The difference between successful people and unsucessful people is this:
The former INVESTS his time while the latter SPENDS his time. Most young people don’t realize that they are at a golden moment to plant seeds of talent to harvest throughout their lives. Some think, "When you get older, it gets harder." That’s only if you SPEND rather then INVEST. If you INVEST your time, life keeps getting easier and more fun.

- Pook, The Book of Pook


And what would be the point of government if consumers could increasingly get all they wanted and needed, for lower and lower prices or -- heaven forbid -- for free? The true purpose of government is to make life HARDER for consumers, so that the consumer -- like the producer -- will keep thinking like a dependent child, looking to that "higher power" of legal coercion to gain advantage. Without its subjects thinking like needy dependents, government goes out of business.
In the master-slave relationship of the ruler and the ruled, the ruler must keep alive the notion that active and aggressive "protection" is essential, and that it can only be provided by the protective ruler. Yet the only thing we really need protection from, in the normal course of daily life, is our self-appointed protector.

- noah in the comments section of this Mises Wire article [mises.org]


Socialism seems to be the most persistent non-falsifiable ideology on planet earth. The socialists are like people who swear that gravity doesn't exist and keep hopping around on two feet, expecting to rise into the clouds at any moment. It never happens, but the faith that there is no gravity remains unshaken.
What, in any case, is socialism? No matter how one describes it, no matter how many failed cases you point to, no matter how often all its central ideas are refuted, the socialist refuses responsibility.
So let's just take at least someone's word for it. The Socialist Party of Britain gives this shorthand description of what socialism is: "free access to all goods and services."
Interesting idea. I think I'll take a Bentley, a vacation to Europe, a custom-made suit, and a lifetime of haircuts. For free. Thank you very much.

- Jeffrey Tucker, Socialists Are Scarcity Deniers [fee.org]


[Central bankers] see themselves as doctors who must care for a sick patient (made sick, as it turns out, in no small part due to the prior actions of doctors).
As thinking humans, we don't spend too much time trying to think our way into the most natural and optimal rates of breathing or heart-beating. Our lungs pump air and our hearts pump blood pretty well on their own.
If we end up in the hospital, doctors might monitor our life functions and might intervene if they see our breathing rates or heart rates become "too low" or "too high." But doctors in a hospital are typically working with infinitely greater knowledge and precision than are central bankers. Central bankers can never do more than guess.
Imagine if well-meaning doctors tried to predict and control our breathing rates or heart rates at all times without knowledge of where we were or what we were doing. If one night we had insomnia and decided to go for a midnight run, the remote central planners who assumed we were asleep in bed would be alarmed at the sudden elevation of breathing rate and heart rate and would take immediate "corrective" action.
By artificially lowering our breathing rates and heart rates to normal sleeping levels while we were in fact running, the doctors wouldn't make us healthy... they would make us dead. The doctors, acting out of arrogance and ignorance, would be guilty of malpractice... as are today's central bankers and other central planners.

- noah in the comments section of this Mises Wire article [mises.org]


Prior to the invention of government reporting on economic trends, for example, there was no concept of "the economy" as a thing that could be observed, counted, and - most importantly - manipulated by public policy. Since the 1930s, though, a non-stop barrage of government statistics on "the economy" has shaped and revolutionized our most basic notions of economic growth, employment, and national policy.

- Ryan McMaken, How the Census Bureau Invented "Hispanics" [mises.org]


In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is [...] in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

- Theodore Dalrymple


How to be a [Communist]:
Assign the word "freedom" to things that are involuntary.
Assign the word "slavery" to things that are voluntary.
Assign the word "Capitalism" to things that involve money or production, unless it just so happens to be your form of "socialism".

- CapitalJusticeWarrior on Reddit [www.reddit.com]