Some classic quotes:

The America Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money. — Alexis de Tocqueville

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. — James Madison

A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader. — Samuel Adams

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. — John Stuart Mill

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap. — Ronald Reagan

I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts. — Ronald Reagan

“When the United States was formed in 1776, it took 19 people on the farm to produce enough food for 20 people. So most of the people had to spend their time and efforts on growing food. Today, it’s down to 1% or 2% to produce that food. Now just consider the vast amount of supposed unemployment that was produced by that. But there wasn’t really any unemployment produced. What happened was that people who had formerly been tied up working in agriculture were freed by technological developments and improvements to do something else. That enabled us to have a better standard of living and a more extensive range of products.” — Milton Friedman

“Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.” — Milton Friedman

“What drew me to conservatism years ago was the fact that it gave discipline a slightly higher status than virtue. This meant it could not be subverted by passing notions of the good. It could be above moral vanity. And so it made no special promises to me as a minority. It neglected me in every way except as a human being who wanted freedom. Until my encounter with conservatism I had only known the racial determinism of segregation on the one hand and of white liberalism on the other — two varieties of white supremacy in which I could only be dependent and inferior. The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity. … In a liberalism that wants to redeem the nation of its past, minorities can only be ciphers in white struggles of conscience.”  –Shelby Steele

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” — Adam Smith
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. — Winston Churchill

Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have. — Barry Goldwater

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. — Martin Luther King

Every measure which establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives to it an administrative form creates thereby a class unproductive and idle, living at the expense of the class which is industrious and given to work — Alexis de Tocqueville

Shelby Steele in today’s WSJ on Why the GOP Can’t Win With Minorities:

…This was the circumstance that opened a new formula for power in American politics: redemption. If you could at least seem to redeem America of its past sins, you could win enough moral authority to claim real political power. Lyndon Johnson devastated Barry Goldwater because — among other reasons — he seemed bent on redeeming America of its shameful racist past, while Goldwater’s puritanical libertarianism precluded his even supporting the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Johnson’s Great Society grandly advertised a new American racial innocence. If it utterly failed to “end poverty in our time,” it succeeded — through a great display of generosity toward minorities and the poor — in recovering enough moral authority to see the government through the inexorable challenges of the ’60s.

When redemption became a term of power, “redemptive liberalism” was born — a new activist liberalism that gave itself a “redemptive” profile by focusing on social engineering rather than liberalism’s classic focus on individual freedom. In the ’60s there was no time to allow individual freedom to render up the social good. Redemptive liberalism would proactively engineer the good. Name a good like “integration,” and then engineer it into being through a draconian regimen of school busing. If the busing did profound damage to public education in America, it gave liberals the right to say, “At least we did something!” In other words, we are activists against America’s old sin of segregation. Activism is moral authority in redemptive liberalism.

But conservatism sees moral authority more in a discipline of principles than in activism. It sees ideas of the good like “diversity” as mere pretext for the social engineering that always leads to unintended and oppressive consequences. Conservatism would enforce the principles that ensure individual freedom, and then allow “the good” to happen by “invisible hand.”

And here is conservatism’s great problem with minorities. In an era when even failed moral activism is redemptive — and thus a source of moral authority and power — conservatism stands flat-footed with only discipline to offer. It has only an invisible hand to compete with the activism of the left. So conservatism has no way to show itself redeemed of America’s bigoted past, no way like the Great Society to engineer a grand display of its innocence, and no way to show deference to minorities for the oppression they endured. Thus it seems to be in league with that oppression…

…What drew me to conservatism years ago was the fact that it gave discipline a slightly higher status than virtue. This meant it could not be subverted by passing notions of the good. It could be above moral vanity. And so it made no special promises to me as a minority. It neglected me in every way except as a human being who wanted freedom. Until my encounter with conservatism I had only known the racial determinism of segregation on the one hand and of white liberalism on the other — two varieties of white supremacy in which I could only be dependent and inferior….

From Chicago Boyz:

…Obama is learning that people trust what you say based on the context in which you speak. The most dramatic example of this phenomena occurs when smooth talking sociopaths go on trial. Such sociopaths have spent their lives using their glib charm to manipulate people who give them the benefit of the doubt. They come to believe they can talk their way out of any circumstance. When they get on the stand at their trial they intuitively assume that the same benefit of a doubt exist. It does not. The jury looks at them with suspicion and all their superficial charm and glibness does them no good. Without the benefit of the doubt, the jury listens to what they say not how they say it. They usually end up in jail.

