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.
"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
ALL of
the above: Rep. Barney Frank, Sen.
Chris Dodd, Presidents Carter and
Obama
See:
"My Run-ins with ACORN" by bank loan officer
M. S. H. HERE
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
Find
the CONGRESSIONAL report that says the
financial crisis was caused by
governmentHERE and a synopsis HERE.
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 agenda 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
government'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
Bidinotto
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
So
far, 15,000 scientists have signed the
petition saying the global warming is NOT
caused enough by humans, if at all, to
make public policy about it. See who
they are 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
"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
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!]"
"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
"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
