Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency instead of letting campus barbarians run amok?
One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be and how dangerous it is to trust them.
Unbounded morality ultimately becomes counterproductive even in terms of the same moral principles being sought. The law of diminishing returns applies to morality.
The principles applied in economic processes are general social principles.
We need laws written by people who have confronted life in the real world not in the sheltered world of trust fund recipients of the insulated cocoon of academia.
The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.
There are no dead-end jobs. There are no dead-end jobs. There are only dead-end people. Our current social philosophy and the welfare state apparatus based on it are creating more dead-end people.
Apparently the only people who are supposed to be responsible are the taxpayers - and they are increasingly made responsible for other people's irresponsibility.
Tariffs that save jobs in the steel industry mean higher steel prices which in turn means fewer sales of American steel products around the world and losses of far more jobs than are saved.
Social Engineering - The art of replacing what works with what sounds good.
There is no talent so ardently supported nor generously rewarded as the ability to convince parasites they are victims.
All statements are true if you are free to redefine their terms.
Wise men wrote the Constitution but clever judges have been destroying it bit by bit turning it into an instrument of arbitrary judicial power instead of a limitation on all government power.
All the political angst and moral melodrama about getting 'the rich' to pay 'their fair share' is part of a big charade. This is not about economics it is about politics.
You may scoff at the Tooth Fairy if you like. But the Tooth Fairy's approach has gotten more politicians elected than any economist's analysis.
Economic policies need to be analyzed in terms of the incentives they create rather than the hopes that inspired them.
A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas.
Force is the antithesis of freedom but force must be used if only to defend against other force.
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
There are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously.
While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms at the social level it is often a claim- or arrogation- of power to stifle the autonomy of others.
Nobody would put as little thought and effort into buying an automobile as they put into deciding who to elect as President of the United States.
Although I am ready to defend what I have said many people expect me to defend what others have attributed to me.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.
Government restrictions are attractive to people who want to impose their pet notions without having to count the costs.
Some full professors could more accurately be described as empty professors.
What is called 'capitalism' might more accurately be called consumerism. It is the consumers who call the tune and those capitalists who want to remain capitalists have to learn to dance to it.
Actually lowering the cost of insurance would be accomplished by such things as making it harder for lawyers to win frivolous lawsuits against insurance companies.
One undeniable accomplishment of Bill Clinton's presidency was that it kept Jimmy Carter from being the worst U.S. president in history.
Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.
The key fallacy of so called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law abiding citizens while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.
A recent poll shows that a majority of blacks whites Asians and Hispanics do not think the Census should be classifying people as black white Asian and Hispanic.
Many bad policies are simply good policies taken too far.
Asking liberals where wages and prices come from is like asking six-year-olds where babies come from.
Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.
A shortage is a sign that somebody is keeping the price artificially lower than it would be if supply and demand were allowed to operate freely.
Talkers are usually more articulate than doers since talk is their specialty.
People who refuse to accept unpleasant truths have no right to complain about politicians who lie to them. What other kind of candidates would such people elect?
Life in general has never been even close to fair so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.
The Congressional Budget Office has been embarrassed repeatedly by making projections based on the assumption that tax revenues and tax rates move in the same direction.
Liberals seem to assume that if you don't believe in their particular political solutions then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help.
The economic disasters of socialism and communism come from assuming a blanket superiority of those who want to run a whole economy.
The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.
Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos.
Many people including some conservatives have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.
Contrary to the vision of the left it was the free market which produced affordable housing - before government intervention made housing unaffordable.
Study after study not only here but in other countries show that the most affordable housing is where there has been the least government interference with the market - contrary to rhetoric.
How are children supposed to learn to act like adults when so much of what they see on television shows adults acting like children?
Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
In a democracy we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.
Although the big word on the left is 'compassion ' the big agenda on the left is dependency.
Too often the past has been twisted to fit the visions and agendas of the present.
Creating whole departments of ethnic gender and other 'studies' was part of the price of academic peace. All too often these 'studies' are about propaganda rather than serious education.
Central planning judicial activism and the nanny state all presume vastly more knowledge than any elite have ever possessed.
Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves 'progressives.' What arouses them are denunciations of social failures and accusations of wrong-doing.
Subsidies are a shell game not a net addition to national wealth.
The America that has flourished for more than two centuries is being quietly but steadily dismantled by the Obama administration.
The more adaptability exists for a given kind of decision the less risky it is to make plans for the future and therefore the more likely it is that more people will make more plans in such areas.
