From Umberto Eco (1932–2016)Italian novelist, literary critic, philosopher, semiotician, and university professor, Foucault’s Pendulum (1989):
I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
Gautama Buddha (c. 563/480–c. 483/400 BCE), ascetic (śramaṇa) and sage, on whose teachings Buddhism was founded, The Dhammapada:
Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace.
“Violence and Marxism” is almost a redundancy, but Ron Paul has a great way to protect your kids’ minds and bodies. From Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:
The February mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida prompted many parents to consider homeschooling. This is hardly surprising, as the misnamed federal “Gun-Free Schools” law leaves schoolchildren defenseless against mass shooters. Removing one’s children from government schools seems a rational response to school shootings.
School shootings are not the only form of violence causing more parents to consider homeschooling. Many potential homeschooling parents are concerned about the failure of school administrators to effectively protect children from bullying by other students.
Of course many parents choose homeschooling as a means of protecting their children from federal education “reforms” such as Common Core. Other parents are motivated by a desire to protect their children from the cultural Marxism that has infiltrated many schools.
The spread of cultural Marxism has contributed to the dumbing down of public education. Too many government schools are more concerned with promoting political correctness than ensuring that students receive a good education. Even if cultural Marxism did not dumb down education, concerns that government schools are indoctrinating children with beliefs that conflict with parents’ political, social, and even religious beliefs would motivate many families to homeschool.
Even when government schools are not intentionally promoting cultural Marxism or other left-wing ideologies, they are still implicitly biased toward big government. For example, how many government schools teach the Austrian economics explanation for the Great Depression — much less question the wisdom of central banking — or critically examine the justifications for America’s hyper-interventionist foreign policy?
Parents interested in providing their children with a quality education emphasizing the ideas of liberty should consider looking into my homeschooling curriculum. The Ron Paul Curriculum provides students with a well-rounded education that includes rigorous programs in history, mathematics, and the physical and natural sciences. The curriculum also provides instruction in personal finance. Students can develop superior oral and verbal communication skills via intensive writing and public speaking courses. Another feature of my curriculum is that it provides students the opportunity to create and run their own internet businesses.
To continue reading: Homeschooling Protects Children from Violence and Marxism
Posted in Business, Capitalism, Education, Government, Morality, Philosophy, Politics
Tagged Cultural Marxism, Home Schooling, Marxism, Violence
Why would anybody think a government can raise standards of private virtue? Historically, governments have done the exact opposite. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:
Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
In the classic 1966 film, A Man for All Seasons, the family of Thomas More – chancellor of England and eventual Catholic saint –counsels Thomas to arrest power-mad Richard Rich because they suspect (correctly) Rich will betray Thomas and because “that man’s bad.” To this, More replies “there’s no law against that.” Another family member retorts: “yes there is – God law.” More answers with: “then God can arrest him.”
Robert Bolt, the learned atheist who penned A Man for All Seasons knew enough about Catholic philosophy to communicate important Catholic concepts with this scene.
Among these is the fact that, in the Catholic view, as voiced by Bolt’s Thomas More, not every sin, moral defect, or character flaw justifies intervention by the state. The fact that Richard Rich was a betrayer and liar was not sufficient, More understood, to apply More’s police powers as Chancellor of England. After all, for centuries, many Church leaders had long agreed that applying state coercion to cure every social ill was often a cure that was worse than the disease. As Thomas Aquinas notes: “Accordingly in human government also, those who are in authority rightly tolerate certain evils, lest certain goods be lost, or certain evils be incurred.”
Moreover in response to the retort that “God’s law” demands action, Aquinas notes that even God himself is tolerant of moral defects:
Human government is derived from the Divine government, and should imitate it. Now although God is all-powerful and supremely good, nevertheless He allows certain evils to take place in the universe, which He might prevent, lest, without them, greater goods might be forfeited, or greater evils ensue.
So, when More jokes that “God can arrest” Rich if He sees fit, More is giving voice to an already established strain of thought in Catholic thinking.
Moreover, Aquinas’s views toward the state are relatively benign compared to others — Augustine, for instance — who viewed the state as a necessary but violent evil to be tolerated only because it might restrain the excesses of even worse criminals.
