Socialism

Life is Magnifique

You might have heard that International Monetary Fund President and likely 2012 Socialist Party candidate for the French Presidency, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was pulled out of his first class seat on an Air France flight from New York to Paris and indicted for the rape of a chambermaid in his $3000 a night suite at New York's Sofitel Hotel.

He wasn't indicted in the $3000 a night suite, the alleged rape took place in the $3000 a night suite. I just wanted to make that point perfectly clear.

So anyway, I'm going to have to look into this Socialism stuff.

It seems to pay a hell of a lot better than I thought it did.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

To quote Ayn Rand over and over and ....

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

The Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals … that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government … that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection against the government.

The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights.

Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: "Account Overdrawn."

The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel.

When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion -- when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing -- when you see money flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors -- when you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you -- when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice -- you may know that your society is doomed.

Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.

Government control of the economy, no matter in whose behalf, has been the source of all the evils in our industrial society -– and the solution is laissez-faire capitalism, i.e., the abolition of any and all forms of intervention in production and trade, the separation of State and Economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of Church and State.

The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow.