|
Adam Young (in 2004) - "Just as the republics of old died from foreign interventionism and the subsequent rise of domestic tyranny, so too is the American Republic laying to rest its noble heritage and its great potential. Today, under the current President’s promise of decades of foreign and domestic warfare, the centralized state is growing and growing, determined never to relinquish its hold on its foreign possessions and on the individual American and his hopes and dreams for a free and prosperous life."
Robert P. Murphy (in 2004) - "Politicians may break moral laws, but they can't evade economic ones: If they send a man to the moon (or build a new stadium), consumers necessarily must curtail their enjoyments of other goods."
Paul Riechkhoff (in 2004) - "That's the most basic tool a soldier needs on the battlefield--a reason to be there. When you can't articulate that in one sentence, it starts to affect morale. You can only bullshit people for so long."
Steven Latulippe (in 2004) - "Part of the messiah complex that haunts our rulers’ psyche is the idea that our government is omnipotent. Listening to the debates, it quickly became clear to me that our leaders believe that literally everything is achievable by our government. The feds now hold that every imaginable issue, both domestic and foreign, can be addressed and perfected by the actions of Washington. They acknowledge literally no limitations on that power. Even the suggestion of practical limits draws angry retorts of "defeatism" and "lack of imagination and willpower." Despite repeated failures, from the war on drugs to the ongoing basket-case of our federalized public schools, our politicos persist in this grand delusion."
Sean Corrigan (in 2004) - "Let’s take a glimpse at how Rome and her history can give us a reaffirmation of our unshaken belief in the ability of Everyman, acting as a free individual, to repair all the damage ever done by history’s tyrants and their tax gatherers. "
Mogambo Guru (in 2004) - "The United States, for all its "robust" characteristics, is now on the hook for an estimated $60-74 trillion dollars in discounted present-value dollars, representing both present and future liabilities. This huge bill, which is already bigger than seven times the entire annual gross domestic product of the entire nation and is indeed over twice as large as all the goods and services produced by every nation on the whole freaking planet, is, and will be for the rest of your life, coming due and payable and, even worse, getting bigger and bigger. And no matter how young you are, there will never be a time in your life when you will not be paying this bill that has been run up. And you are going to pay every dime of that bill, either by suffering higher taxes or by suffering crippling, ruinous inflation. There is no other way, because if there were, then someone along the way through the last 5,000 years of economics history would have thought of it. So all that crap about a "robust" economy is just that: crap. It has been bought, but not yet paid for."
Henry Hazlitt (1894-1993) - "If the welfarist-socialist-inflationist- trend of recent years continues in this country, the outlook is dark. It is a prospect of mounting taxation, snowballing expenditures, chronic deficits, a budget out of control, an accelerating rate of inflation of the kind endemic in Latin America (at least for the last generation), a collapse of the dollar, increasing world currency chaos, and more and more ruthless price, wage, and exchange controls, leading toward a regimented economy and dictatorship. And if this trend is interrupted temporarily, it may be by riots, assassinations, and a breakdown of law and order.
"
Anonymous - "An economic forecaster is like a cross-eyed javelin thrower; they don't win many accuracy contests, but they sure keep the crowd's attention."
Frank Chodorov (1887-1966) - "The premise is that economic freedom is the necessary result of political freedom, while all the evidence of history and of logic points to the opposite. Political freedom is quite impossible where the right of ownership is abolished; and where the right of property is respected political freedom follows as a matter of course."
Alvin Lowi, Jr (in 2004) - "Politics subordinates the peaceful public province of the competitive marketplace to overweening government by selected politicians, their bureaucratic minions, client factions and other idle busy-bodies who subsist on extractions from and impositions on producers by force, threat of force or defamation."
Mark Reynolds (in 2004) - "If there where no controlling external force, known more commonly as 'government,' if I, as an individual, living here on God's green earth, did a particular act WITHOUT damaging someone else's life, liberty or property, would my act be lawful to do? If my answer is YES, then it is OK to do the particular act, even in the face of man made governments."