To continue reading: The Vatican’s Latest Anti-Capitalist Paper Calls for More Government Regulation
Posted in Capitalism, Civil Liberties, Government, Philosophy, Religion
Tagged Catholic Church, Vatican
From Zig Ziglar (1926–2012), American author, salesman, and motivational speaker:
Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs
It is a logical impossibility that we can all have our “basic needs” provided by someone else. Governments redistribute; they don’t produce. Everything they give to someone they take from someone else. From James Bovard at mises.org:
Freedom from want” is one of the most frequently invoked notions of freedom in our time. However, it is a bogus freedom that politicians and socialists offer to lull people into accepting policies that destroy true freedom. Freedom from want has been most loudly advocated in this century by those who favored removing almost all limits from government power.
For example, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, two of the founders of British socialism and authors of The Soviet Union: A New Civilization?, asserted in 1936: “Personal freedom means, in effect, the power of the individual to buy sufficient food, shelter and clothing.”1
The Webbs did not specify how many millions of people government should be permitted to kill in the name of “freedom from want.” But during Stalin’s bloodiest decade, they asserted that for government economic planning to succeed, “public discussion must be suspended between the promulgation of the decision and the accomplishment of the task” and that any criticisms of the master plan should be treated as “an act of disloyalty, or even of treachery.”2
For government to be able to liberate people with food and clothing, it must have the power to execute anyone who criticizes the official economic plan. After visiting the Ukraine, the Webbs endorsed Stalin’s war on the kulaks (the least impoverished peasants), commenting that “it must be recognized that the liquidation of the individual capitalist in agriculture had necessarily to be faced if the required increase of output was to be obtained.”
(Output plummeted.)
Equating liberty with satisfactory living standards became far more common as the twentieth century went on. “Real freedom means good wages, short hours, security in employment, good homes, opportunity for leisure and recreation with family and friends,” wrote Sir Oswald Mosley, the most prominent British supporter of Nazi Germany, in his 1936 book, Fascism.3
To continue reading: “Freedom from Want” is Slavery for All
Posted in Government, Morality, Philosophy, Taxes
Tagged Freedom, slavery, welfare state
Many of the people who think they should be running the entire planet lack the qualities that define most of us as human. From Brandon Smith at alt-market.com:
It is often said that “other-izing” people overall can be dangerous and other-izing your enemies specifically can be tactically detrimental. For one, it can lead to a false sense of superiority over those people as you assert some kind of imagined genetic advantage. It can also lead to dangerous generalizations of vast groups as you categorize and pigeonhole millions as being exactly the same when this is rationally impossible. However, other-izing is perhaps the only option when faced with a very particular type of person embracing a very particular brand of ideology; other-izing can become a matter of survival.
I am of course talking about globalists.
Not the low level cronies and useful idiots within the globalist push or “movement,” because many of them simply represent a underlying gullibility or stupidity among people attracted to the inbred world of academia. Instead, I’m talking about the people behind the curtain; self proclaimed “globalists” or internationalists that have positioned themselves into strategic power centers. I am talking about the people that influence or outright control government policy as they stand over the shoulders of supposedly freely elected officials. I am talking about the people that influence economic security or insecurity through unaccountable central banking conglomerates. I am talking about the men and women that desire to dictate the fate of billions.
These people are not easily identified by anything other than their rhetoric and actions. They are made up of multiple ethnic groups. They herald from all corners of the planet. They do not subscribe to any one spiritual doctrine, but they do publicly devote themselves to many different religions as a means to “fit in” with the common citizen. Globalism IS their religion. And their god? Well, they see themselves as gods.
To be a globalist, though, one has to do more than merely subscribe to the tenets of globalism; there is a matter of character traits and actions which must be examined.
After studying the behavior of globalists and their organizations for quite some time, I have noticed that their psychological patterns tend to match with a narrow band of people that are best described as “criminally insane.” More accurately, globalists behave like high-functioning narcissistic sociopaths and psychopaths. But what are the traits of such people? Let’s take a look at some of them…
To continue reading: Global Elitists Are Not Human
Posted in Economics, Geopolitics, Governments, Philosophy, Psychology
Tagged Globalism, globalists, sociopaths
