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Kevin D. Williamson QUOTES

Kevin D. Williamson QUOTES

1 " Health care and education are too important NOT to be left to the free market. "

― Kevin D. Williamson , The Dependency Agenda

2 " The difference between communism and socialism is that under socialism central planning ends with a gun in your face, whereas under communism central planning begins with a gun in your face. "

― Kevin D. Williamson , The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

3 " It was not for nothing that Adam Smith wrote that “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” The romantic notion of politics holds that Big Business is synonymous with capitalism and the archenemy of socialism. In fact, Big Business is reliably against most of what must go into any modern definition of capitalism: free trade, free enterprise, free markets, and the impartial rule of law. Big Business reliably seeks to use the state to seek advantages in trade and to crush smaller (and often more innovative) competitors. "

― Kevin D. Williamson , The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

4 " The charges of ‘white privilege’ or ‘rape apologist’ are thrown around only because we no longer accuse people of being witches or communists when we wish to destroy them. "

― Kevin D. Williamson , The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

5 " Outrage is intoxicating, and like other intoxicants, it makes people stupid. "

― Kevin D. Williamson , The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

6 " Moral and intellectual homogeneity is a precondition for communion with the corporation, which is the corporation’s transcendent purpose. "

― Kevin D. Williamson , The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

7 " Socialism’s main defects are the inability of political decision-makers to make rational decisions without the information provided by prices generated by marketplace transactions; the misalignment of incentives and resources; and the subjugation of economic necessities to political mandates with no basis in material economic reality. It is the last of these, above all, that makes socialism dangerous. As Mises’s colleague F. A. Hayek argued in The Road to Serfdom, central planners frustrated by their inability to mold the economic world to their will inevitably are tempted to run roughshod over the rights and interests of the individuals they purport to serve. Sometimes this takes the relatively innocuous form of high-handed officials in the Canadian public-health service denying a procedure or timely access to care; sometimes it takes one of the diverse forms explored with such horrific vigor by Kim Jong Il. "

― Kevin D. Williamson

8 " Idealistic socialists in the West usually will tell you that 'socialism' is anything other than what actual socialist governments have achieved in the real world. What is important to keep in mind is that socialism is not a particular set of political conditions, but a specific kind of economic arrangement. Socialism is not identical with left-wing politics, and socialism is not confined to the Left. The various kinds of political systems that have arisen from socialist economies, from Soviet authoritarianism to India’s 'license raj,' are in no small part responses to the inadequacies and contradictions inherent in socialist systems of production and distribution—systems that seek to ignore or to subvert the laws of economics. "

― Kevin D. Williamson , The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

9 " It would be difficult to find in the United States any profession so dedicated to socialism as that of educators, and difficult to find any argument for socialism as popular as the cause of public education. "

― Kevin D. Williamson , The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

10 " The United States in the twenty-first century is not very much like nineteenth-century Prussia (Prussia today isn’t much like Prussia then, either), but we still use its educational methods. We would never think of using its transportation methods (horsepower was literally horsepower), its communication methods (telegraphs), or its military technology (muzzle-loaders and bayonets). But government-run systems have a way of preserving themselves well past any rational point, which is why the United States still maintains the helium reserve it established for dirigible warfare—presumably to fight those nineteenth-century Prussians. "

― Kevin D. Williamson , The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

11 " Peons must have conformity. The instinct to seek it is in their souls. It is what makes them peons. It is the essence of peonhood "

― Kevin D. Williamson , The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

12 " Detroit is an extreme example of the fact that public-sector employment has become in effect a supplementary welfare state, with salaries and benefits – and, above all, pensions – entirely disconnected from legitimate municipal purposes. Unionized public-sector employees with a high degree of political discipline fortified by narrow financial self-interest become an unstoppable constituency, and the government becomes its own special-interest group. "

― Kevin D. Williamson , What Doomed Detroit

13 " Of all the stupid and destructive products of 1960s-style liberation politics, the effective abolition of marriage (and hence of family, properly understood) will, in the end, turn out to be the worst. And spare me your banal self-justifications: “I divorced my child’s mother, but I’m a good father!” “I was never married to my child’s father, but I’m a good mother.” I’m sure you think you are.

You aren’t.

Statistically speaking, your domestic situation is about as healthy for your children as would be your picking up a drug habit. (Yes, yes, I’m sure that you are the special-snowflake exception to the rule. One of these days, a three-legged horse might win the Kentucky Derby, too.) The numbers are the numbers.

Strange thing: Wildly different philosophical and religious orientations all point to the same central fact of human life. In Genesis, it’s “male and female he created them.” In Plato, we spend our lives seeking the lost half of ourselves from which we were separated by the gods. In good ol’ Darwinian terms, the getting of healthy offspring is the very purpose of life itself. We parted ways with the chimps a few eons ago, and somewhere along the way we developed habits and institutions that helped us to connect our libidos with one of our most useful and uniquely human traits: the ability to engage in long-term planning, even beyond our own lives.

And then, around 1964, we said: “To Hell with it, let’s just be chimps.”

And here we are. "

― Kevin D. Williamson

14 " Populists of the Trump variety and the Sanders variety (who are not in fact as different as they seem) are not wrong to see these corporate cosmopolitans as members of a separate, distinct, and thriving class with economic and social interests of its own. Those interests overlap only incidentally and occasionally with those of movement conservatives — and overlap even less as the new nationalist-populist strain in the Republican party comes to dominate the debate on questions such as trade and immigration. Under attack from both the right and the left, free enterprise and free trade increasingly are ideas without a party. As William H. Whyte discovered back in 1956, the capitalists are not prepared to offer an intellectual defense of capitalism or of classical liberalism. They believe in something else: the managers’ dream of command and control. "

― Kevin D. Williamson

15 " Donald Trump and Paris Hilton share an occupation: publicity whore. Paris Hilton is better at it. "

― Kevin D. Williamson

16 " The proximate cause of Detroit’s bankruptcy is its inability to make good on debts owed to the funds paying out pensions and health care benefits to current and retired city workers. Those obligations make up the great majority of Detroit’s $20 billion or so in outstanding debt. "

― Kevin D. Williamson , What Doomed Detroit

17 " The intersection of authoritarian politics with homoeroticism is a subject of some historical interest, from the Nazi enthusiasm for the sculptures of Josef Thorak and Arno Breker to the Italian Futurists’ ritual rejection of all things feminine. That mostly petered out around the time Francisco Franco stopped rocking that fur in official portraiture, though it has made occasional ignominious appearances in Democratic politics too. But the combination of homoerotic fascination and gay panic that marks the Trump movement is truly remarkable, something unseen in American politics. It "

― Kevin D. Williamson , The Case Against Trump (Encounter Broadsides Book 46)

18 " Barack Obama spent eight years offering himself as the American super-ego, and Americans responded by electing their id. President Trump is as normal as diabetes. "

― Kevin D. Williamson

19 " O problema do capitalismo são os capitalistas. O problema do socialismo é o socialismo.” — Willi Schlamm, ex-socialista austríaco "

― Kevin D. Williamson , The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

20 " But, why this restriction? Why on this speech and not that speech?” There is no evidence, really, that these questions can or will be answered according to principle rather than according to politics and status-seeking or that the project will not be dominated by the desire to punish—by retaliation against real and perceived social rivals—rather than by the desire to prevent some real evil. "

― Kevin D. Williamson , The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics