Maggie's Farm

People have a strong tendency to reject out of hand any information or argument that cuts against their preexisting political views, and this is especially true of those most committed to their ideology or political party. Unfortunately, voters have strong incentives to be both ignorant about public policy and irrational in their evaluation of the information they do know.

Our friend Ilya, at Volokh

"Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious."

George Orwell (h/t, reader)

"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."

H. L. Menchen (h/t, reader)

"Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-state of mind."

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

 "... we must not be surprised if we are in for a rough time. When a man turns to Christ and seems to be getting on pretty well (in the sense that some of his bad habits are now corrected) he often feels that it would not be natural if things went fairly smoothly. When troubles come along - illnesses, money troubles, new kinds of temptation - he is disappointed. These things, he feels, might have been necessary to rouse him and make him repent in his bad old days; but why now? Because God is forcing him on, or up, to a higher level: putting him into situations where he will have to be very much braver, or more patient, or more loving, than he ever dreamed of being before. It seems to us all unnecessary: but that is because we have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us."

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Our struggle is not with Obama or Reid or Pelosi, it is with the system that they advance. A system of unrestricted power that mandates absolute dominance over all human affairs backed by an ideology that treats all human activity as political and in need of control in the name of the greater good. Getting them all out is a plus, but it's a battle, not the war.

Dan Greenfield (Sultan Knish) in Winning the System

Superficiality is only skin deep.

Joseph Wambaugh, in one of his books - I forget which one

"When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both."

James Dale Davidson

"In the place where repentant sinners stand, perfect saints cannot stand."

Talmud

,,,the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearance, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.

Niccolo Machiavelli (h/t Zen)

Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. . . . Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

George Santayana on the modern Liberal, 100 years ago:

 “his ultimate satisfaction in his work is not founded on any good done, but on a passionate willfulness. He calls the thing he wants for others good, because he wants to bestow it on them, not because they naturally want it for themselves. Incapable of sympathy, he has a momentary pleasure in policy.”

As quoted in Bergner's Mugged by Mythology - Liberals believe the darnedest things.

Adolescence, like retirement, is an invention of the modern age. If the extension of retirement into a multi-decade government-funded vacation is largely a function of increased life expectancy, the prolongation of adolescence seems to derive from the bleak fact that, without an efficient societal conveyor belt to move you on, it appears to be the default setting of huge swathes of humanity. It was striking, during the Hurricane Irene frenzy, to hear the Federal Emergency Management Agency refer to itself repeatedly as “the federal family.” If Big Government is a “family,” with the bureaucracy as its parents, why be surprised that the citizens are content to live as eternal adolescents?

Mark Steyn, in A Tale of Two Declines - Even if the economy were to fix itself overnight, we'd still face sincere cultural challenges.

The wise Ray Dalio says we're in decline - a post about that later today.

“The budget must be balanced, the Treasury must be refilled, public debt must be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom must be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands must be curtailed, lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.”

Cicero, 55 B.C., as quoted by Bruce here yesterday

Via Vanderleun:

"The loss of transcendence evokes the flight to utopia. I am convinced that the destruction of transcendence is the actual amputation of human beings from which all other sicknesses flow. Robbed of their real greatness they can only find escape in illusory hopes." 

Benedict XVI

The thief believes that everybody steals.

- Danish aphorism. I cannot spell it in the Danish.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head…Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal ever invented anything so bad as drunkenness – or so good as drink.

G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News 1907, from a selection of Chesterton quotes at Anchoress

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

William Shakespeare 

Going to college offered me the chance to play football for four more years.

Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.

Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.

I've never been able to understand why a Republican contributor is a 'fat cat' and a Democratic contributor of the same amount of money is a 'public-spirited philanthropist'.

We should measure welfare's success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added.

Latinos are Republican. They just don't know it yet.

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!

Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the democrats believe every day is April 15.

The taxpayer - that's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination.

The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jellybeans.

"The government drag on the economy is the Net Present Value of expenditures minus transfer payments" - 1st year MBA Macro Econ

A reader

Catholics keep talking about “calling,” and asking people to stop yakking about what they “deserve” long enough to seriously ask, “Is it truly for me? Is it what I am called to? Is there a possibility that I am not supposed to have this, in order to open my life up to something else? What might that be? Am I being led somewhere I had not imagined?”

The Anchoress

Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing.

Voltaire

"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do on a rainy afternoon." Sippican

"If you want to make a problem worse, pass a law to fix it." Economist Art Carden, via Carpe 

"One sentence which has never been spoken in the history of the universe is "Stop s***ing my d*** immediately or I will call the police." George Carlin on sexual regulations and morality, via Ace

"The global green treaty movement to outlaw climate change is the most egregious folly to seize the world’s imagination since the Kellog-Briand Pact outlawed war in the late 1920s." Mead's The Failure of Al Gore: Part Deux

"Government should not tell you what to do unless there’s a compelling public purpose." It's difficult to believe that the Nanny Of All Nannys Bloomberg said that. Perhaps he was quoting the US Constitution?

"He did express support for Reagan, which shocked me." An assistant of John Lennon, re Lennon's evolving politics. Imagine there's no Carter, no Mondale too...

"Either the problem is in man, or the problem is in "institutions" and other collectivities." One Cosmos

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”

Mark Twain

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Voltaire

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

George Washington

"The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments."

George Washington

"Once each May, amid the quiet hills and rolling lanes and breeze-brushed trees of Arlington National Cemetery, far above the majestic Potomac and the monuments and memorials of our Nation's Capital just beyond, the graves of America's military dead are decorated with the beautiful flag that in life these brave souls followed and loved. This scene is repeated across our land and around the world, wherever our defenders rest. Let us hold it our sacred duty and our inestimable privilege on this day to decorate these graves ourselves -- with a fervent prayer and a pledge of true allegiance to the cause of liberty, peace, and country for which America's own have ever served and sacrificed. ... Our pledge and our prayer this day are those of free men and free women who know that all we hold dear must constantly be built up, fostered, revered and guarded vigilantly from those in every age who seek its destruction. We know, as have our Nation's defenders down through the years, that there can never be peace without its essential elements of liberty, justice and independence. Those true and only building blocks of peace were the lone and lasting cause and hope and prayer that lighted the way of those whom we honor and remember this Memorial Day. To keep faith with our hallowed dead, let us be sure, and very sure, today and every day of our lives, that we keep their cause, their hope, their prayer, forever our country's own."

Ronald Reagan

"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it."

Henry David Thoreau

If it’s good, the government should subsidize it.  If it’s bad, the government should ban it.  If outcomes are in any way perceived by any group to be sub-optimal, then the government should regulate it.  Anyone who opposes these bans, subsidies, and regulations must therefore be a supporter of bad outcomes, hate poor people, want people to get sick and die, etc.

Coyote

Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish, and he'll spend the rest of his life on a boat drinking beer.

Anon.

"And tomorrow will be like today, only more so."

Isaiah 56:12 [NSV] h/t, Vanderleun

"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."

Mark Twain

"Do the dishes."

My Dad, in response to my lovely daughter in law when she asked him his secret for staying happily married for over 60 years.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.

Emily Dickinson

"Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first."

Anon.