The welfare state shields people from the consequences of their own mistakes allowing irresponsibility to continue and to flourish among ever wider circles of people.
The only thing better than "hands-on" experience is hands-off experience - enough experience to understand that some things will turn out better if left alone.
As history has also shown especially in the twentieth century one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.
Freedom is unlikely to be lost all at once and openly. It is far more likely to be eroded away bit by bit amid glittering promises and expressions of noble ideals.
Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.
American society in recent years has been imitating behavior patterns that have produced negative - and sometimes catastrophic - consequences in many other countries around the world.
It's amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.
It is amazing how many people seem to think that the government exists to turn their prejudices into law.
It is amazing how many people think they are doing blacks a favor by exempting them from standards that others are expected to meet.
The freedom of America is the freedom to live your own life and take your own chances.
Nothing as mundane as mere evidence can be allowed to threaten a vision so deeply satisfying.
Envy is always referred to by its political alias 'social justice.
Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.
Sports are the reason I am out of shape. I watch them all on TV.
Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
Politics is largely the process of taking credit and putting the blame on others - regardless of what the facts may be.
There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words match the actual consequences of their deeds?
Although much of the media have their antennae out to pick up anything that might be construed as racism against blacks they resolutely ignore even the most blatant racism by blacks against others.
It would be very heard for example a basketball owner no matter how racist he was to try to operate without Blacks. It would be suicidal.
Over the generations black leaders have ranged from noble souls to shameless charlatans.
Sometimes it seems as if I have spent the first half of my life refusing to let white people define me and the second half refusing to let black people define me.
As a rule of thumb. Congressional legislation that is bipartisan is usually twice as bad as legislation that is partisan.
The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.
The real goal should be reduced government spending rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever rising tax rates to cover ever rising spending.
What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture - and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.
Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?
We might have been better off if the question of Obama's patriotism had been raised before he was first elected. Never should we ignore so many red flag warnings again.
There is no bigger waste of time than doing 90% of what is necessary.
Government bailouts are like potato chips: You can't stop with just one.
The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans or women and men but between talkers and doers.
How you treat the helpless is the real test of morality. Lots of people are flunking that test big time.
Ideological bigotry has become the norm on even our most prestigious campuses where students can go for years without reading or hearing anything that challenges the left vision.
Government cannot solve all our problems even in normal times much less during a catastrophe of nature that reminds man how little he is despite all his big talk.
Deception is one of the quickest ways to gain little things and lose big things.
Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.
Government's power to bully people who have broken no law is dangerous to all of us.
You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats
If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians the barbarians are going to win.
Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians who must be civilized before it is too late.
If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization then be prepared to accept barbarism.
Compassion is the use of public funds to buy votes
Senator John McCain could never convince me to vote for him. Only Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama can cause me to vote for McCain.
The desire of businessmen for profits is what drives prices down unless forcibly prevented from engaging in price competition usually by governmental activity.
Ronald Reagan had a vision of America...Barac k Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.
Mystical references to 'society' and its programs to 'help' may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means isputting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.
Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life's savings without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all.
Liberals are very broadminded: they are always willing to give careful consideration to both sides of the same side
People used to say "Ignorance is no excuse." Today ignorance is no problem. After all you have "a right to your own opinion" - and self-esteem to boot.
If you don't control the borders it doesn't matter what immigration laws you have.
Stupid people can cause problems but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.
Experience trumps brilliance.
Time was when people used to brag about how old they were - and I am old enough to remember it.
Immigration laws are the only laws that are discussed in terms of how to help people who break them.
A passionate commitment to social justice is no substitute for knowing what the hell you're talking about.
You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible.
The real minimum wage is zero.
The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.
Facts are not liberals' strong suit. Rhetoric is.
It doesn't matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.
The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.
Like a baseball game wars are not over till they are over. Wars don't run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.
Most variables can show either an upward or downward trend depending on the base year chosen.
The most basic question is not what is best but who shall decide what is best.
I'm always embarrassed when people say that I'm courageous. Soldiers are courageous. Policemen are courageous. Firemen are courageous. I just have a thick hide and disregard what silly people say.
In this era of political correctness some people seem unaware that being squeamish about words can mean being blind to realities.
It is so easy to be wrong-and to persist in being wrong-when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
Being willing to donate the taxpayers' money is not the same as being willing to put your own money where your mouth is.
The welfare state has always been judged by its good intentions rather than its bad results.
If you truly believe in the brotherhood of man then you must believe that blacks are just as capable of being racists as whites are.
