The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
You know, for the last hundred years there has been entirely too much Promoting of the General Welfare and Creating a More Perfect Union and way too damned little Securing of the Blessings of Liberty. – Tam, from Getting down to brass tacks…
Can I get an “AMEN!”?
Richard Epstein per Reason Magazine: “Epstein splits faculty appointments at the University of Chicago and New York University; he’s also a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a contributor to Reason. In books such as Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (1992) to Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995), and Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism (2003), Epstein pushes his ideas and preconceptions to their limits and takes his readers along for the ride. A die-hard libertarian who believes the state should be limited and individual freedom expanded, he is nonetheless the consummate intellectual who first and foremost demands he offer up ironclad proofs for his characteristically counterintuitive insights into law and social theory.” As an example, they say, “His 1985 volume, Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain is a case in point. Epstein made the hugely controversial argument that regulations and other government actions such as environmental regulations that substantially limit the use of or decrease the value of property should be thought of as a form of eminent domain and thus strictly limited by the Constitution. The immediate result was a firestorm of outrage followed by an acknowledgment that the guy was onto something.
“As Epstein told Reason in a 1995 interview, ‘I took some pride in the fact that [Sen.] Joe Biden (D-Del.) held a copy of Takings up to a hapless Clarence Thomas back in 1991 and said that anyone who believes what’s in this book is certifiably unqualified to sit in on the Supreme Court. That’s a compliment of sorts…. But I took even more pride in the fact that, during the Breyer hearings [in 199X], there were no such theatrics, even as the nominee was constantly questioned on whether he agreed with the Epstein position on deregulation as if that position could not be held by responsible people.'”
Now that we have Prof. Epstein’s bona fides established, here is today’s QotD from this Reason TV interview:
All the ingenuity of gimmicks fails…We have more debt, more unemployment, and less happiness in this country now because Hope & Change turns out to be Discord & Confusion. And there’s no way that you can stop that. You cannot stop the blunders of one government program by putting another one on top of it. That’s what I learned in the Yale Law School. You don’t like what the minimum wage does, you create a welfare program. You don’t like what a welfare program does, you have a back-to-work program. If you just got rid of the minimum wage, you’d get rid of three programs and you’d free up lots of economies, and what people have to understand is that Mies van der Rohe was essentially a political theorist when he said “Less is More.” You get more production out of fewer regulations, and one of the great tragedies of the modern stuff is that you spend all this time on monetary and fiscal policy, where regulatory policy taken in the round and taken in particular cases is every bit as important.
Yup. That’s got to make the Denizens of D.C. recoil in abject horror, screaming “Heresy! Heresy!”
From Stop Shouting!, My Rebuttal to a Progressive who Admonished Me to Play Nice ….
Realizing that you are losing your grip on the public schools, that the youth that propelled the boy-king to victory have abandoned you, that the bitter, blue collar white workers are now Tea Party grandmas and grandpas, that you have lost control of the federal checkbook and the legislative calendar,
now you want to petition for peace?
now you cry out for civility and consensus?
I have a message for you:
Go. To. Hell.
You GO girl! The pendulum has stopped its swing, and is now going back the other way. Our job: keep it from going too far.
The GOP once again demonstrates that they are simply the other wing of the federal bird of prey.
— Mike Vanderboegh, Explain to me why this passed UNANIMOUSLY?
We must not focus our attention exclusively on the material, because though important, it is not the main issue. The economic success of the Western world is a product of its moral philosophy and practice. The economic results are better because the moral philosophy is superior. It is superior because it starts with the individual. — Margaret Thatcher
Quoted from Claire Berlinski’s There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters from NRO’s Uncommon Knowledge interview of Berlinski
See also yesterday’s QotD.
Really, there is no excuse for this kind of poverty. It’s an attitude, an acceptance, an ignorance that there is something better. Americans wouldn’t leave things this way. We’d figure out a way to make things better, even if it were through pure brutal labour. This is undeniable- even if you hate us, you know it’s true. But somebody will be angry that I made the comparison. They won’t be able to say exactly why they’re angry, but they will be. Because it’s racist somehow.
The wealth of my people is our culture. The things we have are a side effect.
