Maggie's Farm

"Never believe everything you read on the internet."

- Abraham Lincoln 

"People don't have ideas. Ideas have people."

Carl Jung  (h/t Jordan Peterson)

Two good ones from his excellent interview we posted last week:

"Intellectuals are more likely than others to spout off about things they know little about." 

Sowell, a Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford guy, blames it on the arrogance of diplomas 

"At the heart of the social vision among contemporary intellectuals is the idea that there are "problems" and "solutions." 

Sowell says rightly that there are only trade-offs 

"He who excuses himself accuses himself."

From How the FBI chose to forget that FISA warrants are for counterintelligence.  Has the FBI dishonored itself?  I would say so. Shameful, possibly criminal.

"Socialism: Great theory. Wrong species."

E.O Wilson 

There’s no doubt that individuals acting privately – in families, in friendships, in free markets – often say and do childish, stupid, and sometimes even destructive things. But there’s also no doubt that the forum that brings out, magnifies, and amplifies  – and, unlike in private settings, actively encourages – human childishness, stupidity, and destructiveness is politics. Compared to any randomly chosen government official, the typical consumer, worker, business executive, entrepreneur, and investor is more logical than Mr. Spock, more sober than a devout Morman, more intelligent than Einstein, more wise than King Solomon, more creative than Edison, and more resolute than Helen Keller.

Don Boudreaux, here 

Government power, a vast, organized, and living body, naturally tends to grow. It feels cramped within its supervisory mission. Now, its growth is hardly possible without a succession of encroachments upon the field of individual rights. The expansion of government power means usurping some form of private activity, transgressing the boundary that I set earlier between what is and what is not its essential function.

Frederic Bastiat, via Cafe Hayek 

"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old... They literally know nothing... We created an echo chamber... They were saying things that validated whatever we had given them to say."

Obama White House aide Ben Rhodes, describing how the Obama admin clowned willing journalists for 8 years.

The idea behind giving professors lifetime tenure is that this will enable them to speak out freely. But it would be hard to name any other occupation with a more cowardly record than academics, who have been giving in to politically correct campus bullies ever since the 1960s.

Thomas Sowell, via Mark Perry 

h/t, Ace

“One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence.” 

“No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems – of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.”

A QQQ on religious-like faith in government to cure all ills, via Cafe Hayek. Herbert Spencer, 1853

"Though we have ceased to assume the infallibility of our theological beliefs and so ceased to enact them, we have not ceased to enact hosts of other beliefs of an equally doubtful kind. Though we no longer presume to coerce men for their spiritual good, we still think ourselves called upon to coerce them for their material good: not seeing that the one is as useless and as unwarrantable as the other. Innumerable failures seem, so far, powerless to teach this. Take up a daily paper and you will probably find a leader exposing the corruption, negligence, or mismanagement of some State department. Cast your eye down the next column, and it is not unlikely that you will read proposals for an extension of State-supervision. Yesterday came a charge of gross carelessness against the Colonial Office. Today Admiralty bunglings are burlesqued. Tomorrow brings the question, “Should there not be more coal-mine inspectors?” Now there is a complaint that the Board of Health is useless; and now an outcry for more railway regulation. While your ears are still ringing with denunciations of Chancery abuses, or your cheeks still glowing with indignation at some well-exposed iniquity of the Ecclesiastical Courts, you suddenly come upon suggestions for organizing “a priesthood of science.” Here is a vehement condemnation of the police for stupidly allowing sight-seers to crush each other to death. You look for the corollary that official regulation is not to be trusted; when, instead, à propos of a shipwreck, you read an urgent demand for government-inspectors to see that ships always have their boats ready for launching. Thus, while every day chronicles a failure, there every day reappears the belief that it needs but an Act of Parliament and a staff of officers to effect any end desired. Nowhere is the perennial faith of mankind better seen."