To say that being non-judgmental is better than being judgmental is itself a judgment and therefore a violation of principle.
I am so old that I can remember when liberals were liberal - instead of being intolerant of anything and anybody that is not politically correct.
Some of the most vocal critics of the way things are being done are people who have done nothing themselves and whose only contributions to society are their complaints and moral exhibitionism.
There is nothing so bad that politics cannot make it worse.
There is nothing that politicians like better than handing out benefits to be paid for by someone else.
Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals but their real function is social to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights.
The law of diminishing returns means that even the most beneficial prinicple will become harmful if carried far enough.
One of the beauties of an economy coordinated by price movements is that nobody has to understand it in order for it to work.
You don't send people to prison on the basis of what other people imagine or on the basis of media sound bites like 'shooting an unarmed child ' when that 'child' was beating him bloody.
You need to be empathetic in your own personal life and we help our neighbors and our friends out who are struggling in our neighborhoods. But we don't make bad decisions based on empathy.
Anyone who does not understand the utter cynicism of politics does not understand politics.
Most of the founders of this country had day jobs for years. They were not career politicians. ... We need leaders with experience in the real world not experience in the phony world of politics.
Pedestrians never seem to realize that they are a threat to the safety of cars.
Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.
The whole idea of equal justice under law is completely incompatible with the idea of judges deciding cases according to "empathy".
All too often when liberals cite statistics they forget the statisticians' warning that correlation is not causation.
One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten.
Government central planning means over-riding other people's plans.
The political left has been weak on protecting society from criminals for more than two centuries.
People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.
People who identify themselves as conservatives donate money to charity more often than people who identify themselves as liberals. They donate more money and a higher percentage of their incomes.
All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least we should check such beliefs against facts.
Do countries with strong gun control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data.
Do all children have some inherent right to live in America if they have done nothing wrong? If not then why should the children of illegal immigrants have such a right?
What 'eminent domain' laws mean in practice is that politicians have a right to seize your property and turn it over to someone else in order to gain campaign contributions and win votes.
You need only visit campuses where whole departments feature soft courses preaching a sense of victimhood and resentment and see the consequences in racial and ethnic polarization on campus.
Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination.
Civilization is an enormous device for economizing knowledge .
What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.
Few professors would dare to publish research or teach a course debunking the claims made in various ethnic gender or other 'studies' courses.
No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce.
Right after liberal Democrats the most dangerous politicians are country club Republicans.
The idealism of the left is a very selfish idealism. In their war against 'the rich' and big business they don't care how much collateral damage there is to workers who end up end up unemployed.
Our schools and colleges are turning out people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.
Much of the self-righteous nonsense that abounds on so many subjects cannot stand up to three questions: (1) Compared to what? (2) At what cost? and (3) What are the hard facts?.
Compassion is good but politicians have turned compassion into the welfare state.
One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.
Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.
All that makes earlier times seem simpler is our ignorance of their complexities.
The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.
Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.
People who pride themselves on their "complexity" and deride others for being "simplistic" should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.
Everyone may be called "comrade " but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.
[Con] men have long known . . . that their job is not to convince skeptics but to enable the gullible to continue to believe what they want to believe.
All too often we do smart things only after exhausting every conceivable dumb thing we could have done.
It is bad enough that so many people believe things without any evidence. What is worse is that some people have no conception of evidence and regard facts as just someone else's opinion.
Economics is concerned with what emerges not what anyone intended.
The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.
The desire to order other people around and make them conform to one own's vision takes many forms.
Don't you get tired of seeing so many "non-conformists" with the same non-conformist look?
The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.
There are only two economists in Congress and hundreds of lawyers. Does that explain why the government is in such a mess?
Policies are judged by their consequences but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusaders feel.
When you want to help people you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself you tell them what they want to hear.
I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.
It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
Politeness and consideration for others is like investing pennies and getting dollars back.
The Constitution cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution.
To say the Constitution is living is to say that it's dead.
The demands of unbounded individualism need to be weighed in the light of inherent social constraints which can only change their form but cannot be eliminated without eliminating civilization.
If you want to get each individual's honest opinion you don't want that opinion to be influenced by others who are present much less allow a group to coordinate what they are going to say.
The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.
Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.
A friend from India told me that a countryman of his said: "I want to go to America. I want to see a country where poor people are fat.
Some of the people on death row today might not be there if the courts had not been so lenient on them when they were first offenders.
