markets that we are now working so hard to correct."

Richard Fisher, CEO Dallas Fed.

"The United States..appears to be running the same type of fiscal policies that engendered hyperinflations in 20 countries over the past century."

Professor Kostlikoff

September 3, 2008

"Central energy planning and government-funded prizes are economic idiocy."

John Stossel

"There has been and will be resistance to the inevitable deep recession that is coming. The American consumer is not cutting back willingly. They are being dragged kicking and screaming towards the joys of frugality. The ‘material generation’ needs to dematerialize. My biggest concern is that our politician leaders and their cronies running our government will continue to try and reverse the normal capitalistic course of recession and expansion. Companies need to fail, housing needs to find its bottom based on supply, demand and price. Those who gambled must be allowed to lose and suffer the consequences. If the government attempts to shift the losses to those who lived lifestyles of thrift, an angry uprising will ensue. Government intervention in this natural process could lead to a decade long depression. Let’s hope that reasonable heads prevail."

James Quinn

"When we hear about rent control or gun control, we may think about rent or guns but the word that really matters is ‘control.’ That is what the political left is all about, as you can see by the incessant creation of new restrictions in places where they are strongly entrenched in power, such as San Francisco or New York."

Thomas Sowell

"The broad outlook remains the same: further intensification of the inflationary recession and a deepening systemic and banking solvency crisis. Near-term market recognition of these issues and growing global political tensions intensify the risks for unstable market conditions."

John Williams

September 2, 2008

"American presidents, through several administrations, have been publicly commenting moralistically on the internal affairs of other countries around the world. We have been criticizing friend and foe alike. Sometimes we have sounded like the world’s nanny. This has been more than a bad habit. Our nagging our friends and irritating our enemies has produced remarkably few benefits to anyone and much ill-will among countries whose cooperation we either have needed or will need."

Thomas Sowell

"McCain promises a $300-million prize to whoever develops a battery for an electric car. But the free market already provides plenty of incentive to invent a better battery. As George Mason University economist Donald Boudreaux writes, ‘Anyone who develops such a device will earn profits dwarfing $300 million simply by selling it on the market. There’s absolutely no need for any such taxpayer-funded prize.’"

John Stossel

"The leftist takeover of the liberal arts departments in nearly every American university has been an intellectual and moral calamity."

Dennis Prager

"Dominance and domineering are not the same. True dominance goes unnoticed."

James Cook

August 29, 2008

"Gold’s monetary value is not limited to protecting only against a failure in the U.S. dollar, but against any faltering fiat currency… a moniker that the euro deserves in spades. Not only is it backed by nothing, but it is also backed by no one."

David Galland

"Nothing is easier than for experts with that small band of knowledge to imagine that they are so much wiser than others. Central planning is only the most demonstrable failure of such thinking. The disasters from other kinds of social engineering involve much the same problem."

Thomas Sowell

"A far-left commentator working for NBC News put forth that Putin is not the villain in the Georgia action; America is because it encouraged Georgia to join NATO thereby annoying Russia. Once again, it was the United States that caused the violent confrontation. NATO was set up to protect democratic countries like, well, Georgia. But in the creepy world the far left inhabits, whatever happens is inevitably America’s fault."

Bill O’Reilly

"We look at religious zealots with disdain, but they are making mistakes in the name of God while the rest of us are just making mistakes."

James Cook

August 28, 2008

"Great things were expected from centrally planned economies. Their early failings were brushed aside as ‘the growing pains’ of ‘a new society.’ But, when centrally planned economies lagged behind free market economies for decade after decade, eventually even socialist and communist governments began to free their economies from many, if not most, of the government controls under central planning."

Thomas Sowell

"In a social democracy with a fiat currency, all roads ultimately lead to inflation."

Bill Fleckenstein

"The gathering storm has arrived. It will be long, painful and destructive. Those who prepared for the storm by not taking on excessive debt and living above their means, will ride it out unscathed. Those who built their house on sand by leveraging up and living the ‘good’ life, will see their house swept out to sea. The storm will pass and we will rebuild. Our country is resilient. The purging of this massive debt will result in the creative destruction that is the hallmark of American capitalism. New opportunities, new technologies and a new attitude will put us back on course."

James Quinn

"Jimmy Carter, saying that achieving energy independence was the ‘moral equivalent of war,’ called for ‘the most massive peacetime commitment of funds… to develop America’s own alternative.’ Then he wasted billions of our tax dollars on the utterly failed ‘synfuel’ program."

John Stossel

August 27, 2008

"In addition to the straight-up consequences of the government monetary prolificacy and businesses raising prices to try and stay afloat, there is something else feeding power to the storm… that the global fiat currency system will fail."

David Galland

"… we are in an economic environment where we have more to fear than fear itself…"

Lawrence Summers

"People suspect that the gold standard would disempower the nation-state as we know it, including its ability to wage endless wars. To me, this is the strongest case for reform. If we want freedom and peace, the gold standard is the topic that cannot and will not die."

Llewellyn Rockwell

"McCain and Obama talk constantly about how much they will ‘invest’ – with money taken from the taxpayers, of course – to achieve energy independence. ‘[W]e can provide loan guarantees and venture capital to those with the best plans to develop and sell biofuels on a commercial market,’ Obama said. What makes Obama think he’s qualified to pick the ‘best plans’? It’s the robust competition of the free market that reveals what’s best. Obama’s program would preempt the only good method we have for learning which form of energy is best."

John Stossel

August 26, 2008

"Obama has promised that ‘we will get 1 million 150-mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on our roads within six years.’ What a tranquilizing verb ‘get’ is. This senator, who has never run so much as a Dairy Queen, is going to get a huge, complex industry to produce, and is going to get a million consumers to buy, these cars. How? Almost certainly by federal financial incentives for both – billions of dollars of tax subsidies for automakers and billions more to bribe customers to buy cars they otherwise would spurn."

George Will

"It is common for ordinary parents, with no training in education, to homeschool their children and consistently produce better academic results than those of children educated by teachers with Master’s degrees and in schools spending upwards of $10,000 a year per student – which is to say, more than a million dollars to educate ten kids from K through 12. Nevertheless, we continue to take seriously the pretensions of educators who fail to educate, but who put on airs of having ‘professional’ expertise beyond the understanding of mere parents."

Thomas Sowell

"It is utterly shameful that Democratic House leaders have refused to schedule a vote on the U.S. – Colombia free trade deal. How can we treat Colombia so poorly and expect other countries to view us as a credible partner? If U.S. lawmakers understood how their rebuke of Colombia was hurting America’s image in the region, one hopes they would reconsider and approve the trade pact immediately."

Jaime Daremblum

"Too much money makes people stupid."

James Cook

August 25, 2008

"While McCain has complained about media favoritism toward Obama, most recently about NBC News’ tilted coverage, maybe he ought to encourage it. Resentment over the media love affair with Obama might be McCain’s most powerful weapon. The fawning coverage exaggerates even routine Obama events, and when he fails to meet giddy expectations, the excuse machine warps into overtime. That, in turn, creates another unappealing layer of media-imposed conventional wisdom."

Michael Goodwin

"Throughout his career, Obama has worked closely with a network of stone-cold socialists and full-blown communists striving for ‘economic justice.’"

