L. Neil Smith

Those who sell their liberty for security are understandable, if pitiable, creatures. Those who sell the liberty of others for wealth, power, or even a moment's respite deserve only the end of a rope.

A border is a completely imaginary line on a paper or cybernetic map that has no genuine counterpart in the real world. Do not mistake it for a property line. It is possible, in some instances, for a border to be congruent with a property line, but they are not the same thing at all. One represents the geographical limit of a military and political claim to authority over a given territory. The other is part of the description of something — in this case, land — lawfully owned by an individual or a voluntary and contractual association of individuals.

Try never to speak of your enemies by name. Any publicity is still publicity — and there are those for whom your disapproval constitutes a recommendation.

Gun ownership is a problem, not because it represents any physical danger to [the IRS]. Americans have proven dismayingly forbearing in that regard. But people who own guns often look at the world differently than those who don't. That's the real danger to social and political parasites. Roughly 25% of Americans own guns. The number increases each time there's widespread discussion of more gun control - call it what it is: 'victim disarmament'. If the figure ever rises to 50%, I suspect the widespread discussion will be about repealing the 16th Amendment.

Many individuals in government don't seem to understand the laws of economics. Most of them — aside from those in Congress — seem to be concentrated in the area of 'drug enforcement'. They often brag at news conferences that their interception of drugs between producer and consumer has raised the 'street value' of the drugs, meaning that the drugs are now scarcer than they were. What these statists stubbornly refuse to acknowledge is that this only increases the market incentive to cash in on those higher prices by making up for the artificial scarcity.

Ask yourself this question: if you were one of America's Founders, and you'd just surprised the world (and yourself) by winning a war of secession against the most powerful and heavy-handed government on the planet, and the last thing in the world you wanted for yourself, for your children, or for your grandchildren was to fall beneath the heels of its jackboots again, what would you want the Bill of Rights to mean?
And if the first act, under martial law, of that powerful, heavy-handed government had been to try to take your guns away at Lexington and Concord, would you have written a Second Amendment to guarantee its 'right' to own and carry weapons? Would you have written a Second Amendment that was subject to whatever government claims is 'reasonable regulation'? Or would you have written the Second Amendment to forbid government from having anything to do with your guns?
Anything whatever.

The Bill of Rights isn't about us, it's about them. It isn't a list of things we're permitted to do, it's a list of things they aren't allowed even to consider.

...[T]ry not to be too angry or disappointed with your fellow Americans. Most of them don't care about politics as much as the majority of my readers, and the education they have received about it from the government's public school system is nothing more than a septic tank full of warmed-over self-serving statist lies and leftist propaganda.

Just as liberalism is the main force that drives conservatism and maintains its popularity in some quarters, conservatism is the reason liberalism continues to enjoy the traction that it does in our poor civilization.

Barack Obama is the pampered pet of Chicago gangsters. He is good buddies with a murderous African dictator. And his wacko leftist academic background evokes memories of the style of sideways thinking that inspired the death marches in Cambodia.
The man burns to have a private army all his own. During the election campaign, he threatened to create a 'domestic security force' as large and well-funded as the entire U.S. military, just the thing to send door-to-door (as the police attempted in the Chicago projects) searching for privately-owned weapons. Sure enough, the very first item to appear on his website www.change.org following the election was a proposal to require 'mandatory community service' — 50 hours a year from junior high school and high school students, 100 hours from those in college — or the individuals in question needn't expect to graduate.

Other common names for fascism are 'crony capitalism', 'state capitalism', 'corporate socialism' and 'mercantilism'. Sometimes members of the mercantile class become partners with the state and, in certain circumstances, even end up controlling it. The whole thing looks like a different system than ordinary socialism until you apply the ethical definition. What's more important in a fascist society, the needs and wants of the group, or the rights of the individual? As Mr. Spock once famously observed (in the original James Blish novel Spock Must Die), 'a difference that makes no difference is no difference.'

I always said that in a country where a legislature, its sessions limited by statute, could alter reality by turning back the clock (I actually saw this done, once, with a long pole pushing on the hour hand), any travesty was possible. I see nothing lately to prove me wrong.

[I]f a politician won't trust you, why should you trust him? If he's a man — and you're not — what does his lack of trust tell you about his real attitude toward women? If "he" happens to be a woman, what makes her so perverse that she's eager to render her fellow women helpless on the mean and seedy streets her policies helped create? Should you believe her when she says she wants to help you by imposing some infantile group health care program on you at the point of the kind of gun she doesn't want you to have?
On the other hand — or the other party — should you believe anything politicians say who claim they stand for freedom, but drag their feet and make excuses about repealing limits on your right to own and carry weapons? What does this tell you about their real motives for ignoring voters and ramming through one infantile group trade agreement after another with other countries?
Makes voting simpler, doesn't it? You don't have to study every issue — health care, international trade — all you have to do is use this X-ray machine, this Vulcan mind-meld, to get beyond their empty words and find out how politicians really feel. About you. And that, of course, is why they hate it.

As Al Franken has demonstrated, liberals give lousy talk radio.

Nobody would claim that America has never made mistakes, never failed to live up to its own rhetoric. Nothing in the universe is perfect. There isn’t a nation anywhere on the planet whose record for slavery and slaughter isn’t worse. What the British did to the Irish and the Scots would have had their leaders doing the hemp dance right along with the Nazis at Nuremberg. And even the Swiss thought it was acceptable to inflict unspeakable cruelties on Gypsies and their children.
The difference, for better or worse, is that America never seems to stop examining and reexamining its historical failures, while other countries do their damnedest to sweep theirs under the rug and forget them.

Thanks to guys like Boss Tweed, famous for saying, 'I don't give a damn who does the voting, as long as I do the nominating,' there hasn't been an honest election in the USA since sometime around the War Between the States.

A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation.
Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim.

Once you've taken a public stand you know is right, never back down; anything less than a rock-hard stance will let your enemies nibble you to death.

I suspect that our ancestors adapted to bipedalism for the view above the level of the grass, as much as for anything else. Later, they discovered that they could carry things if they remained upright.
Change of posture brought other changes. Notice, for example, that human beings court face-to-face. Then they marry and see each other mostly in profile for the rest of their lives. But see each other they do, while animals, at least judging from my cats, hardly ever look one another in the face. Ultimately, I believe that eye contact changed everything.

Importantly, there is nothing in the Constitution — by which, under Article 6, Section 2, officials at every level of government are obligated to abide — that authorizes the banning of any substance or enforcing that ban with the threat of injury, incarceration, or death. The lawful powers of the federal government are enumerated in Article 1, Section 8, and they do not include forbidding drugs or any other substance. Politicians early in the 20th century understood this, and passed a Constitutional amendment allowing them to outlaw alcohol. No such amendment has ever been passed, or even proposed, with regard to drugs.