Freedom Keys a
collection of amusing,
fascinating,
insightful, or maybe even useful information
"All
of us necessarily hold many casual opinions that are ludicrously wrong
simply because life is far too short for us to think through even a small
fraction of the topics that we come across." -- Julian Simon
"There
is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible and
wrong." -- H. L. Mencken
"There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns
or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot
win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns." -- Ayn Rand
"The
right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom." --
Justice William O. Douglas "In
matters of principle, stand like a rock." -- Thomas Jefferson
"They
conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone--the most
prehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men." --Justice
Louis Brandeis (Olmstead v. U.S.) "In
a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion
and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance." --Thomas
Jefferson, 1824 "Control
freaks who sneer at people who have 'faith' in the free market (voluntary
trading) must be fantasizing an allegedly 'higher' political end than freedom."
-- Rick Gaber >"Liberty is not a means to
a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end." --Prof.
John E. E. D. Acton "The
single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because
it's so rare." --Daniel Patrick Moynihan "The single
most frightening thing you encounter is confidence-in-government
because it's so common." -- Rick Gaber "THE
most widespread form of child abuse in the United States is parents' sending
children to the government to be educated." -- Neal Boortz
"Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and
ill-educated people who run our schools can undermine and destroy from
within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to
create and maintain." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell "Never
— and I mean never — blindly trust the statistics you read [or hear] about
the economy."-- Don Luskin "It
is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never
in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior,
career, and sexual orientation." -- Camille Paglia "We
turn sacred cows into hamburger."-- Lowell Ponte
| index
| Stand
up to the vicious "You're selfish!" attacks.
Democrats and some Republicans opposed
reform [the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005] in part
because Fannie and Freddie were very good at greasing palms. Fannie has
spent $170 million on lobbying since 1998 and $19.3 million on political
contributions since 1990.
The principal recipient of Fannie Mae's
largesse was a Democrat, Sen. Chris Dodd (D, CT), chairman of the Senate
Banking Committee. No. 2 was another Democrat, Sen.
Barack Obama (D, IL).
Mr. Dodd was also the second largest
recipient in the Senate of contributions from Countrywide's political action
committee and its employees, and the recipient of a home loan from Countrywide
at well below market rates. The No. 1 senator on Countrywide's list? Barack
Obama. -- Check it out HERE:
http://tinyurl.com/4h9955
The poll from
The O'Leary Report by Brad O'Leary and Zogby International today revealed
that 73 percent of Americans think politicians, including President
Obama and Sen.
Chris Dodd, D-Conn., should not have profited
from AIG and should return the money.
Obama and Dodd were the top recipients of campaign largesse from AIG over
the past two years, with Obama getting $104,332 and Dodd raking in $103,900.
Others got money, too, but in smaller amounts. All together, AIG donated
$644,218 to federal politicians -- Check
it out HERE
"Obama is offering
the basic Roosevelt method or formula: buoyant American 'can-do' optimism
-- in the service of the economy-killing aggenda of a high-taxing, high-spending
welfare and regulatory state. Get the people to love you for giving them
a pep talk that lifts their spirits -- even as you impose policies that
dash their hopes.
"If Obama is identical
to FDR in his basic method, all we can hope that he does not achieve the
same result: another ten years of economic collapse."
-- Robert
Tracinski
Obama’s Backward
Economics
“Barack Obama claims that Americans
can only stave off economic disaster by trillions in government spending--which
means trillions of dollars taxed or borrowed to finance government make-work
programs.
“Obama-nomics couldn’t be
more wrong.
“Prosperity requires that the government
drastically cut government spending. That way, as much real
capital as possible will remain in private hands, and be put to productive
use by entrepreneurs to create valuable goods and services to sell
at home and abroad. By taxing and inflating our wealth away, Obama
will simply be creating more of the crushing debt that brought about the
current crisis.
“You don’t put out a fire with more
gasoline. And you don’t end a recession by destroying capital.”
"Congress
has made the economy dead on arrival. Because any capitalist economy
depends, more than anything else, more than on electricity, more than on
energy, more than on the internet, more than on communications, on THE
- RULE - OF - LAW. And if governmment's contracts with its OWN
counterparties get abrogated as soon as the lynch mob starts agitating,
then there are NO contracts that are worth ANYthing. Nobody can plan,
nobody can invest, nobody can take risk. THAT is a recipe for depression.