Michael Badnarik (in 2004) - "The draft is nothing more than the government stealing services from its citizens because it does not want to pay a market rate for them. "
Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) - "Until we begin to inquire: who is 'society?' Where is it? What are its identifiable attributes? Whenever someone begins to talk about 'society' or 'society's' interest coming before 'mere individuals and their interest,' a good operative rule is: guard your pocketbook. And guard yourself! Because behind the facade of 'society,' there is always a group of power-hungry doctrinaires and exploiters, ready to take your money and to order your actions and your life. For, somehow, they 'are' society!"
Lew Rockwell (in 2004) - "In the world of ideas, a vigorous debate is taking place about the extent to which private enterprise is capable of providing security, not only as a supplement but as a full replacement for state-provided security."
Dorothy Anne Seese (in 2004) - "The terms 'super power' and 'land of the free' are mutually exclusive in a society where might makes right has replace the rule of law, and that is what has happened in the United States since 1965, the year the 'Great Society' was introduced to American and socialist control began to replace individual freedom."
Paul Craig Roberts (in 2004) - "How did the US Congress, the opposition party, the news media, and the US public let the Bush administration start a war based on phony documents?"
Alvin Lowi, Jr (in 2004) - "How can Machiavellian political processes be trusted to govern a progressive human population when history records only failure?"
Uri Avnery (in 2004) - "Many of the most heinous crimes in human history were committed in the name of religion. The Book of Joshua says that God commanded the Children of Israel to commit a general ethnic cleansing in the land of Canann. The crusaders carried out horrible massacres in this country (Israel - and against the Jews on the way here) while shouting 'Deus le volt!' (God wills it). Three years ago today, Osama bin Laden sent his people to kill thousands in the New York Twin Towers in the name of Allah. May God protect us from those who would speak in His name."
Auberon Herbert (1838-1906) - "Dynamite (terrorism) is not opposed to government; it is, on the contrary, government in its most intensified and concentrated form. . . . It is government in a nutshell, government stripped, as some of us aver, of all its dearly beloved fictions, ballot boxes, political parties, House of Commons oratory and all the rest of it."
Jeff Snyder (in 2004) - "The claimed right of a majority to govern does not rest on any moral foundation, but on power."
Auberon Herbert (1838-1906) - "You may give your own rights away, but you cannot possibly give away, however generous your mood, the rights of your fellow-man. If, however, you persist in attributing such powers to the delegated body, please say exactly whence – from what human or superhuman source – it has drawn them, since it is plain that it has not drawn them from the individuals. Nor is it possible to escape from the difficulty by denying human rights, and declaring that rights are only imaginary things, for, in that case, government itself has no rights. By such sweeping and reckless denial of rights you make of government the very outlaw of outlaws. All that it has done or is doing would then be absolutely void of moral foundations. All its regulations, its takings its compulsions, would then simply rest upon what is convenient in the opinions of some persons, and what could be enforced by their superior strength; and, therefore, of course, it would be liable, as the mere product of convenience, to be removed in any way, or by any weapon, that is convenient and superior to itself in strength"
Jeff Snyder (in 2004) - "Herbert’s key insight is that, because government rests on power, all claims to govern are simply contests of strength. Since government rests not on right but on power, government by its very nature invites contests of strength."
Auberon Herbert (1838-1906) - "But the moment that this truth -- that no moral foundations for unlimited and undefined power could by any intellectual ingenuity be discovered anywhere -- the moment that this truth was grasped in all its significance...., the moment that all rhetorical sophistries were swept aside, and it was seen that, morally speaking, three men had no better right to govern two men than two men to govern three, then at once it became open to any revolutionary section of the minority, who considered that war was to be met by war, and were not impeded by any moral scruples as regards the use of means, to equalize or reverse the conditions of power by finding some new agent which had "governing force" in it. This new agent was supplied by dynamite, and from that day it has become war – war between those who govern openly by majorities and those who govern secretly by dynamite."
Mike Rogers (in 2004) - "When you get right down to it, 'Sharing the wealth,' is in no uncertain terms, Communism. Think about it: What else could you possibly call it? What else could you call penalizing people with money to pay for people who don't have it? And you've got it America; it didn't come from Russia either. It came straight to you from Washington D.C. and The Communist Party of the United States of America; or as Americans would say, 'Democrats or Republicans' have brought it to you and are laying it right in your lap and you are eating it up."