Investors Business Daily

"No one is in a position to restrain the president, the congress, or the courts so long as the dollar is as printable as paper. Matters of fiscal policy become purely illusory. This is the most dishonest form of finance there is. It makes a mockery of elections, debates, budgets, and just about every other aspect of government."

Llewellyn Rockwell

"It must be understood that ending programs for the poor (via phase-out) is logically the last step in the process of desocialization, and there is a hideous glut of statism before we ever reach that point."

Barry Loberfield

August 21, 2008

"Medicaid was supposed to help the poor, but one of its most expensive roles is to serve as ‘inheritance insurance’ for the wealthy. One of the fastest-growing areas of legal practice involves helping the affluent qualify for Medicaid long-term care."

Dr. Jane M. Orient

"When John McCain looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes, he saw ‘a K, a G, and a B.’ He is our Winston Churchill. We will need him soon."

Jack Kelly

"A rough measure of broad money in the world’s 20 largest economies is growing at near 20%, year-over-year, in dollar terms."

Grant’s Interest Rate Observer

"For hundreds of years, lawyers have been taught the sanctity and importance of the attorney-client privilege and the attorney work product protection as central to our adversary system of justice. Indeed the existence of that privilege and that protection helps to define the role of lawyers in society and the public’s perception of the fairness with which the legal system operates. At least in the context of investigations of organizations and their employees, all this is being irreparably destroyed by the government’s successful assault on centuries of tradition."

N. Richard Janis

August 20, 2008

"In Kenya’s recent civil unrest, Obama privately phoned the leader of the opposition Luo tribe, Raila Odinga, to voice his support. Odinga is so committed to communism he named his oldest son after Fidel Castro."

Investors Business Daily

"Statism is the disease that prescribes itself as the cure."

Barry Loberfield

"The wind venture, as Pickens himself acknowledges, depends on permanent federal subsidies."

Michelle Malkin

"A derivatives-related disaster whose full cost is not yet apparent is the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Again, those institutions were based on a lie, that they were really private sector companies that could be relied upon to pursue profit in a rational fashion, without endangering the national solvency by their default. In practice, they leveraged more than would have been possible without the government’s quasi-guarantee, lobbied like crazy to ensure they were not properly regulated and collapsed thankfully into the arms of the taxpayer as soon as ill winds began to blow."

Martin Hutchinson

August 19, 2008

"A careful reading of Obama’s first memoir, ‘Dreams From My Father,’ reveals that his childhood mentor up to age 18 was a man he cryptically refers to as ‘Frank’ was none other than the late communist Frank Marshall Davis, who fled Chicago after the FBI and Congress opened investigations into his ‘subversive,’ ‘un-American activities.’ As Obama was preparing to head off to college, he sat at Davis’ feet in his Waikiki bungalow for nightly bull sessions. Davis plied his impressionable guest with liberal doses of whiskey and advice, including: Never trust the white establishment. ‘They’ll train you so good,’ he said, ‘you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that sh**.’ After college, where he palled around with Marxist professors and took in socialist conferences ‘for inspiration,’ Obama followed in Davis’ footsteps, becoming a ‘community organizer’ in Chicago. His boss there was Gerald Kellman, whose identity Obama also tries to hide in his book. Turns out Kellman’s a disciple of the late Saul ‘The Red’ Alinsky, a hard-boiled Chicago socialist who wrote the ‘Rules for Radicals’ and agitated for social revolution in America. The Chicago-based Woods Fund provided Kellman with his original $25,000 to hire Obama. In turn, Obama would later serve on the Woods board with terrorist Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground. Ayers was one of Obama’s early political supporters. After three years agitating with marginal success for more welfare programs in South Side Chicago, Obama decided he would need to study law to ‘bring about real change’ on a large scale."

Investors Business Daily

"Even the mainstream press is shocked at the machinations of Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve, as it resorts to every means not only to print new money, but to force it into the banking system through bribes and trickery."

Llewellyn Rockwell

"Sophocles wrote, ‘There is a point beyond which even justice becomes unjust.’ Our current system of justice, at least insofar as it applies to investigations of corporations, other organizations, and their employees has already reached such a point."

N. Richard Janis

"Do not enumerate your fears every night, but fight them off with faith."

James Cook

August 18, 2008

"If you really want to help the poor, help the rich. They’re the ones who will invest, build more factories, create more jobs."

William E. Simon

"Foreign aid: the ‘transferring [of] money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries."

Lord Bauer

"Anyone who is serious about people being free to express themselves with their votes wants a secret ballot. The problem for labor unions is that workers in the private sector increasingly vote against being represented by unions. The proportion of workers in the private sector who are represented by unions has fallen below 10 percent. Since unions are losing the game under the current rules, their obvious answer is to change the rules."

Thomas Sowell

"We are completely dependent on the commercial banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the banks create ample synthetic money, we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system."

Robert H. Hemphill, Credit Manager Atlanta FED

August 15, 2008

"Politically, what matters to the left-wing base that Obama has been playing to for decades is sticking it to ‘the rich.’ What effect that has on the tax revenues received by the government is secondary, at best."

Thomas Sowell

"The levels of taxation advocated by liberals render those taxes a veiled form of theft. ‘Give me more than half of your honestly earned money or you will be arrested’ is legalized thievery."

Dennis Prager

"A committee led by Gerald Corrigan, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, produced a report this week that promises to revolutionize finance. It proposes to place severe limits on derivatives, bringing them under the ambit of regulators and protecting retail investors from their more egregious products."

Martin Hutchinson

"Humiliation brings humility."

James Cook

August 14, 2008

"Today, 70 cents of every [welfare] dollar goes, not to poor people, but to government bureaucrats and others who serve the poor."

Michael Tanner

"What’s most cruel about government intervention in the economy is not how it stops us from helping the poor, but how it stops the poor from helping themselves."

Barry Loberfeld

"Past and ongoing experience demonstrates the unreliability of wind and the miserably low operating capacity of wind power facilities here and around the world."

Michelle Malkin

"Surprisingly, The Washington Post’s editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, put his finger precisely on the liberal mindset concerning Republican challenges to their Democratic rivals and their policies. Hiatt says it is ‘an article of faith among many Democratic believers … that Democratic policies are so obviously superior, and so much more in the interest of a majority of voters, that only some form of chicanery can explain Republican election victories. In this view of the world, Republican operatives … manipulate … issues … to deceive people to vote against their economic self-interest. Or they inflate security threats to frighten them into voting against their self-interest.’ Bingo and kudos."

David Limbaugh

August 13, 2008

"Obama doesn’t stop with socialized health care. He wants to socialize your entire human resources department from payrolls to pensions. His social-microengineering even extends to mandating all employers provide seven paid sick days per year to salary and hourly workers alike. You can see why Obama was ranked, hands-down, the most liberal member of the Senate by the National Journal."

Investors Business Daily

"When the government is the counterfeiter, the counterfeiting process not only can be ‘detected’, it proclaims itself openly as monetary statesmanship for the public weal. Monetary expansion then becomes a giant scheme of hidden taxation, the tax falling on fixed income groups, on those groups remote from government spending and subsidy, and on thrifty savers who are naïve enough and trusting enough to hold on to their money, to have faith in the value of the currency."

Murray N. Rothbard

"The tipping point has been reached. The biggest consumption party in the history of the world is now over and the hangover will be felt for years to come."

