Myron Calhoun's Collection of Liberty & Freedom Quotations

If you find this site interesting and/or useful, please let me know! Unless I hear from you, adding new quotations is lots of work with no reward, and I'm going to quit bothering with it!

However, even if I do stop adding to it, I will still accept suggestions for corrections and appreciate being told about duplicate quotes I can remove!

When I was a child, I spake as a child. But as I grew up, I learned that some people could say some things much better than I could, so I began collecting their quotations. I am a libertarian (small "l") and believe strongly in minimal government, individual freedom, property rights, respect for others, free trade, etc., so I've mostly collected quotations about such things. Because the "founding fathers" of the United States of America seemed to think much as I do (or is it the other way around?-), I have a LOT of their quotations! I hope you find the following interesting/useful/informative/....

Do be aware that, while SOME of these quotations have been verified by me or by someone whom I have trust, they have NOT ALL been verified. Since many of the quotes came from the Internet, and since information on the Internet can be UNreliable, some quotes may be spurious! If you have evidence that a quote is false, please let me know.

The first quotation is from Charles A. Beard, an American historian:
"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go around repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in their struggle for independence."

INDEX

(Economics) (Free Trade/Markets) (Law) (Militia) (Money) (Politics)
(Property) (Religion) (Rights) (Taxes) (War) (Miscellaneous)

Be aware there may be overlap in every category. For example: quotes about "law" can be found in "Law", "Second Amendment", "Rights", "Politics", etc.; quotes about Article II of the Bill of Rights can be found in "Second Amendment", "Gun Violence", "Law", "Militia", "Rights", ...; quotes about "money" can be found in "Money", "Politics", "Property", "Taxes", ...; quotes from any particular document may be found in many catagories; and so on. But here it is! Use your favorite word-processor or editor ("vim" is my favorite) to search for whatever name(s) and/or subject(s) interest you.

Remember, this is (usually) an EVER-GROWING collection; tomorrow's version will probably be bigger than today's!

QUOTATIONS ABOUT ECONOMICS

Winston Churchill: "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery."

From "Pensions: A Worldwide, But Avoidable Crisis" (author not shown on the torn-out page I kept), printed in the October, 2003, issue of The Freeman/Ideas on Liberty:
"One of the many achievements of the much-maligned Pinochet regime in Chile was its solution to the country's burgeoning pensions problem. Chile was one of the earliest countries with a PAYG [Pay as you Go] scheme, established in 1924. By the 1970s it was getting extremely costly, but it was calculated that the cost of winding it up, if historic commitments were to be honored, was 3 percent of gross domestic product.

"Nevertheless, a radical reform was successfully introduced [footnote: Eamonn Butler and Madsen Pirie, "The Fortune Account" (London: Adam Smith Institute, 1995), pp. 7-9]. All people entitled to the existing pension could keep it or go private (as 90 percent did). All new workers, however, would have to join one of the new competing private pension funds and save at least 10 percent of their incomes so that eventually the state scheme would wither away. Now almost everyone is convered privately, with the returns from their investments exceeding the state pension by 40-50 percent. No one has been hurt by the changeover, and thanks in part to the privatization of state-owned assets, it was carefully worked out so that it did not lead to a tax rise."

Andrew Zimbalist, as quoted by George C. Leef in his review of "Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports", printed in the April, 2000, issue of "Ideas on Liberty":
"The University of North Carolina gives more than $3 million in athletic scholarships yearly to around 700 athletes, but only some $600,000 in academic merit scholarships among the rest of its 15,000 students.

"Clemson University paid young black men from Columbia, South Carolina, to be on campus and pretend to be members of a black fraternity so the university would look more appealing to visiting black athletes.

"The president of the University of Oklahoma said in a speech to the state legislature, 'I hope to build a university of which our football team can be proud.'"

David M. Levy, from "150 Years and Still Dismal!", printed in the March, 2000, issue of "Ideas on Liberty":
"The lack of public prostitution in southern cities -- a fact that had been pointed to as evidence of the moralizing effect of slavery in the debates of the time -- was explained by Martineau's extension of classical population theory. Why would a man rent a woman by the hour when he could buy her and keep the children for resale? Colored children, after all, followed the status of their mother. Slave concubinage replaced public prostitution. After Martineau, everyone knew how to see this. And by seeing this, one knew all there was to know about the benevolence of those with absolute power over the lives and persons of their subjects."

Thomas Jefferson:
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies."

"I place economy among the first and most important virtues and public debt as the greatest dangers to be feared ... We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our choice between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude ... The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the disposition of public money. We are endeavoring to reduce the government to the practice of rigid economy to avoid burdening the people ..."

Quoted from "Say's Law Is Back" by Mark Skousen, as published in the August, 1999, issue of THE FREEMAN, the journal of the Foundation for Economic Education, pp. 54-55:

In researching my forthcoming book, The Story of Modern Economics ... , I came across a remarkable new work by Australian economist Steven Kates, Say's Law and the Keynesian Revolution [Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 1998]. According to Kates, John Maynard Keynes created a straw man in order to produce a revolution in economics. The straw man was Jeane-Baptiste Say and his famous law of markets. Steven Kates calls The General Theory "a book-length attempt to refute Say's Law."

But to refute Say's Law, Keynes gravely distorted it. As Kates states, "Keynes was wrong in his interpretation of Say's Law and, more importantly, he was wrong about its economic implications."

"Exactly what is [Jean-Baptiste] Say's Law? Chapter 15 of Say's "A Treatise on Political Economy" [Augustus M. Kelley, 1971 (1832), p. 134] describes his famous law of markets: 'A product is no sooner created, than it, from that instant, affords a market for other products to the full extent of its own value.' When a seller produces and sells a product, the seller instantly becomes a buyer who has spendable income. To buy, one must first sell. In other words, production is the cause of consumption, and increased output leads to higher consumer spending.

In short, Say's Law is this: The supply (sale) of X creates the demand for (purchase of) Y.

Say illustrated his law with the case of a good harvest by a farmer. "The greater the crop, the larger are the purchases of the growers. A bad harvest, on the contrary, hurts the sale of commodities at large."

Say's Law states that recessions are not caused by failure of demand (Keyne's thesis), but by failure in the structure of supply and demand. Recession is precipitated by producers miscalculating what consumers wish to buy, thus causing unsold goods to pile up, production to be cut back, income to fall, and finally consumer spending to drop. As Kates elucidates, "Classical theory explained recessions by showing how errors in production might arise during cyclical upturns which would cause some goods to remain unsold at cost-covering prices." The classical model was a "high-sophisticated theory of recession and unemployment" that with one fell swoop by the illustrious Keynes was "obliterated."

Index

QUOTATIONS ABOUT FREEDOM AND LIBERTY

Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind:
"The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside."

Pastor Martin Niemoller:
First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Robert A. Heinlein, in the chapter titled "If This Goes On--" in THE PAST THROUGH TOMORROW, copyright 1967, page 499:
"I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy ... censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, 'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything -- you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."

Congressman Ron Paul, M.D., from a February, 2004, speech delivered at "Evenings at FEE" in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, and reported in the March, 2004, issue of "NOTES from FEE" published by the Foundation for Economic Education:
AN AGENDA FOR ACHIEVING FREEDOM

We know that the idea of perfect socialism is an oxymoron. Pursuing utopia throughout the last century has already caused untold human suffering. That's why the clear goal of a free society must be understood and sought or the vision of the authoritarians will face little resistance and will easily fill the void.

There are precise goals we should work for, even under today's difficult circumstances. We must legalize freedom to the maximum extent possible:

1. Complete police protection is impossible; therefore we must preserve the right to own weapons in self-defense.

2. In order to maintain economic prottection against government debasement of the currency, gold ownership must be preserved -- something taken away from the American people during the Great Depression.

3. Adequate retirement protection by the government is limited, if not ultimately impossible. We must allow every citizen the opportunity to control all his or her retirement funds.

4. Government education has clearly failed. We must guarantee the right of families to homeschool or send their kids to private schools and help them with tax credits.

5. Government snooping must be stopped. We must work to protect all our privacy, especially on the Internet, prevent the National ID Card, and stop the development of all government data banks.

6. Federal police functions are unconstitutional and increasingly abusive. We should disarm all federal bureaucrats and return the police function to local authorities.

7. The army was never meant to be used in local policint activities. We must firmly prohibit our presidents from using the military in local law-enforcement operations, which is now being implemented under the guise of fighting terrorism.

8. Foreign military intervention by our presidents in recent years is a costly failure. Foreign military intervention should not be permitted without explicit congressional approval.

9. Competitions in all elections should be guaranteed, and the monopoly powers gained by the two major parties through unfair signature requirements, high fees, and campaign donation controls should be removed. Competitive parties should be allowed in all government-sponsored debates.

10. We must do whatever is possible to help instill a spiritual love for freedom and recognize that our liberties depend on responsible individuals, not the group or the collective or society as a whole. The individual is the building block of a free and prosperous social order."

