Aphorisms


There's nothing so bad, that adding government can't make it worse. -- The Immigrant

Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. -- Ronald Reagan

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Read the next two together:

Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of 'Emergency'." -- Herbert Hoover

This is too good a crisis to waste. -- Rahm Emanuel

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Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. -- Fredric Bastiat, French Economist (30 June 1801 – 24 December 1850)

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to another. -- François-Marie Arouet, a.k.a. Voltaire, (21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778)

The problem with socialism is that, sooner or later, you run out of other people's money. -- Margaret Thatcher

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. -- Winston Churchill

Saturday, July 11, 2009

#1: On "Social Justice."


This is an instructive case study in Orwellian newspeak. There really is no justification for the existence of this term, it is nothing more than an effort to avoid the negative charge attached to the word "socialist." "Social justice" is nothing other than "socialist justice" and, whether one is "for it" or "agin it", it is important to fight the good fight of calling things what they are. And, by the way, while Orwell drew attention to the political practice, it actually evolved out of the socialist rumblings in Europe from the 1850s on, to be perfected and put into practice by Lenin from the time he took over the peasants' revolution of 1917. There are fascinating and instructive passages in Dostoevsky's The Possessed (sometimes The Devils) in which the techniques of taking over a state by revolution are described in chilling detail, and that's around 1870. The political transformation of language is included among those techniques.

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