Essayists From The United States

"Perhaps the easiest way for a modern American or European to understand Nazism is to understand that a good Brown thought about preserving the Deutsche Volk in exactly the same way that today's Greens think about preserving the Environment."

"On a historical timescale, the practical effect of the sovereignty of the press is just to play yet another whack-a-mole game of quis custodiet ipsos custodes. Who watches the watchdog? In the end, this chain must logically terminate in a dog you just… trust. Sovereignty is conserved."

"Who is the sovereign? Not a who but a what. The sovereign is the story. Of course, there is no story without a storyteller. There are a lot of storytellers. Professionals, even. They make a good living and they’re all quite replaceable. I actually have great sympathy for the professional. In a bureaucratic oligarchy like ours, the professional both rules and is ruled. At the top, there is no one on top of him. Yet he cannot change his mind. He would simply be replaced. There are always younger, more eager professionals. Sovereignty is conserved; it is always humans who rule; and yet, it seems that no one rules."

"Cannot we marvel at what the Third Reich achieved, with the knowledge that it was run by a maniac? In the hands of a non-maniac, what might it have done? In the hands of an Augustus, for instance? Well, somewhere in Germany in 1933, there might have been an Augustus or two. Or even three. But Germany in 1933 was a democracy. And that democracy elected not Augustus, not Frederick the Great, not even Kaiser Bill. It elected — Wait. Who did it elect? Gee. I've forgotten already. I hate these migraines. An Austrian, I think. A sergeant? A private first-class? Someone like that. A man of the people, that's for sure. History is so confusing."

"Our lovely "mainstream media" is not, of course, a hierarchical organization reporting to the hidden Elders of Journalism. However, modern journalism is descended from such a hierarchical organization. That organization was the Office of War Information, OWI."

"Was royalism a perfect system? It was not. But if we imagine a world in which the revolutions and civil wars of the last four centuries had never happened, it is hard not to imagine that world as happier, wealthier, freer, more civilized, and more pleasant."

"If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia."

"Washington, especially since it governs not only the United States but also most of the world, is just too huge to serve as a good thought-experiment for government. It's easier and more fun to think in terms of California, if California could somehow be a sovereign state. Assuming security and responsibility, how could we produce effective government in California? The answer: find the world's best CEO, and give him undivided control over budget, policy and personnel. I don't think there is any debate about it. The world's best CEO is Steve Jobs. Which would you rather live in: California as it is today, or Applefornia? Which would you rather carry: the iPhone, or the Calphone? I rest my case."

"Our modern democratic elections are an extremely poor substitute for actual regime change. As we've seen, democracy is to government as gray, slimy cancer is to pink and healthy living tissue. It is a degenerate neoplastic form. The only reason America has lasted as long as she has, and even still has more than a few years left, is that this malignancy is at present encysted in a thick husk of sclerotic scar tissue - our permanent civil service."

"There is no reason at all that a libertarian, such as myself, cannot favor martial law. I am free when my rights are defined and secured against all comers, regardless of official pretensions. Freedom implies law; law implies order; order implies peace; peace implies victory. As a libertarian, the greatest danger threat to my property is not Uncle Sam, but thieves and brigands. If Uncle Sam wakes up from his present sclerotic slumber and shows the brigands a strong hand, my liberty has been increased."

"Thus, Anglo-American democracy causes the war (World War II), and its resulting terrors and destructions, because the nascent system of global suzerainty it set up in 1919 forces Germany to either accept a position which is permanently subordinate to the Anglo-American system or "international community," effectively sacrificing her independence as a nation, or demonstrate its disobedience by violently attacking that community. The dog has been backed into a corner; it must either cringe and submit, or bite. It probably should have cringed."

"(The United States’) industries are gutted and vanished. Her finances are ruined beyond imagining. Her old cities, but for a few, are dirty, dangerous, unlivable. Millions of feral, armed savages, perfectly de-civilized, run wild in her streets. Her famous social fabric is shredded, her famous voluntary institutions defunct, her population bored, lonely, atomized. Her small towns have rotted, turned into strip-malls, or both. (Her birds, however, are remarkably well-protected.)"