A.E. van Vogt, THE WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER, 1951, ISBN: 0-671-81354-4:
"The right to buy weapons is the right to be free"

Emma Lazarus "THE NEW COLOSSUS" (1883):
"Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed sunset-gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles, From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome, her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin-cities frame.

"'Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!' cries she,
With silent lips. 'Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore;
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!'"

Lord Acton:
"Liberty is not the means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end."

Ayn Rand:
"The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws."

In "The Nature of Government," Ayn Rand observed:
"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force."

Ayn Rand, but unknown source:
"Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man's fundamental right -- the right to life -- and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man's life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time."

"If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and crippling, in a war declared at the state's discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom -- then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man's protector any longer. What else is there left to protect?"

From "The True Meaning of Patriotism" by Lawrence W. Reed, in the June, 2003, issue of The Freeman/Ideas On Liberty:
"In 1320, in an effort to explain why they had spent the previous 30 years in bloody battle to expel the invading English, Scottish leaders ended their Declaration of Arbroath with this line: 'It is not for honor or glory or wealth that we fight, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.'"

President Wm. (Bill) Clinton, August 12, 1993, quoted in a Letter-to-the- Editor" by R.E. Schaller, Boxford, Massachusetts, published in The Washington Times, National Weekly Edition June 5-11, 2000, page 39:
"If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees."

Franklin Roosevelt (quoted by General Richard Myers. Vice Chairman of Joint Chief of Staff, at Kansas State University's 118th Landon Lecture, 27 April, 2000):
"Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time that men have died to win them."

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in "Notes from Underground", from page 49 of Angus E. Crane's article "The Day We Read No More" in the March, 2000, issue of "Ideas on Liberty":
"[M]an may purposely, consciously choose for himself even the harmful and the stupid, even the stupidest thing -- just so that he will have the right to wish the stupidest thing, and not be bound by the duty to have only intelligent wishes. For this most stupid thing, this whim of ours, gentlemen, may really be more advantageous to us than anything on earth, especially in certain cases. In fact, it may be the most advantageous of all advantages even when it brings us obvious harm and contradicts the most sensible conclusions of our reason concerning our advantage. Because, at any rate, it preserves for us the most important and most precious thing -- our personality, our individuality."

Charlie Chaplin, in "The Little Dictator":
"Dictators free themselves by enslaving others. They work not for your benefit, but their own."

Leonard E. Read (1898-1983), Founding President of FEE, the Foundation for Economic Education, said that, in an ideal America, every person should be free:
... to pursue his ambition to the full extent of his abilities, regardless of race or creed or family background.
... to associate with whom he pleases for any reason he pleases, even if someone else thinks it's a stupid reason.
... to worship God in his own way, even if it isn't 'orthodox.'
... to choose his own trade and to apply for any job he wants -- and to quit his job if he doesn't like it or if he gets a better offer.
... to go into business for himself, be his own boss, and set his own hours of work -- even if it's only three hours a week.
... to use his honestly acquired property or savings in his own way -- spend it foolishly, invest it wisely, or even give it away.
... to offer his services or products for sale on his own terms, even if he loses money on the deal.
... to buy or not to buy any service or product offered for sale, even if the refusal displeases the seller.
... to disagree with any other person, even when the majority is on the side of the other person.
... to study and learn whatever strikes his fancy, as long as it seems to him worth the cost and effort of studying and learning it.
... to do as he pleases in general, as long as he doesn't infringe the equal right and opportunity of every other person to do as he pleases.

Lao Tzu in "Tao Te Ching", Chapter 61:
"A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults
as his most benevolent teachers.
He thinks of his competitor
as the shadow that he himself casts."

Alexis de Tocqueville, DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA:
"It is not that in the United States, as everywhere, there are no rich; indeed I know no other country where love of money has such a grip on men's hearts or where stronger scorn is expressed for the theory of permanent equality of property. But wealth circulates there with incredible rapidity, and experience shows that two successive generations seldom enjoy its favor."

"In America most rich men began by being poor."

"The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money."

"To commit violent and unjust acts, it is not enough for a government to have the will or even the power; the habits, ideas and passions of the time must lend themselves to their committal."

Benjamin Franklin, before the Constitutional Convention, (June 2, 1787):
"... as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharoah, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever ..."

Benjamin Franklin, letter to the French Ministry March 1778:
"Taxes on consumption, like those on capital or income, to be just, must be uniform."

Butler D. Shaffer, Southwestern School of Law, Los Angeles:
"Let us go back in time to the point at which we began to allow others to operate as authorities over us, and begin to confront the proposition that others have rightful power over our lives, that others have expertise superior to anything we could ever know on our own. Let us respond to such a proposition as any 3-year old would to anything so palpably absurd: "Why?"

When we relearn to ask such questions - and to ask them of anyone who seeks to advance his or her authority over us - we shall have discovered the way to our psychological independence."

Abraham Lincoln:
"At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some trans-Atlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us with a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined with a Bonaparte at their head and disposing of all the treasure of the earth, our own excepted, could not by force make a track on the Blue Ridge or take a drink from the Ohio in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up from amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all times, or die by suicide."

Abraham Lincoln, 1838:
"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it."

Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861:
"... the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the supreme Court, ... the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal."

"If I don't have to do it, it only shows that you don't have to either."

"We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing."

"We, the People are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts - not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow men who pervert the Constitution."

Abraham Lincoln:
"Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"

Abraham Lincoln, 1858:
"What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not ... the guns of our war steamers, or the strength of our gallant and disciplined army ... our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms."

"You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn. You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and industry. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797):
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Edmund Burke, "Reflections on the Revolution in France":
"Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subject are rebels from principle."

"The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded."

Edmund Burke, 1784:
"The people never give up their liberty but under some delusion."

Edmund Burke:
"Tell me what are the prevailing sentiments that occupy the minds of your young people, and I will tell you what the character of the next generation will be."

George Stark, General:
"LIVE FREE OR DIE; DEATH IS NOT THE WORST OF EVILS."

Goethe:
"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."

John Hospers:
"By far the most numerous and most flagrant violations of personal liberty and individual rights are performed by governments ... The major crimes throughout history, the ones executed on the largest scale, have been committed not by individuals or bands of individuals but by governments, as a deliberate policy of those governments -- that is, by the official representatives of governments, acting in their official capacity."

Josiah Quincy (1774):
"Under God we are determined that, wheresoever, whensoever, or howsoever, we shall be called upon to make our exit, we will die freemen."

Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead vs. United States, United States supreme Court, 1928:
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent ... the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding."

Justice William O. Douglas:
"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air -- however slight -- lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."

Lysander Spooner (1808-1887):
"That no government, so called, can reasonably be trusted, or reasonably be supposed to have honest purposes in view, any longer than it depends wholly upon voluntary support."

"... the only security men can have for their political liberty, consists in keeping their money in their own pockets ...."

Marvin Cooley:
"We must pity the poor wretched, timid soul who is too faint-hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the song of the dammed: "I can't fight back; I have too much to lose; I own too much property; I have worked too hard to get what I have; They will put me out of business if I resist; I might go to jail; I have my family to think about." Such poor miserable creatures have misplaced values and are hiding their cowardice behind pretended family responsibility - blindly refusing to see that the most glorious legacy that one can bequeath to posterity is liberty; and that the only true security is liberty."

Paul Anderson (?? I think. _Not_ Poul):
"If the price I must pay for my freedom is to acknowledge that the government was granted the power to infringe on them, then I am not free."

Paul Williams, "Das Energi":
"Don't ever think you know what's right for the other person. He might start thinking he knows what's right for you."

Richard E. Byrd, Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates (1910):
"A hand from Washington will be stretched out and placed upon every man's business; the eye of the Federal inspector will be in every man's counting house. The law will of necessity have inquisitorial features, it will provide penalties. It will create a complicated machinery. Under it businessmen will be hauled into courts distant from their homes. Heavy fines imposed by distant and unfamiliar tribunals will constantly menace the taxpayer. An army of Federal inspectors, spies and detectives will descend upon the state. They will compel men of business to show their books and disclose the secrets of their affairs. They will dictate forms of bookkeeping. They will require statements and affidavits. On the one hand the inspector can blackmail the taxpayer and on the other, he can profit by selling his secret to his competitor."

Robert H. Jackson (1953):
"There is no such thing as an achieved liberty; like electricity, there can be no substantial storage and it must be generated as it is enjoyed, or the lights go out."

President Ronald W. Reagan:
"If no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us is capable of governing someone else?"

"It's time we rebelled."

"When I am President, my number one priority will be to get big government off the back of the American people."

President Reagan's Speech at the 1964 National Convention: A Time for Choosing:
"This idea that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power, is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves."

"Government is not the solution to the problem; government IS the problem!

"We will never disarm any American who seeks to protect his or her family from fear and harm."

"The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other."

President Reagan had been in the White House only a little over a year when he spoke to the British Parliament and challenged the long-held belief about the permanence of Communist rule, saying:
"The march of freedom and democracy will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies that stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people."