Obama will face something of the same effect. All his life he has been the up and coming ernest black man in a political subculture that fawns over such people. He’s never really had to decide and to produce. He campaigned on being himself. He campaigned on the story of being the first black President. People listened to him in the context of partaking in the story of the first black President.  As President, he no longer has that context. He’s no longer the mythic story but just another politician. People listen to him with a certain suspicion. They want to know the specific whys and hows of his proposals….

The term “liar” is overused in contemporary political conversations, but….

This interview was 10 days before the House version of the “stimulus” bill was passed.

From the Baltimore Examiner:

…Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, with about $60 billion in assets each, are America’s richest men. With all that money, what can they force us to do? Can they take our house to make room so that another person can build an auto dealership or a casino parking lot? Can they force us to pay money into the government-run retirement Ponzi scheme called Social Security? Can Buffett and Gates force us to bus our children to schools out of our neighborhood in the name of diversity? Unless they are granted power by politicians, rich people have little power to force us to do anything.

A GS-9, or a lowly municipal clerk, has far more life-and-death power over us. It’s they to whom we must turn to for permission to build a house, ply a trade, open a restaurant and myriad other activities. It’s government people, not rich people, who have the power to coerce and make our lives miserable. Coercive power goes a long way toward explaining political corruption….

Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s hawking of Barack Obama’s vacated U.S. Senate seat; Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel’s alleged tax-writing favors; former Rep. William Jefferson’s business bribes; and the Jack Abramoff scandal are mere pimples on the government corruption landscape. We can think of these and similar acts as jailable illegal corruption. They pale in comparison to what’s for all practical purposes the same thing, but simply legal corruption….

From Chicago Boyz:

I think a threshold or tipping point exists in the ratio between the political power of those who pay taxes and those who consume taxes directly. After that tipping point is reached, those who pay taxes become the economic slaves of those who consume taxes.

I think California has passed that point. [h/t Instapundit] Tax consumers now control the state government and can vote themselves almost any level of personal income and benefits they wish while taxpayers cannot muster the political capital to defend themselves…

…California has ~2.3 million unionized government workers and ~18.6 million civilians. With so many people organized with a laser-like focus on increasing taxes and spending, the private working citizens of California find it nearly impossible to prevent government workers from voting their own paychecks.

In effect, government workers have hijacked democracy. Instead of state employees working for the people, the people now work for the state employees. As far as the state government is concerned, people in the private sector work merely so that they can be taxed for the benefit of the tax consumers. They’ve entered a condition not unlike like that of pre-industrial serfs…

And, from the San Diego Union Tribune:

For years, the Democrats who dominate Sacramento have made it clear in 100 ways that their No. 1 priority is protecting and enriching unions…

…When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed his “Million Solar Roofs” initiative, Democratic lawmakers blocked it because he wouldn’t require that the solar panels be installed by union shops. When a bill was introduced to use the Internet to make it easier for poor families to enroll their kids in health care programs, Democrats killed it because it might prompt layoffs of union members who handled paper applications.

So much for their party’s support for environmentalism or social services for the needy. Democratic officeholders know their political futures largely depend on keeping unions happy and behave accordingly.

Now the state budget crisis has yielded the starkest example of this subservience yet. Controller John Chiang, a Democrat who aspires to be governor, is refusing to enforce Schwarzenegger’s order that state workers take two unpaid furlough days a month beginning Feb. 1 to ensure the government has enough money to continue to perform its basic functions…

From Reason:

…After the 2000 Census, the richest county in America was Douglas County, Colorado. By 2007, Douglas County had fallen to sixth. The new top three are now Loudon County, Virginia; Fairfax County, Virginia; and Howard County, Maryland. All three are suburbs or exurbs of Washington, D.C. In 2000, 14 of the 100 richest counties were in the Washington, D.C., area. In 2007, it was nine of the richest 20…

…The problem is that, save for the tech corridor in D.C.’s Virginia exurbs, the Washington Metro area doesn’t actually produce anything. Washington doesn’t create wealth, it just moves it around—redistributes it. As government grows and takes control of more and more of the private economy—either through spending, regulation, or taxes—more and more wealth that’s created elsewhere comes to Washington to be devoured.

The Washington wealth boom is the result of the massive expansion in government over the last 10 years, which has populated the region with an increase in well-paid federal employees, and wealthy federal contractors and lobbyists…

…The Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards estimates that in 2005, the average federal employee made $106,579 per year including benefits, about twice as much as the average person makes in the private sector. Federal wages are also rising at about twice the rate that wages are rising in the private sector…