We know - or should know - what lies at the end of the road of racial polarization. A 'race card' is not something to play because race is a very dangerous political plaything.
Eternal vigilance is only part of the price of freedom. The maturity to live with imperfections is another crucial part of the price of freedom.
Global warming' is just the latest in a long line of hysterical crusades to which we seem to be increasingly susceptible.
The difference between a policy and a crusade is that a policy is judged by its results while a crusade is judged by how good it makes its crusaders feel.
The real culprits are those who created a system that makes it dangerous to work and safe to loaf.
Perhaps people who are gushing over the Obama Cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under Sharia law.
The curse of the intelligentsia is their ability to rationalize and re-define. Ordinary people lacking that gift are forced to face reality.
You do not need proof for what people want to believe.
Doing the right thing is fun. If nothing else it surprises people.
The talkers and writers resent being left on the sidelines by the doers.
Relevance is not something you can predict. It is something you discover after the fact.
When people get used to preferential treatment equal treatment seems like discrimination.
Any statistics can be extrapolated to the point where they show disaster.
One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before time and again.
In politics throwing the taxpayers' money at disasters is supposed to show your compassion. But robbing Peter to pay Paul is not compassion. It is politics.
There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young.
The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits - food stamps housing subsidies and the like - if their income goes up.
If politicians stopped meddling with things they don't understand there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either party advocates.
Any politician who starts shouting election-year demagoguery about the rich and the poor should be asked "What about the other 90 percent of the people?
How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?
The word 'racism' is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything - and demanding evidence makes you a 'racist.'
Neither the depth of despondency nor the height of euphoria tells you how long either will last.
An independent judiciary does not mean judges independent of the Constitution from which they derive their power or independent of the laws that they are sworn to uphold.
All justice is inherently social. Can someone on a desert island be either just or unjust?
As for gun control advocates I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightest dent in their thinking - or lack of thinking.
The inefficiency of political control of an economy has been demonstrated more often in more places and under more varied conditions than almost anything outside the realm of pure science.
Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.
The more people who are dependent on government handouts the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.
What is politically defined as economic planning is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by Government officials.
There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster you need people with high IQs.
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
Child poverty in the United States declined after the work requirement was put in there. People realized that they had to work and people went out and worked and they got off welfare.
Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.
All things are the same except for the differences and different except for the similarities.
Morality like other inputs into the social process follows the law of diminishing returns- meaning ultimately negative returns. People can be too moral.
Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution " the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.
In the long run the greatest weapon of mass destruction is stupidity.
However widespread the desire to be free that is wholly different from a desire to live in a society where others are free.
When you start off by telling those who disagree with you that they are not merely in error but in sin how much of a dialogue do you expect?
We donâ??t have faith that #freedom works. We have evidence.
Ideas are everywhere but knowledge is rare.
What exactly is your 'fair share' of what 'someone else' has worked for?
Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case it is usually at the expense of others. In other words it is the opposite of idealism.
If we become a people who are willing to give up our money and our freedom in exchange for rhetoric and promises then nothing can save us.
Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having their own racial or ethnic leaders to follow.
Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it hence race gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.
When government takes away options it is bound to make some people worse off even with intrinsicallly good intentions behind that government intervention.
An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground.
One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce subsidized those who refuse to produce and canonized those who complain.
Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left - which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study - are not likely to get much attention.
Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.
Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational "excellence " I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity.
What does 'economic justice' mean except that you want something that someone else produced without having to produce anything yourself in return?
Our economic problems worry me much less than our political solutions which have a far worse track record.
As an economist whenever I hear the word shortage I wait for the other shoe to drop. That other shoe is usually price control.
Lunches don't get free just because you don't see the prices on the menu. And economists don't get popular by reminding people of that.
Trade-offs have been with us ever since the late unpleasantness in the Garden of Eden.
Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.
People who think that they are being exploited should ask themselves whether they would be missed if they left or whether people would say: Good riddance?
The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert but for every fact there is not necessarily an equal and opposite fact.
I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.
The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected.
The reason so many problems do not get solved in Washington is that solving those problems is not the No. 1 priority: Re-election is.
American prosperity and American free enterprise are both highly unusual in the world and we should not overlook the possibility that the two are connected.
Since this is an era when many people are concerned about 'fairness' and 'social justice ' what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?
Envy plus rhetoric equals "social justice.".
If you believe in equal rights then what do "women's rights " "gay rights " etc. mean? Either they are redundant or they are violations of the principle of equal rights for all.
