There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.
— Sam Walton (via freemarketliberal)
This plea comes from the bottom of my heart. Every friend of freedom, and I know you are one, must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence. A country in which shooting down unidentified planes “on suspicion” can be seriously considered as a drug-war tactic is not the kind of United States that either you or I want to hand on to future generations.
— Milton Friedman. (via libertarians)
(via libertarians)
It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (via coeus)
Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their “betters.
— Thomas Sowell
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
— H.L. Mencken
A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on.
— Mark Twain. (via ahistoryofquotes)
It is a curious anomaly. State power has an unbroken record of inability to do anything efficiently, economically, disinterestedly or honestly; yet when the slightest dissatisfaction arises over any exercise of social power, the aid of the agent least qualified to give aid is immediately called for. Does social power mismanage banking-practice in this-or-that special instance — then let the State, which never has shown itself able to keep its own finances from sinking promptly into the slough of misfeasance, wastefulness and corruption, intervene to “supervise” or “regulate” the whole body of banking-practice, or even take it over entire.
— Albert Jay Nock
There is no Left or Right - there is only freedom or tyranny. Everything else is an illusion, an obfuscation to keep you confused and silent as the world burns around you.
— Philip Brennan
(via libertarians)
Credit expansion cannot increase the supply of real goods. It merely brings about a rearrangement. It diverts capital investment away from the course prescribed by the state of economic wealth and market conditions. It causes production to pursue paths which it would not follow unless the economy were to acquire an increase in material goods. As a result, the upswing lacks a solid base. It is not real prosperity. It is illusory prosperity. It did not develop from an increase in economic wealth. Rather, it arose because the credit expansion created the illusion of such an increase. Sooner or later it must become apparent that this economic situation is built on sand.
— Ludwig von Mises
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
— H.L. Mencken
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.
— Thomas Sowell (via libertarians)
The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.
— Henry Steele Commager (via statehate)
Liberty is the most precious possession of all mankind. Food and water are nothing; clothing and shelter are luxuries. He who is free stands with his head held high, even if hungry, naked and homeless. I dedicate my own life, whatever may be left of it, to the cause of liberty—liberty for all men, everywhere.
—
Victor Hugo
Here, the French novelist and author of Les Misérables (1862) eloquently expresses what we’d today call the deontological libertarian argument: freedom for freedom’s sake.
(via whakahekeheke)
I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.
— William Ernest Henley
Here’s your enemy for this week, the government says. And some gullible Americans click their heels and salute – often without knowing who or even where the enemy of the week is.
— Charley Reese (h/t libertarians)