From in his September 9, 1982 presentation at Kansas State University's Landon-Lecture series:
"This federal government of ours, by trying to do too much, has undercut the ability of individual people, of communities, churches and businesses -- to meet the real needs of society -- as Americans always have met them in the past."

"Our first President, George Washington, father of our country, shaper of the Constitution, and truly a wise man, believed that religion, morality and brotherhood were the essential pillars of society, and he said you could not have morality without the basis of religion. And yet today we are told that to protect the First Amendment we must expel God, the very source of our knowledge, from our children's classrooms.... Was the First Amendment written to protect American people from religion, or was it written to protect religion from government tyranny?"

"Balancing the budget is a little like protecting your virtue: you just have to learn to say 'no'."

"The people have something that is in short supply in government -- common sense. They understand that making this government live within its means will ultimately do more to protect their earnings, bring down interest rates and put our unemployed back to work than anything else we could do."

President Reagan in 1986:
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases:
If it moves, tax it.
If it keeps moving, regulate it.
And if it stops moving, subsidize it."

Senator William Grayson of Virginia in a letter to Patrick Henry:
"Last Monday a string of amendments were presented to the lower house; these altogether respect personal liberty ...."

Susan B. Anthony, 1871:
"I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand."

John O'Sullivan, editor of the "United States Magazine and Democratic Review", wrote in 1837 (quoted on page 137 of the March, 1996, issue of THE FREEMAN, the journal of the Foundation for Economic Education):
"The best government is that which governs least. ... Government should be confined to the administration of justice, for the protection of the natural equal rights of the citizen, and the preservation of the social order. In all other respects, the voluntary principle, the principle of freedom ... affords the true golden rule."

W. Somerset Maugham:
"If a nation or an individual values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony is that if it is comfort or money it values more, it will lose that too."

Winston Churchill:
"If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."

Michael Parenti, "Inventing Reality" (1986):
"If Big Brother comes to America, he will not be a fearsome, foreboding figure with a heart-chilling, omnipresent glare as in 1984. He will come with a smile on his face, a quip on his lips, a wave to the crowd, and a press that
(a) dutifully reports the suppressive measures he is taking to save the nation from internal chaos and foreign threat; and
(b) gingerly questions whether he will be able to succeed."

Kee Hinckley:
"I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate everyone else's."

John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty", 1859:
"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant."

Thomas Jefferson:
"The constitutions of most of our states [and of the United States] assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed and that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property, and freedom of press."

Thomas Jefferson, 1st Inaugural, 4-Mar-1801:
"If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

Thomas Jefferson in a letter to William S. Smith in 1787. Taken from Jefferson, On Democracy 20, S. Padover ed., 1939:
"And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms .... The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Thomas Jefferson:
"Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

"Enlighten people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."

Thomas Jefferson, 1774:
"The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time."

Encyclopedia of Thomas Jefferson, 318 (Foley, Ed., reissued 1967):
"A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walk."

Thomas Jefferson, 1816:
"Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe."
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free ... it expects what never was and never will be...."

Thomas Jefferson, in his chapter on religion in his 1781 "Notes on the State of Virginia", as quoted in Barry Loberfeld's "Freedom of Education: A Civil Liberty" printed in the August, 2001, issue of IDEAS ON LIBERTY, pp. 26-32:
"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neigbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

Jefferson's "Notes" also offered insights explaining why education, like religion, would come under government control:
"[W]hy subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desireable? No more than of face and stature.... Difference of opinion is advantageous.... The several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."

Jefferson's "Notes" also described the effect of compulsory education on Johnny, who may indeed hold beliefs contrary to school curricula:
"Constraint may make him worse by making him a hypocrite, but it will never make him a truer man. It may fix him obstinately in his errors, but will not cure them. Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true [idea], by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation.... [T]he Newtonian principle of gravitation is now more firmly established, on the basis of reason, than it would be were the goveernment to step in, and to make it an article of necessary faith. Reason and experiment have been indulged, and error has fled before them. It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."

Another reason Jefferson ("Notes" again) opposed laws denying religious liberty was their cruel punishments, including:
"A father's right to the custody of his own children being founded in law on his right of guardianship, this being taken away, they may of course be severed from him, and put, by the authority of a court, into more orthodox hands."

Jefferson's reason for opposing heresy laws was also his reason for opposing compulsory attendance laws:
"It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father."

President Thomas Jefferson, author of the phrase "Separation of church and state," asked Congress to ratify a treaty with the Kaskaskia Indians, which they did this day, December 3, 1803. As reported by Bill Federer in his 3 December 2003 "American Minute" <www.amerisearch.net>, it stated:
"And whereas the greater part of the said tribe have been baptized and received into the Catholic Church, to which they are much attached, the United States will give annually, for seven years, one hundred dollars toward the support of a priest of that religion, who will engage to perform for said tribe the duties of his office, and also to instruct as many of their children as possible, in the rudiments of literature."

The treaty, signed by Jefferson, concluded: "The United States will further give the sum of three hundred dollars to assist the said tribe in the erection of a church."

Thomas Jefferson, concerned about the future, wrote (as reported in the March, 2004, "NOTES from FEE", the Foundation for Economic Education):
"Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of Freedom? Material abundance without character is the path of destruction."

Dmitri Z. Manuisky, Lenin School of Political Warfare (1931):
"War to the hilt between capitalism and communism is inevitable. Today, of course, we are not strong enough to attack. Our time will come in 20 or 30 years. In order to win, we shall need the element of surprise. The bourgeoisie will have to be put to sleep, so we shall begin by launching the most spectacular peace movement on record. There will be electrifying overtures and unheard of concessions. The capitalist countries, stupid and decadent, will rejoice to cooperate in their own destruction. They will leap at another chance to be friends. As soon as their guard is down, we shall smash them with our clenched fist."

William F. Buckley:
"Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other peoples' money, except when it comes to questions of national survival when they prefer to be generous with other people's freedom and security."

"Keep Democracy in Perspective", an editorial in THE FREEMAN, the journal of the Foundation for Economic Education, some month in 1999.

[At the very bottom of the article there is a footnote-like reference:
1. Thomas Sowell, THE QUEST FOR COSMIC JUSTICE (New York: Free Press, 1999)
but there is NO "1" reference anywhere in the article; it may be that the editorial is by Thomas Sowell. --MAC]

The second lesson of the past 100 years is that democracy alone is insufficient for a society to be truly free and prosperous. Private property rights are far and away the most important bulwark protecting freedom and ensuring prosperity. Democracy, as such, guarantees neither. WHile this lesson is just as true as the one about utopia [last month's editorial? -MAC], it isn't as widely understood. After all, most of us alive in the West have been bombarded with paeans to democracy. Schoolchildren are taught that Western nations are free because they are democratic. Indeed, they are taught that freedom is synonymous with democracy. Voting = freedom = voting.

But voting does not equal freedom. Voting is merely the act of yanking a lever (or slipping paper into a box) every few years to register one among thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions or hundreds of millions of preferences for this or that candidate. The chance that any one vote will affect the output of any election is practically zero. No voter every really chooses his or her representative -- at least not in the way that each of us chooses an occupation, a house, a church, a college major, books to read, or a spouse.

In our everyday, nonpolitical lives -- equipped as we all are with our private property rights -- we routinely make choices that count. If you choose to buy a Ford rather than a Volkswagen, you get a Ford. What you get among the available options does not depend upon how others choose. You get what you want; everyone else gets what he and she wants. Not so in elections. You get only what a majority of the voting group wants. Thus, every time a decision is made collectively rather than individually, no individual is free. Each is a slave to the majority.

De-romantizing democracy is frowned upon today, but I believe that it must be done. Democracy might be the most appropriate means of choosing government officials, but that does not imply that democracy equals freedom. Freedom requires more than the right to vote; it requires that each person be as unrestrained as possible from the arbitrary will of others -- regardless of whether the others are conquering tyrants, hereditary oligarchs, black-robed judges, or a majority of neighbors or countrymen.

Private property is the indispensable protection from the arbitrary will of others, even when this arbitrary will results from a majoritarian election. Private property gives to each of us not only the assurance that others will employ themselves and their resources in ways that create prosperity for all, but also that each of us has a space that others cannot violate.

For evidence that private property rather than democracy is the key to prosperity and freedom, I point to India and Hong Kong. In India the electoral franchise is wide and elections have long been regular, but property rights are weak. For most of the post-World War II era, in contrast, Hong Kong had no democracy, but property rights there have been among the strongest the world has ever seen. Indians are poor and shackled by a massively corrupt state; the people of Hong Kong are wealthy and free.

Private property, not democracy, is the great guarantor of prosperity and liberty. And because it decentralizes power, it safeguards us from madmen with utopian hallucinations.

Samuel Adams, 1771 (quoted by Wayne LaPierre in the October, 2003, issue of AMERICAN RIFLEMAN, p. 12):
"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution are worth defending.... We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood.... It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy ... if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men."

Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776:
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."

Samuel Adams warned future generations (as reported in the March, 2004, "NOTES from FEE", the Foundation for Economic Education):
"Neither the wisest Constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt."