And if we don't get that runaway train back on the rails, that is where
we are heading, mark my words." -- Don Luskin on The Kudlow Report 3-25-09
here: http://tinyurl.com/EconomyDOA
Duh "The
US requires large amounts of capital for any economic recovery that may
take place. Ask yourself one of the most basic questions any investor should
ask: can I get my money back if I need
to? If the answer is no or only maybe,
and if there is the threat of governments robbing investors, then less
investment occurs." -- Johnathan
Pearce
"I know you hate it when I bring
this up, but how else are you going to learn?
What sort of economic system do
you call it when industry, businesses and financial institutions are privately
owned but government controlled? The word would be 'fascist.'
Never let a good learning opportunity
go to waste." -- Neal
Boortz
WHERE
DO AMERICAN "LIBERALS" REALLY FIT ON THE REAL POLITICO-ECONOMIC
SCALE? FIND OUT
>
HERE
<
"As every economics student learns,
high marginal rates distort economic decisions, the damage from which rises
with the square of the rates (doubling the rates quadruples the harm). The
president claims he is only hitting 2% of the population, but many more
will at some point be in these brackets." -- Michael
Boskin [Besides that top 2% were the movers and shakers who worked
16 hours a day, took enormous risks, made things happen, and created millions
of jobs and physical value where none existed before. Do you really
think they'll continue when they're punished for it? Well,
DO YA, Punk?]
"In 1897, troops from the greatest empire
the world had ever seen marched down London’s mall for Queen Victoria’s
diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care,
a government- owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was
a shriveled high- unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling
cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the
Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later
. . . Let’s not go there." -- Mark
Steyn
Gee, ain't it great when the GUBMINT
takes over things? Like THIS?
"A large number of
people, certainly the majority of the political looter class, think the
best way to deal with the rapidly deepening economic crisis is via 'stimulus
packages' with money plucked off the magic money tree... which is to say,
by trying to re-inflate the credit bubble that actually caused the crisis.
This is a bit like treating alcoholics by urging them to buy more whiskey."
-- Perry
de Havilland
"One Blue Dog Democratic
House Member reminded me earlier this month of the saying that 'insanity
is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.'
He wondered if his fellow Members weren't more in need of advice from psychiatrists
than from economists at this point." -- John
Fund
"Many
politicians and pundits claim that the credit crunch and high mortgage
foreclosure rate is an example of market failure and want government to
step in to bail out creditors and borrowers at the expense of taxpayers
who prudently managed their affairs. These
financial problems are not market failures but government failure.
... The credit crunch and foreclosure problems are failures of government
policy." -- Stubborn
Ignorance: The Financial Crisis is a Failure of Government Policy by
Dr. Walter E. Williams
See: "But while capitalism
may be a convenient scapegoat, it did not
cause any of these problems. Indeed, whatever one wishes to call the unruly
mixture of freedom and government controls that made up our economic and
political system during the last three decades, one cannot call it capitalism."
-- Stop
Blaming Capitalism for Government Failures, HERE
Oh,
and Guess what? It's
THE DEMOCRATS who are mostly to blame.
"Republicans
don't
know how to defend morally an individual's right to achieve wealth and
to keep it, and that is why they fail. ... It's part and parcel with their
ambivalence over the individualist heritage of the nation. ... One of the
things that people have to understand is that the American Revolution was
truly an epic revolution in the way individuals were perceived in relation
to the rest of the society. Throughout history individuals had always
been cogs in some machine; they'd always been something to be sacrified
for the king, the tribe, the gang, the chieftain, the society around them,
the race, whatever, and the real revolution, in America especially, was
a
moral revolution. It was a moral revolution in that ...
suddenly, with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the
individual,
his life, his well-being,
his property,
his
happiness became central
to our values, and
that is what
really made America unique. People came here from all over the world
to try to escape the kind of oppression they had and experienced in the
past. They came here for freedom; they came here for self-expression and
self-realization, and America offered them that kind of a place."
-- Robert Bidinnotto
Finally, I would quote Tibor Machan's ubiquitously useful comment, "This
right to life, this right to liberty, and this right to pursue one’s happiness
is unabashedly individualistic, without in the slightest denying at the
same time our thoroughly social nature. It’s only that our
social relations, while vital to us all, must be chosen - that
is what makes the crucial difference." -- found HERE
"Why
is it when times get rough only the people have to look for ways to cut
back?
Why is
this always just absolutely impossible for government?" - Neal
Boortz "Modern
[wind] turbines can be as tall as 400 feet and carry 130-foot, seven-ton,
endangered-bird-slicing blades. Building these wind farms requires five
to 10 times more steel and concrete than a nuclear plant generating the
same amount of power." -- IBD, here
Fact:
It would take enough solar cells to cover 53,760 acres, or 84 square miles,
in order to supply as much energy at the same rate as just one average
gas station.
