If there were a generic one-word expression for 'one whose fear of the uncertainties of success moves him to surrender at the very moment of victory', it would be 'Republican'.

People in the mass media tend more and more every day to look and act like elected and appointed officials.

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.

You're people, in short, who must be stupid, insane, or evil to continue arguing in the face of indisputable facts and irrefutable logic that others must be forced into a state of helplessness and victimized by individual criminals or the state. Stupid, insane, or evil.

Psychologist 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?

I'll remind you all, however, that for government, existence is a privilege, not a right.

Collective states are constitutionally incapable of reliably producing anything but corpses.