Major John Pitcairn, Lexington, Massachusetts, April 19, 1775:
"Disperse you Rebels - Damn you, throw down your Arms and disperse."

Albert Einstein:
"The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure."

"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong."

Daniel Webster:
"God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it."

Franklin D. Roosevelt:
"Democracy, the practice of self-government, is a covenant among free men to respect the rights and liberties of their fellows"

"Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time that men have died to win them."

Jeff Cooper; from "Pistols and the Law" in "Cooper on Handguns":
"In all history the only bright rays cutting the gloom of oppression have come from men who would rather get hurt than give in."

Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States (1856-1924):
"The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation."

William Lloyd Garrison:
"With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but with tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will be certainly be lost."

C.S. Lewis:
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences."

Goethe:
"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."

James Madison, 1822:
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

James Madison:
"It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The freemen of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much ... to forget it."

James Madison, Federalist Papers #51 (1787), quoted in "Government Ethics: If Only Angels Were to Govern!" by Stuart C. Gilman, PHI KAPPA PHI FORUM, Vol. 83, No., 2, p. 29:
"If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal comtrols on Government would be necessary. In framing a Government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the Government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the Government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, "The Gulag Archipelago":
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand.-- The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"

John Adams:
"We hold that each man is the best judge of his own interest."

"Liberty can not be preserved without a general knowledge among the people. Let us dare to read, think, speak and write".

Patrick Henry [3 J. Elliot, Debates in the Several State Conventions 45, 2d ed. Philadelphia, 1836]:
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined."

Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural address (as reported in the February, 1996, issue of THE FREEMAN, the journal of the Foundation for Economic Education):
"... a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own persuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities."

Thomas Jefferson:
"Above all I hope that the education of the common people will be attended to so they won't forget the basic principles of freedom."

Thomas Paine, in "American Crisis", published by the Philadephia Journal on December 19 and read by George Washington to his soldiers on Christmas Day, 1776:
"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country, but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."

Thomas Paine:
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."

John Quincy Adams, 1821:
"Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will be America's heart, her benedictions and prayers, but she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator of her own."

Frederick Douglass (1857):
"The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."

From: etg002@email.mot.com (Tim Grothause)
Date: 21 Oct 93 15:24:24 GMT
Newsgroups: info.firearms.politics

I support car ownership although cars can be used to drive drunk.
I support pharmaceutical manufacture although drugs can be abused.
I support swimming pool ownership although kids can drown in them.
I support steak-knife ownership although they can be used in stabbings.
I support free speech although people say things I don't like to hear.
I support freedom of religion although cults do the damnedest things.
I support parenthood although parents can abuse their children.
I support pregnancy although abortion couldn't happen without it.
I support penis ownership although they are used in rapes.
I support gun ownership although guns can be used in crime.
I support open elections although a moron became President.

Thomas Paine:
"... The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance."

Mark Twain:
"In the beginning of a change, The Patriot is a scarce man, brave, hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot."

US Justice Dept, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/ascii/soo.txt (March2000):
Most rape victims are under 21, but 70% of rapists are over 30.

Bill Bradley, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton (March2000):
Women under 21 years old should not be allowed to own guns.

Unknown, but not Philip R. Zimmermann, author of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) because I asked him!:
If my (so called; they aren't defined) assault rifle makes me a criminal,
And my encryption program makes me a terrorist,
Does Dianne Feinstein's vagina make her a prostitute?

Index

QUOTATIONS ABOUT FREE TRADE AND MARKETS

Frederic Bastiat, as quoted by Christopher Mayer in "Free Trade and Flexible Markets", published in the April, 2000, issue of "Ideas on Liberty":
"Assume, if it amuses you, that foreigners flood our shores with all kinds of useful goods, without asking anything from us; even if our imports are infinite and our exports nothing, I defy you to prove to me that we should be the poorer for it."

Alfred E. Kahn, "Deregulation and Vested Interests: The Case of Airlines", in Roger G. Noll and Bruce M. Owen, eds., The Political Economy of Deregulation , as quoted by Lawrence W. Reed in "Internet Access Should Be Left to the Free Market", printed in the April, 2000, issue of "Ideas on Liberty":
"The essence of the case for competition is the impossibility of predicting most of its consequences. The superiority of the competitive market is the positive stimuli it provides for constantly improving efficiency, innovating, and offering consumers diversity of choice."

Thomas J. DiLorenzo, in "Regulatory Extortion", published in the March, 2000, issue of "Ideas on Liberty":
"In the environmental arena, countless capitalistic bogeymen have been blamed for everything from cancer to the destruction of the planet. This list of phony environmental scares is so long that any rational, thinking person should routinely assume that everything the organized, political environmental organizations say is a lie.

"The federal government has been forcasting an impending energy crisis ever since the dawn of the oil industry -- roughly 1866. In that year the U.S. Revenue Commission warned that the nation may run out of oil at any moment. In 1885 the U.S. Geological Survey forecast no chance of oil's being discovered in California; some ten billion barrels have been pumped from that state since then. By 1914 the U.S. Bureau of Mines was predictiong that only 5.7 billion barrels of oil were left; more than 50 billion barrels have been pumped since then. In 1947 the U.S. Department of State warned that 'sufficient oil cannot be found in the United States'; in 1948 more than 4 billion barrels were found -- the largest discovery in history up to that point and twice the volume of U.S. consumption. In 1951 the U.S. Department of Interior forecast that oil reserves would last only until 1964."

From John Semmens' review of "Alternate Route: Toward Efficient Urban Transportation" by Clifford Winston and Chad Shirley, published in the March, 2000, issue of "Ideas on Liberty":
".... A model for the privatized transit of the future exists today in the 'Queens Van Plan.' This is a privately operated transit service in New York City that serves mostly low-income neighborhoods. Despite an unsubsidized fare of only $1, the service operates at a profit. The owner would like to expand beyond the borough of Queens, but is presently barred from doing so by the city council. You see, the public transit system needs to hold on to a "captive" transit clientele lest their case for large extractions from taxpayers be undermined."

From an old (date unknown) of THE FREEMAN (the journal of the Foundation for Economic Education), recently renamed "Ideas on Liberty":

One day a hairy hunter staggered home to this cave, under the weight of a small venison -- happy to have provided some food for his cave and its inmates, but distraught because, in killing the deer with a well-aimed arrow, he had broken his last flinthead, and must now spend a lot of time and effort to find and fashion another to replace it.

His neighbor, however, had a different kind of problem to worry about. With all the instincts and needs of a good hunter, he was, however, lame from a broken hip and could not go afield to hunt big game. Instead, he had to content himself with wild fruit and with easily-caught small fish for food. This handicap, however, allowed him plenty of time to sit before his cave and chip pieces of rock into flintheads -- an occupation at which he had become rather expert. As his hunter friend drew near, he had several such flints all shaped and ready to become spear or arrow points. But ... he had no food; and he was hungry!

And then suddenly:

The thought elusive that had burned
With smoking smudge, remote and dull,
Within each thick and troubled skull
Burst forth at last in vocal flame.
Each gave a start, and then a shout
Of wonderment; and each held out,
The one his flint, the one his game,
And thus a mighty force was sired.
Man's life would never be the same,
Each gave the thing he least required,
And gained the thing he most desired!

Well ... in some such fashion the principle of trade was discovered, and a first long step was taken toward civilization. For that (or some experience like it) was the beginning of specialization, which was the convenience under which individuals no longer had to supply with their own hands all they needed, but each could specialize in what he did best, easiest, and with most pleasure. This gave to those who wanted it freedom for leisure; and with leisure, even a little of it, came time to wonder, to think, to dream, to question, to doubt, to create -- in short, to begin to be civilized.

That was trade -- exchange; and it is still at the heart of business. It has almost infinite ramifications -- finances, credit, production, distribution, salesmanship, advertising, competition, legal observances and restrictions -- but it comes down finally to an exchange between two people.

The two cave men of my little poetic fable stood face to face. In modern conmmerce the original producer and ultimate consumer almost never see each other. A score, maybe a hundred, intermediaries may stand between them. But the principle and the results are the same.

Namely, Mr. A has produced something far in excess of his need for that particular thing. He receives tokens for the time and skill he has expended in producing the thing. These tokes are called money. Another man, Mr. B, has done the same thing with some other product. On the open market each exchanges his tokens -- his money -- for what he needs of the other's product -- and so do millions of others -- with some grumbling, some cheating, some chiseling going on, no doubt; but with general satisfaction, benefit and convenience to all concerned.

GETTING GOVERNMENT OUT OF ENTREPRENEURS' HAIR ===============================================
By Dana Berliner, senior attorney, Institute for Justice, Washington, DC

Wendy Moody and Debra Jennings are entrepreneurs and fans of the Renaissance and Medieval eras. They work hard and pay taxes. Most people wouldn't think of them as criminals. But the Kansas Board of Cosmetology isn't "most people."

According to the Board of Cosmetology, braiding hair at the Kansas Renaissance Festival requires a cosmetology license, which, in turn, takes 1500 hours of cosmetology school. Braiding without a license is a misdemeanor and could subject Moody and Jennings to up to 90 days in jail.