Bill Bonner (in 2004) - "An individual knows he cannot kill another individual without risking jail.....Or hell. But put him in a crowd, and he's ready to declare war on people he's never met for reasons he's never understood."
James Madison (1751-1836) - "With respect to the words 'general welfare,' I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators."
Bill Bonner (in 2004) - "An individual knows he cannot spend his way to wealth. But put him in a group, and he's ready to believe that "consumer spending" can make the whole society rich."
James Madison (1751-1836) - "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which grants a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
Bill Bonner (in 2004) - "A man on his own knows that he is best advised to leave his dumbbell neighbors alone. But let him join a political party, and he fantasizes that he has the right and the power to tell everyone on the block what to do. "
William Anderson (in 2004) - "The Soviet Union, supposedly the mightiest police state the plane had ever seen, collapsed because it could not stand up to the impeccable logic of Ludwig von Mises. Likewise, the logic of Mises condemns the welfare-warfare state that now governs us. No matter what the politicians may say when speaking before their favored delegates, this unwieldy apparatus of governance cannot and will not stand forever, as it will fall of its own weight. "
Ivan Eland (in 2004) - "If President Bush and his security apparatus really want to make us safer, they should use the alert system differently. Every time the U.S. government meddles overseas--for example, needlessly invading the Islamic country du jour--and enlarges the bull's eye already painted on us here at home, the alert level should be raised a notch. Thus, in this election year, voters would have a better idea of exactly how safe government actions overseas were making all of us here at home."
Mark Weisbrot (in 2004) - "The post-9/11 age of American empire will close not with a bang but a whimper, suffocated by the laws of arithmetic, the constraints of public financing, and the limits of foreign borrowing. What remains to be determined is how much the U.S. will pay--in lost and ruined lives, as well as bills for future generations--and how many enemies it will make throughout the world, before coming to grips with reality."
Gary North (in 2004) - "The war on terrorism is being brought to us by the same high-efficiency organization that has waged the war on drugs for five decades. We should expect similar results."
Karen Kwiatkowski (in 2004) - "We have an incompetent, bankrupt, obese federal government bureaucracy led by ignoramuses who dream of empire, with continued zero accountability to either the facts on the ground or to the people who pay for it all."
George Bush (in 2004) - "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
Wes Alexander (in 2004) - "Don't you wish you had a job that accrued more authority, paid higher wages, and demanded less responsibility the more you screwed up! Monopoly government thrives on failure. "
William Anderson (in 2004) - "The Soviet Union, supposedly the mightiest police state the planet had ever seen, collapsed because it could not stand up to the impeccable logic of Ludwig von Mises. Likewise, the logic of Mises condemns the welfare-warfare state that now governs us. No matter what the politicians may say when speaking before their favored delegates, this unwieldy apparatus of governance cannot and will not stand forever, as it will fall of its own weight."
Wes Alexander (in 2004) - "Government spends our money like a madman, borrows from the future, devaluates the money we manage to keep, and STILL has deficits bigger than the closest planet! That's not even counting things like war, rebuilding countries we just destroyed, Social Security, and the Post Office; which are all OFF BUDGET! I tried to persuade Kenneth Lay at Enron to just claim OFF BUDGET. I tried to tell my wife that my new monster digital TV and surround sound was OFF THE STINKING BUDGET! "
Gary North (in 2004) - "The free market is a system for allocating responsibility. It is rarely seen this way, but that is what it is."
Alexis De Tocqueville (1805-1859) - "Trade is the natural enemy of all violent passions. Trade loves moderation, delights in compromise, and is most careful to avoid anger. It is patient, supple, and insinuating....it leads them to want to manage their own affairs and teaches them how to succeed therein. Hence it makes them inclined to liberty but disinclined to revolution."
Eric Englund (in 2004) - "Democracy does not pave the way for peace, prosperity, and civility. Democracy endangers private property rights and therefore liberty itself."
James Madison (1751-1836) - "Democracy will envy all, contend with all, endeavor to pull down all, and when by chance it happens to get the upper hand for a short time, it will be revengeful, bloody, and cruel."
