“If the covid episode has given us anything good, it’s the reductio ad absurdum of the rule of experts (or supposed experts; Fauci has been a fool ever since the start of the AIDS epidemic, when he announced that, according to the science, AIDS can be contracted casually). Experts — at least those appointed by politicians, and what are their qualifications? — have an occupationally induced blindness to problems that are not in their field. Ask a Lit professor like me how many years of Lit should be required, and ’17!’ will be the answer. Who cares about the other things that people have to do? So the experts on covid eradication turned out to care for only one thing — eradicating covid. They didn’t do it, because they couldn’t do it, but they let nothing stand in the way of their pursuit of that single, all-consuming goal. And look at the results.” (01/20/22)
“[Benjamin] Tucker understood unjust authority as any coercive force not developed spontaneously and naturally out of the constitution of the individual himself or herself. For Tucker, the dual buttresses of society by force were the authority of the Church and the authority of the State, a union he referred to as a double-headed monster. He sought to eliminate both. In place of the forceful jurisdiction of Church and State, he wished to establish the self-jurisdiction of the individual within a voluntary society. … Tucker acknowledged that noble intentions might well underlie the Christian principle of loving your neighbor. In fact, if the principle of brotherly love were consistently applied, a crime-free society based on human cooperation might be the result. But to enforce brotherly love by force or law was a contradiction in terms. … Tucker was equally clear about what constituted the authority of the State, which an individual could never rightfully join or employ.” (01/20/22)
“I’m firmly on record as favoring gridlock. In my opinion, the less the Senate ‘gets done,’ the better off most Americans are. I’d support a constitutional amendment requiring a unanimous, or at least high super-majority vote, to actually pass any bill. It should be hard, not easy, to subject 330 million Americans to legislative dictates. But I’m also in favor of requiring politicians to actually debate the bills they propose or oppose instead of just blocking consideration of those bills. … The ‘talking filibuster’ should be restored as a permanent Senate rule instead of offered up as a one-off workaround.” (01/20/22)
“In its ongoing attempt to investigate and gather information about private U.S. citizens, the Congressional 1/6 Committee is claiming virtually absolute powers that not even the FBI or other law enforcement agencies enjoy. Indeed, lawyers for the committee have been explicitly arguing that nothing proscribes or limits their authority …. This abuse of power is not merely abstract. The Congressional 1/6 Committee has been secretly obtaining private information about American citizens en masse: telephone records, email logs, internet and browsing history, and banking transactions. And it has done so without any limitations or safeguards: no judicial oversight, no need for warrants, no legal limitations of any kind.” (01/20/22)
“I have recently had an extended conversation with some supporters of the Austrian school of economics about the differences between the way they do economics and the way I do. One thing they offered as part of what distinguished their school of thought was the idea that one can determine economic laws by logical reasoning based on axioms known with certainty, just as one could know facts such as the Pythagorean Theorem without measuring any triangles. The interesting thing about that example is that it isn’t true.” (01/20/22)
“In August 1998, a shot was heard around the world. Russia had just defaulted on its government bonds, and a prominent New York hedge fund was about to pay the price. Long-Term Capital Management, the $126 billion hedge fund started by Nobel Prize-winning economists and some of Wall Street’s finest investors, began hemorrhaging cash. Despite losing hundreds of millions of dollars a day on its Russian bond portfolio, the fund’s trusted financial computer models told it to hang on… a decision that nearly took down the entire U.S. financial system. Now, 24 years later, a similar situation is emerging all over again — and in a far more disastrous, dangerous, and large-scale way. What was once known in financial circles as the ‘Russian flu’ back in 1998 could become our present-day 2022 global financial pandemic.” (01/20/22)
“President Joe Biden took office one year ago today promising that his administration would undo the damage former President Donald Trump did to the U.S. immigration system. He had big plans for reform and restoration. However, the U.S. immigration system does not look much better than it did on Inauguration Day 2021, despite improvements on the margins. … CBP expelled over 1 million people under Title 42 in 2021, with over 7,000 migrants getting kidnapped and attacked by cartels and Mexican authorities post-expulsion since Inauguration Day. The Biden administration has also used Title 42 to deport thousands of Haitians to Haiti, even though many of the deportees hadn’t lived in Haiti for years and were actually coming from South America. … But Biden’s critics falsely claim that the Southern border is open.” (01/20/22)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Today, it’s easy for socialists to point to the Interstate Highway System and exclaim, ‘Look at what we socialists did to facilitate transportation within the United States.’ However, as with all socialist projects, it’s necessary to also see what is unseen about socialist projects. For one thing, what is one of the main complaints of statists today? Isn’t it air pollution? Well, guess what one of the principal causes of air pollution is. That would be automobiles. The Interstate Highway System was a gigantic subsidy to the automobile industry. … There is also all the large amount of suffering that was inflicted on people through the forcible taking of their homes and businesses all across the country through eminent domain. Entire neighborhoods, some of which had been in existence for decades, were destroyed to make way for this massive socialist program.” (01/20/22)
“Florida legislators are working hard to pass a bill that, as the Associated Press observed, would ‘prohibit public schools and private businesses from making white people feel ‘discomfort’ when they teach students or train employees about discrimination in the nation’s past.’ ‘This is good,’ added one legislator, in a trench coat and hat, whose voice sounded somewhat muffled, as though it came from around his rib cage. ‘But it doesn’t go far enough.’ His whole body swayed and undulated strangely. ‘Yes!’ his head added. ‘It is good, but we need to pass more laws.’ ‘More?’ one of his colleagues inquired, handing him a drink of water. He missed grabbing the water the first time and then poured it all over his face and body, and a voice from beneath his belt said, ‘Stop it, Jeremy!'” (01/20/22)
“After anthropologist Sarah Beaulieu discovered what she thought to be 200 potential child burial graves on the site of Kamloops Indian Residential School, Canadians had a conniption. In July of 2021, Beaulieu stepped up to her new micro soap box and declared, ‘They were children, robbed of their families and their childhood. We need to now give them the dignity that they never had. Those are our next steps.’ It quickly became about children disappearing from similar schools all across the nation which dovetailed nicely with the ever-present message of colonial oppression being the America’s defining feature. The narrative arc came to us as if rolled off of a grievance conveyor belt and rippled through the Anglosphere as Justin Trudeau took to his cuddly pulpit and referred to ‘a dark and shameful chapter’ in Canadian history. But it didn’t stop there.” (01/20/22)
