“Many years ago, as a small child, I was told one of those old-fashioned fables for children. It was about a dog with a bone in his mouth, who was walking on a log across a stream. The dog looked down into the water and saw his reflection. He thought it was another dog with a bone in his mouth — and it seemed to him that the other dog’s bone was bigger than his. He decided that he was going to take the other dog’s bone away and opened his mouth to attack. The result was that his own bone fell into the water and was lost. At the time, I didn’t like that story and wished they hadn’t told it to me. But the passing years and decades have made me realize how important that story was, because it was not really about dogs but about people. Today we are living in a time when the President of the United States is telling us that he is going to help us take that other dog’s bone away — and the end result is likely to be very much like what it was in that children’s fable. Whether we are supposed to take that bone away from the doctors, the hospitals, the pharmaceutical companies or the insurance companies, the net result is likely to be the same — most of us will end up with worse medical care than we have available today. We will have opened our mouth and dropped a very big bone into the water.” –economist Thomas Sowell
“The dilemma … is between the democratic process of the market in which every individual has his share and the exclusive rule of a dictatorial body. Whatever people do in the market economy is the execution of their own plans. In this sense every human action means planning. What those calling themselves planners advocate is not the substitution of planned action for letting things go. It is the substitution of the planner’s own plan for the plans of his fellowmen. The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans. He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute preeminence of his own plan.” –Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)
“As the president’s approval ratings fall and rise and fall again, some of his supporters in journalism and politics are returning to days of old when the label ‘racist’ could end any discussion and force the accused either into stunned silence, or groveling repentance. I suspect the tactic won’t work this time because Obama supporters will have difficulty explaining how a mostly white country could elect a black man president last November and ten months later become a racist majority. Racism has always been a one-way street for the Left. … According to liberal doctrine, black people can never be racist because they are members of a victim class created by white liberals as a kind of modern plantation to keep blacks voting for liberal Democrats. … The president’s race would be a factor only if Americans shied away from criticizing him because of it. That they are not is a triumph of Martin Luther King Jr.’s hope that people be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Some opinion polls show that Obama’s character is being judged and found wanting by a rapidly growing number of Americans, at least a small percentage of whom are black. With Democrats controlling all three branches of government, including significantly wide margins in Congress, isn’t there a better explanation than racism for why the president is having difficulty with some of his proposals? … There is a better explanation for the growing opposition to President Obama. It has less to do with his ethnicity than it does his credibility. Character, after all, is colorless.” –columnist Cal Thomas
Conservative Libertarian Outpost 
September 23, 2009 at 20:22
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