Richard Whately (1787-1863) - "The best way is to leave all laborers and employers, as well as all other sellers and buyers, free to ask and to offer what they think fit."
Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) - "There is no justification for public interference with purely private concerns."
Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) - "The property of the people belongs to the people. To take it from them by taxation cannot be justified except by urgent public necessity. Unless this principle be recognized, our country is no longer secure, our people no longer free. A government which requires of the people the contribution of the bulk of their substance and rewards cannot be classed as a free government... "
Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) - "Unfortunately the Federal Government has strayed far afield from its legitimate business. It has trespassed upon fields where there should be no trespass. If we could confine our Federal expenditures to the legitimate obligations and functions of the Federal Government, a material reduction would be apparent. But far more important than this would be its effect upon the fabric of our constitutional form of government, which tends to be gradually weakened and undermined by this encroachment."
Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) - "You can display no greater wisdom than by resisting proposals for needless legislation. It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones."
Joe Sobran (in 2004) - "People who never dream of robbing their neighbors at gunpoint find it acceptable to have a government bureaucracy do the the dirty work."
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) - "Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical."
Albert Jay Nock (1870-1947) - "Wherever economic exploitation has been for any reason either impracticable or unprofitable, the State has never come into existence; government has existed, but the State, never."
Albert Jay Nock (1870-1947) - "Based on the idea of natural rights, government secures those rights to the individual by strictly negative intervention, making justice costless and easy of access; and beyond that it does not go. The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing."
Albert Jay Nock (1870-1947) - "Take the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class."
Frank Chodorov (1887-1966) - "If we assume that the individual has an indisputable right to life, we must concede that he has a similar right to the enjoyment of the products of his labor. This we call a property right. The absolute right to property follows from the original right to life because one without the other is meaningless; the means to life must be identified with life itself. If the State has a prior right to the products of one’s labor, his right to existence is qualified. Aside from the fact that no such prior right can be established, except by declaring the State the author of all rights, our inclination (as shown in the effort to avoid paying taxes) is to reject this concept of priority. Our instinct is against it. We object to the taking of our property by organized society just as we do when a single unit of society commits the act. In the latter case we unhesitatingly call the act robbery, a malum in se. It is not the law which in the first instance defines robbery, it is an ethical principle, and this the law may violate but not supersede. If by the necessity of living we acquiesce to the force of law, if by long custom we lose sight of the immorality, has the principle been obliterated? Robbery is robbery, and no amount of words can make it anything else.
"
Marilyn vos Savant (in 1996) - "We are prone to elect people who say what we want to hear, thereby putting in leadership positions more people who seek votes simply as a means to power, and fewer people of great stature. And perhaps the greatest irony of all, then, is that with this system, the people who have the least economic success have the most influence on our economy."
Lew Rockwell (in 2004) - "Iraq has shown the world that power has limits. No government can rule by force of arms alone. No policy can be imposed on a country whose citizens are opposed to the policy. In the end, governments are nothing but small, well-armed minorities attempting to impose its will on everyone else. They can be held at bay and even overthrown if the people resist."
Marilyn vos Savant (in 1996) - "I didn't know whether to be amused or dismayed. I didn't just find a misleading statistic or pronouncement here and there, now and then. I found it (and still do) every day, in every way, throughout the most respected information sources in the country, but most especially from-no surprise-our government. This phenomenon isn't the exception. It's the rule."
George Washington (1732-1799) - "Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty."
Marilyn vos Savant (in 1996) - "Never before, in the history of this country, have citizens been so jerked around logically to the point where they have become incapable of making reasonable decisions. This has begun to evidence itself in incredible jury verdicts. By using every logical error known to mankind in an effort to further one or another special interest, we have begun to reap what we have sown--the seeds of intellectual weakness and mental disorder."
Russell Madden (in 2004) - "You might be a fascist if you believe that the proper way to decide whether a casino should be built in your hometown is to vote on the idea."
Butler Shaffer (in 2004) - "The state has institutionalized irresponsibility. It consistently lives beyond its financial means, creating debts that can ultimately be resolved only through repudiation; is a betrayer of promises, thus helping to erode the sanctity of contracts upon which any creative society must depend; and maintains an almost pathological commitment to lying. In order to advance its interests – and of those who control its apparatuses – the state encourages us to demand immediate benefits that will only be paid for much later, and by others."
