Ilana Mercer
The end result of positively reinforcing bad behavior is that you get more of it. The culmination of a failure to punish predators is a debased, dissolute, slum-dog society in which, by legal decree, the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper.Collection: Dog
Whether arrived at through reason or revelation, natural law is the highest law known to man. It is anchored in the very existential nature of man and is therefore a priori just.Collection: Men
By the standards of honest, if unorthodox, accounting, government workers don't pay taxes, but are paid out of taxes. In other words, they pay taxes out of money confiscated from taxpayers, who, in turn, pay taxes twice: on their own income and on the income of members of the bureaucracy. At the very least, this should disqualify state workers from voting.Collection: Government
Demographics need not be destiny. The waning West became what it is not by out-breeding the undeveloped world. We were once great not because of huge numbers, but due to human capital - people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy.Collection: Philosophy
The proposition that economist Ludwig von Mises was a feminist is an apodictic impossibility.Collection: Feminist
Prosperity and penury do not turn on gyno-centric and gay matters. But leftist statists and libertarians of the left place these wedge issues at the forefront of the fight for freedom. [...] Every bit as bad as liberals, "libertarian" political operators are prepared to shed political blood over any imagined sign of bigotry.Collection: Fighting
In the bureaucracy, incentives will forever be inverted. Failure results in success: in more funds, more training, more time off.Collection: Forever
Big media are all about the angle, the spin. Look to the overarching theme that runs through each and every news story. Be hip to the meta-narrative peddled.Collection: Running
There is no such thing as absolute free speech; there are only absolute rights of private property. Speech is circumscribed by private property rights. You may deliver a disquisition in my virtual or actual living room only if I permit you to so do.Collection: Rights
The free flow of people across borders is not to be confused with the free flow of goods across borders. Free trade is a positive-sum game. Contrary to illegal immigration, it is always invited, consensual and hence mutually beneficial to the parties involved.Collection: Confused
He who saves you from war is better than he who sends you to war.Collection: War
A depraved culture supports a depraved politics and vice versa.Collection: Support
Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn.Collection: Yarn
Like environmentalists, politicians generally privilege flora and fauna over folks.Collection: Nantucket
The only kind of marriage liberals had ever glorified is the gay kind. But thanks to Michael Schiavo, the sanctity of marriage is fast becoming a liberal sacrament, with the proviso it has to involve 'mercy killing.' It took Michael Schiavo's devoted efforts to starve and dehydrate his wife to restore liberal faith in the institution.Collection: Gay
The strength of ideas rests on their relationship to reality. MacKinnon’s unrealistic fulminations against a phantom patriarchy exist in the arid arena of pure thought.Collection: Reality
Breaking into a country signals quite reliably a willingness to break yet more of the invaded country's laws.Collection: Country
Libya is a war of the womb. A product of the romantic minds of women who fantasize about an Arab awakening. It is estrogen-driven paternalism on steroids.Collection: War
Think of mass immigration into America as a global 'right of return.'Collection: Thinking
Chinese mercantilism is not free trade, but it is far better than American militarism.Collection: Chinese
Gays have become colossal bores. Once interesting and iconoclastic, all they seem to crave nowadays is the State's pension and seal of approval. They ought to go back to the days of the Stonewall Riots, when the police's violations of privacy and private property were the object of their anger and activism.Collection: Gay
The rights to life, liberty and property were not meant to be subject to the vagaries of majority rule.Collection: Rights
Whether it is committed by a group operating within or without the law, terrorism is still terrorism.Collection: Law
Rights give rise to legal claims. Ultimately, the more rights animals are granted, the greater the legal lien exercised on their behalf against the liberty and property of people.Collection: Animal
The great Roman statesman Cicero observed that, 'Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.' In our ignorance of the values that form part of our history and heritage, we Americans have become perpetual children.Collection: Children
We're not all the same. A common liberal refrain is that differences between individuals are statistically more significant than those between cultural, ethnic, and racial groups. I don't see why the fact of inter-individual differences would nullify inter-group variance. That's liberal logic for you.Collection: Individual Differences
