Jews From The United States

"There's a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise … and yet we need taxes. We have to recognize that we must not hope for a Utopia that is unattainable. I would like to see a great deal less government activity than we have now, but I do not believe that we can have a situation in which we don't need government at all. We do need to provide for certain essential government functions — the national defense function, the police function, preserving law and order, maintaining a judiciary. So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago."

"[A] society which is socialist cannot also be democratic, in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom."

"You can only aim at equality by giving some people the right to take things from others. And what ultimately happens when you aim for equality is that A and B decide what C should do for D, except that they take a bit of commission off on the way.”"

"In my opinion, a society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty. A society that aims first for liberty will not end up with equality, but it will end up with a closer approach to equality than any other kind of system that has ever been developed."

"Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending, because that is the true tax. Every budget is balanced. There is no such thing as an unbalanced federal budget. You're paying for it. If you're not paying for it in the form of explicit taxes, you're paying for it indirectly in the form of inflation or in the form of borrowing. The thing that you keep your eye on is what government spends. And the real problem is to hold down government spending as a fraction of our income. And if you do that, you can stop worrying about the deficit."

"Let me take the example which is today the greatest sacred cow of them all—Social Security. Was there an overwhelming demand for Social Security in the 1930s when the law was adopted? Far from it. There was no public demand for it, it had to be sold. How was it sold? By the slickest devices of Madison Avenue, by imaginative packaging and deceptive labeling. Social Security was sold as an insurance scheme. It is not an insurance scheme. There is very little relationship to the amount of money any one individual pays and the amount of money he is entitled to receive. Social Security is a combination of a bad tax system with a bad way of distributing welfare… If you look at the tax system, who could defend a wage tax, a tax on wages up to a maximum, a tax on work, a tax which discourages employers from hiring people, and discourages people from going to work; a tax which is borne by the lowest wage group, workers? It is a regressive tax. You could never in a million Sundays… have gotten such a tax passed as a tax."

"The reality is that if you look at every program that the government has adopted in the direction of extending its scope, it took an enormous propaganda campaign by special propaganda groups to get those measures passed. There was no underlining public demand for those measures. On the contrary, the demand had to be created, it had to be developed, it had to be produced. And it was created, it was developed, it was produced, by people… who sincerely wanted to see an expansion in the scope of government."

"The great enemy of human freedom is the Government. By taking money out of our pockets and spending it, it destroys our freedom."

"It's nice to elect the right people, but that isn't the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things."

"That is a widespread myth, that it is possible to spend money with nobody paying for it. You have everybody screaming that we ought to have new, bigger, more generous government programs. Where are we going to raise the money? Tax business. But business corporations can’t pay any taxes. A corporate executive may sign the check, but where does he get the money? From his stockholders or from his customers or from his employees. Unlike the federal government, he doesn’t have a printing press in his basement. So the only way he can pay money to the government is imposing a burden on somebody. Government cannot spend money at nobody’s expense."

"This leads to my next myth—the myth that government can spend money at nobody’s expense. What was really involved in that last story was that somehow the local people do not pay out the money coming down from Washington somebody else does. Of course, the truth is that the money makes a round trip between Florida and Washington, and there is a discount taken off for cash as it passes through Washington. Some of you may remember that wonderful description of government by the French economist, Frederic Bastiat, who said that government is that fiction whereby everybody believes that he can live at the expense of everybody else."

"The elementary truth is that the Great Depression was produced by government mismanagement. It was not produced by the failure of private enterprise, it was produced by the failure of government to perform a function which had been assigned to it."

"In this day and age, we need to revise the old saying to read, "Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.""

"One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results."

"If we have system in which government is in a position to give large favor - it's human nature to try to get this favor - whether those people are large enterprises, or whether they're small businesses like farmers, or whether they're representatives of any other special group. The only way to prevent that is to force them to engage in competition one with the other."

"I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater."

"I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintenance of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing and it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind. It requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you step in to do something about them you not only may make them worse, you will spread your tentacles and get bad results elsewhere."