Mogambo Guru (in 2004) - "I peer through the periscope of the Mogambo Bunker, and note that things just keep getting more and more weird. Holding gold in one hand and a powerful handgun in the other seems to calm me down. I am calming down. I am getting calmer and calmer. I am calm. I am perfectly calm. I can make it through another day."
Butler Shaffer (in 2004) - "The one factor that allows brute force to prevail, i.e., the willingness of men and women to subordinate themselves to the violence of others. Political systems are strong because we have chosen to be weak; the state is immune from responsibility for its actions because we choose to be irresponsible for our own lives and actions. "
Harry Browne (in 2004) - "Would you be willing to die to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq? If the answer is no, then anything you have to say about the world being a better place now - about collateral damage - about the glory of soldiers sacrificing their lives for their country - is meaningless. You're not willing to pay the price. You're like so many people who believe various government programs are wonderful - provided someone
else pays for them. "
George Bush (in 2004) - "The nice thing about being president is that I don’t have to answer to anyone, people have to answer to me."
Butler Shaffer (in 2004) - "The virus of collectivism insinuates itself into our lives long before men and women are beheaded or sent to gulags for the politically incorrect opinions. State collectivism does not begin at the point of a gun, but culminates there. Its origins are to be found in our attitudes about the independence of individuals who choose, for whatever their reason, to live outside prescribed herds."
John Tierney (in 2004) - "How did so many conservatives, who normally don't trust their government to run a public school down the street, come to believe that federal bureaucrats could transform an entire nation in the alien culture of the Middle East?"
Paul Craig Roberts (in 2004) - "When Bush says that torture is not indicative of American values, he is speaking of the old America, the America of restraint, the America that did not believe that the ends justify the means, a classically educated America that understood that hubris brings nemesis."
Hans-Herman Hoppe (in 2001) - "Democracy (majority rule) and private property are incompatible."
Sheldon Richman (in 2004) - "The American people have been conditioned for years to expect government to give them things that someone else will have to pay for. Republicans have found a way to do this without appearing to be socialists. Is this something to be proud of? The advocates of big government either don't recognize that plunder is at the heart of the state. Or they don't care."
Hans-Herman Hoppe (in 2001) - "There is near-universal agreement that democracy represents an advance over monarchy and is the cause of economic and moral progress. This interpretation is curious in light of the fact that democracy has been the fountainhead of every form of socialism."
Hans-Herman Hoppe (in 2001) - "The selection of government rulers by means of popular elections makes it essentially impossible for a harmless or decent person to ever rise to the top. Presidents and prime ministers come into their position as a result of their efficiency as morally uninhibited demagogues. Hence, democracy virtually assures that only dangerous men will rise to the top of government."
Gary North (in 2004) - "Politics could not function in a democracy without the votes of the terminally gullible. Terminally gullible voters are always in the hip pockets of whichever political party they belong to. People in a politician's hip pocket spend most of their lives being sat on."
Johannes Althusius (1557-1638) - "All power is limited by definite boundaries and laws. No power is absolute, infinite, unbridled, arbitrary, and lawless. Every power is bound to laws, right, and equity."
Gene Callahan (in 2004) - "The logic is flawless: when a private business accidentally kills 146 people, we need to increase the power of the government, an entity that deliberately kills millions."
Marine Staff Sgt Jimmy Massey (in 2004) - "Yes, I killed innocent people for our government. I feel like I've had a hand in some sort of evil lie at the hands of our government. I just feel embarrassed, ashamed about it."
Paul Hein (in 2004) - "The Fed's 'bills' enter circulation, indirectly as a loan. Interest is being paid on every one, in that it is being paid on the bank credit that 'bought' the bills. My homemade 20s and 50s, though, enter circulation interest-free. So who's the bigger crook: the 'legal' counterfeiter, or the do-it-yourselfer?"
