Ilana mercer quotes

By going on the defensive. [...] libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone and deserve to be purged from "polite" company.

The United States has already passed on as the world's economic leader. Having flouted Thomas Jefferson for too long, America has succumbed to public debt, the 'fore horse for oppression and despotism,' after which 'taxation will follow, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.'

[G]lobal warming, that manufactured monomania.

Think of mass immigration into America as a global 'right of return.'

Any opinion writer worth his salt would have rejected the quaint notion that certain eternally aggrieved identity groups have exclusive linguistic rights to words in the English language.

The Democratic and Republican parties each operates as a necessary counterweight in a partnership designed to keep the pendulum of power swinging in perpetuity from the one set of colluding quislings to the other, and back.

If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be.

'You didn't build that' will be Obama's political epitaph: With these remarks, Obama has come out of the closet as a most odious collectivist, who believes religiously that government predation is a condition for production. Or, put simply, that the parasite created the host.

The Little Guy, behind whom politicians strategically coalesce — thumping majorities prevail in a democracy — cannot abide by a reality in which greater wealth affords greater "access."

Government jobs are not an addition to the country's payroll; they are an increase in the nation's payload.

Obamacare is a marketplace in the same way the Knockout Game is a game.

free market is a market in which groups and individuals are differently represented. Parity in prosperity and performance between differently able individuals and groups can be achieved only by playing socialist leveler.

Think of lab rats racing through a maze, when you watch the sub-intelligent, dual-panel 'dialogue' conducted on the teli. Each rat runs with a designated, neatly bifurcated (Republican or Democratic) political orthodoxy. Each is a 'maze-bright' rat, and not the possessor and giver of any truth.

Inviting an invasion by foreigners and instigating one against them are two sides of the same neoconservative coin.

Ludwig von Mises referred to Ayn Rand as 'the most courageous man in America.' If that doesn't say it all about the economist's man-centric frame of reference, I don't know what does.

Whatever open-border libertarians think about immigration law, once the immigration scofflaw steals, trespasses, or vandalizes private property, said alien is guilty of crimes. To say, moreover, that the state's laws made masses of men and women commit such crimes is to voice the philosophy of determinism, not individualism.

There is no such thing as absolute free speech; there are only absolute rights of private property. Speech is circumscribed by private property rights. You may deliver a disquisition in my virtual or actual living room only if I permit you to so do.

Breaking into a country signals quite reliably a willingness to break yet more of the invaded country's laws.

The only time Republicans will shake fists and point fingers is over a war delayed, one that isn't led by the US, or a war waged without the necessary conviction (read collateral damage).

Progressive policies lead to a regressive society.

We're not all the same. A common liberal refrain is that differences between individuals are statistically more significant than those between cultural, ethnic, and racial groups. I don't see why the fact of inter-individual differences would nullify inter-group variance. That's liberal logic for you.

A crucial difference between lite libertarians and the right kind is that to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional - a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values. Conversely, the paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure.

Demonstrators for a government takeover of medicine have a right to discuss their demands, but no right to enact these demands.

Hamas hides among unwitting civilians, who have no way of controlling its activities. This fact does not give Israel the right to kill innocent non-combatants, not even unintentionally. Besides, murder is not "unintentional" when you know it is inevitable.

Members of the media-monetary-military-congressional complex are immoral and have an allergy to the truth.

In a free society, the “vision thing” is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a “visionary” bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government [...] the poorer and less free the people.

Islamic terrorism is the handiwork of people who've heeded, not hijacked, Islam. Or so says [Wafa] Sultan.

Round and round will Americans be compelled to ride on a mindless, manufactured, racial carousel... for without it, the edifice of an industry built upon grievance and excuse-making is destined to collapse.

Liberals retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian idea that traumatic toilet training is destiny.

In the rare event that the Supreme Court refuses to play along [...] there is always a perfectly legal, extra-constitutional, quasi-legislative, quasi-executive, quasi-judicial, "independent" regulatory commission or executive agency to kill off or override constitutional protections.

Whether it is committed by a group operating within or without the law, terrorism is still terrorism.

For too long, the U.S. has been operating upon the premise that American men and matériel should be capable of reaching and controlling all corners of the world. This was a bully’s universe.

Ron Paul would have demanded that entire departments be shuttered – not that the bums merely bring into balance what was stolen (taxes) with what is squandered (spending). Besides, what a balanced-budget requirement implies is that government has the constitutional right to spend as much as it takes in – that government is permitted to waste however much revenue it can extract from wealth producers.