"In education markets,
like the Asian tutoring industry, top teachers are superstars who get to
design curricula for thousands or even millions of students and train scores
or hundreds of other teachers to use their effective methods. Quality providers
expand and are emulated by competitors, and there is a powerful incentive
for meaningful innovation. ... One teacher in Korea’s private tutoring
sector made $2 million last year because his web-based employer has profit
sharing and he’s brilliant at what he does, so he gets tons of students.
That’s what should have happened to [Jaime] Escalante. That’s the sort
of success that should greet excellence in education at all levels. It
doesn’t because
we don’t have a market." --
Andrew
J. Coulson
Science
disproves global warming
U.S.
Senate Report: Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming
Claims in 2007
"Let's be clear: the
work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus
is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one
investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results
that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus
is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists
in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus."
-- Michael Crichton
WHY
POLITICIZED SCIENCE IS DANGEROUS
"It is time for our
school systems to stop accepting the gospel of that false religion and
start doing their due diligence. Our children should be taught about the
demonstrable solar cycles; and the whole human-caused Global Warming theory,
along with the Hockey Stick Hoax, should be taught only as another example,
after Piltdown Man and pre-Copernican theories of planetary movement, of
how science can be corrupted when ideology gets ahead of the data." --
Orson Scott Card, HERE
The
earth has spent most of its time in ICE AGES.
AreYOU
smart
enough to see WHERE WE ARE NOW
on
this LONG term
chart?
Also
see: "Read
the Sunspots"
"The
next time somebody in the media denies that there is media bias, ask how
they explain the fact that there are at least a hundred stories about the
shrinking arctic ice cap for every one about the expanding antarctic ice
cap, which has now grown to record size." --Thomas
Sowell
"When
government will expropriate any wealth that people create, the present
value of future output can actually be less than the value of the country's
tangible resources. The power of predatory government to destroy wealth
is truly awesome." -- Arnold
Kling
"Those
who support the death tax generally do so not for economic reasons but
for political ones. They want to make the tax code 'fair' by taxing away
the lifetime wealth of others." -- William Beach--
See
THIS.
"When
the US government ended 'welfare as we know it' in 1996, it handed responsibility
for reform to the states. In so doing, it also created a real-world test
of two competing economic strategies used to fight poverty. The results
are in and the lessons are clear: Low tax rates lift up the lives
of America's poor." -- from The
Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 15, 2006
"Some observers blame the [Feb. 20, 2007] crash of
the Shanghai stock market on rumors of anti-growth tax policy. ... Chinese
stocks recovered Wednesday following their worst plunge in a decade as
regulators shifted into damage control, denying rumors of plans for a 20
percent capital gains tax on stock investments. Fortunately, it was
just a rumor. It's hard to think of a better way to crush investment and
growth than imposing a 20% tax on capital gains. But wait. If the
2003 tax cuts are allowed to expire after 2010, as per current law, the
US capital gains tax will rise to... yes, 20%. And that's no rumor." --
Don
Luskin STOP
LYING ABOUT TAX CUTS! by Herman Cain
So far the Sarbanes-Oxley Act
has wiped out $1 trillion of market capitalization, has done nothing to
improve business performance or investor value, and in fact has provided
absolutely no benefits to the overall economy whatsoever, unless you're
a large corporation which enjoys
seeing
the government hamper your smaller upstart competitors. It
has, in fact, turned out to be nothing more than another poor excuse for
politicians
to claim they've "done something." Check out "THE
REAL
COST OF SARBOX" HERE
ALWAYS
remember: the old INCOME tax hurts those still TRYING to get rich, NOT
the
ALREADY-rich. And with
the FairTax: EVERY family gets a PREBATE of $180-$700 a MONTH,
depending on family size. See
the research on the FairTax HERE.
"In education markets, like the Asian
tutoring industry, top teachers are superstars who get to design curricula
for thousands or even millions of students and train scores or hundreds
of other teachers to use their effective methods. Quality providers expand
and are emulated by competitors, and there is a powerful incentive for
meaningful innovation. ... One teacher in Korea’s private tutoring sector
made $2 million last year because his web-based employer has profit sharing
and he’s brilliant at what he does, so he gets tons of students. That’s
what should have happened to [Jaime] Escalante. That’s the sort of success
that should greet excellence in education at all levels. It doesn’t because
we
don’t have a market." --
Andrew
J. Coulson
.Atlas
Shrugged -- movie
production updatelots
more production news
Another
Atlas Shrugged adaptor heard from
"Imagine
that! The Supremes actually found that ALL of the amendments in the Bill
of Rights protect the rights of individuals, not just nine of them. What
a country!" -- Neal
Boortz
Do
you grasp what we mean when we say the mainstream media -- the network
news and the major metropolitan newspapers -- are-lying
through their teeth? Study-THIS-and-THIS-and
understand.
"Sometimes the fourth estate seems more like a fifth column."
--
Thomas
Sowell
"Suppose
that American media were really funded and supported by the Muslim Brotherhood,
and openly opposed to the United States. How would the coverage differ?
Answer: not at all."- C.Johnson
"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics,
which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people
consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible
to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining
in this state of ignorance." -- Murray
N. Rothbard "There is nothing more frightening than active
ignorance." - Goethe
>
See
EXACTLY who
made
health care expensive HERE.
<
>>>The
facts:about
Canada's "free" health care system
Canada
has been trampling Individual Rights by Outlawing
Private Medical Care, but its
Supreme Court just ruled that Quebec's law banning private care is unconstitutional!-Check
it out. (Don't
mess with us, Sen.
Bill Nelson; we're watching you...)
"If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work
of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned
to slave labor." -- Ayn Rand
"Any
alleged 'right' of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights
of another, is not and cannot be a right."- Ayn
Rand
See: "Putting doctors in jail for practicing
medicine under arbitrary rules and paying old people to put doctors in
jail is a moral outrage."HERE See
"Doctors
Shrug" HERE
"Socialism has been discredited as an explicitly
avowed belief but it still lives on in a thousand disguises, of which
'universal health care' is just one. Like so many pretty words used
in politics, 'universal health care' is seldom examined in terms of what
its
actual track record has been in the countries where it has been tried."
-- Thomas Sowell, HERE,
HERE
and HERE.
"If you want to see the future of health care
in the United States just look at the VA hospitals today. ...
The Washington Times is reporting that many veterans are waiting up to
six months for an appointment to see a doctor. ... That,
my friends, is your medical future … and it is your medical future
because you have accepted the idea that you have a
'right' to medical care, a right that politicians are all-too-willing
to recognize." -- Neal Boortz, 5-26-03
THE
ROAD TO HELL ...
By
1997, after the first 30 years of the "War on Poverty," $5.4Trillion
in
tax dollars had been spent on poverty programs, and the national debt had
risen to (guess what? yep...) $5.4 Trillion. And
the poverty rate? Uh-huh, EXACTLY THE SAME as it was 30 years before.
So we mortgaged our childrens' and grandchildrens' futures. For what?
Right. For the subsidization of a vast army of self-aggrandizing,
self-important, self-righteous (but ineffectual, if not actually counter-productive)
politicians and bureaucrats and their "intellectual" apologists.
A million seconds is less than 12 days; a billion seconds is over 31
years; a trillion seconds is more than 31,000 years, and 5.4 trillion seconds
is over 167,000 years.
See how runaway environmentalism
played a part in both the WTC and Columbia tragedies
HERE,
in the northeast blackout HERE,
in
the California blackouts HERE,
in the California wildfires (and
resulting mudslides) HERE,
... and how "California [has been],
in fact, a perfect petri dish of [such] policies." HERE
"Cuba's
poverty is caused by the crackpot Marxist doctrines imposed by its sociopathic
ruler and promoted by half the liberal arts professors on American faculties."
--
David
Horowitz
"The
most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they
do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated
in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive." --
Thomas
Sowell
"The
ratio of Democrats to Republicans among liberal arts professors at universities
is routinely 20 to one. And the deans, the presidents, the curricula, the
speech codes and the campus newspapers are all liberal. Liberals also run
the schools of education, the law schools, the high schools and the elementary
schools." -- Dennis Prager
“Government
is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” --
Ronald Reagan
"An America that is militarily and economically strong is not
enough. The world must see an America that is morally strong with a creed
and a vision. ... For us, values count." -- Ronald Reagan
"As Thomas Jefferson put it, 'I consider
trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man by which a government
can be held to the principles of its constitution.' The Webster's dictionary
current in Jefferson's time defines a jury as a group of citizens empaneled
to judge both the facts and the law in both civil and criminal cases. Jury
'nullification,' or the voiding of a law by juries who judge it to be immoral
or repressive or simply wrong, is part of our legal heritage." -- Richard
E. Sincere, Jr.
"It would be an absurdity for jurors to be required
to accept the judge's view of the law, against their own opinion, judgment,
and conscience." -- John Adams
"For
more than six hundred years -- that is, since Magna Carta, in 1215 -- there
has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law,
than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the right and duty of juries
to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent
of the accused; but that it is also their right, and their primary and
paramount duty, to judge of the justice of the law, and to hold all laws
invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and all persons
guiltless in violating, or resisting the execution of, such laws."