"As in the late Roman period, declining official authority, declining personal morality, and increasing public bureaucracy are observed in synchrony. This is not in any way a coincidence. The combination is an infallible symptom of the great terminal disease of the polity — leftism. Leftism is cancer."

"When we look at the astounding violence of the democratic era, it strikes me as quite defensible to simply write off the whole idea as a disaster, and focus on correcting the many faults of monarchism."

"And while not all the crimes in this tragedy (crimes of the 20th century) were committed by democrats, democracy is indeed its prime and ultimate cause. It is not a coincidence that the century of murder and the century of democracy were one and the same."

"A century and a half of democracy has wreaked unbelievable devastation on a place and people once considered by far the most promising on earth. No mere ecological pollution could possibly compare."

"The world before nationalism and democracy was a world of mild wars, small and effective governments, personal freedom, and civilized high culture… Note that, before the coming of nationalist democracy, it was actually not a problem at all for wealthy, high-IQ people to live in the same society as poor, low-IQ people. It worked just fine. The latter served the former."

"It was democratic power that executed Socrates; even lynching is a fundamentally democratic exercise of power. Lynching is mob violence; mob violence, unless the mob is an organized mob, is democratic violence. It is useless to pretend that mob violence was not an essential aspect of the American Revolution, for instance."

"The basic grim truth that Americans need to face up to is that American successes and victories in the 19th and 20th centuries did not happen because of America's unique political system. They happened despite America's unique political system. America became great not because American democracy was great, but because America was a great people in a great place. As such, it was uniquely resistant to the poison of democracy, and alone survived its own disease. Now that the bloom is off the continent's youth, we can see how well American democracy works in a normal country. Others have experienced this disappointment; now, it is our turn."

"Politics can be defined as limited warfare. For example, you can see a democratic election as a form of civil war, in which both sides agree to settle the conflict by simply counting soldiers. While this is a long way from a war in which tank battles are legitimate but poison gas is not, the principle is the same, and no qualitative line can be drawn between the two."

"As a people, we believe insane things, because democracy has driven us all insane. After all, it's had two hundred years to do so. Its edifice of magical thinking is a wonderful thing, ornate as a Disney castle, more worthy of admiration than destruction. Sadly, it is the castle of evil, and God's sweet fire will melt it in a flash."

"It is very difficult for a modern American to construct the history of the last 250 years as a history of decay. Decay is especially concealed by the obvious history of technical and scientific progress. While this has no reason at all to correlate with political or cultural progress, the two are certainly not hard to confuse."

"Objectively, an agency is official if it controls government decisions, or the government controls its decisions. A classic Orwellian state-controlled press is easy to recognize, even if the control path is informal—such as a financial subsidy. What about the other direction: a press-controlled state? ‘‘‘In the modern regime, government literally leaks power into journalism, by tolerating leaks: nominally unauthorized, but objectively permitted, disclosures of confidential information to the legitimate press. Leaking is both subsidy and control.’’’ … On Wall Street, selective disclosure of material nonpublic information is a crime… If the government enforced this standard on its own employees, journalism as we know it could not exist. … Putting these camouflaged agencies together, we see a Department of Reality which is unquestionably the center of power in our regime. No other agency can withstand it—certainly, no elected politician can withstand it. Sovereignty equals unaccountability, and our Reality Department is accountable to no one."

"The fundamental historical problem of the current period is why, though we can buy our ideas from any stall in a huge open-air bazaar, they all seem to come from the same manufacturer—exactly as if made in some cathedral. Yet there is no such conspiracy—and certainly no such agency. No person or institution is coordinating the party line."

"While there is no limited government, there is incomplete government; incomplete government means a vacuum made of anarchy; true anarchy is not even nothing, it is the billion tiny bubbles of local power we call crime; you don’t want to be anywhere near it; so, counting anarchy as governance, government power is absolute. A regime that tolerates crime has just chosen to share its absolute power with crime."