— The Bastidge, The Wealth of My People
RTWT
(H)ow I see the Right is that the Right is connected to Jeffersonianism and Jacksonian principles. In other words, limited government intervention, freedom and libertarianism. The Left wants the far Right to be known as some kind of Hitler or Mussolini, and unfortunately they’re wrong, or FORTUNATELY they’re wrong, because that kind of right is on the Left, that’s why Hitler and the rest of them were known as National Socialists. Look, yes, I mean if you’re on the Right and we understand the Right, you believe in individual freedom, limited government intervention and basically a free society. Now the Left is attracted to totalitarianism because you see the Left wants to build a perfect planet on this Earth. They want perfectibility in human beings and human institutions, ultimately. They want to build a utopia. So in order to build their paradise there needs to be a transformation. Now that transformation necessitates changing and molding the human being from what and who he is, and therefore necessitates destruction. And that’s why every Leftist experiment, every socialist experiment has led to that kind of bloodshed, from the Soviet Union to Mao’s China, Viet Nam, Castro’s Cuba, the Sandinista’s Nicaragua, you name it. So, to make a long story short, because the Left wants that kind of destruction, to build a new paradise on the ashes of the old Earth, they support – it makes complete sense who perpetrates Ground Zero: radical Islam. So you’ve got the Jihadis trying to build Sharia paradise, you’ve got the Left trying to build classless utopia, so therefore they are united in hate.
–– Dr. Jamie Glasov, NRO’s Between the Covers interview for his book United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.
The Obama camp ran their campaign in such a way that they won the election by dooming the presidency. Of course there is nothing new in politicians promising more than they can deliver. But Obama committed this political sin on such a gargantuan scale that it ought to be named after him. — Timothy Dalrymple, The Wages of Sin
From Brian Micklethwaite at Samizdata from his post Assuming that everyone is like me:
In what way does my sometimes vehement libertarianism result from assumptions that I make about others mostly being like me? What do libertarians generally assume to be true of people generally, which actually isn’t?
The first comment, by “Falco:”
With profound regret: That they want to be free.
The first Stephen Hunter book I ever read was The Master Sniper, picked up at a library book sale many, many years ago. It was obvious to me then that the author was not one of those for whom a firearm is a magic talisman or an incomprehensible piece of technology. This guy understood guns. Yes, he exaggerated and embellished, but you had to know firearms to know that. At least nothing he wrote in that novel made me want to whack my forehead against a wall.
Later, I found more of his books, and discovered that his day job was as a film critic for The Washington Post, where he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. In his spare time, he cranked out novels, novels that always included firearms as minor, sometimes major, plot devices. Novels where the gun-handling wasn’t unbelievable because it was wrong, it was just sometimes unbelievable because nobody’s that perfect. Hunter’s book Point of Impact was made into the movie Shooter in 2007. He retired from the WaPo in 2008.
A coincidence, I’m sure.
I’ve liked everything I’ve read that Hunter has written, and that includes his “homage” to the Tom Cruise film The Last Samurai, The 47th Samurai, which some people just didn’t care for.
I’m currently reading his latest paperback, I, Sniper, which is living up to my expectations, but I want to relate one interesting passage. Remember, Hunter spent more than 37 years working for big-city newspapers, one of the few people in those organizations not fully a member of the media zeitgeist.
Stephen Hunter on “The Narrative:”
You do not fight the narrative. The narrative will destroy you. The narrative is all-powerful. The narrative rules. It rules us, it rules Washington, it rules everything.
—
The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide “These are the lies we will tell today.” No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it’s a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they’ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they’ve chosen to live their lives. It’s a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They know, for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama is a saint. They know communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They know that Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was fucked up…. Cheney’s a devil. Biden’s a genius. Soft power good, hard power bad. Forgiveness excellent, punishment counterproductive, capital punishment a sin.
—
And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don’t even know they’re true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything. But they will absolutely de-frackin’-stroy anybody who makes them question that….I, Sniper, pp. 231-232
I refer you now to The Church of the MSM and the New Reformation from January, 2008.
Hunter’s next novel, Dead Zero comes out in hardcover in December. Oh, and Hunter doesn’t take himself too seriously, either.