--
Lysander Spooner, An Essay on the Trial by Jury [1852]
See: "And
now the court has let the most powerful of American interest groups --
incumbent politicians -- have their way with the First Amendment. Wednesday's
message to the mere people was clear: Shut up, the court explained." --
Paul
Greenberg. ... and: Find
your lazy, ignorant, unprincipled legislators in a well-deserved state
of shock
HERE--
"in
a story that is simultaneously hilarious and appalling." "The
problem with politics isn't the money; it's the power [stupid!]"
"Congressman
Frank and Senator Dodd wanted the government to push financial institutions
to lend to people they would not lend to otherwise, because of the risk
of default. "The idea
that politicians can assess risks better than people who have spent their
whole careers assessing risks should have been so obviously absurd that
no one would take it seriously." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell,
Professor
Emeritus, Economics, Stanford University, HERE
"The sale of loose, cheap cigars has been
banned in Maryland's Prince George's county -- you must now buy them in
packs of five. Loose, cheap women are still available as singles." -- Katherine
Mangu-Ward
"There are enough fools in Washington to destroy
the country without any help from Muslim terrorists." -- Paul
Craig Roberts
"No 'middle class' worth the name aspires to economic benefits without
bothering to acquire the skills to produce the wealth to make those benefits
sustainable." -- Holman Jenkins
"Wealth is based on productivity, and productivity is expandable.
In fact, productivity is fabulously expandable." -- P.J. O'Rourke in Eat
the Rich
"In small towns as well as large, good people outnumber bad people by
100 to 1. In big towns the 100 are nervous. But in small towns,
it's the one." -- Paul Harvey
"Sprawl is beautiful." -- Doug Newman
"A fact to a liberal is like
Kryptonite to Superman." -- Larry Elder "In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions
are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination,
from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue
but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions
about them were not worth a brass farthing." -- Autobiography
of Mark Twainby Samuel Clemens
"The problem that religious moderation poses for all of
us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious
literalism." -- Sam
Harris
"Contrary to popular belief, people who buy
political influence are vastly outnumbered by people who are sold
political influence by creative or desperate politicians." -- Rick
Gaber
"If liberty should be the highest political end,
then what is the grounding for that goal? It should be clear . .
. that, first and foremost, liberty is a moral principle, grounded in the
nature of man. In particular, it is a principle of justice, of the abolition
of aggressive violence in the affairs of men. ... Justice, not the weak
reed of mere utility, must be the motivating force if liberty is to be
attained." -- Murray N. Rothbard
"Individualism is at once an ethical-psychological
concept and an ethical-political one. As an ethical-psychological concept,
individualism holds that a human
being should think and judge independently, respecting nothing more than
the sovereignty of his or her mind; thus, it is intimately
connected with the concept of autonomy. As an ethical-political concept,
individualism upholds the supremacy of individual rights ..." -- Nathaniel
Branden HERE
"I've torn up my AARP card. I've decided that twelve
and a half bucks I was paying to AARP was getting me the most expensive
discounts in history. Why save a couple bucks on a movie if I have to pay
that back thousands of times over in [much, MUCH] higher taxes [which
the policies they advocate require -- BIG TIME]?" -- Don Luskin, HERE.
Some of the evil the AARP has perpetrated is listed HERE.
"Evil
acts can be given an aura of moral legitimacy by noble-sounding socialistic
expressions such as spreading the wealth, income redistribution or caring
for the less fortunate. Let's think about socialism.
"Imagine
there's an elderly widow down the street from you. She has neither the
strength to mow her lawn nor enough money to hire someone to do it. Here's
my question to you that I'm almost afraid for the answer: Would you support
a government mandate that forces one of your neighbors to mow the lady's
lawn each week? If he failed to follow the government orders, would you
approve of some kind of punishment ranging from house arrest and fines
to imprisonment? I'm hoping that the average American would condemn such
a government mandate because it would be a form of slavery, the forcible
use of one person to serve the purposes of another.
"Would
there be the same condemnation if instead of the government forcing your
neighbor to physically mow the widow's lawn, the government forced him
to give the lady $40 of his weekly earnings? That way the widow could hire
someone to mow her lawn. I'd say that there is little difference between
the mandates. While the mandate's mechanism differs, it is nonetheless
the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another. ... This
is why socialism is evil." -- Dr. Walter E. Williams, in A
Nation of Thieves
