People From Detroit

"We're still a mission diocese and we have missionary needs."

"I was a priest to the Catholics and a chaplain to all."

"I cannot come in with preconceptions of any issue. I need to listen what we can do to resolve and heal the wounds left in the community."

"Unleash The Gospel is not a numbers game. It's about falling in love with the one who loves us, and that's a person-by-person change."

"What in our lives could be more important than receiving the Body and Blood of Christ each week? Recall how, for many of us who participated in team sports or band, we had to practice before the next game or concert. Well, by going to Mass every week, we become better Christians and most certainly have a better understanding of Jesus’ “game plan” for each and every one of us, as well as for the human family. As in sports, if you continue to miss practice, you become less and less an effective member of the team. While Mass is much more than practice, I hope you get the point."

"Our purpose in the Church is to share the light of Christ. We cannot allow scandals to impede our sharing of the Good News."

"We are surrounded by darkness and are afraid to venture out. Unless we do, however, we will not find God, because it is only by leaving what is safe and comfortable to pierce the darkness that we will find the light of God. This is a fitting metaphor for the spiritual pilgrimage that all of us have to make out of our self-contained comfort zone into the wide world of God and God’s people in the Catholic Church."

"So much depends upon a priest’s personality. All you have are priests who have been validly ordained who are doing the best they can to sustain the Church and to save souls. People get upset when they hear about priests fighting and they are really consoled when they see other priests coming for a visit. They yearn to be part of something bigger. That’s the attraction of the SSPX — a parallel church."

"I enjoy all the different levels of engagement. Whether it’s going to be a slow burn or an instant, raging forest fire depends on the story…"

"I’m still learning, I’m still finding stuff that fascinates me. I’m still putting people out front who I call the “unsung” — those who once had places in history and made a difference, but who have now been forgotten. Because, you know, you bring them back to life [when you write about them], and they live again."

"There were never any characters that looked like me or my sisters or my girlfriends…Our stories needed to be told."

"A lot of times, as I like to say, I was the only chip in the cookie…I chose to embrace who I am and what I do, and keep my head down and keep writing, and hoped that things would change. But it was lonely in the sense that I was the only."

"Libertarians don’t tell starving people to ‘eat cake;’ they prevent starvation by creating an abundance of ‘cake.’ Virtually all poverty in the world today is a result of governments aggressing against their people. Free countries, on the other hand, end poverty by removing the laws that foster it. They create an abundance of wealth because the poor aren’t legally ostracized from supporting themselves."

"Libertarians don’t want to do away with force, just ‘first-strike’ force. If neither of us strike first, no fight is possible. If you are behaving peacefully, and I assault, defraud, or steal from you, then defensive force is permissible in a libertarian society."

"Simply, libertarians do not advocate the initiation of force, fraud, or theft to achieve social or political goals. If you refused to contribute to my favorite charity, and I took your money at gunpoint anyway, I’d be stealing from you. Similarly, if I vote for taxes to force you to contribute to that charity, I’m asking the government to take your money—at gunpoint, if necessary… Wrong doesn’t turn into right, just because the majority agrees to it. Minorities have no protection if they have to depend upon the majority for it."

"As for charitable giving, Alexis de Tocqueville commented on the high level of generosity he observed during his travels in the early days of the United States. People who are free and prosperous are more likely to share with those who have less."

"Libertarians are the ultimate decentralists: libertarians want to take government from the nation, state, and community down to the level of the individual. The closer to this ideal that we come, the more libertarian our society should be."

"Government is, in essence, the privileged class dominating the disadvantage. The Big Lie is that government is the friend of the poor and the foe of the well-to-do."

"In a libertarian society, aggressors would be required to compensate their victims and pay for costs of their trial and apprehension. Studies show that such restitution is one of the most effective deterrents known."

"Throughout the world, law enforcement has many characteristics of fourth-layer aggression. Police, courts, and prosecutors are often part of tax-subsidized government monopolies that we are forced to use. As with all such aggression, we end up with high-cost, low-quality service and little innovation. We pay too much for too little."