"The way to do political, rather than cosmopolitical, economy is straightforward: consolidate the national balance sheet, treating the entire nation as a single corporation. Current account deficits then appear as losses. The notorious decay of nations which run a chronic trade deficit appears as a parallel with the notorious decay of corporations which run at a chronic loss. Similarly, the old mercantilist strategy of accumulating precious metals—much mocked by Adam Smith—appears as no more than the accumulation of retained earnings by a profitable polity."

"One of the many divine paradoxes in our political formula is the double valence of democracy. This word, its declensions, its synonyms, carry positive associations well up in the sacred range. Deep in your medulla, warmth glows from everything democratic. Yet at the same time, we have a related family of words, such as politics and its declensions, which seem to mean exactly the same thing—yet reek of heinous brimstone. How is it possible to have democracy but not politics, or vice versa? What can the two be, but the same thing? Yet anything democratized is made good, and anything politicized is made bad. Of course, to the hardened UR reader, this is just one more sign that we are dealing with an essentially magical belief system. I will defy any Republican or Democrat to explain this paradox. He can only fall on his knees and worship it."

"The American, being human, being descended from a long line of chimpanzees and their still more foul hominid spawn, craves status, importance, meaning, in a word: power. But power is hard, oh so hard, to come by in his whip-broken, fixed and empty life of pleasant boredom. The solution? Oh, solution there is none, for power does not grow on trees. Power is here in America, as everywhere; power in America is locked up tight as Katrina van den Heuvel's ass. It's open to someone, perhaps, but not to him."

"People think at least as much about breeding each other as they do about breeding animals."

"The righteous ruler has nothing to hide."

"To debauch a people, debase their currency."

"To a true libertarian, "classical liberalism" is a moral imperative, not a prudent policy. To me, it is just a prudent policy, and it is only a prudent policy in those cases where it does not turn out to be imprudent."

"The definition of a sovereign is that a sovereign is above the law. Its will is its own law."

"A sovereign should never make any concessions in response to violence or the threat of violence, unless there is no alternative but surrender."

"The free market isn't something that just happens. It needs to be designed and invented. The past is at best an inspiration."

"Economically, a fiat monetary system works exactly the same as a metallic monetary system in which the sovereign owns an infinite gold mine."

"How do you anesthetize a population? When it reacts normally, convince it that it's being hysterical."

"This is how Rothbard so frequently reasons himself from Lockean absolutes to sheer insanity. He is a master of the reductio ad absurdum, but so stubborn that he defends the absurdum."

"The root cause of terrorism is liberalism."

"[Y]ou don't want to be governed by a persistently unprofitable government any more than you want to eat in a persistently unprofitable restaurant."

"The strong government executes firmly and decisively. The weak one is fickle and inconsistent, and as a result has to be much more vicious to achieve any given level of security."

"Today's American has no idea what it feels like to live in an atmosphere of genuine public safety and order."

"If we want to end the era of chaos, democracy, and revolution, we need to deal squarely with the poisonous legacy of the Puritans."

"You are probably used to worrying about the crimes of your government overseas, but not in this way. You have an eagle eye for the crimes of the Defense Department. When it comes to the crimes of the State Department, you have the approximate visual acuity of the average snail."

"The [British] Empire had to die not because it didn't work, but because it worked too well. The quality of imperial rule was starting to present evidence against democracy herself."

"Yes, the US military should leave Iraq and Afghanistan. But it should leave not because it is impossible for a modern military to defeat a bunch of tribal warriors. It should leave because it is fighting an American civil war by proxy. One, this is just sick. And two, the right place to fight a civil war is always at home."

"Did you ever wonder why nationalism seemed so similar, right down to the names of the parties in, say, Algeria, Indonesia, and Vietnam? What did Algeria, Indonesia, and Vietnam have in common? Certainly nothing that could be described as Algerian, Indonesian, or Vietnamese. Oh, no. What they had in common was that they all had friends—or, more precisely, sponsors—at Harvard."

"Men fight because they expect to win. Period. When they know they'll lose, they surrender."

"Of course empire works. Conquest works. It has worked for the entire course of human history. It is not only effective, it is profitable."

"[F]ar from advancing toward tolerance for all, Western civilization is being overrun by an aggressive and intolerant monoculture."