Butler Shaffer (in 2004) - "The state, being grounded in a network of lies and contradictions held together by force, is always threatened by truth. "
Christopher Westley (in 2004) - "How great can the distance between rhetoric and policy become before people realize that the assertions of the Left and the Right are meaningless when both are used to serve the cause of Big Government? It is long past time for those who take liberty seriously to stop supporting officials simply because they perceive them as being relatively less statist in action than the competition. "
Joe Sobran (in 2004) "Many Americans see nothing wrong with servitude to the state-in the forms of military draft, limitless taxes, or what is now being touted as 'national service.' All these things presume that we belong to the state and must do whatever it demands of us."
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) - "I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilised."
Etienne de la Boetie (1530-1563) - "If we led our lives according to the ways intended by nature and the lessons taught by her, we should be intuitively obedient to our parents; later we should adopt reason as our guide and become slaves to nobody."
Harry Goslin (in 2004) - "Liberty is not something that must be paid for by spilling blood and expending treasure all over the globe. Liberty requires vigilance, yes, but never by government. No government has existed that did not intend to reduce its people to slavery, either by force or by the peoples own hand."
Bill Bonner (in 2004) - Speaking of politicians....."His works, if ever examined carefully, would almost always be found to be either irrelevant or actually deleterious. Wars, laws, intrigues, backstabbing, boondoggles, puffery, lies--what is a career in politics but a life ill spent?"
Harry Goslin (in 2004) - "The hand of tyranny is patient. It has strangled free people many times throughout history. At times, men have willingly placed the rope in the hands of the tyrant and served him faithfully while he tightened the noose around their necks. Americans are no different. They've just duped themselves into believing they are somehow immune to the forces of history. "
Lew Rockwell (in 2004) - "To understand the world being recreated before us, we must constantly keep this principle in our mind: trade based on ownership is always and everywhere mutually beneficial. Within the institution of trade--whether on the most local level or the global level--we find the key to peace, prosperity, and human flourishing."
Jacob G. Hornberger (in 2003) - "Should government be limited to protecting people from thieves or should it also have the power to assume the role of the thief? "
Frank Chodorov (1887-1966) - "The American tradition rests its case squarely on the premise that the human being is endowed with rights by his very existence; that is what makes him human. Hence, any political action which attempts to violate these rights violates his humanness, and thus becomes 'evil.' Putting it another way, any political action which disregards man's inalienable rights disregards God."
Jacob G. Hornberger (in 2003) - "By adopting the socialistic welfare state in the early part of the 20th century, the American people knowingly and deliberately embraced a way of life based on the notion that there's nothing morally wrong with taking money from one person in order to give to to another person, so long as the taking and redistribution are done through the political process, preferably democratically. "
Frank Chodorov (1887-1966) - "The (16th) amendment puts no limit on governmental confiscation. In short, when this amendment became part of the Constitution, in 1913, the absolute right of property in the United States was violated."
Frank Chodorov (1887-1966) - "Socialism, in all its forms, is that might is right."
Vin Suprynowicz (in 2004) - "The notion that the government is doing us a favor by looting as much as they deem necessary from our paychecks to feed, clothe and school the children of the drunken, the dissolute, the shiftless, the illegitimate and the criminal--spreading the wealth of the nation as evenly as possible, like spreading manure on a field--has a name. It's called 'socialism.'"
Frank Chodorov (1887-1966) - "Men work to satisfy their desires, not to pay taxes. There is no sense in keeping my barn full if the highwayman empties it regularly and I have no means of preventing him from so doing. "
Jacob G. Hornberger (in 2003) - "In fact, the moral corruption has become so pervasive that not only do Americans no longer consider the welfare-redistribution process to constitute stealing, they have convinced themselves that what they are doing is actually moral, compassionate, and benevolent. "
Frank Chodorov (1887-1966) - "In name, it was a tax reform. In point of fact, it was a revolution. For the Sixteenth Amendment corroded the American concept of natural rights; ultimately reduced the American citizen to a status of subject, so much so the he is not aware of it; enhanced Executive power to the point of reducing Congress to innocuity; and enabled the central government to bribe the states, once independent units, into subservience. No kingship in the history of the world ever exercised more power than our Presidency, or had more of the people's wealth at its disposal. We have retained the forms and phrases of a republic, but in reality we are living under an oligarchy, not of courtesans, but of bureaucrats."
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) |