These women braid hair, using ribbons and flowers to create Renaissance and Medieval hair styles. They study old books and illustrations for style ideas, as well as creating their own styles. Working for seven weekends at the Renaissance Festival provides them with more than a third of their annual income.

Cosmetology school, which costs several thousand dollars, would teach them hair coloring, permanent waving, cutting, and manicuring. The "Braidin' Maidens" have no interset in providing any of these services. On the other hand, braiding is a minor part of a cosmetology school curriculum, if it is taught at all. And Renaissance styles certainly are not included.

This means that to braid hair lawfully, the maidens must demonstrate proficiency in a wide range of techniques they will never use, and none whatsoever in the services they will offer. Kansas argues this is necessary to protect public health and safety, but the multitude of hair braiding hazards don't spring readily to the imagination.

To give some sense of the gravity of safety risks inherent in braiding, one can become a firefighter in Kansas with about 240 hours of initial training. By statute, Kansas only requires a police officer to have 320 hours of training before joining a force (the police officer will undergo other training, but only 320 hours are mandated by law). An emergency medical technician is required to have 90 hours of training, and a hunting license may be obtained after only a 10- or 12-hour course. Even a full-fledged paramedic, skilled in heart defibrillation and a full panoply of emergency services, needs 1200 hours of class -- less than it takes, apparently, to recognize lice in a child's hair.

It's obvious that the purpose of those 1500 hours can't be safety. And, in fact, the real purpose of the licensing regimen is protecting the cosmetology cartel from competition. For more than 20 years, these women braided without incident, but after a report from a licensed cosmetologist last year, an inspector came to visit. Now Moody and Jennings have been subjected to a "cease and desist order" and threats of criminal prosecution.

This is not just a problem in Kansas. Most states restrict hair styling of any type to licensed cosmetologists, and African hairbraiders (who also braid hair, but use styles best suited for very curly hair) throughout the country have rebelled. Braiders in Washington, DC, New York, Georgia, Ohio, and California have all brought lawsuits.

Several states have changed their laws. New York, Ohio, and Florida have created special limited licenses for braiders. Maryland and Michigan have simply exempted braiders from the cosmetology laws. And only three months ago, JoAnne Cornwell scored a victory in federal court challenging the application of the California law to her "Sisterlocks" hair styling system. The judge held that application of the law to a person who did not use chemicals or perform cosmetology services "did not pass constitutional muster" and violated the equal protection and due process clauses of the Bill of Rights. The impact of that ruling extends beyond African hairstyling and beyond California. Anti-competitive licensing requirements are not unique to the cosmetology industry. More than 500 occupations -- approximately ten percent of all jobs -- require that you have permission from the state, in the form of a license, before you can pursue your chosen profession. Our firm, for example, represents entrepreneurs ranging from casket retailers in Tennessee to commuter van drivers in New York City who are fighting arbitrary licensing laws.

On October 8, [1999,] Judge Eric Rosen of the County Court ruled that the braiders could continue to braid for the last two weekends of the Festival. In doing so, he specifically explained that the Maidens posed no threat to public health or safety. That's good news for now, but the Judge's preliminary ruling doesn't resolve the underlying issue of whether it is constitutional to require these women and other braiders to get cosmetology licenses. A decision on those larger issues is hopefully forthcoming. And after the California ruling, Kansas should think twice about enforcing this unconstitutional and foolish law.

* * * * * * * * * *

BRAIDING BILL GETS SENATE NOD

Associated Press, printed on page A3 of the Manhattan [KS] Mercury [Newspaper] of 24 February, 2000:

TOPEKA -- The Senate tentatively approved a bill, after brief debate, that takes away the Board of Cosmetology's regulation over hair braiding.

Kept intact and regulated are other forms of hair styling, cutting, and dyeing.

The Senate gave first-round approval to the bill Wednesday on a voice vote.

Sen. Sandy Praeger presented the bill, which came about after two women, known as the Braiden Maidens, were prevented from braiding hair last fall at the Kansas City Renaisance Festival, because they have no cosmetology license.

Some Democrats raised health and safety concerns.
[I include few of my own comments in this collection of quotes, but I'm going to include one here: "Some people don't have their heads screwed on right!" --MAC]

Debra Jennings (one of the "Braidin' Maidens"), in an article in the May, 2000, issue of "The Free State Vision", a publication of the Kansas Public Policy Institute" [I am on KPPI's Research Advisory Council] noted that "Senate Bill 513 was signed by Governor Bill Graves on April 19...." and gave recognition to KPPI's help in getting the Cosmetology-license law changed.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson (book):
"You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn, while you deprive the community even of the moderate services that he is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage, you substitute unemployment. You do harm all around, with no comparable compensation."

Adam Smith, in "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" (1776; Cannan's ed., Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 477:
"Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to society .... He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, and in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention."

Henry George, in "Protection or Free Trade" (1886, reprinted edition, New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1980), p. 47:
"Free trade consists simply in letting people buy and sell as they want to buy and sell .... Protective tariffs are as much applications of force as are blockading squadrons, and their objective is the same -- to prevent trade. The difference between the two is that blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading."

Index

QUOTATIONS ABOUT THE LAW

H. L. Mencken
Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us. Worse, we are very apt to discover, facing their sudden inhibition of our desires, that their reputed impersonality and impartiality are myths -- that the government whose mandates we almost instinctively evade is not the transcendental and passionless thing it pretends to be, but simply a gang of very ordinary men, and that the judge who orders us to obey them is another of the same kind...

Justice Benjamin Curtis dissenting in Dred Scott, 1857:
And when a strict interpretation of the Constitution, according to the fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws, is abandoned, and the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we have no longer a Constitution; we are under the government of individual men, who for the time being have power to declare what the Constitution is, according to their own views of what it ought to mean.

Sparf v. United States, 156 U.S. 51 (1895):
"It may not be amiss here, gentlemen, to remind you of the good old rule that on questions of fact it is the province of the jury, on questions of law it is the province of the court to decide. But it must be observed, by the same law which recognizes this reasonable distribution of jurisdiction, you have, nevertheless, a right to take upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy."

James Monroe (1758-1831), 5th U.S. President:
"Of the liberty of conscience in matters of religious faith, of speech and of the press; of the trial by jury of the vicinage in civil and criminal cases; of the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus; of the right to keep and bear arms .... If these rights are well defined, and secured against encroachment, it is impossible that government should ever degenerate into tyranny."

Grover Cleveland, from "Transforming the Political Marketplace" by Russell Roberts, published in THE FREEMAN (now called IDEAS ON LIBERTY) of December, 1999, page 54:
"In the discharge of my official duty I shall endeavor to be guided by a just and unstrained construction of the Constitution, a careful observance of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people, and by a cautious appreciation of those functions which by the Constitution and laws have been especially assigned to the executive branch of the Government."

Charles W. Baird, in his review of "The Stakeholder Society" by Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott, published in the April, 2000, issue of "Ideas on Liberty":
"... the authors are badly confused about equality. They are hung up on the term 'equality of opportunity.' Jefferson's 'equality' in the Declaration is, of course, what Hayek called isonomia -- equality before the law. Philosopher Robert Nozick called it process equality, which he carefully distinguished from end-state-equality. The authors pursue the latter of those mutually exclusive concepts."

From page 193 of "The World's Best-Loved Poems", compiled by James Gilchrist Lawson and published by Harper & Brothers, Copyright 1927:
On June 15, 1215, King John met the barons near Runnymeade on the Thames, England, and granted them the charter which they laid before him, now famous under the name "Magna Charta."

This charter contains sixty-three articles, some of which were merely temporary; the principles upon which the whole English judicial system is based are these:

"No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or diseised [footnote: dispossessed of land], or outlawed, or banished ... unless by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land."

"We will sell to no man, we will not deny to any man, either justice or right."

Among the most important articles were the two which limited the power of the king in matters of taxation:

"No scutage or aid shall be imposed in our kingdom unless by the general council of our kingdom;" and

"For the holding of the general council of the kingdom ... we shall cause to be summoned the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and the greater barons of the realm, singly, by our letters. And furthermore, we shall cause to be summoned generally by our sheriffs and bailiffs, all others who hold of us in chief."

Charles Evans Hughes, Justice of the supreme Court (1907):
"... the Constitution is what the judges say it is."

First Chief Justice John Jay [from "Academic Freedom on Religious Campuses" by James R. Otteson, as published in the August, 1999, issue of THE FREEMAN, the journal of the Foundation for Economic Education, pp. 55-53]:
"anything in the Constitution can be made to mean anything."

John Jay, 1st Chief Justice, US supreme Court (Georgia vs. Brailsford, 1794:4):
"The jury has a right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy."

"You [the jurors] have, nevertheless, a right to take upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy."

Samuel Chase, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Supreme Court Justice, (1796-1804?):
"The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts."

Oliver Wendell Holmes, US Supreme Court Justice, Horning vs. District of Columbia, 138 (1920--or 1902?):
"The jury has the power to bring a verdict in the teeth of both law and fact."