"The basic premise of libertarianism is that each individual should be free to do as he or she pleases so long as he or she does not harm others."

"We are more likely to protect the environment when we own a piece of it and profit by nurturing it. *Whenever people do not pay the full cost of something they use, they have less incentive to conserve. For example, when people pay the same amount of taxes for solid waste disposal whether they recycle or not, fewer people are inclined to recycle. As a consequence, we have more waste and disposal problems."

"Actually, libertarianism assumes people will look after their own selfish interests. Because interaction is voluntary in a libertarian society, people can only cater to their own selfish interests by paying attention to what others want."

"The Swiss people are the best practitioners of the ideals of non-aggression. The Swiss national government posts are parttime positions. Most decisions are made at the canton (state) level. Swiss per capita income is the highest in the world, showing that non-aggression pays. How did the Swiss come to adopt a relatively non-aggressive constitution in an aggressive world? In the mid-1800s, they imitated our constitution and stuck with it!"

"A person who harms another owes the victim compensation. If the victim has been killed, the claim to that compensation usually passes to the victim’s heirs. Without apparent heirs, it’s possible that a libertarian jury would direct the compensation towards a charity or group that the victim favored. Although compensation is primarily awarded to restore the victim, studies show that restitution serves to rehabilitate the criminal as well."

"Can you imagine a school system funded by taxation hiring a teacher who equated taxation with theft? Hardly! Consequently, our children are instructed by teachers who believe that first-strike force, fraud, or theft is acceptable as long as it’s for a good cause."

"In spite of the additional financial burden, struggling immigrants made great sacrifices to educate their children as they saw fit rather than send them to inexpensive or even free public schools. Catholics saw the public schools as vehicles for Protestant propaganda and established parochial schools. German immigrants sent their children to private institutions when the public ones refused to teach them in German as well as in English. Immigrants who wanted their children to learn their native tongue and their Old World history opted for private or parochial schools that catered to their preferences."

"A free-market is the only way to control corporations! As long as government has the power to regulate business, business will control government by funding the candidate that legislates in their favor. A free-market thwarts lobbying by taking the power that corporations seek away from government!"

"How many innovative, potentially lifesaving drugs never make it to the marketplace because of the added costs in time and money imposed by the [Kefauver-Harris] Amendments? No one knows for sure, but the studies that have been done imply that we’ve lost about 80% of the innovations that we would have had in the absence of he Amendments."

"When the AIDS epidemic began, the US pharmacist had little to offer its unfortunate victims. Consequently, AIDS patients began bringing in antiviral drugs or immune stimulants that were approved in other nations, such as ribavirin and Isoprinosine. It might have made sense to approve those drugs on the basis of data from other countries, but back then the FDA insisted on considering only studies done in the United States."

"As children, we learned that if no one hits first, no fight is possible. Therefore, refraining from ‘first-strike’ force, theft, or fraud, is the first step in creating peace."

"When we, as individuals, take from our neighbors what they won’t voluntarily give—at gunpoint, if necessary—we call it theft. When majorities take from minorities what they won’t voluntarily give—at gunpoint, if necessary—we call it taxation."

"Congress enacted the 1962 Kefauver-Harris Amendments to the 1938 Food and Drug Act… What the Amendments actually did was increase the time it takes for a new drug to move from the lab bench to the marketplace: a change from 4 years to 14 years over the next few decades. Terminally ill patients who couldn’t live with the delay turned to the black market to get access to potential cures. Every year, the cost of satisfying the FDA have soared, resulting to ever-increasing prices at the pharmacy. More than half of our potential innovations have never made it to patients because companies realized they couldn’t recoup their investments under the new regulations."

"In a libertarian society, big business wouldn’t be so big, since they couldn’t destroy their competition through government regulation. Without government control of the airways, more radio and television stations would be available and could not be shut down on political whim."