"I think the government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem and very often makes the problem worse."

"They had cliche answers but only to their self-created straw-men. To exaggerate only slightly, they had never talked to anyone who really believed, and had thought deeply about, views drastically different from their own. As a result, when they heard real arguments instead of caricatures, they had no answers, only amazement that such views could be expressed by someone who had the external characteristics of being a member of the intellectual community, and that such views could be defended with apparent cogency. Never have I been more impressed with the advice I once received: "You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.""

"Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation."

"The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power - we must have a dispersion of power."

"So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not."

"There was nothing in these views to repel a student; or to make Keynes attractive. Keynes had nothing to offer those of us who had sat at the feet of Simons, Mints, Knight, and Viner."

"Make politics an avocation, not a vocation."

"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output. … A steady rate of monetary growth at a moderate level can provide a framework under which a country can have little inflation and much growth. It will not produce perfect stability; it will not produce heaven on earth; but it can make an important contribution to a stable economic society."

"Now, when anybody starts talking about this [an all-volunteer force] he immediately shifts language. My army is 'volunteer,' your army is 'professional,' and the enemy's army is 'mercenary.' All these three words mean exactly the same thing. I am a volunteer professor, I am a mercenary professor, and I am a professional professor. And all you people around here are mercenary professional people. And I trust you realize that. It's always a puzzle to me why people should think that the term 'mercenary' somehow has a negative connotation. I remind you of that wonderful quotation of Adam Smith when he said, 'You do not owe your daily bread to the benevolence of the baker, but to his proper regard for his own interest.' And this is much more broadly based. In fact, I think mercenary motives are among the least unattractive that we have."

"I have no right to coerce someone else, because I cannot be sure that I'm right and he is wrong."

"Over the period covered by these data, a drastic change has occurred in the responsibilities undertaken by the state to provide assistance to the aged, unemployed and otherwise dependent. This change has had divergent results on the particular data under discussion. The availability of assistance from the state would clearly tend to reduce the need for private reserves and so to reduce private saving—it is equivalent, in terms of our hypothesis, to a reduction in the variance of transitory components."

"The construction of hypotheses is a creative act of inspiration, intuition, invention; its essence is the vision of something new in familiar material. The process must be discussed in psychological, not logical, categories; studied in autobiographies and biographies, not treatises on scientific method; and promoted by maxim and example, not syllogism or theorem."

"If we are to use effectively these abstract models and this descriptive material, we must have a comparable exploration of the criteria for determining what abstract model it is best to use for particular kinds of problems, what entities in the abstract model are to be identified with what observable entities, and what features of the problem or of the circumstances have the greatest effect on the accuracy of the predictions yielded by a particular model or theory."

"A largely parallel example involving human behavior has been used elsewhere by Savage and me. Consider the problem of predicting the shots made by an expert billiard player. It seems not at all unreasonable that excellent predictions would be yielded by the hypothesis that the billiard player made his shots as if he knew the complicated mathematical formulas that would give the optimum directions of travel, could estimate accurately by eye the angles, etc., describing the location of the balls, could make lightning calculations from the formulas, and could then make the balls travel in the direction indicated by the formulas. Our confidence in this hypothesis is not based on the belief that billiard players, even expert ones, can or do go through the process described; it derives rather from the belief that, unless in some way or other they were capable of reaching essentially the same result, they would not in fact be expert billiard players. It is only a short step from these examples to the economic hypothesis that under a wide range of circumstances individual firms behave as if they were seeking rationally to maximize their expected returns (generally if misleadingly called "profits") and had full knowledge of the data needed to succeed in this attempt; as if, that is, they knew the relevant cost and demand functions, calculated marginal cost and marginal revenue from all actions open to them, and pushed each line of action to the point at which the relevant marginal cost and marginal revenue were equal. Now, of course, businessmen do not actually and literally solve the system of simultaneous equations in terms of which the mathematical economist finds it convenient to express this hypothesis, any more than leaves or billiard players explicitly go through complicated mathematical calculations or falling bodies decide to create a vacuum. The billiard player, if asked how he decides where to hit the ball, may say that he "just figures it out" but then also rubs a rabbit's foot just to make sure; and the businessman may well say that he prices at average cost, with of course some minor deviations when the market makes it necessary. The one statement is about as helpful as the other, and neither is a relevant test of the associated hypothesis."