A silly society is a youth-obsessed society: To the Chinese, who appreciate the value of experience, the greater the ratio in a team of grey 'hairs and no-hairs' to 'black hairs' the faster and better a task will be completed. The opposite assumption obtains in the youth-obsessed U.S.Collection: Team
Christianity in our country is a lot like what the Ducksters profess. No longer doctrinaire or demanding, the mishmash of pop-religion practiced in churches across America is an extension of the therapeutic culture: festooned with feelings, mostly misdirected. Untempered by intelligent interpretation of scripture... American pop-theology: light on doctrine, heavy on hellfire and damnation.Collection: Country
A crucial difference between lite libertarians and the right kind is that to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional - a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values. Conversely, the paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure.Collection: Reality
Members of the media-monetary-military-congressional complex are immoral and have an allergy to the truth.Collection: Military
If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be.Collection: Government
Like environmentalists, politicians generally privilege flora and fauna over folks. (NIMBYs excepted. Senator Edward Kennedy is a not-in-my-backyard environmentalist: he opposes wind farms in Nantucket Sound, offshore from his Hyannis Port compound.)Collection: Wind Farms
Ludwig von Mises referred to Ayn Rand as 'the most courageous man in America.' If that doesn't say it all about the economist's man-centric frame of reference, I don't know what does.Collection: Men
For too long, the U.S. has been operating upon the premise that American men and matériel should be capable of reaching and controlling all corners of the world. This was a bully’s universe.Collection: Men
Any opinion writer worth his salt would have rejected the quaint notion that certain eternally aggrieved identity groups have exclusive linguistic rights to words in the English language.Collection: Rights
Government jobs are not an addition to the country's payroll; they are an increase in the nation's payload.Collection: Country
Like or dislike her, the British Queen is harmless. Her role is purely ceremonial. Conversely, life and death are in the hands of the monarch who sits in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.Collection: Queens
Government commissions are where accountability goes to die.Collection: Government
Cognitive consonance is what writing in the Age of the idiot is all about. The key to success in the scribbling profession is to strike the right balance of mediocrity in writing and thinking, which invariably entails echoing one of two party lines, poorly.Collection: Party
The Delphic oracles of the disease theory of delinquency (the "experts") have slapped all manner of misconduct with diagnostic labels... The arsonist has ”pyromania,” the thief is inflicted with ”kleptomania,” and Bill Clinton is not promiscuous, but a ”sex-addict."Collection: Sex
Whatever open-border libertarians think about immigration law, once the immigration scofflaw steals, trespasses, or vandalizes private property, said alien is guilty of crimes. To say, moreover, that the state's laws made masses of men and women commit such crimes is to voice the philosophy of determinism, not individualism.Collection: Philosophy
If for harming himself a man forfeits his freedom, then he is not free at all.Collection: Men
The Democratic and Republican parties each operates as a necessary counterweight in a partnership designed to keep the pendulum of power swinging in perpetuity from the one set of colluding quislings to the other, and back.Collection: Party
Demonstrators for a government takeover of medicine have a right to discuss their demands, but no right to enact these demands.Collection: Father
Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa, is now its dust bowl.Collection: Dust
Incarcerating people for their [drug] consumption choices has the consistency of arresting a survivor of suicide for attempted murder.Collection: Suicide
The only time Republicans will shake fists and point fingers is over a war delayed, one that isn't led by the US, or a war waged without the necessary conviction (read collateral damage).Collection: War
Obamacare is a marketplace in the same way the Knockout Game is a game.Collection: Games
Quotas are a perfectly logical, if diabolical, extension of the regulation of private property courtesy of the Civil Rights Act, whereby in an attempt to shape American society in politically pleasing ways, people have been coerced into liking, hiring or renting against their will or better judgment.Collection: Rights
One’s life, liberty and the products of one’s labor were not intended to be up for grabs by grubby, greedy majorities. Contra classical natural law theory, legal positivism equates justice with the law of the state. However, from the fact that most Americans want others to fund or subsidize their health care, it does not follow that they have such a right. A need is not a right.Collection: Men