(From the Intellectual Ammunition section in Volume 19, No. 11 of the Liberator Online. Subscribe here!)
RAND PAUL ON WHY WE SHOULD MINIMIZE GOV’T:
“You want to minimize how much government we have because government frankly isn’t good at anything.” — Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) tweet, July 19, 2014.
P.J. O’ROURKE ON LEGISLATING PERSONAL MORALITY:
“Imagine trying to make the Ten Commandments into laws. There goes Hollywood Buddhism, representative art, golf on Sunday, the language I use during golf on Sunday, most sex, Wall Street, fibbing to escape the Tupperware party next door, and envying your boss’s Porsche. And we’d all be jailed for putting mom in the nursing home.” — P.J. O’Rourke, “Up To A Point: My Problem With People Who Agree With Me,” The Daily Beast, July 20, 2007.
BACK TO IRAQ:
“[T]roops — well, advisers — are going back to Iraq, six years after this president was elected on a promise to get us out of there.” — Nick Gillespie, “After Bipartisan Bush-Obama Blundering, Let’s Try a Libertarian Foreign Policy,” The Daily Beat, July 16, 2014.
GOV’T VS THE POOR:
“How do states harm poor people? Oh let me count the ways… patent and copyright laws, which impede competition, immigration restrictions, which lock people out of opportunities, licenses, which prevent people from entering the market, regulation that is often originated in rent seeking, the money monopoly, which helps large banks and currency manipulators, credit laws, which crush small banks through capitalization requirements, tariffs, which protect large companies from foreign competition, transportation, which helps big box corporations through highway subsidies, urban sprawl policies, which enrich construction companies, research subsidies, which hook the public on risky investments, limited liability laws that protect large corporations from lawsuits, labor laws that restrict the ability of unions to defend their workers, bailouts that directly redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich, eminent domain, which rewards land to political donors, a tax code that can be gamed by the wealthy, the military industrial complex that enriches weapons manufacturers, and more.” — Cory Massimino, “The Conscience of an Anarchist: A Review,” Center for a Stateless Society, May 30th, 2014.
UH-OH:
“According to a new study, the largest producer of oil is now the United States. So you know what that means — any day now we’ll be invading ourselves.” — David Letterman, July 11, 2014.
REAL BREAKING NEWS:
“They want to make it so the president can instantly 
interrupt TV broadcasts whenever there’s breaking news. Then Obama said, ‘And I mean REAL breaking news, not that CNN stuff.'” — Jimmy Fallon, July 15, 2014.
POWER OF THE PEN:
“House Speaker John Boehner is threatening to sue President Obama for using executive actions to create laws, instead of going through Congress first. Then Obama shrugged and made a new law that you can’t sue the president.” — Jimmy Fallon, July 7, 2014.
NOTED AND REQUOTED
LIBERTARIANISM:
“The fundamental axiom of libertarian theory is that no one may threaten or commit violence (‘aggress’) against another man’s person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another. In short, no violence may be employed against a non-aggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory.” — Murray Rothbard, from his classic 1963 essay “War, Peace and the State,” recently requoted by Sheldon Richman.
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