Kurt Kasum

"The bigger government gets and the more powerful the state becomes, the greater the threat to individual liberty and the greater the likelihood that evil will ensue. In the 20^th century, the powerful state, not religion, was the greatest purveyor of evil in the world."

Dennis Prager

August 12, 2008

"It is no overstatement to say that the enforcement of the criminal law, at least insofar as it applies to investigations of organizations, amounts to a state-sponsored shakedown scheme in which business firms are extorted to pay penalties that are grossly out of proportion to any actual misconduct."

N. Richard Janis

"While the media are stunned that Obama is not resonating in line with their expectations, others wonder how he can resonate at all, given his McGovernesque, leftist agenda and his damning associations with America-hating preachers (Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger), terrorists and radicals (William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn) and a mentor (Frank Davis) who was a member of the Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA and who, according to Investor’s Business Daily, ‘fled Chicago after the FBI and Congress opened investigations into his ‘subversive,’ ‘un-American activities.’"

David Limbaugh

"The body likes habits."

James Cook

August 11, 2008

"The consumption binge is over. The great unwind of debt and leverage for most has started."

Kurt Kasun

"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."

James Madison

"It’s clear from a close reading of his [Obama] two books that he’s a firm believer in class envy. He assumes the economy is a fixed pie, whereby the successful only get rich at the expense of the poor. Following this discredited Marxist model, he believes government must step in and redistribute pieces of the pie. That requires massive transfers of wealth through government taxing and spending, a return to the entitlement days of old."

Investors Business Daily

August 8, 2008

"Government income redistribution programs produce the same result as theft. In fact, that’s what a thief does; he redistributes income. The difference between government and thievery is mostly a matter of legality."

Walter Williams

"Monetary expansion is a massive scheme of hidden redistribution."

Murray N. Rothbard

"If there is no dominance there will be no order."

James Cook

August 7, 2008

"Monetary inflation not only raises prices and destroys the value of the currency unit; it also acts as a giant system of expropriation."

Murray N. Rothbard

"Whether we want to own up to it or not, the welfare state has done what Jim Crow, gross discrimination and poverty could not have done. It has contributed to the breakdown of the black family structure and has helped establish a set of values alien to traditional values of high moral standards, hard work and achievement."

Walter Williams

"What happens when about half the nation becomes repulsed by Obama’s efforts to socialize medicine, use the tax code to redistribute wealth even more radically, retreat and surrender in Iraq despite the turning of the tide in that war and the consequences that would flow, negotiate with terrorists, and inject even more life into social liberalism?"

David Limbaugh

August 6, 2008

"In our self-obsessed, entitlement age, politicians send the message that if you’re breathing you should expect a government check. Few want to hear a message about personal responsibility and accountability. The Obama disciples want to hear more about what government will do for them, not what they can do for themselves in a free country that offers opportunity to those who will seize it. They want to punish ‘the rich,’ who they used to want to emulate, but now just envy. And so those few who are already paying more than half the taxes are told they aren’t paying enough."

Cal Thomas

"Politics is largely the process of taking credit and putting the blame on others – regardless of what the facts may be."

Thomas Sowell

"Before friendly audiences, Barack Obama speaks passionately about something called ‘economic justice’…. ‘Economic justice’ simply means punishing the successful and redistributing their wealth by government fiat. It’s a euphemism for socialism."

Investors Business Daily (IBD)

"Doubling the tax in invested capital and ratcheting up the top tax bracket to an effective 60%, will plunge the nation into a real depression. Not a recession or a downturn or a correction or a slowdown."

Dick Morris

August 5, 2008

"Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude."

Jonah Goldberg

"Unlike every other person and institution in society, government obtains its revenue from coercion, from taxation."

Murray N. Rothbard

"The dollar, seen as a store of value, has never been more suspect. One of the most grievous mistakes in US history was made when Congress in 1913 turned over our money to the discipline of men (the Federal Reserve) rather than to the discipline of gold. The transfer was unconstitutional (in fact, the Constitution warns against fiat money). We will pay dearly for this circumvention of the Constitution. In fact, we are paying for it now via taxes and inflation."

Richard Russell

"Socialism is the triumph of people’s prejudices over their reason."

James Cook

August 4, 2008

"If you ever hear a government official come out and say that an institution is fine, you know it’s time to get your money out because history shows they’re likely lying. Look what happened with Fannie and Freddie. The government said everything was fine right up to the day the US Treasury dropped the biggest government bailout of all time on the American taxpayer. The bill for Fannie, Freddie and the bank failures could cost the taxpayer over $400 billion. (That’s your money, of course.)"

Richard Benson

"Government bailouts are like potato chips: You can’t stop with just one."

Thomas Sowell

"There is in government a living impulse to extend itself indefinitely; and there is in freedom a necessity to resist that impulse."

Garet Garrett

"Freddie and Fannie are hopelessly bust. They have $5 trillion in obligations and $80 billion in capital. To be sure, on an accounting basis they are probably not bust yet. That is because defaults and foreclosures are very lagged in this cycle relative to nonpayment."

Frank Veneroso

August 1, 2008

"I’m convinced that time is now upon that some Big Events are about to occur. These fast approaching events will not go unnoticed. They will affect all of us. They will not be limited to just some areas of our country. The world economy and political system will share in the chaos about to be unleashed."

Karl Kasun

"It was established pretty convincingly by Milton Friedman, and proved beyond all doubt in the inflationary episodes of the 1970s and 1980s that if you want to bring inflation under control, you must set interest rates at a margin above the current inflation level."

Martin Hutchinson

"Throughout history governments have been chronically short of revenue. The reason should be clear: unlike you and me, governments do not produce useful goods and services that they can sell on the market; governments, rather than producing and selling services, live parasitically off the market and off society."

Murray N. Rothbard

"Liberals have one solution for every economic issue; eat the seed corn."

James Cook

July 30, 2008

"Last week Richard Fisher, head of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, ‘speaking solely in [his] own capacity,’ alerts us that ‘the unfunded liabilities from Medicare and Social Security…comes to $99.2 trillion over the infinite horizon.’"

Kurt Kasun

"The GSEs are now trapped in a precarious riptide where they must swim incredibly hard to barely tread water. This is an extremely tenuous position for the conventional mortgage marketplace, not to mention the increasingly credit-starved U.S. Bubble economy."

Doug Noland

"The natural tendency of government, once in charge of money, is to inflate and to destroy the value of the currency."

Murray N. Rothbard

"In the market economy the worker sells his services as other people sell their commodities. The employer is not the employee’s lord. He is simply the buyer of services which he must purchase at their market price."

Ludwig von Mises

July 29, 2008

"The Producer and Consumer Price Indexes announced last week were significant in that they sounded the death-knell of Bernankeism. No longer will it be possible to inflate the money supply by pretending that inflation in the real economy is not a problem; other means will have to be found to perpetuate the shell-game."

Martin Hutchinson

"The United States financial system is as fragile as can be. You can almost smell it in the air … another financial shoe is likely to drop soon. The mess is going to lead to a great deal of commotion and send gold and silver to new highs … and well beyond."

Midas

"The distinctive principle of Western social philosophy is individualism."

Ludwig von Mises

"Most people won’t be loyal unless there is something in it for them."

