Månadsarkiv: oktober 2015

Leviathan

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Leviathan

The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively ”peaceful” the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society. Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. 

The State has never been created by a “social contract”; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation.

The classic paradigm was a conquering tribe pausing in its time-honored method of looting and murdering a conquered tribe, to realize that the time-span of plunder would be longer and more secure, and the situation more pleasant, if the conquered tribe were allowed to live and produce, with the conquerors settling among them as rulers exacting a steady annual tribute.

– Murray Rothbard, Anatomy of the State, 1974.

The Chains of Majority Rule

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Frihet

To highlight the offensiveness to liberty that democracy and majority rule is, just ask yourself how many decisions in your life would you like to be made democratically. How about what car you drive, where you live, whom you marry, whether you have turkey or ham for Thanksgiving dinner?

If those decisions were made through a democratic process, the average person would see it as tyranny and not personal liberty. Is it no less tyranny for the democratic process to determine whether you purchase health insurance or set aside money for retirement?

Both for ourselves, and our fellow man around the globe, we should be advocating liberty, not the democracy that we’ve become where a roguish Congress does anything upon which they can muster a majority vote.

– Walter E Williams, Professor of Economics, George Mason University, 2011.

The Road to Socialism

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Beyond Democracy

The fact is that people usually don’t get what they want in a democracy. The democratic one-size-fit-all principle, leads to centralization, bureaucracy and monopolization (the characteristics of socialism). It inevitably leads to poor quality and high costs.

If you need proof that democracy does not live up to it promises, consider that at every election politicans admit that government has made a mess of things. Every time they promise they will change everything – education, safety, health care, and so on – for the better.

But they always offer the same solution: Give us more money and more power and we will fix the problems. This never happens, of course, because the problems are caused by the money and the power of those same politicans.

– Frank Karsten & Karel Beckman, Beyond Democracy, 2012.

Höstsäsong á la Brideshead?

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Brideshead Revisited

”To choose clothes, either in a store or at a home, is to define and describe ourselfs”, skrev Alison Lurie i Language of Clothes (1981). Något att betänka kanske, nu när det på allvar är dags att se över garderoben inför höst- och vinterhalvåret.

Kläder är ju mera än bara plagg. De uttrycker vår identitet, verklig eller önskad, och representrerar en iscensättning av jaget. I den postmoderna eran står det fritt att välja. Var och en sin egen aristokrat från Brideshead Revisited och Downton Abbey exempelvis. Det tycker jag är trevligt. Frågan är dock om man vågar sträcka sig till att bära en bowler-hatt som Sebastian. 

Järnladyn påminner

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Margaret Thatcher

Let us never forget this fundamental truth: the State has no source of money other than money which people earn themselves. If the State wishes to spend more it can do so only by borrowing your savings or by taxing you more. It is no good thinking that someone else will pay—that ”someone else” is you. There is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers’ money.

– Margaret Thatcher, tal vid Torypartiets konferens i Blackpool, 14/10 1983.

A Farewell to Kings

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Karl Hess Death of PoliticsPolitics has always been the institutionalized and established way in which some men have exercised the power to live off the output of other men. But even in a world made docile to these demands, men do not need to live by devouring other men.

Politics does devour men. A laissez-faire world would liberate men. And it is in that sort of liberation that the most profound revolution of all may be just beginning to stir. It will not happen overnight, just as the lamps of rationalism were not quickly lighted and have not yet burned brightly.

But it will happen – because it must happen. Man can survive in an inclement universe only through the use of his mind. His thumbs, his nails, his muscles, and his mysticism will not be enough to keep him alive without it.

– Karl Hess, liberal frihetsaktivist och talskrivare i Barry Goldwaters presidentvalskampanj, 1969.