“…the argument against government in this case (and in most other cases) is not based on the IQ or goodness of the individuals that populate it. The argument is that even good people in groups make terrible decisions due to problems with their information and incentives.”
“The task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they know about what they imagine they can design.”
— F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
“Don’t expect to see much media criticism – even if it’s objective and deserved – of our infant Messiah president. The media has a lot invested into him and they unofficially hung the last shred of their validity on his success. It’s not to say that conservatives don’t want a successful president; we define success differently than liberals. Conservatives want the United States to be successful in foreign relations, we want a thriving economy, success in maintaining individual liberty, all the good stuff of which America is made. Conservatives don’t want to see plans to nationalize and thereby socialize the private sector because the very irony of such economic strategy is that it hasn’t been successful in a multitude of countries in which it’s been implemented.”
— Dana Loesch, Big Government
“Legislate how you will, establish universal suffrage, if you think proper, as a law which can never be broken. You are still as far as ever from equality. Political power has changed it shape but not its nature. The result of cutting it up into little bits is simply that the man who can sweep the greatest number of them into one heap will govern the rest. The strongest man in some form or other will always rule. If the government is a military one, the qualities which make a man a great soldier will make him a ruler. If the government is a monarchy, the qualities which kings value in counsellors, in generals, in administrators, will give power. In a pure democracy the ruling men will be the wirepullers and their friends. . . . Changes in the form of government alter the conditions of superiority much more than its nature.”
— James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894), Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873). Quoted from PP. 154-155 of the Liberty Classics Edition, 1993.
“Whatever may be the benefits of democracy, it also levies severe costs that render it a languid business. For the “wirepullers” need only satisfy an ignorant multitude, and this, Stephen feared, would lead to a debased and mediocre culture, one predicated on sordidness and vulgarity. In order to satisfy the unenlightened, these new rulers would extend government into the deepest recesses of the lives of individuals, willingly abandoning certain liberties along the way.”
— Professor Stuart D. Warner, Roosevelt University, 1992.
In 2009 Americans caught on to the machinations of that Triumvirate of wirepullers— Obama, Reid and Pelosi— and their friends in the state-run media. Let us hope that movement continues and intensifies in the year ahead.