Ilana Mercer

"The voluntary free market is a sacred extension of life itself. The free market—it has not been unfettered for a very long time—is really a spontaneously synchronized order comprising trillions upon trillions of voluntary acts that individuals perform in order to make a living. Introduce government force and coercion into this rhythm and you get life-threatening arrhythmia. Under increasing state control, this marketplace - this magic, organic agora - starts to splutter, and people suffer."

"Whether it is committed by a group operating within or without the law, terrorism is still terrorism."

"The end result of positively reinforcing bad behavior is that you get more of it. The culmination of a failure to punish predators is a debased, dissolute, slum-dog society in which, by legal decree, the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper."

"Progressive policies lead to a regressive society."

"Government jobs are not an addition to the country's payroll; they are an increase in the nation's payload."

"Think of mass immigration into America as a global 'right of return."

"The idea that the Founders were flawed, sinful men like you and me is current among a hefty majority of Americans, conservative too. It is wrong. Quite the reverse. The Founders are matchless today both morally and intellectually — their actions bespeak a willingness to forsake fortunes and risk lives for liberty, a concept and cause alien to contemporary Americans, who're, mostly, bereft of both the mental and moral gravitas necessary to grasp it."

"The military is government. The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government, chief of which is its liberalism. Like the government, the military is freighted with pathological political correctness."

"In an effort to create reality on the ground - instead of reporting on it - the American media seem to color events by refracting them through a sickeningly sentimental prism."

"Libya is a war of the womb. A product of the romantic minds of women — Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice — who fantasize about an Arab awakening. It is estrogen-driven paternalism on steroids."

"The titan is tired. We Americans have our own tyrants to tackle. We no longer want to defend to the death borders not our own—be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, wherever. And we don't need our friends looking to us to do so."

"Like or dislike her, the British Queen is harmless. Her role is purely ceremonial. Conversely, life and death are in the hands of the monarch who sits in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue."

"The United States has already passed on as the world’s economic leader. Having flouted Thomas Jefferson for too long, America has succumbed to public debt, the 'fore horse for oppression and despotism,' after which 'taxation will follow, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."

"The prototypical WASP is flabby in body and mind. He is fearful and easily cowed. He erupts in tears at a drop of a hat. He is gripped by the culture of apology, and flagellates over sins he has not committed. His eternal state of expiation is driven not by goodness, but by insufferable self-righteousness."

"Europeans have come to realize that adding an overarching tier of tyrants—the EU—to their own government has benefited them as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man."

"Socialism is humanity's second nature. All politicians do is turn human vice into votes."

"From dwarf tossing to drug taking: The legislator has no place in voluntary exchanges between consenting adults, as dodgy and as dangerous as these might be."

"A depraved culture supports a depraved politics and vice versa."

"When South Africa was governed by a racist white minority, it was scorned by the West and treated as Saddam Hussein was, with boycotts and sanctions. Now that a racist, black-majority government controls the country; that it is as violent as Iraq, Liberia, or the Congo and rapidly becoming another Islamist-friendly, failed African state, it is the toast of the West."

"America, a humane society, ought to take pity on the persecuted descendants of another Protestant patriarchy. However, even if American immigration policy welcomed white South Africans, which it doesn't, Afrikaners would find it hard to leave. The Boers (and British) built the place. Like Heidi away from the Alps, Afrikaners tend to wilt when separated from their homeland. Not for nothing have the Afrikaners been dubbed "The White Tribe of Africa.""

"By staving off crime and communism, the apartheid regime, a vast repressive apparatus though it was, saved black South Africans from an even worse moral and material fate."

"Why have some people produced Confucian and Anglo-Protestant ethics—with their mutual emphasis on graft and delayed gratification—while others have midwived Islamic and animistic values, emphasizing conformity, consensus, and control? Why have certain patterns of thought and action come to typify certain people in the first place? Such an investigation political correctness prohibits."

"Provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches, generalizations are not incorrect. Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a representative sample. People make prudent decisions in their daily lives based on probabilities and generalities. That one chooses not to live in a particular crime-riddled county or country in no way implies that one considers all individual residents there to be criminals, only that a sensible determination has been made, based on statistically significant data, as to where scarce and precious resources—one's life and property—are best invested."

