Meat is Evil?

Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.

Lord Stern of Brentford (2009)

Doug Casey on Education

I fear that most of what kids get today, whether in grade school, high school, college, or post-grad, is not education. It’s training.

Doug Casey (2009)

Bill of Rights Cause

 ...one would not expect to find a Bill of Rights in Heaven; it would be an affront to God.

Walter E Williams (2009)

Copenhagen, Olympics and Obama

What has become of America, when Chicago can't steal an election?

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (2009)

Augustine and Business

It is not business, but businessmen who are evil.

St Augustine

The Late Scholastics

The Truth is His, the errors are mine

Alejandro A Chafuen in Faith and Liberty, The economic thought of the late scholastics

Adam Smith and Self Interest

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

Adam Smith - An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nation (1776)

Goldwater on the Right to Try

I was a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater in the 1964 campaign. During the campaign, I recall very clearly, there was a moment, at a conference to determine the campaign's "farm strategy," when a respected and very conservative senator arose to say, "Barry, you've got to make it clear that you believe that the American farmer has a right to a decent living."

Senator Goldwater replied, with the tact for which he is renowned, "But he doesn't have a right to it. Neither do I. We just have a right to try for it." And that was the end of that.

Karl Hess writing about Barry Goldwater, originally published in Playboy 1969 under the title The Death of Politics

Goldwater and Ideas

[antagonistic ideologies can] never be beaten by bullets, but only by better ideas.

Barry Goldwater

Tanks vs American Idol

If the tanks rolled down the streets on the same day the American Idol winner was named, you'd never even hear about the tanks.

- Unknown 'Wag' (2009)

Shadow

When a small man casts a long shadow the sunset is near.

Lin Yutang

Jefferson and the Right of Secession

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments to the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

- Thomas Jefferson (1801)

Jefferson and Taxation

To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.

Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval (1816)

Definitions:

• Profusion: Extravagence, Lavish expenditure