James Cook

July 28, 2008

"If government manages to establish paper tickets or bank credit as money, as equivalent to gold grams or ounces, then the government, as dominant money-supplier, becomes free to create money costlessly and at will. As a result, this ‘inflation’ of the money supply destroys the value of the dollar or pound, drives up prices, cripples economic calculation, and hobbles and seriously damages the workings of the market economy."

Murray N. Rothbard

"Chinese exports to the oil-exporting nations grew by 45% last year, and exports to the other BRIC nations – Brazil, Russia and India – grew by 60% last year over the year before, and in fact are still growing at that pace. So the developing world has taken on a life of its own, independent of what is happening to the U.S. economy."

Lawrence Roulston

"If people cannot limit government they will not for long be free."

Garet Garrett

"Western civilization is based upon the libertarian principle and all its achievements are the result of the actions of free men."

Ludwig von Mises

July 25, 2008

"Government is the natural enemy of freedom."

Garet Garrett

"Commenting of the Jackson flap at the execrable Huffington Post, Dan Sweeney fondly reminisced: A couple months ago I wrote a blog entry here at HuffPo that ended by calling for the public castration of Grover Norquist. The comments that the good readers of the Huffington Post left at that blog entry were strongly approving, especially of the final line."

Ben Johnson

"All government operation is wasteful, inefficient, and serves the bureaucrat rather than the consumer."

Murray N. Rothbard

"All almsgiving inevitably tends to pauperize the recipient."

Ludwig von Mises

"It would be remarkable if what we believe about the afterlife turned out to be true."

James Cook

July 24, 2008

"The one thing Sen. Obama remains consistent on is that he’s the candidate of change. Now we know that this means he intends to change his positions as often as he feels necessary to win more votes."

Linda Chavez

"Gold is market money, a commodity which must be supplied by being dug out of the ground and then processed; but government, on the contrary, supplies virtually costless paper money or bank checks out of thin air."

Murray N. Rothbard

"China is by far the largest consumer of every metal. There’s still a perception that the Chinese economy is dependent on exports to the United States, but the reality is that exports to the U.S. represented only 2.1% of the Chinese economy last year. So if the U.S. economy slows by a couple of percentage points from where it was last year, it will have no noticeable impact on the Chinese economy or on other parts of the world."

Lawrence Roulston

"An essential point in the social philosophy of interventionism is the existence of an inexhaustible fund which can be squeezed forever. The whole system of interventionism collapses when this fountain is drained off: The Santa Claus principle liquidates itself."

Ludwig von Mises

July 23, 2008

"Gold gives three signals: inverse performance to the dollar, an inflation call, and a warning if a financial crisis impends…It is once again signaling that there is stormy weather ahead on Wall Street, just as there is stormy weather on the plains."

Don Coxe

"Never was it [Capitalism] imposed on life as a system, or at all. It grew out of life, not all at once but gradually, and is therefore one of the great natural designs. When it was found and identified by such men as Adam Smith, who wrote its bible, and Karl Marx, who wrote its obituary too soon, it was already working."

Garet Garrett

"The US is the only nation in the world that can print the currency that its own debt is denominated in. That’s an unbelievable ‘gift.’ But the US has been doing too damn much printing and too much debt creating. The world recognizes this, and it’s systematically moving away from dollars."

Richard Russell

"The policies advocated by the welfare school remove the incentive to saving on the part of private citizens."

Ludwig von Mises

July 22, 2008

"We have borrowed so much money from abroad. Our trade deficits are now very big, and our industrial base and our infrastructure has been allowed to decay for so long, that we are now at a point that we can only survive as an economy thanks to the charity of the rest of the world. They have provided us with all the goods that we can no longer produce because we lack the industrial capacity. And they have to lend us the money because we don’t have savings anymore."

Peter Schiff

"In October 2004, UK Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker asked, ‘John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. – where are you now that we need you?’ While protesting the War on Terror, some leftists carried signs proclaiming, ‘Bush is the disease. Death is the cure.’ Indeed, an entire film has been made – and favorably reviewed – imagining the assassination of President George W. Bush."

Ben Johnson

"To concede that there are social problems that cannot be corrected without the state is to give up the entire argument over the future of liberty itself."

Llewellyn Rockwell

"The Welfare State is merely a method for transforming the market economy step by step into socialism."

Ludwig von Mises

"All organizations tend to become incompetent."

James Cook

July 21, 2008

"The Left controls higher education more completely than any other aspect of American life. Not only is anti-Americanism rampant on the college campus, so too is a uniformity of opinion enforced with an iron hand."

Don Feder

"In the course of the twentieth century, supposedly sophisticated Europeans managed to create some of the most monstrous forms of government on earth – Communism, Fascism, Nazism – in peacetime, and to start the two World Wars, the bloodiest in all human history. In each of these wars, both the winners and the losers ended up far worse off than they were before these wars were started."

Thomas Sowell

"A group of Americans, retired teachers, recently went to France on a tour. Robert Whiting, an elderly gentleman of 83, arrived in Paris by plane. At French Customs, he took a few minutes to locate his passport in his carry on. ‘You have been to France before, monsieur?’ the customs officer asked sarcastically. Mr. Whiting admitted that he had been to France previously. ‘Then you should know enough to have your passport ready.’ The American said, ‘The last time I was here, I didn’t have to show it.’ ‘Impossible. Americans always have to show your passports on arrival in France!’ The American senior gave the Frenchman a long hard look. Then he quietly. Explained. ‘Well, when I came ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day in ’44 to help liberate this country, I couldn’t find any Frenchmen to show it to.’ You could have heard a pin drop."

"Even if Obama means what he is saying as he moves to the center trying to win the general election, the fact is that he will be forced to move very far to the left should he become president, forced by the liberals in his own party."

Dick Morris & Eileen McGann

"The masses, in their capacity as consumers, ultimately determine everybody’s revenues and wealth."

Ludwig von Mises

July 18, 2008

"Those Americans who are pushing us toward the kinds of policies that Europeans impose on pharmaceutical companies show not the slightest interest in what the consequences of such laws have been. One consequence is that even European pharmaceutical companies do much of their research and development of new medications in the United States, in order to take advantage of American patent protections and freedom from price controls. There are the very policies that the European imitators want us to change. It is not a coincidence that such a high proportion of the major pharmaceutical drugs are developed in the United States. If we kill the goose that lays the golden egg, as the Europeans have done, both we and the Europeans – as well as the rest of the world – will be worse off, because there are few other places for such medications to be developed."

Thomas Sowell

"The earthquake [in China] brought into question the wisdom of constructing huge dams to provide electricity and water for rapid industrialization in a country where such powerful earthquakes are common. Building impressive dams, regardless of consequences, is a characteristic of Communist societies. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, the outside world became aware of how ecologically destructive and economically inefficient the Soviets’ Big Dam policy in central Asia was. China seems determined to make similar mistakes."

Paul Johnson

"The great thing about gold is that it, and only it, is money supplied by the free market, by the people at work."

Murray N. Rothbard

"The wealth of the well-to-do of an industrial society is both the cause and effect of the masses’ well-being."

Ludwig von Mises

"Procrastinators are ideally suited to be government employees."

James Cook

July 17, 2008

"Increasing numbers of economists and historians have concluded that New Deal policies are what prolonged the Great Depression."

Thomas Sowell

"If significant down payments come to be required for GSE-related mortgages the effects will be felt immediately in neighborhoods all across the country – not to mention the acutely vulnerable consumption-based U.S. Bubble economy."

