Tag: QotD

Quote of the Day – Economics Edition

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From Thomas Sowell:

I think that if the average citizen understood economics as well as it was understood by economists 200 years ago, most of the nonsense that’s done in Washington would be impossible politically.

From a very recent Uncommon Knowledge interview you can watch (and I strongly recommend you do) below, courtesy of Power Line:

http://cdn.agahe.net/toolset/flashvideo/v.swf

If you don’t have 33 minutes to devote to watching this video at the moment, here’s a short (2:39) excerpt to whet your appetite:

http://static.photobucket.com/player.swf

Sowell’s Basic Economics (Third Edition) is still sitting on my headboard waiting to be read.

Quote of the Day – Heartwrenching Edition

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This shouldn’t happen in this country, or anywhere else, but in a free society we’re going to be subject to people like this. I prefer this to the alternative. – John Green, father of 9 year old Christina Green

Christina was slain Saturday by the nutjob who tried to assassinate Congresswoman Giffords here in Tucson.  Quoted on Sunday’s Today Show in a clip at Reason online.  Watch the whole piece.

Found via SayUncle.

UPDATE:  The video is currently available on YouTube:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXZOGNhw6p8?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&w=640&h=385]

Thanks to Linoge for the pointer.

Quote of the Day – George Bernard Shaw Edition

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George Bernard Shaw was a socialist. There is no doubt about that. He was also a promoter of eugenics.

The two ideas are not mutually exclusive. They are, as Jonah Goldberg pointed out in his Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change, commonly associated.

They are commonly associated because socialism requires a “New Man” in order to succeed. For the Russian Communists, it was the “New Soviet Man.” For the Nazis it was their “master race” of Übermenschen, but either way, it requires those “others” to cease to exist so that they’ll stop gumming up the works of their scientifically- and socially-engineered utopia.

Yes, the socialists were all in favor of “the workers,” as long as they were the right type:

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Source: The Soviet Story
It is suggested that Shaw was using satire here, to poke holes in (as Wikipedia puts it) “the eugenicists’ wilder dreams,” but the fact of the matter is, joking or not, his call for chemists to “discover a lethal gas” for carrying out mass killings was eventually taken seriously.  And it wasn’t satire that killed millions of Ukrainian kulaks, it was deliberate starvation, starvation that the New York Times’ Walter Duranty covered up, saying “Must all of them and their families be physically abolished? Of course not – they must be ‘liquidated’ or melted in the hot fire of exile and labor into the proletarian mass.”  Nor was that the first – or the last – mass murder carried out in the name of socialist utopianism.

Mass murder isn’t a bug with socialism, it’s a feature.

Quote of the Day – “What’s Wrong With a Little Socialism?” Edition

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From American Thinker, The Stealthy Spread of Socialism in the U.S.

The biggest challenge facing Republicans in the 112th Congress is not Barack Obama. It is not Harry Reid and the Democrat-controlled Senate. It isn’t high unemployment, repealing ObamaCare, the threat of Islamism and sharia in America, the deficit, or the looming insolvency of several (mostly blue) states. These, broadly speaking, are symptoms. The disease is socialism — or at the very least, a pervasive socialistic mindset.

According to a February 2010 Gallup poll, “61% of liberals say their image of socialism is positive” and “53% of Democrats have a positive image of socialism.” Overall, 36% of Americans view socialism favorably.

Winston Churchill aptly described socialism as “a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue [being] the equal sharing of misery.” As economist Thomas Sowell put it, “[s]ocialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

“It’ll work if the right people are in charge!!“

Found at Dr. Sanity.  Read the whole post, and her links.  

Quote of the Day – Media and Education Edition

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It’s not just crappy education [although that certainly contributes], it’s that most ‘reporters’ study ‘journalism’ in college, where they’re taught not to ‘report’ facts and such but to ‘describe’ and ‘explain’ ‘narratives’ and ‘messages’ to the ignorant public. They are to become ‘journalists’, which apparently means they don’t really need to know anything except how to string together words to make a sentence. And they don’t need to understand anything at all.

The journalism majors I get in my class are second worst, only better than the education majors.

Posted by: JorgXMcKie at January 6, 2011 10:21 AM

Found at Arms and the Law, Media ignores ATF internal scandals

Quote of the Day – December 31st Edition

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A good thought to conclude the year, from one of my favorite sources, Henry Louis Mencken (via Joe Huffman):

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman’s club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.

Unfortunately, too many of our fellow citizens reject this philosophy.  It makes me think of this from Robert Heinlein:

Roman matrons used to say to their sons: “Come back with your shield, or on it.” Later on this custom declined. So did Rome.

Most Americans used to believe in liberty, but this custom has declined. See above.

Quote of the Day – W.H. Chamberlain Edition

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One of the most insidious consequences of the present burden of personal income tax is that it strips many middle class families of financial reserves & seems to lend support to campaigns for socialized medicine, socialized housing, socialized food, socialized every thing. The personal income tax has made the individual vastly more dependent on the State & more avid for state hand-outs. It has shifted the balance in America from an individual-centered to a State-centered economic & social system.

Found here. I am convinced that the nation’s current path began with the “Progressive” movement that brought us the 16th and 17th Amendments, and for that matter, the 18th.

Quote of the Day – Parenthood Edition

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This one comes from Cybrus over at Lost and Found:

Listen up people – raising safe kids isn’t done by waiting until they’ve hit puberty to let them touch anything fun. It’s done by TEACHING them how to think and how to play and then by letting them try and, sometimes, fail. Hell, minor injuries as a child end up being good lessons – if they’re not getting the occasional bruise or risking a broken bone, they’re not really playing! And I’m not talking about sore thumbs from 12 hour XBox sessions. Get your kids outside and playing. What they play is not as important as the fact that they ARE playing.
At the end of the day, bubble-wrapping kids isn’t about making THEM safer – it’s about making YOUR life easier by not having to do your job as a parent.

Quote of the Day – Globular Warmering Edition

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No doubt the warmist crowd will be quick to express outrage at this blatant confusion of global climate with local weather, but that won’t wash. The Met makes its short-term forecasts on the basis of the same brand of massive computer power and Rube Goldberg modelling used to project the global climate. The suggestion that forecasting the climate is easier than forecasting the weather comes into the same category as acknowledging that governments couldn’t run a lemonade stand, but then believing that they can “manage” an economy.

Red Faces at the Met Office,The Global Warming Policy Foundation

Via Vanderleun