The whole notion that you can equalize opportunity in things that
The whole notion that you can equalize opportunity in things that matter is utopian.
Military pay has been allowed to lag behind to the point where career enlisted men with families to feed have been forced to resort to food stamps.
France has never gotten over the fact that it was once a great power and is now just a great nuisance.
Without a moral framework there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path of least resistance by others. Neither can sustain a free society.
Young people in general - and young women in particular - need to understand that they cannot retrieve in their forties the opportunities they threw away in their twenties.
Tolerating imperfections is the price of freedom.
The fashionable idiocy that haters must have justifications is one of those ideas that George Orwell said only an intellectual could believe -- because no one else could be such a fool.
Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.
People have a vested interest in promoting one set of polices rather than finding out what the truth is.
Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.
Few of the great tragedies of history were created by the village idiot and many by the village genius.
The great escape of our times is escape from personal responsibility for the consequences of one's own behavior.
Those government officials who want more power are not going to stop unless they get stopped.
High tax rates that people don't actually pay do not bring the government as much revenue as lower tax rates that they do pay.
Some people say that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. But the runaway taxes of our time are the price we pay for being gullible.
Wal-Mart has done more for poor people then any ten liberals at least nine of whom are almost guaranteed to hate Wal-Mart.
How much more of an injustice is it that people who work get more money than people who don't work?
History is the memory of a nation
People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.
What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?
It is a way to take people's wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.
If we spend our time with regrets over yesterday and worries over what might happen tomorrow we have no today in which to live.
Our national problems usually do not cause nearly as much harm as the solutions.
It is hard to read a newspaper or watch a television newscast without encountering someone who has come up with a new 'solution' to society's 'problems.'
I'm so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.
Let's face it most of us are not half as smart as we may sometimes think we are-- and for intellectuals not one-tenth as smart.
Intellectuals may like to think of themselves as people who "speak truth to power" but too often they are people who speak lies to gain power.
Intellect is not wisdom.
Too many policies programs and institutions are judged by what they are supposed to do rather than by what they actually do and the consequences of their actions.
The idea that money is corrupting innocent politicians would be laughable if it did not lead to such dangerous legislation...
Capitalism is not an 'ism.' It is closer to being the opposite of an 'ism ' because it is simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever economic transactions they can mutually agree to.
If a word means everything then in means nothing.
If you don't believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings just try raising children.
Credentialed ignorance is still ignorance.
Ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism rather than the petty tyranny it is.
The New York times' long-standing motto 'All the News That's Fit to Print ' should be changed to reflect today's reality: 'Manufacturing News to Fit an Ideology.'
People who talk incessantly about "change" are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.
Much of what sophisticates loftily refer to as the "complexityof the real world is in fact the inconsistency in their own minds.
President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before in many times and places around the world and have failed time and again.
Students are often in no position to judge 'relevance' until long after the fact.
You may have the right to live anyway you like but you don't have a right to have other people like it. Respect it or pay for it.
The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible only liars can satisfy.
Racism is not dead but it is on life support -- kept alive by politicians race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as 'racists'
In liberal logic if life is unfair then the answer is to turn more tax money over to politicians to spend in ways that will increase their chances of getting reelected.
The political mirage of something for nothing from leaders who 'care ' has ruined many a nation.
It is truly a triumph of rhetoric over reality when people can believe that going into politics is 'public service ' but that producing food shelter transportation or medical care is not.
In politics the truth is strictly optional and that also seems to be true in parts of the media.
Racism does not have a good track record. It's been tried out for a long time and you'd think by now we'd want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.
Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options
Reality is not optional.
If you have a right to respect that means other people don't have a right to their own opinions.
One of the most important skills for political success is the ability to make confident assertions of absurdities or lies.
...Politics is not about facts. It is about what politicians can get people to believe.
Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny it turns out that many of today's problems are a result of yesterday's solutions.
When all is said and done the Constitution of the United States is a set of words on a piece of paper. The only way that the Constitution can protect us is if we protect the Constitution.
I hate to think that someday Americans will be looking at the ruins of their cities and saying that this happened because their leaders were afraid of the word unilateral.
Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.
You have to have a sense of humor if you follow politics. Otherwise the sheer fraudulence of it all will get you down.
The left takes its vision seriously - more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep.
There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs.
The anointed don't like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy "solutionsthat get rid of the whole problem- at least in their imagination.
Too many people in Washington are full of themselves among other things that they are full of.
It doesnt matter what you do if you dont do what matters. If you do what matters it doesnt matter what you do.