Doug Noland

"In 1970, one out of every 70 children born had a Mexican immigrant mother; today it’s one out of 10. No single foreign country has ever accounted for such a large share of births. Astonishingly, more than half of these mothers have not graduated high school."

Rich Lowry

"Fannie’s credit default swaps, a measure of credit worthiness on senior debt, have doubled since last month. You may recall that our legislators were recently considering Fannie and Freddie as the rescue vehicles for the housing foreclosure problem. Now it looks increasingly as if you and I will be the rescue vehicle for Fannie and Freddie."

Michael Berry

"There can be no economic justification for the government guaranteeing the great majority of the nation’s home mortgages, and the spurious ‘government sponsored enterprise’ structure of Fannie and Freddie merely hid the likely consequences of their default. Their senior employees have been paid like Wall Street for performing a function that was economically entirely unnecessary, and they have survived for more than 50 years simply through their ability to offer lucrative consulting contracts to ex-Congressmen and other politically well-connected people."

Martin Hutchinson

"If, as is generally the case, the heirs are not equal to the demands which life makes on an entrepreneur, the inherited wealth rapidly vanishes."

Ludwig von Mises

July 16, 2008

"In the course of human events it is necessary, now and again, to dissolve our political bands with the ninnies who keep abandoning our founding principles. It used to be self-evident that our government’s role was primarily to protect certain unalienable rights, such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It used to be that our government did the bidding of the people – that any power it derived was solely through the consent of the governed. It used to be our country believed in limited government – that government at its best was a necessary evil and should be aggressively restrained."

Tom Purcell

"Liberals complain that – as B. Hussein Obama put it – there’s ‘no way that allowing offshore drilling would lower gas prices right now. At best you are looking at five years or more down the road.’ This is as opposed to airplanes that run on woodchips, which should be up and running any moment now. Moreover, what was going on five years ago? Why didn’t anyone propose drilling back then?

Ann Coulter

"The state always poses a greater threat to society than whatever problem it purports to solve."

Llewellyn Rockwell

"Men are raised on high in order that they may fall more heavily."

Claudian

"Fortunes cannot grow; someone has to increase them."

Ludwig von Mises

July 15, 2008

"Jesse Jackson made himself a comfortable living in the racial-grievance industry. But this mindset of victimology has been enormously damaging and demoralizing to young black people who are led to think that no matter how hard they work, the deck is stacked against them. Jackson and his media enablers have spent two generations popularizing the warped idea that institutional racism is responsible for every major societal woe."

Laura Ingraham

"Now we find ourselves in the midst of another leg down with regard to the credibility of U.S. (and, increasingly, British) financial assets and economic structures overall. And while recent market tumult has not had the intensity of March’s acute de-leveraging, the ramifications of recent developments are more problematic. For one, the markets are now coming to grips with the reality that much of the massive apparatus of various types of Credit insurance is insolvent and has little chance of recovery. While the nature of these companies’ obligations may not require bankruptcy filings in the near-term, the market nonetheless recognizes that much of the future protection guaranteed by these companies/financial players has become worthless."

Doug Noland

"If the supply of goods were increasing, as it has been and if at the same time the quantity of money remained stable, prices would necessarily fall."

Kel Kelly

"Sell Everything…Nothing is Working."

Jim Cramer

"In capitalist enterprise there is no secure income and no security of wealth."

Ludwig von Mises

"A dogma will spread if it makes the believer feel superior to others."

James Cook

July 14, 2008

"Suddenly it is impossible that farmers should be trusted to conduct agriculture. As free and unrestrained individuals they ruin it and ruin themselves collectively. Where formerly there were six million farmers lying awake at night, each with his own problems, now for each kind of farmer… there is a bureau to stay awake for him, to do his thinking, to make his decisions…"

Garet Garrett 1934

"Liberals assure us that Reagan won landslide elections because Americans were mesmerized by his sunny disposition and corny jokes. If that’s true, why isn’t Al Roker president?"

Ann Coulter

"The cost of energy has become, almost overnight, the sole issue for everyone (and I mean everyone)."

Michael Berry

"Over the past 20 years, the US has transferred its wealth to foreign nations. In return, we received cheap goods, cheap oil, and a higher standard of living. Now, foreign nations are beginning to use the transferred wealth to improve their standards of living. They are competing with the US for basic commodities we assumed would always be available."

Richard Russell

"A wealthy man can preserve his wealth only by continuing to serve the consumers in the most efficient way."

Ludwig von Mises

July 11, 2008

"Record High Oil prices we are experiencing NOW will surely cause a hyperinflationary ripple effect for many months downstream, even if they begin to decline soon. Real U.S. Consumer Price Inflation is still nearly 12%, Real U.S. Unemployment nearly 14%, and Real Money Supply Inflation (M3) is still around 16% annualized according to the quite credible calculations of shadowstats.com."

Deepcaster

"Since the 1960s, a major goal of the left has been to weaken American national identity and replace it with other cultural, national, racial and ethnic identities (in effect, changing the motto of the United States from ‘From Many, One’ to ‘From One, Many’). It has pursued this goal through bilingual education, election ballots in multiple languages, numerical guidelines in American history textbooks concerning the percentage of space allotted to given minorities, opposition to declaring English America’s national language, and rendering the term ‘flag waving’ a pejorative that implies quasi-fascist sentiments."

Dennis Prager

"Treason permeates the Left. Its bastions – Hollywood, academia, the establishment media and the mainline churches – are nests of treason."

Don Feder

"The riches of successful entrepreneurs is not the cause of anybody’s poverty; it is the consequence of the fact that the consumers are better supplied than they would have been in the absence of the entrepreneur’s effort."

Ludwig von Mises

"The government should practice social Darwinism; everyone else should practice charity."

James Cook

July 10, 2008

"In effect, he [Obama] would legislate a 60 percent tax bracket for upper-income Americans, killing all initiative and innovation. He’d raise the top bracket to 40 percent. He’d apply FICA taxes to all income, not just that under $100,000 as at present. So add 40 percent plus FICA’s 12.5 percent plus Medicare’s 2 percent plus state and local taxes averaging, after deduction, at 5-6 percent, and you have a 6o percent bracket."

Dick Morris

"We are calibrating our investments toward a serious economic slowdown, but with high inflation…. Businesses and personal net worth will be devastated at the same time that costs run out of control."

David Galland

"Any report that details variations in wealth is greeted with the call for redistribution, an equalization of money and things – value –regardless of the cost. The line of thought runs in this direction: The United States is blessed by resources that are to be used for the benefit of all. Whenever one exceeds his allotted possession or enjoyment of those resources, he must share his excess equally with all others."

Jim Fedako

"Time magazine’s June 30 cover story is titled "The Great Wall of America: A billion-dollar barrier between the U.S. and Mexico. It’s reducing illegal immigration – but does America really need to wall itself off? This isn’t about walling ourselves off. This isn’t a Berlin Wall erected to keep people in. It is a fence designed to keep illegals out. Anyone who doesn’t understand the difference will not be persuaded by facts."

Cal Thomas

"Minimum wage rates, whether decreed and enforced by the government or by labor union pressure and violence, result in mass unemployment."

