The Like/Hate Thread

[Pinky]

On Capitalism, which is economic liberty and personal responsibility against the notion of collectivism:

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion. - Ed Burke

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose those too. - Maugham

Self-sufficiency... has three meanings. The first is taht one should not depend upon others for one's daily bread. The second is that one should have developed the power to acquire knowledge for oneself. The third is that a man should be able to rule himself, control his senses and his thoughts. - Bhave

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. - Pres. Eisenhower

Property is the fruit of labor -- is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is homeless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built. - Pres. Lincoln

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. - Pres. Jefferson

The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government. - Pres. Washington

I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as the law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts. - Pres. Reagan (his farewell speech following the end of the Cold War, implosion of the Red Menace, and collapse of the Berlin Wall during his terms of office)

That we have a president who so openly flirts with socialism after the hard-learned lessons of the failures of collectivism across the two previous centuries, and in the face of the principals that the US was founded on, is insane.