It doesn’t matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.
People who pride themselves on their “complexity” and deride others for being “simplistic” should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.
There are only two ways of telling the complete truth–anonymously and posthumously.
What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.
Nothing is easier than to get peaceful people to renounce violence, even when they provide no concrete ways to prevent violence from others.
Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.
Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible.
What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?
Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on “income distribution,” the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.
No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.
What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don’t want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.
The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people’s money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.
As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.
Racism does not have a good track record. It’s been tried out for a long time and you’d think by now we’d want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.
It would be very heard, for example, a basketball owner, no matter how racist he was, to try to operate without Blacks. It would be suicidal.
Everyone may be called “comrade,” but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.
What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.
The government is indeed an institution, but “the market” is nothing more than an option for each individual to chose among numerous existing institutions, or to fashion new arrangements suited to his own situation and taste.
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
Liberals seem to assume that, if you don’t believe in their particular political solutions, then you don’t really care about the people that they claim to want to help.
Nothing is easier than to find some individuals—in any group—who share a given writer’s opinion, and to quote such individuals as if their views were typical.
If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.
Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be right—creating great resentment among the anointed, who feel themselves entitled to rewards for being articulate, politically active, and morally fervent.
When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.
If politicians stopped meddling with things they don’t understand, there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either party advocates.
As for gun control advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightest dent in their thinking – or lack of thinking.
One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.
Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.
Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson’s administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s brilliant ‘whiz kids’ tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.
The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.
The biggest and most deadly ‘tax’ rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits – food stamps, housing subsidies and the like – if their income goes up.
The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.
The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.
The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.
Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.
Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.
It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.
Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok?
People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.
I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals’ imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.
All the political angst and moral melodrama about getting ‘the rich’ to pay ‘their fair share’ is part of a big charade. This is not about economics, it is about politics.
The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.
Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.
Those who cry out that the government should ‘do something’ never even ask for data on what has actually happened when the government did something, compared to what actually happened when the government did nothing.
The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever rising tax rates to cover ever rising spending.
The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.
Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.
In liberal logic, if life is unfair then the answer is to turn more tax money over to politicians, to spend in ways that will increase their chances of getting reelected.
Too much of what is called ‘education’ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.
Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.
Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left – which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study – are not likely to get much attention.
Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other ‘studies’ was part of the price of academic peace. All too often, these ‘studies’ are about propaganda rather than serious education.
Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.
Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path of least resistance by others. Neither can sustain a free society.
It is hard to read a newspaper or watch a television newscast without encountering someone who has come up with a new ‘solution’ to society’s ‘problems.’