When Government has a monopoly of all production and all distribution, as many Governments have, it can not permit any economic activity that competes with it. This means that it can not permit any new use of productive energy, for the new always competes with the old and destroys it. Men who build railroads destroy stage coach lines.
Rose Wilder Lane, Discovery of Freedom (1943).
The pace of this election year is picking up. But what we are sure to gain faster isn’t what the candidates want.
Click on over to Townhall.com for this weekend’s dose of Common Sense. Then come back here for the extra dollops of information and opinion:
Progress . . . is to be measured by the accuracy of man’s knowledge of nature’s forces. If you examine this sentence carefully you will observe that I conceive progress as a sort of process of disillusion. Man gets ahead, in other words, by discarding the theory of to-day for the fact of to-morrow.
H. L. Mencken, in Robert Rives La Monte and Mencken, Men versus The Man (1910).
On the hundredth day of 1998, the Northern Ireland peace talks ended with an historic agreement, dubbed the Belfast, or Good Friday Agreement. The accord was reached after nearly two years of talks and 30 years of conflict.
Johan Norberg gives the concise case against the old hat leftist love for “Swedish Socialism”:
Look around YouTube and you will find more from Norberg about the reality behind the myths of Scandinavia.
I am a contributing creator of American civilization; it does not create me. I control the stem of this civilization that is within my reach; it does not control me. It can not even make me read Spengler, if I’d rather read a pulp magazine.
Rose Wilder Lane, Discovery of Freedom (1943).
Despite being outnumbered 16 to 1, forces of the Old Swiss Confederacy proved victorious over the Archduchy of Austria in the Battle of Näfels, April 9, 1388.
On this date in 1991, Georgia declared its independence from the Soviet Union.
Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.
Václav Havel, Open letter to Dr. Gustáv Husák, Communist President (April 8, 1975).
On April 8, 1913, the 17th amendment to the Constitution, providing for the popular election of U.S. senators, was ratified.
Men are born free, that since they begin with no government, they must therefore institute government by voluntary agreement, and thus government must be their agent, not their superior. Since volition is a function of the individual, the individual has the precedent right. Then even if it was presumed that government did equate roughly with the moral shorcomings of humanity, it should still be limited and subsidiary. If everyone were invariably honest, able, wise, and kind, there should be no occasion for government. Everyone would readily understand what is desirable and what is possible in given circumstances, all would concur upon the best means toward their purpose and for equitable participation in the ensuing benefits, and would act without compulsion or default. The maximum production was certainly obtained from such voluntary action arising from personal initiative. But since human beings will sometimes lie, shirk, break promises, fail to improve their faculties, act imprudently, seize by violence the goods of others, and even kill one another in anger or greed, the government might be defined as the police organization. In that case, it must be described as a necessary evil. It would have no existence as a separate entity, and no intrinsic authority; it could not be justly empowered to act excepting as individuals infringed one another’s rights, when it should enforce prescribed penalties. Generally, it would stand in the relation of a witness to contract, holding a forfeit for the parties. As such, the least practicable measure of government must be the best. Anything beyond the minimum must be oppression.
Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943.