Gays have become colossal bores. Once interesting and iconoclastic, all they seem to crave nowadays is the State's pension and seal of approval. They ought to go back to the days of the Stonewall Riots, when the police's violations of privacy and private property were the object of their anger and activism.

From dwarf tossing to drug taking: The legislator has no place in voluntary exchanges between consenting adults, as dodgy and as dangerous as these might be.

One’s life, liberty and the products of one’s labor were not intended to be up for grabs by grubby, greedy majorities. Contra classical natural law theory, legal positivism equates justice with the law of the state. However, from the fact that most Americans want others to fund or subsidize their health care, it does not follow that they have such a right. A need is not a right.

In the bureaucracy, incentives will forever be inverted. Failure results in success: in more funds, more training, more time off.

By the standards of honest, if unorthodox, accounting, government workers don't pay taxes, but are paid out of taxes. In other words, they pay taxes out of money confiscated from taxpayers, who, in turn, pay taxes twice: on their own income and on the income of members of the bureaucracy. At the very least, this should disqualify state workers from voting.

The free flow of people across borders is not to be confused with the free flow of goods across borders. Free trade is a positive-sum game. Contrary to illegal immigration, it is always invited, consensual and hence mutually beneficial to the parties involved.

If for harming himself a man forfeits his freedom, then he is not free at all.

Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn.

A depraved culture supports a depraved politics and vice versa.

Incarcerating people for their [drug] consumption choices has the consistency of arresting a survivor of suicide for attempted murder.

Liberals can always be trusted to see God in Mumia Abu-Jamal and the devil in the Pope.

Rights give rise to legal claims. Ultimately, the more rights animals are granted, the greater the legal lien exercised on their behalf against the liberty and property of people.

Thus evidence that contradicts the global warming theory, climate Chicken Littles enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory; every permutation in weather patterns — warm or cold — is said to be a consequence of that warming or proof of it.

The proposition that economist Ludwig von Mises was a feminist is an apodictic impossibility.

Antitrust laws ought to be deployed, not against business, but to bust this two-party monopoly, which subverts competition in government and rewards the colluding quislings with sinecures in perpetuity.

A brave nation fights only because it must; a cowardly nation fights because it can.

Like environmentalists, politicians generally privilege flora and fauna over folks. (NIMBYs excepted. Senator Edward Kennedy is a not-in-my-backyard environmentalist: he opposes wind farms in Nantucket Sound, offshore from his Hyannis Port compound.)

But public works, economic protectionism, cheap money, "deficit-financed government spending," and "the animal spirits of the spendthrift in the service of boosting "consumption demand"... Doesn't Keynesianism simply appeal to the worst in human nature?

The rights to life, liberty and property were not meant to be subject to the vagaries of majority rule.

Dance, in general, has become more atavistic than artistic.

The much-maligned price system works not only to secure supply but to conserve. [...] Profits and prices are the street signs of the economy. Only fools flout them.

Certain bedrock principles - arguably a true conservative mindset - dictate a respect for life. A life-conserving sensibility means that guns are meant for self-defense, not for needless killing. [...] This gun owner is no gun nut; but a right-to-self-defense fanatic.

The Big-Media collective, however, is slow, stupid and shackled by ideology. Reality must bite them before they’ll recognize it, much less report it.

American media seem to color events by refracting them through a sickeningly sentimental prism. Their efforts to create reality on the ground — instead of reporting on it — notwithstanding, here's what we know about the inchoate Egyptian uprising: the movement's members hated their ruler and did what was necessary to be rid of him.

The nice men in periwigs who came up with the Fourth Amendment were recklessly naive to imagine that branches of a government, each of whose power is enhanced when the power of the other branches grows, would serve to check one another.

Chinese mercantilism is not free trade, but it is far better than American militarism.

Quotas are a perfectly logical, if diabolical, extension of the regulation of private property courtesy of the Civil Rights Act, whereby in an attempt to shape American society in politically pleasing ways, people have been coerced into liking, hiring or renting against their will or better judgment.

Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa, is now its dust bowl.

Like environmentalists, politicians generally privilege flora and fauna over folks.

He who saves you from war is better than he who sends you to war.

Barack the boy was raised by his white maternal grandparents; his Kenyan father abandoned him. The qualities Americans appeared to find universally appealing in the ambitious, affable Obama - his confidence and calm, and his commitment to community and kin, education and excellence - these came from Kansas, not Kenya.

Cognitive consonance is what writing in the Age of the idiot is all about. The key to success in the scribbling profession is to strike the right balance of mediocrity in writing and thinking, which invariably entails echoing one of two party lines, poorly.