Harlan F. Stone, 12th Chief Justice, U.S. Supreme Court, 1941:
"The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided."

U.S. vs. Dougherty, 473 F 2nd 1113, 1139 (1972):
"The pages of history shine on instances of the jury's exercise of its perogative to disregard the instructions of the judge....

"The jury has an unreviewable and unreversible power ... to acquit in disregard of the instructions on the law given by the trial judge...."

Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury, in some advice to jurors to acquit against the judge's instructions:
"... if exercising their judgment with discretion and honesty they have a clear conviction that the charge of the court is wrong."

"That in criminal cases, the law and fact are always blended, the jury, for reasons of a political and peculiar nature, for the security of life and liberty, is intrusted with the power of deciding both law and fact."

Marbury vs. Madison, 5 US (2 Cranch) 137, 174, 176 (1803):
"All laws which are repugnant to the Constitution are null and void."

Chief Justice John Marshall:
"The government of the United States has been emphatically termed a government of laws and not men."

Chief Justice Marlin T. Phelps, Arizona Supreme Court:
"Nothing was further from the minds of the Framers of the Constitution, than that the supreme Court should ever make the Supreme Law of the Land."

Chief Justice Warren Burger:
"Ours is a sick profession. [A profession marked by] incompetence, lack of training, misconduct, and bad manners. Ineptness, bungling, malpractice, and bad ethics can be observed in court houses all over this country every day."

Daniel Boorstin "The mysterious Science of the Law":
"In the first century of American independence, the [Blackstone] Commentaries were not merely an approach to the study of the law; for most lawyers they constituted all there was of the law."

Donald T. Regan (NOT President Ronald Reagan!):
"We do many things at the federal level that would be considered dishonest and illegal if done in the private sector."

Edward Gibbon, "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire":
"... the discretion of the judge is the first engine of tyranny."

Fred Rodell:
"In tribal times, there were the medicine men. In the Middle Ages, there were the priests. Today there are the lawyers. For every age, a group of bright boys, learned in their trade and jealous of their learning, who blend technical competence with plain and fancy hocus-pocus to make themselves masters of their fellow men. For every age, a pseudo-intellectual autocracy, guarding the tricks of its trade from the uninitiated, and running, after its own pattern, the civilization of its day."

"It is the lawyers who run our civilization for us - our governments, our business, our private lives."

Harold Berman, Harvard law professor:
"[The] whole culture seems to be facing the possibility of a kind of nervous breakdown ... One major symptom of this threatened breakdown is the massive loss in the confidence in law - not only on the part of law-consumers but also on the part of lawmakers and distributors."

Henry Clay:
"The Constitution of the United States was made not merely for the generation that then existed, but for posterity -- unlimited, undefined, endless, perpetual posterity."

James A. Kidney, "U.S. News & World Report":
"Despite growing unease among the public and legal experts, judges ... are reaching into areas once considered the exclusive preserve of legislators, public administrators and the family."

Justice Hugo Black, Columbia University's Charpentier Lectures (1968): >BR>"The public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges' views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice. I have no fear of constitutional amendments properly adopted, but I do fear the rewriting of the Constitution by judges under the guise of interpretation."

Justice Hugo Black:
"... any broad unlimited power to hold laws unconstitutional because they offend what this Court conceives to be the 'conscience of our people' ... was not given by the Framers, but rather has been bestowed on the Court by the Court."

Laurence Tribe, Harvard law professor:
"... the highest mission of the supreme Court, in my view, is not to conserve judicial credibility, but in the Constitution's own phrase, 'to form a more perfect union' between right and rights within that charter's necessarily evolutionary design."

Lord Henry Brougham, "Present State of the Law":
"The whole machinery of the State, all the apparatus of the system, and its varied workings, end in bringing simply twelve good men into the box."

Michael H. Brown, "Brown's Lawsuit Cookbook":
"You've got to know where the machinery is and how it works before you can throw a monkey-wrench into it."

Michael J. Hodge, Asst. Attorney General, State of Michigan:
"... U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 10, is binding on the states."

Prof. Abram Chayes, Harvard law school:
"[Judicial action in the last two decades] adds up to a radical transformation of the role and function of the judiciary in American life. Its chief function now is as a catalyst of social change with judges acting as planners of large scale."

Prof. Edward S. Corwin:
"[Attorneys have been] prone to identify the judicial version of the Constitution as the authentic Constitution."

Prof. William Forrester, Cornell law school:
"The Court has assumed, gradually, the role of deciding the problems on its own and ...the American people and their selected officials gradually have accepted the Court as the political instrument for lawmaking."

Richard M. Nixon:
"I'm a lawyer, and I can't make head or tail out of the current form."

Samuel Cooke (1770):
"Fidelity to the public requires that the laws be as plain and explicit as possible, that the less knowing may understand, and not be ensnared by them, while the artful evade their force."

"Mysteries of law and government may be made a cloak of unrighteousness."

Schaeffer & Koop, "Whatever happened to the Human Race?":
"[Law] is only what most of the people think at that moment of history, and there is no higher law. It follows, of course, that the law can be changed at any moment to reflect what the majority currently thinks."

"More accurately, the law becomes what a few people in some branch of the government think will promote the present sociological and economic good. In reality the will and moral judgement of the majority are now influenced by or even overruled by the opinions of a small group of men and women. This means that vast changes can be made in the whole concept of what should and what should not be done. Values can be altered overnight and at almost unbelievable speed."

Senator Sam Ervin:
"... judicial verbicide is calculated to convert the Constitution into a worthless scrap of paper and to replace our government of laws with a judicial oligarchy."

Theophilus Parsons, in the Massachusetts Convention on the ratification of the U.S. Constitution [Jonathan Elliot, ed., _The Debates of the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution_, (New York, Burt Franklin: 1888), 2:94:
"But, sir, the people themselves have it in their power effectually to resist usurpation, without being driven to an appeal of arms. An act of usurpation is not obligatory; it is not law; and any man may be justified in his resistance. Let him be considered as a criminal by the general government, yet only his fellow-citizens can convict him; they are his jury, and if they pronounce him innocent, not all the powers of Congress can hurt him; and innocent they certainly will pronounce him, if the supposed law he resisted was an act of usurpation."

William H. Seward (1850), in "There is a higher law than the Constitution":

"The Second American Revolution":
"... a 1973 Harris Poll found that only 18 percent of the public had confidence in lawyers, a somewhat lower approval rating than that of garbage collectors."

"In Massachusetts, the Body of Liberties (1641) permitted anyone who could not plead his own cause to retain someone else for assistance "provided he give him noe fee or reward for his paines".

"Law has become utilitarian. It can be what the majority conceives as law, or it can be what an elite says it is. There is no absolute. In the end, it is always what a court or judge says it is."

George Washington:
"Government is not reason. It is not eloquence -- it is force! Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful/terrible [I've seen two versions; --MAC] master."

Thomas Jefferson (from "Guns & Ammo" magazine: February, 2001):
"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."

Goethe (from "Guns & Ammo" magazine: February, 2001; engraved on a plaque at the Naval War College):
"There is nothing more terrifying than ignorance in action."

David Kopel, from a review of Clay S. Conrad's, JURY NULLIFICATION: THE EVOLUTION OF A DOCTRINE, in the May/June, 1999, edition of "The American Enterprise, A National Magazine of Politics, Business, and Culture", Vol. 10, #3, as reprinted in the Winter/Spring, 1999, issue of "the FIJActivist", page 9:

"According to a poll by the "National Law Journal", 76 percent of Americans believe juries have the right to bring their conscience into the jury room -- and to acquit a defendant who is technically guilty but morally innocent.

"Conrad refutes various criticisms of jury independence. He argues that jurors who vote their conscience are not 'nullifying' the law. Rather, they are exercising their discretion, ruling that it would not be fair to apply a particular law in a particular case. District attorneys constantly exercise similar discretion -- not bringing charges in the first place -- and no one accuses them of 'nullification' or 'anarchy'.

U.S. Supreme Court: Martin v. Hunter's Lessee (1816):
The Federal Government "can claim no powers which are not granted to it by the constitution, and the powers actually granted must be such as are expressly given, or given by necessary implication."
(See also City of Boerne v. Flores (1997) and United States v. Lopez (1995))

From Printz v. U.S. (95-1478, 1997) as "published" at http://laws.findlaw.com/US/000/95-1478.html:

"We held in New York that Congress cannot compel the States to enact or enforce a federal regulatory program. Today we hold that Congress cannot circumvent that prohibition by conscripting the State's officers directly. The Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the State's officers or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program. It matters not whether policy making is involved, and no case-by-case weighing of the burdens or benefits is necessary; such commands are fundamentally incompatible with our constitutional system of dual sovereignty.

"The Federal Government may not compel the States to implement, by legislation or executive action, federal regulatory programs. We warned that this Court never has sanctioned explicitly a federal command to the States to promulgate and enforce laws and regulations, 'The Federal Government,' we held, 'may not compel the States to enact or administer a federal regulatory program.'"