"On more than one occasion, Pipes has called for the extension of Israel’s already ruthless policy of collective punishment, arguing that leveling Palestinian villages is justifiable if attacks are launched from among their inhabitants. It seems to me from observing his style that he came to this conclusion with rather more relish than regret... The objection to Pipes is not, in any case, strictly a political one. It is an objection to a person who confuses scholarship with propaganda and who pursues petty vendettas with scant regard for objectivity."

"Daniel Pipes... perhaps the foremost analyst of radical Islam and related phenomena, as well as one of the great minds of our age. (197)"

"There is no problem with Islam itself or with the Muslims, but these are difficult times, and the difficulty stems from radical Islam."

"Anti-Islamist Muslims - who wish to live modern lives, unencumbered by burqas, fatwas and violent visions of jihad - are on the defensive and atomized. However eloquent, their individual voices cannot compete with the roar of militant Islam's determination, money (much of it from overseas) and violence. As a result, militant Islam, with its West-phobia and goal of world hegemony, dominates Islam in the West and appears to many to be the only kind of Islam."

"Israelis must be encouraged to defeat the Palestinians."

"There is no escaping the unfortunate fact that Muslim government employees in law enforcement, the military, and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism, as do Muslim chaplains in prisons and the armed forces. Muslim visitors and immigrants must undergo additional background checks. Mosques require a scrutiny beyond that applied to churches, synagogues, and temples. Muslim schools require increased oversight to ascertain what is being taught to children."

"Even as the nation monitors the Muslim world within its borders more closely for signs of Islamism, it must continue, of course, to protect the civil rights of law-abiding American Muslims. Political leaders should regularly and publicly distinguish between Islam, the religion of Muslims, and Islamism, the totalitarian ideology. In addition, they should do everything in their power to make sure that individual Muslims, mosques, and other legal institutions continue to enjoy the full protection of the law. A time of crisis doesn’t change the presumption of innocence at the core of our legal system. Police should provide extra protection for Muslims to prevent acts of vandalism against their property or their persons."

"The great thing about attackers is that there are so many to choose from!"

""So it's tempting to incorporate a smaller resolver library into qmail. [...] I'd no longer be able to blame the BIND authors and vendors for the fact that attackers can easily use DNS to steal mail." [From the file "THOUGHTS" of the qmail distribution]"

""I often see people saying 'Nobody has produced an invulnerable software system; therefore, nobody will ever produce an invulnerable software system.'"By the same bogus reasoning, nobody will ever reach Mars; nobody will ever find MD5 collisions; nobody will ever cure cancer; nobody will ever prove the Poincare conjecture; nobody will ever clone a human; nobody will ever build a 1GHz CPU; nobody will ever find SHA-1 collisions; nobody will ever break the sound barrier; etc." (15 January 2005)"

"Of course, the test difficulty depends on what you're doing, and on how you're doing it. I'm constantly asking "How much would I have to screw this up to write an incorrect function that passes these simple tests?" Occasionally the answer is "Not much," so I'll throw the code away and start over. It was probably perfect code, but that's not good enough."

"We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook?"

"You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever."

"When we describe what the other person is really like, I suppose we often picture what we want. We look through the prism of our need."

"What do I want to take home from my summer vacation? Time. The wonderful luxury of being at rest. The days when you shut down the mental machinery that keeps life on track and let life simply wander. The days when you stop planning, analyzing, thinking and just are. Summer is my period of grace."

"We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives . . ., not looking for flaws, but for potential."

"We owned what we learned back there; the experience and the growth are grafted into our lives."

"We are told that people stay in love because of chemistry, or because they remain intrigued with each other, because of many kindnesses, because of luck . . . But part of it has got to be forgiveness and gratefulness."

"Values are not trendy items that are casually traded in."