(From the They Said It section in Volume 20, No. 2 of the Liberator Online. Subscribe here!)
THE ENDLESS WAR: “The [Afghanistan] war thus far has lasted as long as U.S. 
participation in World War II plus U.S. participation in World War I, plus the Korean War, plus the Spanish-American War, plus the full length of the U.S. war in the Philippines, combined with the whole duration of the Mexican-American War.” — author David Swanson, “Renaming Afghan War, Renaming Murder,” DavidSwanson.org, December 29, 2014.
FREE SPEECH HYPOCRITES:
“The big French free-speech march was led by such ‘world leaders’ as Hollande, Cameron, Merkel, and Netanyahu, all of whom enthusiastically jail people for thought crimes expressed in speech or print.” — Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., “No Irony in Paris,” LewRockwell.com blog, January 11, 2015.
ABOLISH THE UN-AMERICAN CIA: “The CIA should be abolished. … The CIA has made Americans less safe. … It will never accept accountability for its actions — including torture, kidnappings, and extrajudicial killings — because it salutes the motto that the ends justify the means, that savagery is justified to defeat perceived savages. …The CIA is un-American. It sneers at our nation’s signature creed that it is better to risk being the victim of injustice than to be complicit in it. …abolishing the C.I.A. would make Americans safer and their liberties more secure.” — Bruce Fein, constitutional scholar and Associate Deputy Attorney General under President Reagan, “It’s time to abolish the CIA,” Washington Times, December 31, 2014.
PLEASE, NO NEW GAS TAX: “Gas tax supporters say that it is time to raise the tax because it has not been raised in two decades. What they leave out of the story is that the gas tax rate more than quadrupled between 1982 and 1994 from 4 cents per gallon to 18.4 cents… Thus, looking at the whole period since 1982, federal gas tax revenues have risen at a robust annual average rate of 6.1 percent (based on Tax Foundation data). So, again, we have a spending crisis, not a funding crisis.”— Chris Edwards, Cato Institute, “Highways and the Federal Gas Tax,” Jan. 10, 2015.
WE TAKE MAGIC FOR GRANTED: “The aggregate effect of competitive capitalism is indistinguishable from magic, but we are so used to its bounty that we never stop to notice that no king of old ever enjoyed quarters so comfortable as those found in a Holiday Inn Express, that Andrew Carnegie never had a car as good as a Honda Civic, that Akhenaten never enjoyed such wealth as is found in a Walmart Supercenter. The irony is that capitalism has achieved through choice and cooperation what the old reds thought they were going to do with bayonets and gulags: It has recruited the most powerful and significant parts of the world’s capital structure into the service of ordinary people. And it would do so to an even greater degree if self-interested politicians… would get out of the way. — Kevin Williamson, “McDonald’s is Microsoft,” National Review Online, December 29, 2014. (Hat Tip to Mark Perry, Carpe Diem blog.)
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