This is great:
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Frederick Douglass
I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom. This good spirit was from God, and to him I offer thanksgiving and praise.
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John Bright
Force is no remedy.
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Togetherness
“We’re all in this together,” folks say. I’ve even said it. But are we?
Yesterday, I discussed Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded comments on the “47 percent” he believes are hell-bent on supporting President Obama . . . and an apparently different 47 percent not paying federal income taxes. Romney expressed a not unreasonable fear that government bailouts and handouts and entitlements will cause dependency, and there will come a breaking point where those working and producing will be unable to shoulder that burden.
But Mr. Romney shouldn’t go along with the bifurcation of the American public facilitated by the structure of the federal income tax and the payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare. Most people of all incomes are paying a lot more in taxes than they should have to, even when they do not pay federal income taxes.
Moreover, while no doubt some folks wallow in dependency through welfare or crony insider deals, the vast majority of Americans desire to stand on their own two feet. Part of the 47 percent not paying income taxes are people on Social Security, as noted in an online comment by John C. Bisely:
To lump Social Security in with the other parasites is very disturbing to me. I didn’t ask for SS, it was a government run insurance for my retirement that made sense, actually. The politicians used it as a cash cow and stole billions to buy votes — plus the fact, I gave them real dollars at the time I paid into it and they give me, inflated fiat!!!
Mr. Bisely, like most Americans, is not a parasite. He’s earned his way in this world. He deserves a less parasitic government.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Richard Cobden
I believe that the harm which Mill has done to the world by the passage in his book on Political Economy in which he favours the principle of Protection in young communities, has outweighed all the good which may have been caused by his other writings.
I’m not sure there’s much percentage in talking about percentages.
Divvying folks into groups, and then relying on people to “stay” within their group — behaving according to one’s specifications — seems . . . kind of creepy.
Last year’s “Occupy” movement, with its relentless pitching of the “99 percent,” demonstrated that creepy/icky factor pretty well.
But Mitt Romney had to horn in on the action. “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” he said. These wards of the state, he went on to say, believe that
- they are victims
- government has a responsibility to care for them
- they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it
Furthermore, “these are people who pay no income tax,” Romney stated. “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
Well, not all folks who are somehow “dependent on government” — a group ranging from Social Security retirees and the non-working poor to federal employees and agribusinesses and Solyndras feeding at the federal trough — necessarily want to increase their own ranks. Not a few are savvy enough to notice that the system that feeds them would, if larded up with more recipients, be made less capable of feeding them.
As for the logic of “not biting the hand that feeds you,” the advice of the late Thomas Szasz is pertinent: “maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.”
After all, many of the people who may qualify, technically, as being “dependent on government” would rather not be. And might like the option of being less encumbered by government “help.”
Mitt, I wouldn’t write them off yet.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Last week, the Federal Reserve announced it was going ahead with “quantitative easing.” Chairman Ben Bernanke said that he’d be buying $40 billion dollars of mortgage-backed securities every month, no end in sight.
Now, the traditional way that the Federal Reserve influenced the money supply, economist Randall Holcombe explains, was via “open market operations by buying and selling government securities.” But this changed in 2008 with the $85 billion AIG bailout: “Since then it has engaged in continual bailouts of financial firms and purchases of non-government securities. . . .
The Fed has moved from engaging in monetary policy in a way that was neutral toward various businesses and industries in the economy to one in which monetary policy is targeted toward specific firms and industries. This current foray, specifically targeted at the housing market, is crony capitalism.
It’s actually worse. It’s crank policy, as the redoubtable Mr. Peter Schiff summarizes: “Ben Bernanke’s plan to revive the U.S. economy and create jobs is to inflate another housing bubble. That’s it. That’s what the Fed’s got. That’s what it came up with. As if the last housing bubble worked out so well for the economy that the Fed wants an encore.”
Our leaders are obviously desperate.
And out of control. George Will states that the Fed has gone far beyond “mission creep” — it’s “mission gallop on part of the Fed, which is on its way to becoming the fourth branch of government — accountable to no one and restrained by nothing, as far as I can tell, in exercising both monetary and fiscal policy.”
This is what forsaking limited government and the Constitution gets you: a sort of frantic idiocy in aid of politically connected speculators and financiers.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Richard Cobden
How can protection, think you, add to the wealth of a country? Can you by legislation add one farthing to the wealth of the country? You may, by legislation, in one evening, destroy the fruits and accumulation of a century of labour; but I defy you to show me how, by the legislation of this House, you can add one farthing to the wealth of the country. That springs from the industry and intelligence; you cannot do better than leave it to its own instincts. If you attempt by legislation to give any direction to trade or industry, it is a thousand to one that you are doing wrong; and if you happen to be right, it is work of supererogation, for the parties for whom you legislate would go right without you, and better than with you.
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That’s Rich
What have the rich got that we haven’t got? Besides money?
Well, many assaults on their money.
Less cash-encumbered mortals also get our pockets picked by those with political pull. But persons of certain envious bent are particularly eager to assail the wealthiest among us. (You know who you are, envious people and wealthy people.)
Peter Schiff took a camera to the Democratic Convention and asked attendees what they felt about the idea of curtailing or outlawing corporate profits. Interviewee upon interviewee exclaimed in grateful agreement, “Oh yes! Great idea. Love to see that!” Outlawing profit, killing enterprise, destroying economic life, turning the earth into a barren landscape, sure, let’s do it!!!
Forward!
Then there’s the Chicago Teachers Union’s strike bulletin, which was issued on September 8 but has apparently been memory-holed from the web page where the Illinois Policy Institute found it. Among the chants for union members hoping to pad their on-average $76,000 per annum salaries with a 30 percent hike were such beauties as “The war on unions is a joke. Tax the rich that made us broke. How to fix the deficit? Tax, tax, tax the rich!”
Blame the rich? While some rich people and businesses rigged and gamed the system to take huge government subsidies, thus helping “make us broke,” everyone with their hand in the cookie jar contributed. The problem is the cookie jar itself.
And I note that the teachers’ chant isn’t “Stop, stop, stop subsidizing some corporations and appeasing the ridiculous demands of teachers unions!”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Richard Cobden
Free Trade! What is it? Why, breaking down the barriers that separate nations; those barriers, behind which nestle the feelings of pride, revenge, hatred, and jealousy, which every now and then burst their bounds, and deluge whole countries with blood; those feelings which nourish the poison of war and conquest, which assert that without conquest we can have no trade, which foster that lust for conquest and dominion which sends forth your warrior chiefs to scatter devastation through other lands, and then calls them back that they may be enthroned securely in your passions, but only to harass and oppress you at home.