"We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose site of the dangers to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous and independent elections."
John Adams,Inaugural address, 1797
"Corruption, like a cancer ...eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue,integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, floppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole of society."
John Adams
Founding Father, 2nd President (1735-1826)
The Seductive Lure of Socialism
"Here I encounter the most popular fallacy of our times. It is not considered sufficient that the law should be just; it must be philanthropic. Nor is it sufficient that the law should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intelluctural, and moral self-improvement. Instead, it is demanded that the law should directly extend welfare, education, and morality throughout the nation.
This is the seductive lure of socialism. And I repeat again; these two uses of the law are in direct contradiction to each other. We must choose between them. A citizen cannot at the same time be free and not free.
Mr. de Lamartine once spoke to me thusly; "Your doctrine is only half of my program. You have stopped at liberty; I go on to fraternity." I answered him; "The second half of your program will destroy the first."
In fact, it is impossible for me to separate the word 'fraternity' from the word 'voluntary'. I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed, and thus justice be legally trampled underfoot.
Frederc Bastiat ( 1801-1850)
Folks, some things change, some things stay the same! dc
This is by Walter Trohan, 1970, CHICAGO TRIBUNE.
"It is a known fact that the policies of the Government today, whether it be republican or Democrat are closer to the 1932 platform of the Communist party then they are to eather of their own party platforms in that critical year."
And this was written in 1970, 40 years ago! And look where we are today! dc
This Clasic is by Thomas Jefferson:
"To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father's has aquired too much, in order to spare others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association--the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits aquired by it."
