Tag: QotD

Quote of the Day

I’ll recommend myself to you if you have a pretty strong stomach. (Answering a question about “new” military SF authors.)

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I’m not a Libertarian. And the reason I’m not is because there’s three questions Libertarianism has never adequately answered for me:

How do we provide for the national defense?

How do we defend against domestic enemies, to include criminals?

And what about public health? By which I mean plague prevention, not socialized medicine.

I haven’t heard a decent, credible, non-vomit-in-the-gutter answer from a Libertarian on any of those three.

Author Tom Kratman, from An Interview with Tom Kratman, Part 5 that can be found at Blackfive.net The whole interview series is quite interesting. Next up in the interview series is Michael Z. Williamson, but the audio on that is pretty screwed.

The only thing of his I’ve read is Watch on the Rhine, which I thought was actually pretty good. I understand that a lot of his other stuff might, in fact, require that strong stomach he warns about.

Anyway, his three questions are pretty good. I hadn’t considered the public health one, but it does seem obvious in retrospect. Discussion on this would be interesting, I think.

Quote of the Day – American Exceptionalism

Since the golden age of Greece, there has been only one era of reason in twenty-three centuries of Western philosophy. During the final decades of that era, the United States of America was created as an independent nation. This is the key to the country—to its nature, its development, and its uniqueness: the United States is the nation of the Enlightenment. – Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

And yet, as Billy Beck observes, we now seem headed for The Endarkenment – a point made even more ironic by AlGore’s latest tome, since it’s his side of the aisle doing most of the attacking.

Quote of the Day

The basic and crucial political issue of our age is: capitalism versus socialism, or freedom versus statism. For decades, this issue has been silenced, suppressed, evaded, and hidden under the foggy, undefined rubber-terms of “conservatism” and “liberalism” which had lost their original meaning and could be stretched to mean all things to all men.

The goal of the “liberals” — as it emerges from the record of the past decades — was to smuggle this country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time, never permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot—by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli. (The goal of the “conservatives” was only to retard that process.)
– Ayn Rand, ” ‘Extremism,’ or The Art of Smearing,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal