I have a recurring daymare that when the Glorious People's SWAT Teams smash their way in, most of us - by which I mean members of the general freedom movement - will be caught flatfooted, sitting in our underwear behind our computer monitors, guzzling Jolt and gorging on Cheetos, while arguing with our friends and enemies online about immigration or abortion, two of the issues that the Lefties know they can always rely on to keep that general freedom movement divided and powerless.
L. Neil SmithPeople who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work.
L. Neil SmithMoney, first and foremost, is a medium of communication, conveying the information we call 'price'. Government control of the money supply is censorship, a violation of the First Amendment. Inflation is a lie.
L. Neil SmithForget 'redeeming social value,' dirty pictures are fun. When I die I want my ashes sprinkled over a nudist camp.
L. Neil SmithI'm tired of being considered some kind of criminal or dangerous throwback for no other reason than that I value, exercise, and defend my rights under the first ten Amendments to the United States Constitution.
L. Neil SmithVictim disarmament types are sick, sick people, who'd rather see a woman raped in an alley and strangled with her own pantyhose than see her with a gun in her hand.
L. Neil SmithThe freedom to own and carry the weapon of your choice is a natural, fundamental, and inalienable human, individual, civil, and Constitutional right - subject neither to the democratic process nor to arguments grounded in social utility.
L. Neil SmithThanks to guys like Boss Tweed, famous for saying, 'I don't give a damn who does the voting, as long as I do the nominating,' there hasn't been an honest election in the USA since sometime around the War Between the States.
L. Neil SmithWe're most likely to lose our rights when we allow ourselves to be persuaded to deprive others of theirs.
L. Neil SmithAmerica didn't have a drug problem before it passed drug laws. While drugs were consumed by large numbers of people — the number of women habituated to the opium found in laudanum was, no pun intended, staggering — they were, for the most part, easily able to live their lives, do their jobs, and raise their families pretty much the way we do today.
L. Neil Smith[E]lections amount to little more than choosing between the scum that floats to the top of the barrel and the dregs that settle to the bottom.
L. Neil SmithPoliticians need human misery. ... Government's a disease masquerading as its own cure.
L. Neil SmithIncidentally, the next time some war-mongering wise-ass tries to tell you that one reason we're in the Middle East is to enhance the civil rights and social equality of women, remind them that we very enthusiastically destroyed the most secular country over there, where women could dress as they liked, have good jobs, be literate, and vote.
L. Neil SmithTry not to be too angry or disappointed with your fellow Americans. Most of them don't care about politics as much as the majority of my readers, and the education they have received about it from the government's public school system is nothing more than a septic tank full of warmed-over self-serving statist lies and leftist propaganda.
L. Neil SmithGovernment can only do two things: It can beat people up and kill them. Or it can threaten to do so. When it seems to be doing something else - for example, handing out money or, say, surplus cheese - what's actually going on is that something has been taken away from one set of individuals by deadly force or the threat of deadly force, a hefty middleman's fee deducted, and whatever is left thrown to peasants delighted to receive stolen goods.
L. Neil SmithThose who sell their liberty for security are understandable, if pitiable, creatures. Those who sell the liberty of others for wealth, power, or even a moments respite deserve only the end of a rope.
L. Neil SmithPossibly worst of all, from the standpoint of the dedicated enemies of freedom, the Internet is a world that libertarians - having been marginalized for three decades by the establishment media - have made their own, almost without effort. It's an alternative reality (unlike 'meat-space' we live in) in which - exactly like intelligence, bravery, or virtue - the human capacity for violence is not additive, and in which it's impossible to initiate force against anybody.
L. Neil SmithI have long argued that we need to reopen Alcatraz to house government criminals, and let tourists on excursion boats in San Francisco Bay pay to chum the water with meat with an expired sell-by date that would otherwise have to be discarded.
L. Neil SmithImagine how a Teddy Kennedy or a Bill Clinton would take the news that one woman in ten, say, has the power to resist his blandishments by deadly force, and you'll get a perfect idea of how a Charles Schumer or a George Bush feels about armed taxpayers.
L. Neil SmithI'm tired of being lied to by government, by the media, and by every corporation I have anything to do with.
L. Neil SmithEach day, it seemed, another law was passed to impoverish and diminish them, punishing them for whatever success they achieved and rewarding their less competent and industrious neighbors.
L. Neil SmithIt's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance.
L. Neil SmithDespite the Internet 's origin in the late 1960s as a government sponsored means of communication between the Department of Defense, private industry, and academia, it has been at its best and generated the greatest economic, social, and technological benefits since it was 'liberated' by the hordes of 'geeks' who were originally hired to run it by employers who were not themselves conversant with computers, and couldn't tell when their employees were exchanging official traffic or trading dirty jokes and recipes for marijuana brownies.
L. Neil SmithYou cannot force me to agree with you. You can force me to act as though I agree with you but then you'll have to watch your back. All the time.
L. Neil SmithSocialism is, among other things, the political habitat of low self-esteem, incompetence, self-loathing, and a willingness to steal - or have stolen for you what you are unable or unwilling to work for. Socialism is a philosophy fit only for slugs, leaches, and mosquitoes.
L. Neil SmithHuman rights are an aspect of natural law, a consequence of the way the universe works, as solid and as real as photons or the concept of pi. The idea of self- ownership is the equivalent of Pythagoras' theorem, of evolution by natural selection, of general relativity, and of quantum theory. Before humankind discovered any of these, it suffered, to varying degrees, in misery and ignorance.
L. Neil SmithCollective states are constitutionally incapable of reliably producing anything but corpses.
L. Neil SmithMost libertarians agree that all rights are, in effect, property rights, beginning with this fundamental right to self-ownership and control of one's own life. As owners of their own lives, individuals are completely free to do absolutely anything they wish with them provided, of course, that it doesn't violate the identical right of others whether the people around them approve of what they do or not.
L. Neil SmithMany individuals spend a considerable portion of their lifetimes in terror of one imagined catastrophe or another. The classic is that your immortal soul will be consigned to eternal torment in the never-ending subterranean barbecue if you fail to follow the whacky edicts of one particular set of puckered dogwhistles or another. You may recall from the great movie Strange Days that a "dogwhistle" is a guy whose asshole is so tight that when he farts, only dogs can hear him.
L. Neil SmithA libertarian presidential candidate isn't going to win anyway, so he can afford to say that all taxation is theft, and it isn't the job of a libertarian presidential candidate to cook up new ways to commit theft.
L. Neil SmithFew things are more laughably pitiable than authority once it has been successfully defied.
L. Neil SmithGun control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound.
L. Neil SmithThe most dangerous and successful conspiracies take place in public, in plain sight, under the clear, bright light of day -- usually with TV cameras focused on them.
L. Neil SmithIf a politician isn't perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash -- for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything - without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn't your friend no matter what he tells you.
L. Neil Smith[N]o one's ever been able to show me any difference between democracy and brute force. It's just a majority ganging up on a minority with the minority giving in to avoid getting massacred.
L. Neil SmithEvery man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon - rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything - any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission.
L. Neil SmithI'll remind you all, however, that for government, existence is a privilege, not a right.
L. Neil SmithPsychologist Nathaniel Branden speaks of a benevolent sense of life possible to those with rational, productive values, vividly contrasted with the coercive parasitic group-culture of mystics and altruists we live in, where people all around you seem a burdensome annoyance, a threat to your survival. Having been told from childhood that life is a zero-sum game in which you owe everything to others, at some level you worry all the time that someday the bastards will collect. And collect they do, every April 15th. Why do you think they call it collectivism?
L. Neil SmithEconomists tell us that the 'price' of an object and its 'value' have very little or nothing to do with one another. 'Value' is entirely subjective economic value, anyway while 'price' reflects whatever a buyer is willing to give up to get the object in question, and whatever the seller is willing to accept to give it up. Both are governed by the Law of Marginal Utility, which is actually a law of psychology, rather than economics. For government to attempt to dictate a 'fair price' betrays complete misunderstanding of the entire process.
L. Neil SmithThe function of government is to provide you with service; the function of the media is to supply the Vaseline.
L. Neil SmithWorse than thieves, murderers, or cannibals, those who offer compromise slow you and sap your vitality while pretending to be your friends. They are not your friends. Compromisers are the enemies of all humanity, the enemies of life itself. Compromisers are the enemies of everything important, sacred, and true.
L. Neil SmithSocialism, whether it's the 'soft tyranny' of the EuroAmerican management state or the murderously repressive forms taken by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, is all about disindividuation, a steady, relentless erasure of the individual differences among us, everything that makes us who we are. 'Everybody in, nobody out!' is the marching mantra of militant collectivized medicine, but it accurately describes all other aspects of collectivism as well. No alternatives allowed, no choices, no individualism, no individuality, and ultimately, no individuation.
L. Neil Smith