Friday, June 25, 2010

Bastiat Quote From "The Law"

"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.
We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain."

"The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else."

"Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place."

"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder."

"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race?" 

--Frederic Bastiat 

The Law







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http://www.rd.com/clean-jokes-and-laughs/11-funny-church-signs/article177226.html#slide

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Forbes magazine would list him as the seventh-richest man in the world in 1989.

Pablo was establishing a pattern of dealing with the authorities that would become his trademark.  It soon became known simply as plata o plomo.  One either accepted Pablo's plata (silver) or his plomo (lead).

He could not fathom Lara's behavior because he did not believe that anyone acted out of principle.

If Pablo was trying to craft some manifesto to relate his own struggle to that of Marxist heroes Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, he failed -- not because he lacked intelligence but because he lacked convictions.  His only cause, ultimately, was himself.

Beginning that summer, U.S. Army troops joined DEA agents and Bolivian police in raiding fifteen cocaine-processing labs in that country.

Cocaine was not Colombia's problem; it was the norteamericanos' problem.  And even if they did away with El Doctor, as the United States insisted, it was not going to curb the cocaine industry.

Killing Pablo would not end cocaine exports to the United States or even slow them down--everybody knew that....

Killing Pablo had not ended the cocaine industry; it had merely handed it off to new leaders.....

All in all, there was more cocaine available for sale in the United States at cheaper prices that year than ever before in history.  Indeed, throughout the remainder of the decade, cocaine prices in the United States gradually declined.  The bottom line was that regardless of the billions spent in the war on drugs, there was more than enough cocaine for everybody in America who wanted to buy it.



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"Never Forget, even for an instant, that the one and only reason anybody has for taking your gun away is to make you weaker than he is, so he can do something to you that you wouldn't allow him to do if you were equipped to prevent it. This goes for burglars, muggers, and rapists, and even more so for policemen, bureaucrats, and politicians." -- Alexander Hope, from the novel "Hope" by L. Neil Smith and Aaron Zelman

purchase "Hope" at Amazon.com


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