Bill Bonner on inflation

Governments are seldom good at anything, but one thing they are undeniably good at is destroying their own currencies. The dollar has lost 95% or so of its value since 1913. That’s a pretty darn good job. Other countries have been even more thorough.

~ Bill Bonner, "Preparing for the New Economy," LewRockwell.com, July 16, 2009

Jim Rogers on socialism in the U.S.

America now owns the car industry. America owns the mortgage industry. America owns a lot of the insurance industry. Karl Marx must be somewhere standing up in his grave cheering. And why is that? America has become a socialist and maybe even communist nation in many ways.

~ Jim Rogers, "'Printing money will lead to serious problems down the road,' says Jim Rogers," Business Intelligence Middle East, July 17, 2009

Carrie Lukas on the modern feminist movement

Feminists have a vision: To see men and women represented equally, in all disciplines and in all walks of life. They lament that women still assume disproportionate responsibility for housework and childcare, have lower levels of achievement in business and politics, and gravitate away from disciplines like math and science.

If you accept these assumptions, then something can – and indeed should – be done. So long as society is at fault, then the feminist vision can theoretically become reality by changing public education, creating government-subsidized daycare, encouraging more mothers to leave their children for the workforce, and many other measures that change society.

If, however, men and women’s differences are not social constructs – if they are instead the product of innate, biological differences – then no amount of government intervention will create the feminist utopia. Indeed, if gender differences are natural, then the feminist idea of progress isn’t progress at all, and their agenda makes men and women worse off by driving them away from their true preferences in pursuit of feminist fantasy.

~ Carrie L. Lukas, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism, p. 6

Butler Shaffer on justice and 9/11

One of the emptiest words in our culture is "justice." Its vacuous quality is what makes it so popular: it requires little in the way of focused, intelligent explication to employ it. To those on the political "left," justice" gets translated into a demand for money to be taken from some and bestowed upon others. Those on the political "right" use it as a plea for the building of more prisons and the hiring of more police officers to ferret out more persons to fill them. When people tell me "I demand justice," my response is to warn them to temper their insistence, as they might just get it!

When pressed for a definition, I reply that justice is the redistribution of violence. In its simplest form, X commits a wrong upon Y, for which Y demands retaliation against X. In its more complex form in our collectivized world, fifteen Saudis, two men from the United Arab Emirates, one Egyptian, and one Lebanese join in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center buildings. As these men were killed in the process, the demands for "justice" led most Americans to accept the bombing and killing of innocent men, women, and children in such unrelated places as Afghanistan and Iraq! Justice and rationality have little to do with one another.

~ Butler Shaffer, "What Is Justice?," LewRockwell.com, July 13, 2009