What is more obscene: the idea that one can apologize for the hubris and deceit that is Obama and his health care, or the actual need some have for an apology from an entity so evil that he would toy with the lives of millions as though they were insects and he God? This is hard to tell.

Big media are all about the angle, the spin. Look to the overarching theme that runs through each and every news story. Be hip to the meta-narrative peddled.

Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.

Prosperity and penury do not turn on gyno-centric and gay matters. But leftist statists and libertarians of the left place these wedge issues at the forefront of the fight for freedom. [...] Every bit as bad as liberals, "libertarian" political operators are prepared to shed political blood over any imagined sign of bigotry.

Revive the value of seasoned, stoical masculinity in education. Men in authority are now a threatened minority. Again, and in defense of the pack that piled on Klein, America’s progressive schools are overrun by ineffectual females.

Because of the oil-and-water relationship governments have cultivated between ethics and political economy, speaking in plain terms - spelling it out as it is - as become foreign to the public. So here goes: When government sports a surplus, this implies that the political pickpockets have stolen more funds than they can possibly dream of spending. The property is not theirs to keep! Conversely, when deficits are reported, this means that the kleptomaniacs have not been able to steal sufficient funds to cover their profligacy.

Socialism is humanity's second nature. All politicians do is turn human vice into votes.

The strength of ideas rests on their relationship to reality. MacKinnon’s unrealistic fulminations against a phantom patriarchy exist in the arid arena of pure thought.

The great Roman statesman Cicero observed that, 'Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.' In our ignorance of the values that form part of our history and heritage, we Americans have become perpetual children.

Adding an overarching tier of tyrants - the EU - to European governments has benefited Europeans as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man.

Government commissions are where accountability goes to die.

Whether arrived at through reason or revelation, natural law is the highest law known to man. It is anchored in the very existential nature of man and is therefore a priori just.

The National Education Association is the al-Qaida of education.

If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, men would have long-since priced themselves out of the market.

The Delphic oracles of the disease theory of delinquency (the "experts") have slapped all manner of misconduct with diagnostic labels... The arsonist has ”pyromania,” the thief is inflicted with ”kleptomania,” and Bill Clinton is not promiscuous, but a ”sex-addict."

Christianity in our country is a lot like what the Ducksters profess. No longer doctrinaire or demanding, the mishmash of pop-religion practiced in churches across America is an extension of the therapeutic culture: festooned with feelings, mostly misdirected. Untempered by intelligent interpretation of scripture... American pop-theology: light on doctrine, heavy on hellfire and damnation.

A propagandized population has a hard time choosing worthy heroes. It is high time Americans celebrate the Anti-Federalists, for they were correct in predicting the fate of freedom after Philadelphia.

The end result of positively reinforcing bad behavior is that you get more of it. The culmination of a failure to punish predators is a debased, dissolute, slum-dog society in which, by legal decree, the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper.

B.B. King is no match for Johann Sebastian Bach.

Like or dislike her, the British Queen is harmless. Her role is purely ceremonial. Conversely, life and death are in the hands of the monarch who sits in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

There are just too many Americans grubbing for free stuff and a preponderance of Republicans eager to parcel it out in exchange for power.

The only kind of marriage liberals had ever glorified is the gay kind. But thanks to Michael Schiavo, the sanctity of marriage is fast becoming a liberal sacrament, with the proviso it has to involve 'mercy killing.' It took Michael Schiavo's devoted efforts to starve and dehydrate his wife to restore liberal faith in the institution.

Libya is a war of the womb. A product of the romantic minds of women who fantasize about an Arab awakening. It is estrogen-driven paternalism on steroids.

The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports the same inherent malignancies and perverse incentives of government, down to the racial-spoils system.

Still - and for all Obama's heavy hinting to the contrary - Islam has no "human rights." The ideas of individual rights and the dignity of man are distinctly Western, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. And while dialogue is dignified; dhimmitude is not, even if it achieves a desired, if temporary, effect.

Demographics need not be destiny. The waning West became what it is not by out-breeding the undeveloped world. We were once great not because of huge numbers, but due to human capital - people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy.

A silly society is a youth-obsessed society: To the Chinese, who appreciate the value of experience, the greater the ratio in a team of grey 'hairs and no-hairs' to 'black hairs' the faster and better a task will be completed. The opposite assumption obtains in the youth-obsessed U.S.

Mistaking Palestinian military weakness for moral innocence seems to further amplify the inattention of journalists to the culture of lies.

...the West has its share of liars and poseurs, the ablest of whom congregate in government.