Judge Earl Johnson Jr.:
"Poor people have access to the courts in the same sense that the Christians had access to the lions...."

James Madison, Federalist Paper 44:
"The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases affecting personal rights, become jobs in the hands of enterprising and influential speculators, and snares to the more-industrious and less informed part of the community. They have seen, too, that one legislative interference is but the first link of a long chain of repetitions, every subsequent interference being naturally produced by the effects of the preceding." {V}

Thomas Jefferson, 1789:
"The new Constitution has secured these [individual rights] in the Executive and Legislative departments: but not in the Judiciary. It should have established trials by the people themselves, that is to say, by jury."

Thomas Jefferson, 1820:
"You seem...to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.... The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal."

Thomas Jefferson, 1821:
"...the Federal Judiciary; an irresponsible body (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow), working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little to-day and a little to-morrow, and advancing it's noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one. ... when all government ... in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the centre of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated."

Thomas Jefferson, 1821:
"The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in...the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body, (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow,) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little to-day and a little to-morrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States."

Thomas Jefferson:
"...judges should be withdrawn from the bench whose erroneous biases are leading us to dissolution. It may, indeed, injure them in fame or fortune; but it saves the Republic..."

Thomas Jefferson:
"I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."

Thomas Jefferson:
"The opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional, and what not, ... would make the judiciary a despotic branch."

Unknown:
"... the Constitution is an intentionally incomplete, often deliberately indeterminate structure for the participatory evolution of political ideals and governmental practices."

Copied from "The Soldiers Training Manual" issued by the War Department, November 30, 1928:

TM2000-25: 118-120 DEMOCRACY: A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any other form of direct expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic- negating property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it be based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences. Results in demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy.

TM 2000-25: 120-121 REPUBLIC: Authority is derived throughout the election by the people of public officials best fitted to represent them. Attitude toward property is respect for laws and individual rights, and a sensible economic procedure. Attitude toward law is the administration of justice in accord with fixed principles and established evidence, with a strict regard to consequences. A greater number of citizens and extent of territory may be brought within its compass. Avoids the dangerous extreme of either tyranny or mobocracy. Results in statesmanship, liberty, reason, justice, contentment, and progress.

James Madison, Federalist Paper 62:
"It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?" {V}{LAW}

John Adams:
"It would be an absurdity for jurors to be required to accept the judge's view of the law, against their own opinion, judgement, and conscience."

Adolf Hitler, 1936 Decree:
"A decision of the Fuhrer in the express form of a law or decree may not be scrutinized by a judge. In addition, the judge is bound by any other decision of the Fuhrer, provided that they are clearly intended to declare law."

Index

QUOTATIONS ABOUT MILITIAS

Alexander Hamilton didn't argue that a select militia made a general militia unnecessary, but rather that a general militia was insufficient by itself to adequately protect the nation: (Federalist 28 or 29?)

"But so far from viewing the matter in the same light with those who object to select corps as dangerous, were the Constitution ratified, and were I to deliver my sentiments to a member of the federal legislature from this State on the subject of a militia establishment, I should hold to him, in substance, the following discourse:

"`The project of disciplining all the militia of the United States is as futile as it would be injurious, if it were capable of being carried into execution. A tolerable expertness in military movements is a business that requires time and practice. It is not a day, or even a week, that will suffice for the attainment of it. To oblige the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens, to be under arms for the purpose of going through military exercises and evolutions, as often as might be necessary to acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well-regulated militia, would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss. It would form an annual deduction from the productive labor of the country, to an amount which, calculating upon the present numbers of the people, would not fall far short of the whole expense of the civil establishments of all the States. To attempt a thing which would abridge the mass of labor and industry to so considerable an extent, would be unwise: and the experiment, if made, could not succeed, because it would not long be endured. Little more can reasonably be aimed at, with respect to the people at large, than to have them properly armed and equipped; and in order to see that this be not neglected, it will be necessary to assemble them once or twice in the course of a year.'"

Alexander Hamilton, collected in Federalist Paper 28, originally in the 10 January, 1788, "Daily Advertiser":
"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defence which is paramount to all positive forms of government, and which against the usurpations of the national rulers, may be exerted with infinitely better prospect of success than against the rulers of an individual state. In a single state, if the persons intrusted with supreme power become usurpers, the different parcels, subdivisions, or districts of which it consists, having no distinct government in each, can take no regular measures for defense. The citizens must rush tumultuously to arms, without concert, without system, without resource; except in their courage and despair."

Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Paper 29 (on the organization of the militia):
"Little more can reasonably be aimed at, with respect to the people at large, than to have them properly armed and equipped; and in order to see that this be not neglected, it will be necessary to assemble them once or twice in the course of a year." {V}

Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Paper 29 (speaking of standing armies):
"... if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens." {V}

Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Paper 79 (regarding payment of Judges):
"In the general course of human nature, A power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will." {V}

Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184-188:
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed."

Alexander Hamilton, from "The Federalist Papers" #84:
"I go further and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power. They might urge with a semblance of reason that the Constitution ought not to be charged with the absurdity of providing against the abuse of an authority which was not given, and that the provision against restraining the liberty of the press afforded a clear implication that a power to prescribe proper regulations concerning it was intended to be vested in the national government. This may serve as a specimen of the numerous handles which would be given to the doctrine of constructive powers, by the indulgence of an injudicious zeal for bills of rights."

The New York Times (quoted in the Manhattan [Kansas] Mercury), PRIOR to the sexual (and other) harrassment scandal in an Iraqian prison:
Most important of all, the treatment of the Guantanamo detainees is not true to America's guiding principles. "The practice of arbitrary imprisonments," Alexander Hamilton observed in Federalist No. 84, has been "in all ages" one of "the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny." Much has changed since Sept. 11, 2001, but one thing that has not is this nation's commitments to freedom, and to the rule of law.

Rep. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, spoken during floor debate over the Second Amendment, I Annals of Congress at 750, 17 August 1789:
"What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. ... Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins."

You might also be interested to know how U.S. law defines the militia:

These sections are referred to as 10 USC 311.

TITLE 10 -- ARMED FORCES Section 311. Militia: composition and classes

(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are commissioned officers of the National Guard.
(b) The classes of the militia are --
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.

FOR THE DEFENSE OF THEMSELVES AND THE STATE: LEGAL CASE STUDIES OF THE 2nd AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION by Clayton E. Cramer; Wakefield, NH; Hollowbrook Pub. (1992); ISBN: 0-89341-723-8

Who Are The Militia?

For a contemporary definition of militia, we can look to the Virginia constitution ratification convention:

Mr. GEORGE MASON. Mr. Chairman, a worthy member has asked who are the militia, if they be not the people of this country, and if we are not protected from the fate of the Germans, Prussians, &c., by our representation? I ask, Who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers. But I cannot say who will be the militia of the future day. If that paper on the table gets no alteration, the militia of the future day may not consist of all classes, high and low, and rich and poor; but they may be confined to the lower and middle classes of the people, granting exclusion to the higher classes of the people. If we should ever see that day, the most ignominious punishments and heavy fines may be expected. Under the present government, all ranks of people are subject to militia duty. Under such a full and equal representation as ours, there can be no ignominious punishment inflicted.[14]

Earlier during the Virginia debates, Mason had warned:

An instance within the memory of some of this house will show us how our militia may be destroyed. Forty years ago, when the resolution of enslaving America was formed by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia.[15]

Francis Corbin, arguing for the Constitution, held that the concerns about standing armies were overstated:

The honorable gentleman then urges an objection respecting the militia, who, he tells us, will be made the instrument of tyranny to deprive us of our liberty. Your militia, says he, will fight against you. Who are the militia? Are we not militia? Shall we fight ourselves? No, sir; the idea is absurd. We are also terrified by the dread of a standing army. It cannot be denied that we ought to have the means of defence, and be able to repel an attack.[16]

The following exchange at the Virginia ratifying convention demonstrates that "militia" was recognized as constituting the whole people:

Mr. CLAY wished to be informed why the Congress were to have power to provide for calling forth the militia, to put the laws of the Union into execution.

Mr. MADISON supposed the reasons of this power to be so obvious that they would occur to most gentlemen. If resistance should be made to the execution of the laws, he said, it ought to be overcome. This could be done only in two ways -- either by regular forces or by the people. By one or the other it must unquestionably be done. If insurrections should arise, or invasions should take place, the people ought unquestionably to be employed, to suppress and repel them, rather than a standing army. The best way to do these things was to put the militia on a good and sure footing, and enable the government to make use of their services when necessary.