Ludwig von Mises

July 9, 2008

“The balance of probability [is] for a global downturn which combines the inflation of the 1970s with the severe recession and geopolitical danger of the 1930s. Not an appealing prospect.”

Martin Hutchinson

“The steep rise in prices - of housing, stocks and bonds, oil, gold, commodities, food prices, etc. that we have seen this decade - would be mathematically impossible without the increased supply of money circulating in the world economy.”

Kel Kelly

“If Carrot Top and Joey Buttafuoco were elected to Congress, it would improve the legislative branch’s reputation.”

Jonah Goldberg

“How do liberals propose we acquire the energy required for the economic activity and production that results in light appearing when they flick a switch? The larger enterprise involved in producing that little miracle eludes them.”

Ann Coulter

July 8, 2008

"We are living through the unthinkable… The list of casualties is very different. What has suffered most is the credibility of the most sophisticated financial systems in the world."

Mohamed El-Erian

"It has long been understood that politically connected people are moved to the front of the line for special medical procedures, which causes no small amount of envy among Canadians who might have to wait six months for an MRI and more than a year for knee or hip replacements."

William L. Anderson

"The Fed has assumed the onerous position of counter party on all the crap paper the banks have tendered."

Jim Sinclair

"Alarmists have been reduced to quoting other alarmists on the supposedly impending recession but that is still not the real thing. The definition of a ‘recession’ is very clear and straightforward: Two consecutive quarters of negative growth. We have not yet had one consecutive quarter of negative growth."

Thomas Sowell

"The only means to raise wage rates permanently for all those eager to earn wages is to raise the productivity of labor by increasing the per-head quota of capital invested and improving the methods of production."

Ludwig von Mises

"Government is not using modern technology so much to modernize and improve services as it is to regulate, punish, collect taxes and keep an eye on us. They’d rather rule than serve."

James Cook

July 7, 2008

"Entrepreneurs do not simply do business the way everyone else does; instead, they find new resources or take existing resources and change them to create new goods or to enhance existing services. Over time, in a free-market setting, entrepreneurs lower real costs to customers."

William L. Anderson

"…we haven’t been through anything like what we are going through now. The United States has really been living in a fool’s paradise, or a phony economy, probably for more than twenty years. But our economy has been growing bigger and bigger. We have been able to convince the world to lend us money and to provide us with goods that we don’t produce and that we can’t afford to pay for with exports. And it has gotten to the point now where the problem is so big, especially since the real-estate bubble."

Peter Schiff

"Given the strong possibility of a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate, and a liberal Supreme Court for decades to come, given the number of Supreme Court appointments a Democratic president will be able to make, an Obama victory will move America more radically leftward than ever in its history."

Dennis Prager

"In the gun control decision, there were justices who read the history and meaning of the Second Amendment differently. What was most dangerous, however, was Justice Stephen Breyer’s opinion that it was up to judges to weigh and ‘balance’ the pros and cons of gun control laws. If we have Constitutional rights only when judges like the end results, we may as well not have a Constitution."

Thomas Sowell

"Assistance granted to the unemployed does not dispose of unemployment. It makes it easier for the unemployed to remain idle."

Ludwig von Mises

July 3, 2008

"Throughout history, two commodities have been able to outcompete all other goods and be chosen on the market as money – two precious metals, gold and silver."

Murray N. Rothbard

"Guns are a particularly thorny issue for Democrats, who have long been the party of gun control, and whose strong left wing detests firearms and looks down on the ‘gun nuts’ who enjoy them. Liberal Democrats have generally seen the Second Amendment as an embarrassing constitutional anachronism. And they nurse a singular loathing for the National Rifle Association."

Jeff Jacoby

"America has tried everything? When was minding its own business – nonintervention – tried?

Sheldon Richman

"From 6/24/08 Financial Times ‘Vietnam Halts Gold Imports as Trade Gap grow. Deficits triple in first half of year. Record demand for gold as inflation surges.’

Vietnam doesn’t want its people to protect themselves by buying gold. Besides, if the price of gold were to surge, that would show the world that inflation was raging in Vietnam. So ban the protector, kill the messenger, forbid the importation of gold. A hint of things to come?"

Richard Russell

"Unemployment doles can have no other effect than the perpetuation of unemployment."

Ludwig von Mises

July 2, 2008

"Politicians are also almost entirely ruled by popular fashion."

Martin Hutchinson

"The hurricane that’s just starting to hit the economy will both trigger and worsen problems in other areas. Starting with politics, because nearly everyone today believes the ridiculous notion that the government should guide the economy."

Doug Casey

"It is the typical Democratic strategy to babble meaningless slogans, as if they have a plan. Their plan is: the permanent twilight of the human race."

Ann Coulter

"Let me get this straight. A potential president of a putatively free country scolds companies for ‘obscene profits,’ failure to invest in competing products, and therefore irresponsible citizenship. Why? Is McCain running for national economic commissar?"

John Stossel

"The result of the governments’ and the unions’ meddling with the height of wage rates cannot be anything else than an incessant increase in the number of unemployed."

Ludwig von Mises

July 1, 2008

"We’re in a nasty environment. There is an inflation shock underway. This is going to be very negative for financial assets. We are going into tortoise mood and are retreating into our shell. Investors will do well if they can preserve their wealth."

Tim Bond

"Seven dollar gasoline is the least of our problems. Senator Obama has suggested, according to Canada’s National Post yesterday, that he will veto use of oil from Canada’s Oil Sands. Canada exports about 1.2 million barrels of oil to the US each day and produces about the same amount in the Alberta oil sands…"

Michael Berry

"Democrats have worked hard to ensure that Americans pay as much for gas as Europeans do. After a quarter-century of gas tax hikes, a ban on drilling for oil and a complete destruction of the nuclear power industry in America, I guess liberals can declare: Mission accomplished!"

Ann Coulter

"There prevails on a free labor market a tendency toward full employment."

Ludwig von Mises

"The person you were twenty or thirty years ago no longer exists and the passing of that person was nothing to fear."

James Cook

June 30, 2008

"The Fed cannot continue issuing US treasuries in exchange for something worse than junk and becoming the last counter-party to the world. But they will. The Fed is headed to being counter-party to the entire mountain of OTC derivatives that are still being created daily by the many YOUNG HORSEMEN OF THE FINANCIAL APOCALYPSE."

Jim Sinclair

"Government intervention in the economy – through taxes, regulation and, most importantly, currency inflation – causes distortions and misallocations of capital that must eventually be unwound. The distortions degrade the general standard of living, and the economy goes into a recession (call that an incomplete cleansing). Or it goes into a depression – wherein the entire sickly structure comes unglued."

Doug Casey

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

Adam Smith

"It is the business of people to house themselves. And if and as they do it for themselves, they have free private enterprise without knowing it. They had it for more than one hundred years without ever thinking to give it a name."

Garet Garrett

"Government spending cannot create additional jobs. If the government provides the funds required by taxing the citizens or by borrowing from the public, it abolishes on the one hand as many jobs as it creates on the other."

Ludwig von Mises

June 27, 2008

"Is there another way? Of course there is. There is a way based on simple moral principles: Everyone keeps his own money. Everyone decides what to do with his own money. No income tax. No IRS. No government grants or assistance to anyone. All charity is voluntary. It’s called freedom. It’s a peaceful, harmonious way of life, one that Americans once believed in."

