Tag: QotD

Quote of the Day – Milton Friedman Edition

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Quote of the Day – Milton Friedman Edition

Is there some society we know that doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy; it’s only the other fellow who’s greedy.

The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the auto industry that way.

In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about, they have had capitalism and largely free trade.

If you want to know where the masses are worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. The record of history is absolutely crystal clear: that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.

(Hark! Was that the sound of someone’s head exploding?)

Quote of the Day – Meet the New Boss Edition

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Quote of the Day – Meet the New Boss Edition

In his scathing Wall Street Journal column on The Post articles last week, Thomas Frank crystallized the gap between Obama’s pledge and this reality. “There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery’s version of the Barack Obama ‘Hope’ poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists.” That’s no joke: It was donated by Tony and Heather Podesta.

— Frank Rich, The New York Times – The Rabbit Ragu Democrats

Quote of the Day – Tough History Coming Edition

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Our currency is tanking. Our debts are climbing. Our energy needs are breaking us. Our borrowing is out of control. The country is divided in a 1859/1968 mode. And the world is smiling as Obama, now hesitant and without the old messianic confidence, presides over our accepted inevitable decline. The country needs to buck up and meet these challenges head on, since the world smells blood, whether in Iran, Russia, the Mideast, North Korea, or South America, and in a mere 9 months of the reset button.

– Victor Davis Hanson, Works and Days, Change and Hope

This sh!t is really starting to worry me.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

This is why “gun control” won’t work. It is the culture that people are raised in that matters more th(a)n the tool.

No knives and no guns were used in Thursday’s fight. Just fists, feet and boards.

This is why “gun control” won’t work, because when people want to commit violence they will.

There are two types of violence or cultures of violence in this case.

There is the one displayed here: the culture of predatory violence. The strong take from the weak, might makes right.

Then there is the culture of protectionary violence. The use of violence to stop crime or greater violence from occurring.

When gun control laws –victim disarmament laws– are implemented all that is left is the culture of predatory violence. There will always be a stronger person, more th(a)n one person can handle IF the law abiding is deprived of effective tools.

Chicago shows what happens when decades of victim disarmament laws have been in place.

— 3 Boxes of BS, Does this look like your town?

Sound familiar?

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

All the same, that the dollar’s reign as the world’s dominant currency is drawing to a close is no longer in doubt.
– Jeremy Warner, The Telegraph, The dollar is dead, long live the renminbi

It’s not that bad.

Yet.

The Yuan is heavily tied to China’s ownership of America’s debt. If When the value of the dollar plummets, China will be hard hit, and they own so much of our debt that dumping it hurts them as much (or more) that it would hurt us.

Still, our doubling of the money supply will (must) eventually have an effect, and it won’t be good. And it makes me wonder how much longer oil will be valued in dollars versus another currency, such as the Euro.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

During the Bush years, we constantly heard the refrain, pushed especially by Paul Krugman, that the government was doing incompetent and corrupt things because conservative Republicans “don’t believe in” government. Put the government in the hands of true-believing liberal Democrats, and incompetence and corruption will virtually disappear.

This always struck me as foolish, in part because the problems with government competence and integrity are structural, not individual, and in part because it required one to believe Krugman’s fantasy that the Republican elite during the Bush years was dominated by wild-eyed libertarians intent on drowning the government in a bathtub, or something like that.

—

It’s amusing to get accused of anti-Democrat “partisanship” in the comments for a post whose theme is that when given power the Democrats are just as corrupt and incompetent as the Republicans.

– David Bernstein, The Volokh Conspiracy, Because the Democrats “Believe In” Government

Remind you of anyone?

Bueller?