Category: Thought

Under a system of perfectly free commerce, each country naturally devotes its capital and labour to such employments as are most beneficial to each. This pursuit of individual advantage is admirably connected with the with the universal good of the whole. By stimulating industry, by rewarding ingenuity, and by using most efficaciously the peculiar powers bestowed by nature, it distributes labour most effectively and most economically: while, by increasing the general mass of productions, it diffuses general benefit, and binds together, by one common tie of interest and intercourse, the universal society of nations throughout the civilized world.

Xander: This is just too much. I mean, yesterday my life’s like, ‘Uh-oh, pop quiz.’ Today it’s ‘Rain of Toads.’

Willow: I know. And everyone else thinks it’s just a normal day.

Xander: Nobody knows. It’s like we’ve got this big secret.

Willow: We do. That’s what a secret is, when you know something other guys don’t.

Joss Whedon, writing credits for (and creator of) Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season One; Episode Two: “The Harvest,” March 10, 1997.

With the development of civilisation, man’s wants become more various, and his aptitudes more specialised. The consequence is, that he can produce more utilities than before; but these utilities are more limited in their nature; they are all of one kind. He now produces, not so much what he wants, as what others want. Hence it comes to pass that exchange becomes an ever more imperious necessity; for exchange consists in giving away what are to us superfluous utilities in order to obtain what are to us necessary utilities.

Yves Guyot, Principles of Social Economy (1892).

[I]ncreasing the supply of money by means of additional credit will not merely cause a problem of transforming one price level into another. Beyond this it will have the additional effect of disrupting the price system and distorting the structure of production.

Richard von Strigl, Capital and Production (1934; Margaret Rudelich Hoppe and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, translators, 2000), final paragraph.

We have effectively entered a period in which we cannot trust our experts. We’ve got two generations of institutional experts that are corrupted, and we cannot wake up from this crazy fever dream that we’re all in, because we can’t figure out who we can still trust. The doctors are compromised; the professors are compromised; the journalists are compromised; the politicians are compromised. About the only thing that isn’t badly compromised are people with an independent source of sustenance.

Eric Weinstein, in interview for the Glitch in the Matrix non-fiction film.

Unfortunately, we live in some weird times these days and common sense is about as rare as an ARP 2500.

Tim Shoebridge, reviewing the Behringer 2500 synthesizer, a modular knock-off of the classic ARP.

Is the majority morally supreme, or are there moral rights and moral laws, independent of both majority and minority, to which, if the world is to be restful and happy, majority and minority must alike bow?

Every man should be considered as having a right to the character which he deserves; that is, to be spoken of according to his actions.

Democratic socialism turns out to be an inherently unstable compound, a contradiction in terms. Every social-democratic party, once in power, soon finds itself choosing, at one point after another, between the socialist society it aspires to and the liberal society that lathered it.

Irving Kristol, as quoted in “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy: A Symposium,” edited by William Barrett, Commentary (1978).

There is evil! It’s actual, like cement.

Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962).