"‘Mandatory’ means forced—at gunpoint, if necessary. When we force people to do things, for their own good or the good of others, we violate their right of self-determination. Libertarians respect the rights of others to choose their own path—that’s what liberty is all about. If community service is such a good deal, we should have no trouble persuading people to do it voluntarily. If we can’t convince others that our way is best, maybe we should humbly consider the possibility that it isn’t."

"One way to eliminate the Federal Communications Commission would be to auction off all of the frequencies and allow them to be bought and sold like other property. Trespass by other stations would be handled just like trespass on land. Bandwidths useful for new applications could be ‘homesteaded’ just as land once was."

"Even when the FDA agrees to expanded access, pharmaceutical companies are often reluctant to give terminal patients a drug that is still in development. If patients die from organ failure related to their disease, the FDA may require additional studies from the manufacturer to make sure that the death was not hurried along by the drug. Naturally, the extra studies increase the development timeline and overall cost."

"Libertarians support free trade, but it doesn’t take the five hundred plus pages of the NAFTA agreement to say ‘no more restrictions between us.’"

"Libertarians believe that no one should be forced to support another. If a woman has chosen to gift a fetus with life, it does not necessarily follow that she is obligated to continue to support it with her body, especially if that support threatens the woman’s life. A woman’s body is her property, to do with as she wishes."

"When tariffs are eliminated, consumers pay less for foreign goods. They therefore have more money to spend on other things. Their spending creates more new jobs than those that are lost."

"When the Statue of Liberty was erected, government was the acknowledged enemy of the poor. Lady Liberty asked for the poor, the wretched refuse, the masses, not the wealthy or skilled. Why? Because everyone understood that the poor prospered best when government didn’t put them out of their jobs with excessive regulations. In the 1880s, for example, guild membership was required in Europe to work in certain occupations and the poor had a difficult time qualifying."

"When you subsidize anything, you get more of it. Paying teens even a pittance to have more children encourages them to do so. By the time they are old enough to vote, they finally realize that they will always be poor unless they can get into the work force. By then, however, it is almost too late. Unless a relative helps out, child care costs are prohibitive for someone starting in an entry level job. They find themselves forever stuck in the ‘Poverty Trap.’"

"Libertarian societies also create immense wealth primarily because the poor are not excluded from the labor market. Studies show that the closer a country is to the libertarian ideal, the more even is its distribution of wealth."

"By the late 1970s, armed citizens were killing more criminals in self-defense than the police. Many more would-be attackers and robbers are deterred from their crime when their intended victim simply brandishes a firearm."

"Most non-Western governments make it difficult to get clear land titles. Approximately 60-80% of such property is ‘extralegal,’ making it difficult to borrow against or transfer. As a result, while the poor in these countries ‘hold’ a great deal of land, they cannot easily use its full potential."

"The best way to empower the poor is to allow them to become rich—rich enough to buy land. This is easier than it seems, since most poverty today, even in the Third World, is a direct result of aggression-through-government. Minimum wage and licensing laws put the disadvantage out of work, creating poverty by destroying jobs. When government aggression lessens, poverty decreases too."

"Of course, in a libertarian society, laws discriminating against gay people would not exist. For instance, same-sex couples find themselves facing the same laws against intermarriage as blacks and whites once did. In a libertarian society, marriage would be a private contract between two willing individuals who could set the terms to suit themselves."

"Our greatest polluter is the government (i.e., U.S. military), not corporate America. Putting government in charge of protecting the environment is like asking the fox to guard the hen house."

"When courts found the military liable for illness and death after careless nuclear testing in Utah, the government claimed sovereign immunity and refused to pay damages. In a libertarian society, no one would be immune from the consequences of their actions, especially not a government charged with protecting us."

"Most economists believe that the Great Depression was primarily a result of the Federal Reserve’s manipulation of the national currency. Had the government not interfered with the banking industry by giving the Fed a monopoly on money, the Depression might have never occurred. Too much government, not too little, was the culprit."