Jacob G. Hornberger

"We can always learn particular things from other countries, whether in Europe, in Asia or elsewhere. But imitating Europeans when they are not doing as well as Americans makes no sense."

Thomas Sowell

"The main reason progress in Iraq is not receiving more attention is that the progress is considerable and the big media are not paying attention because they don't like the new storyline. They prefer 'America defeated,' not 'America victorious' because defeat increases the likelihood of a Democratic electoral blowout in the fall.""

Cal Thomas

"Nothing is more calculated to make a demagogue popular than a constantly reiterated demand for heavy taxes on the rich. Capital levies and high income taxes on the larger incomes are extraordinarily popular with the masses, who do not have to pay them."

Ludwig von Mises

"Our life span is to eternity what a molecule is to the universe."

James Cook

June 26, 2008

"It’s hard to find a domestic policy that can be proven to be as successful as the Bush tax cuts – even by presumably Democratic standards. It’s simply a matter of fact that these tax cuts shifted the tax burden substantially to higher income earners and took millions of lower income workers off the tax rolls altogether. The economy took off and ran for at least five years after implementation, and the federal deficit shrank dramatically after the tax cuts were enacted. Yet calls to reverse these tax cuts abound."

Patrick Toomey

"In 25 years on Wall Street, I have never seen things this bad. We’ve had some tough times: the 1987 stock-market crash, the collapse of the once-all-powerful Drexel Burnham Lambert, the immolation of long term capital, the post-9/11 calamity, and the dot-com implosion. Every one of these events rocked the Street, causing pay cuts and layoffs and creating a sense of doom. But this time is different; it’s doom itself."

Jim Cramer

"Central banks from Beijing to Bangkok are losing their bets that a global slowdown would temper price increases. While export demand from the U.S. and Europe may have eased, it has been replaced by rising domestic consumption that has helped push inflation rates in Asia as high as 26 percent."

Bloomberg

"Taxes are necessary. But the system of discriminatory taxation universally accepted under the misleading name of progressive taxation of income and inheritance is not a mode of taxation. It is rather a mode of disguised expropriation of the successful capitalists and entrepreneurs."

Ludwig von Mises

June 25, 2008

"The elderly are using the federal government to dip into the pocketbooks of the young and the productive."

Jacob G. Hornberger

"High food prices are a manifestation of current worldwide price inflation. World governments have been printing money at very high rates this decade. While the United States has been expending the money supply by ‘only’ about 10-15 percent per year, many countries have printed money at rates exceeding 50 percent per year. This money, which had been previously contained mostly in world stock markets, has now also spread to commodity markets, from which the prices of food are derived. Since money is now being created faster than goods are being created, prices are rising."

Kel Kelly

"It is unquestionable that Bush has made this country safe by keeping Islamic lunatics pinned down fighting our troops in Iraq. In the past few years, our brave troops have killed more than 20,000 al-Qaida and other Islamic militants in Iraq alone. That’s 20,000 terrorists who will never board a plane headed for JFK – or a landmark building, for that matter."

Ann Coulter

"For all the clucking over ExxonMobil’s $10.9 billion in profits last quarter, little attention was paid to its total tax bill in the same period: more than $29 billion. So who’s the real ‘profiteer’ – Big Oil or Big Brother? And who is likelier to keep energy abundant – the profit-seeking entrepreneurs who pull it from the ground, or the politicians who demonize them when they succeed?"

Jeff Jacoby

"Progressive taxation of income and profits means that precisely those parts of the income which people would have saved and invested are taxed away."

Ludwig von Mises

June 24, 2008

"I’ve repeated over a number of years a lesson learned repeatedly throughout history: Inflationism is a ‘Road to Ruin.’ This road has become all to visible."

Doug Noland

"The underlying cause of any shortage is the lack of a free market, since genuine shortages cannot appear in a free market. Instead, while prices of goods would likely rise at the onset of reduced supplies, the goods in question would always be available at some price – and the higher the price, the more the supply would increase to meet demand which would then of course reduce the price."

Kel Kelly

"The average American worker toils from January 1^st to the end of April, and has no legal claim to the fruits of his labor for that period. Federal, state and local governments, through the tax code, take what he produces. A small portion of the fruits of his labor is used to provide for the constitutional functions of government. Most of what’s taken, up to two-thirds, is given to some other American in the forms of farm and business subsidies, Social Security, Medicare, welfare and hundreds of other government handout programs. As in slavery, one person is being forcibly used to serve the purposes of another person."

Walter Williams

"Taxing profits is tantamount to taxing success."

Ludwig von Mises

"Human beings progress from lower to higher by way of error."

James Cook

June 23, 2008

"Legislatively enacted environmental barriers have actually resulted in a 25 percent decline in domestic production."

Noel Sheppard

"Entrepreneurial ability and energy are present almost everywhere. But in those countries that still languish in backwardness, the labyrinth intervention of the state and the absence of adequate institutions have kept that ability and energy from translating into full development."

Alvaro Vargas Llosa

"Liberals have only blind hatred for Bush – and for those brute American interrogators who do not supply extra helpings of bearnaise sauce to the little darlings at Guantanamo with sufficient alacrity."

Ann Coulter

"To finance ‘entitlement’ programs, the government threatens force against the taxpayers who provide the money. Why are people who favor compulsion called humanitarians, while those who favor freedom are stigmatized as greedy?"

John Stossel

"Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism."

Ludwig von Mises

June 20, 2008

"All alike [government] are resolved to control the people’s way of living according to a plan, and all alike creating a dependent society."

Garet Garrett

"We’re paying roughly twice as much as we ought to for gasoline, thanks to the restrictions imposed by politicians. Unsatisfied with driving up oil prices, they’ve driven up food prices, too, by heavily subsidizing and mandating the use of corn-based ethanol."

Jack Kelly

"George Washington might have become our king, but chose not to. His governing idea was that government is our servant because we are inherently free. It is an idea too many in government today forget."

Dick Armey

"It is characteristic of current political thinking to welcome every suggestion which aims at enlarging the influence of government."

Ludwig von Mises

"From an economic standpoint, liberalism is a greater threat to America than communism ever was."

James Cook

June 19, 2008

"When I was a boy, the purpose of American history textbooks was to teach American history. Today, the purpose of most American history texts is to make minorities and females feel good about themselves. As a result, American kids today are deprived of the opportunity to feel good about being American (not to mention deprived of historical truth). They are encouraged to feel pride about all identities – African-American, Hispanic, Asian, female, gay – other than American."

Dennis Prager

"Victimhood and a ‘can’t do’ spirit is what the Democratic Party has mostly been about since the Great Depression."

Cal Thomas

"It’s nothing new for advocates of socialism, isolationism, appeasement, multiculturalism, defeatism and American non-exceptionalism to flex their muscles and gain power for a time. But expecting to effect such far-reaching and potentially devastating changes to this nation in the name of unity is breathtakingly arrogant."

David Limbaugh

"What kind of government forces people to make gasoline out of food, artificially boosts the price of corn to $6 a bushel, guarantees that inflated price as the ‘base’ for higher federal subsidies to corn farmers in the future, and then tries to hide its own depredations by excluding high food prices from its measure of ‘core’ inflation?"

Ernest S. Christian and Gary A. Robbins

"The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster."