"A bully's universe: US foreign policy operates upon the premise that American men and matériel should be capable of reaching and controlling all corners of the world."

"In Syria, we witnessed "a successful attempt by the Russians at replacing bully power with a balance of power.""

"If regular visits with prostitutes kept the political class from launching trillion-dollar war- and welfare programs, and financing Fanny, Freddy and the Fed—I would personally contribute to a prostitution fund for Washington whores. The prostitutes would be the patriots."

"In a democracy, thumping majorities prevail."

"Men in authority are now a threatened minority."

"‘You didn't build that’ will be Obama's political epitaph: With these remarks, Obama has come out of the closet as a most odious collectivist, who believes religiously that government predation is a condition for production. Or, put simply, that the parasite created the host."

"Chinese mercantilism is not free trade, but it is far better than American militarism."

"Hamas hides among unwitting civilians, who have no way of controlling its activities. This fact does not give Israel the right to kill innocent non-combatants, not even unintentionally. Besides, murder is not 'unintentional' when you know it is inevitable."

"A right that can't be defended is a right in name only. If you cannot by law defend your life, you have no right to life. If you cannot defend your property, you have no right of private property. And if you cannot defend your liberty, you are not a free man. It follows that inherent in the idea of an inalienable right is the right to mount a vigorous defense of the same rights."

"Most people would define treason as a betrayal of one's country or sovereign. In my book, the book of natural law, treason is properly defined as a betrayal of one's countrymen—and, in particular, the betrayal of the individual's right to life, liberty and property. (To your question, yes, this renders almost all politicians traitors by definition.)"

"The glue of American togetherness is gone, replaced by a flimsy, fluid, and thoroughly fake unity peddled by politicians. ‘Ideas’ they call it. On the one day, it's a crusade for democracy; on the next, it's a war against racism."

"A balanced-budget requirement implies is that government has the constitutional right to spend as much as it takes in; that government is permitted to waste however much revenue it can extract from wealth producers, and that the bums must merely bring into balance what was stolen (taxes) with what is squandered (spending)."

"The great Roman statesman Cicero observed that, 'Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.' In our ignorance of the Immoral values that form part of our history and heritage, we Americans have become perpetual children."

"The only time Republicans will shake fists and point fingers is over a war delayed, one that isn't led by the US, or a war waged without the necessary conviction (read collateral damage)."

"It would appear that the Keynesian faithful have foisted on free-market capitalists an unfalsifiable theory. Evidence that contradicts it, Keynesian kooks enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory."

"But public works, economic protectionism, cheap money, 'deficit-financed government spending,' and 'the animal spirits of the spendthrift' in the service of boosting 'consumption demand'... Doesn't Keynesianism simply appeal to the worst in human nature?"

"Distinguish we must between the right of the people the world over to be free and our obligation to free them. We have a solemn [negative] duty not to violate the rights of foreigners everywhere to life, liberty and property. But we have no duty to uphold their rights. Why? Because the ostensible upholding of the negative rights of the world's citizens involves compromising the negative liberties of Americans—our lives, our liberties and our livelihoods. A just government’s duty is to its own citizens first."

"He who saves you from war is better than he who sends you to war."

"The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports the same inherent malignancies and perverse incentives of government, down to the racial-spoils system."

"[T]rade, not democracy, is the best antidote to war."

"Our staggeringly pompous president is incapable of comprehending that a businessman cannot pay a worker in excess of his productivity and hope to stay solvent."

"There are just too many Americans grubbing for free stuff and a preponderance of Republicans eager to parcel it out in exchange for power."

"[M]embers of the media-monetary-military-congressional complex are immoral and have an allergy to the truth."

"In the bureaucracy, incentives will forever be inverted. Failure results in success: in more funds, more training, more time off."

"The Big-Media collective is slow, stupid and shackled by ideology. Reality must bite them before they'll recognize it, much less report it."

"Prosperity and penury do not turn on gyno-centric and gay matters. But leftist statists and libertarians of the left place these wedge issues at the forefront of the fight for freedom. [...] Every bit as bad as liberals, "libertarian" political operators are prepared to shed political blood over any imagined sign of bigotry."

"The world mistakes Palestinian military weakness for moral innocence."