Ludwig von Mises

June 18, 2008

"At a time when formerly communist countries in central and eastern Europe have adopted flat-rate personal income taxes less than 20 percent, and are booming as a result, the United States clings to an outdated Marxian, growth-retarding, class-warfare, graduated income tax, and at least one presidential candidate wants to raise those rates even more."

Mark W. Hendrickson

"This man who is now supposedly going to ‘unite’ us has for years worked hand in glove, and contributed both his own money and the taxpayers’ money, to people who have sought to divide us in the most crude demagogic ways."

Thomas Sowell

"Entitlement? How can you be entitled to someone else’s money?

John Stossel

"When I was a boy, America was a freer society than it is today. If Americans had been told the extent and number of laws that would govern their speech and behavior within one generation, they would have been certain that they were being told about some dictatorship, not the Land of the Free. Today, people at work, to cite but one example, are far less free to speak naturally. Every word, gesture and look, even one’s illustrated calendar, is now monitored lest a fellow employee feel offended and bring charges of sexual harassment or creating a ‘hostile work environment’ or being racially, religiously or ethnically insensitive, or insensitive to another’s sexual orientation."

Dennis Prager

"The whole of mankind’s progress has had to be achieved against the resistance and opposition of the state and its power of coercion."

Ludwig von Mises

June 17, 2008

"With Iraqi deaths at an all-time low, Iraq is safer than Detroit – although the Middle Eastern food is still better in Detroit."

Ann Coulter

"When in England at a fairly large conference, Colin Powell was asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury if our plans for Iraq were just an example of empire building by George Bush. He answered by saving, ‘Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.’ You could have heard a pin drop."

"For most of the last 40 years, New York’s state-run betting parlors have actually lost money. Apparently, the house always wins – except when Uncle Sam is the bookie."

Jonah Goldberg

"The standard of living of the common man is highest in those countries which have the greatest number of wealthy entrepreneurs."

Ludwig von Mises

"The acid test of intelligence is whether the things you believe in turn out to be true."

James Cook

June 16, 2008

"How does Mr. Obama expect America to compete with China and India when we abandon the principle of individual merit and elevate skin color and sex above performance?"

Ward Connerly

"Guess what Bill Clinton’s campaign theme was in 1992? You are wrong if you guessed: ‘bringing dignity back to the White House.’ It was ‘change.’ In January 1992, James Carville told Steve Daley of The Chicago Tribune that it had gotten to the point that the press was complaining about Clinton’s ‘constant talk of change.’"

Ann Coulter

"Allow me to summarize the rules: We should vote for candidates irrespective of their race and/or gender. However, if the candidate is black and liberal, a vote against him or her is racist. If the candidate is female and liberal, a vote against her is sexist. If the candidate is conservative, regardless of race and/or gender, a vote against him or her is a matter of principle."

Pat Sajak

"The media have been crucial to Barack Obama’s whole candidacy. His only achievements of national significance in his entire career have been media achievements and rhetorical achievements."

Thomas Sowell

"Under capitalism the common man enjoys amenities which in ages gone by were unknown and therefore inaccessible even to the richest people."

Ludwig von Mises

June 13, 2008

"Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail. We execute [kill people] from revolutionary conviction."

Che Guevara

"The Iraqis have a democracy – a miracle on the order of flush toilets in that godforsaken region of the world. Despite its newness, Iraq’s democracy appears to be no more dysfunctional than one that would condemn a man who has kept the nation safe for seven years while deifying a man who has accomplished absolutely nothing in his entire life except to give speeches about ‘change.’"

Ann Coulter

"Half the American people do not vote, and after this marathon campaign, that number might well increase, owing to one of history’s rarely noted undercurrents: sheer boredom."

Bob Tyrrell

"The characteristic feature of modern capitalism is mass production of goods destined for consumption by the masses. The result is a tendency towards a continuous improvement in the average standard of living, a progressing enrichment of the many."

Ludwig von Mises

"The higher the wages the fewer the jobs; the lower the wages the more the jobs."

James Cook

June 12, 2008

"In aggregate, the map of the territory Republican won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great country. Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living on government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare…"

Joseph Olson

"Government aid impedes success and creates dependence, while entrepreneurs create success and independence."

Cal Thomas

"Do the media even care whether Senator Obama knows what he is talking about? Or is the symbolism of ‘the first black President’ paramount, even if that means a President with cocky ignorance at a time of national danger?"

Thomas Sowell

"At 35 percent, the United States now has the second-highest corporate profits tax in the world – absolute insanity in a time of intense global competition when Congress should be doing everything in its power to help domestic employers compete against foreign companies."

Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson

"Reason and ideas determine the course of human affairs. What is needed to stop the trend toward socialism and despotism is common-sense and moral courage."

Ludwig von Mises

June 11, 2008

"Once a person becomes a government dependent, his moral standing to resist the expansion of government power is fatally compromised."

James Bovard

"Diplomacy without force is like music without instruments."

Frederick the Great

"There is something seriously wrong [with] the economic shallowness of politicians who believe that when oil companies prosper they should be penalized. Or who imagine that the way to bring gasoline prices down is to jack the oil industry’s taxes up. Or who actually think that earnings of 8.1 cents per dollar of sales – Big Oil’s profits over the past five years, exactly equivalent to the overall U.S. manufacturing average (excluding autos) – constitute a ‘windfall.’"

Jeff Jacoby

"Socialism [modern liberalism] is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build; it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created."

Ludwig von Mises

June 10, 2008

"What we want is a government so small that it doesn’t matter where it is, what it does, who’s in it, or how it got there."

Libertarian Alliance

"The most self-serving and deceptive of the lies told by the Democratic leadership is this: you can support the troops and not support the war. No you can’t. You can’t tell a 19-year old, who is risking his young life in Fallujah and who is surrounded by terrorists who want to kill him, that he shouldn’t be there in the first place; that he’s with the ‘bad guys’ – the aggressors, the occupiers, who have no moral right to be in Iraq. You can’t do that and not undermine his morale, encourage his enemies, deprive him of allies and put him in danger. And that is exactly what the Democrats have done – and all the Democrats have done – in five years of America’s war to deny the terrorists victory in Iraq. Such a party is unfit to lead this nation in war. To place it in a position to do so would be to invite a tragedy of epic proportions."

David Horowitz

"The true villain in our having to cough up $60, $70 or $80 to fill our gas tanks is the U.S. Congress caught in the grip of environmental extremists. But if reality is too difficult to swallow, we can continue to blame and support the congressional attack on oil executives, turn food into oil and think of other crackpot ‘solutions.’"

Walter Williams

"Socialist society is a society of officials."

Ludwig von Mises

"What auctions for a record price today will bring a record price tomorrow."

James Cook

June 9, 2008

"Criticism of government policy is essential to a democracy. But in the last five years the Democratic Party has crossed the line from criticism of war policy to fundamental sabotage of the war itself, a position no American party has taken until now."

David Horowitz

"Ironically, China, in conjunction with Cuba, is drilling for oil nearer to our coastline than U.S. oil companies are permitted."

Walter Williams

"Free markets are economically optimal, but partially free markets, with endless creation of fiat money and implicit government guarantees of the big boys, can produce perverse and dangerous results."

Martin Hutchinson

"Everything brought forward in favor of Socialism during the last hundred years, in thousands of writings and speeches, all the blood which has been spilt by the supporters of Socialism, cannot mak