Mr. GEORGE MASON. Mr. Chairman, unless there be some restrictions on the power of calling forth the militia, to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions, we may very easily see that it will produce dreadful oppressions. It is extremely unsafe, without some alterations. It would be to use the militia to a very bad purpose, if any disturbance happened in New Hampshire, to call them from Georgia. This would harass the people so much that they would agree to abolish the use of the militia, and establish a standing army.[17]

Gov. Randolph argued before the Virginia ratifying convention:

In order to provide for our defence, and exclude the dangers of a standing army, the general defence is left to those who are the objects of defence. It is left to the militia, who will suffer if they become the instruments of tyranny.[18]

Alexander Contee Hanson, a member of the Maryland State Convention, also discussed the meaning of "militia". In his pamphlet in support of ratification of the Constitution, he argued that the concerns about standing armies were excessive, and that such standing armies were unavoidable. He concludes that the concerns are "a mere pretext for terrifying you", and that:

It may well be material here to remark, that although a well regulated militia has ever been considered as the true defense of a free republic, there are always honest purposes, which are not to be answered by a militia. If they were, the burthen of the militia would be so great, that a free people would, by no means, be willing to sustain it. If indeed it be possible in the nature of things, that congress shall, at any future period, alarm us by an improper augmentation of troops, could we not, in that case, depend on the militia, which is ourselves.[19]

A committee of the Maryland ratifying convention proposed ratification of the Constitution with a list of amendments, one of which is relevant to the Second Amendment.[20] Among these provisions:

13. That the militia shall not be subject to martial law, except in time of war, invasion, or rebellion.[21]

In explaining why this amendment was considered so important, the official journal of the convention argued:

This provision to restrain the powers of Congress over the militia, although by no means so ample as that provided by Magna Charta, and the other great fundamental and constitutional laws of Great Britain, (it being contrary to Magna Charta to punish a freeman by martial law, in time of peace, and murder to execute him,) yet it may prove an inestimable check; for all other provisions in favor of the rights of men would be vain and nugatory, if the power of subjecting all men, able to bear arms, to martial law at any moment should remain vested in Congress.[22]

The ratifying convention refused the full list of proposed amendments. In response, the committee requested the convention to ratify the Constitution with what it considered the most important three amendments. The committee explained further its concern:

The first of these objections, concerning the militia, they considered as essential; for, to march beyond the limits of a neighboring state the general militia, which consists of so many poor people that can illy be spared from their families and domestic concerns, by power of Congress, (who could know nothing of their circumstances,) without consent of their own legislature or executive, ought to be restrained.[23]

The militia, then, was the same as the adult freemen of Maryland.

Tench Coxe of Pennsylvania was a member of the Annapolis Convention and Continental Congress. His letters were among the first to appear in favor of ratification of the Constitution, and were widely reprinted in newspapers of the day.[24] Coxe admitted:

The apprehensions of the people have been excited, perhaps by persons with good intentions, about the powers of the new government to raise an army.[25]

After stating that the Constitution contained adequate restrictions on the funding and control of standing armies, Coxe argued that:

The militia, who are in fact the effective part of the people at large, will render many troops quite unnecessary. They will form a powerful check upon the regular troops, and will generally be sufficient to over-awe them -- for our detached situation will seldom give occasion to raise an army, though a few scattered companies may often be necessary.[26]

Richard Henry Lee was appointed to the Constitutional Convention, but declined to serve. His pamphlet against ratification of the Constitution were "one of the most popular" of the time.[27] His concerns about standing armies and the national government's authority to regulate state militias provide both insights into the importance of private arms in restraining national power, and the identity of the people as the militia. In discussing the danger that Congress might not represent the interests of the common people in the levying of taxes and raising of standing armies, Lee admits:

It is true, the yeomanry of the country possess the lands, the weight of property, possess arms, and are too strong a body of men to be openly offended -- and, therefore, it is urged, they will take care of themselves, that men who shall govern will not dare pay any disrespect to their opinions.28

But recognizing that slow change is frequently capable of lulling the population to sleep in a way that radical change will not:

It is easily perceived, that if they have their proper negative upon passing laws in congress, or on the passage of laws relative to taxes and armies, they may in twenty or thirty years be by means imperceptible to them, totally deprived of that boasted weight and strength: This may be done in a great measure by congress, if disposed to do it, by modelling the militia. Should one fifth or one eighth part of the men capable of bearing arms, be made a select militia, as has been proposed, and those the young and ardent part of the community, possessed of but little or no property, and all the others put upon a plan that will render them of no importance, the former will answer all the purposes of an army, while the latter will be defenceless.[29]

Further evidence of the identity of the militia as "the people", and not just a small part of the population, can be found in James Madison's Federalist 46. Madison sought to alleviate concerns about Federal power. To that end, he pointed out that:

The only refuge left for those who prophecy the downfall of the State Governments, is the visionary supposition that the Federal Government may previously accumulate a military force for the projects of ambition ....[30]

Madison asserts the political unlikeliness of such an event, but:

Extravagant as the supposition is, let it however be made. Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the Federal Government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State Governments with the people on their side would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield in the United States an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops.[31]

This is a clear statement that the "militia" was not a small professional military, but the entire male population of the country, "with arms in their hands".

There is other contemporaneous evidence that the Founding Fathers considered the militia to be equivalent to, if not, "the people", at least a very large part of the people. The Militia Act of 1792 declared the:

"militia of the United States" to include almost every free adult male in the United States. These persons were obligated to possess a firearm and a minimum supply of ammunition and military equipment. This statute, incidentally remained in effect into the early years of the present century as a legal requirement of gun ownership for most of the population of the United States.[32]

The same Congress that debated the Bill of Rights, also debated HR-102, the Militia Bill which became, in the Second Congress, the Militia Act of 1792. Its language clearly shows:

That the militia of the United States shall consist of each and every free, able-bodied male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who are or shall be of the age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is hereinafter excepted) who shall severally and respectively be enrolled by the captain or commanding officer of the company within whose bounds such citizens shall reside .... That every citizen so enrolled and notified shall within _____ month_ thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock of a bore not smaller than seventeen balls to the pound, a sufficient bayonet and belt, a pouch with a box therein to contain not less than twenty-four cartridges suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball, two spare flints, and a knapsack, and shall appear so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise or into service as is herein after directed ....[33] [Look this up in Annals of Congress]

Debate on the Militia Bill, on December 22, 1790, involved discussion of whether the Congress should define what persons would be exempted from militia duty, or the state legislatures should do so. As part of that debate, Rep. Williamson observed:

When we departed from the straight line of duty marked out for us by the first principles of the social compact, we found ourselves involved in difficulty. The burden of the militia duty lies equally upon all persons; and when we contemplate a departure from this principle, by making exemptions, it involves us in our present embarrassment.[34] [emphasis added]

Rep. Randolph, in arguing for a reduction of the standing army on January 5, 1800, emphasized that standing armies were not only "useless and enormous expense", but contrary to the spirit of the Constitution:

A people who mean to continue free must be prepared to meet danger in person, not to rely upon the fallacious protection of mercenary armies.[35]

Current U.S. law still recognizes this organic relationship between the people and the militia:

311. Militia: composition and classes

(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intent to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are commissioned officers of the National Guard.

(b) The classes of the militia are --

(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and

(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.[36]

Indeed, the current National Guard was organized under Congress' power to "raise and support armies", and not under the "organizing, arming and disciplining the Militia" provision, since the militia "can be called forth only 'to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions.'"[37]

More recently, the U.S. Supreme Court in U.S. v. Verdugo-Urquidez (1990) explicitly recognized that "the people" referred to in the Second Amendment has the same meaning as it does in the rest of the Bill of Rights:

Contrary to the suggestion of amici curiae that the Framers used this phrase "simply to avoid [an] awkward rhetorical redundancy," ... "the people" seems to have been a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution. The Preamble declares that the Constitution is ordained and established by "the People of the United States." The Second Amendment protects "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms," and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments provide that certain rights and powers are retained by and reserved to "the people." See also U.S. Const., Amdt. 1, ("Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the right of the people peaceably to assemble"); Art. I, - 2, cl. 1 ("The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States") (emphasis added). While this textual exegesis is by no means conclusive, it suggests that "the people" protected by the Fourth Amendment, and by the First and Second Amendments, and to whom rights and powers are reserved in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community.[38]

Federalists and Antifederalists debating the Constitution in state ratifying conventions, the Militia Act of 1792, current federal and state laws, all agree that the militia was not a standing army, not a "select militia" like the National Guard, but the adult free male citizens of the country.

REFERENCES:
14 Jonathan Elliot, The Debates of the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, (New York, Burt Franklin: 1888), 3:425-426.
15 Elliot, 3:380.
16 Elliot, 3:112-113.
17 Elliot, 3:378.
18 Elliot, 3:401.
19 Alexander Contee Hanson, Remarks on the Proposed Plan of a Federal Government, 21, in Paul Ford, ed., Pamphlets On The Constitution of the United States, (Brooklyn, NY: 1888), 234-235.
20 Elliot, 2:549.
21 Elliot, 2:552.
22 Elliot, 2:552.
23 Elliot, 2:554.
24 Paul Ford, 133.
25 Tench Coxe, An Examination of the Constitution for the United States of America, 20-21, in Paul Ford, 150-151.
26 Ibid., 21.
27 Paul Ford, 277.
28 Richard Henry Lee, Letters of a Federal Farmer, 25, in Paul Ford, 305.
29 Ibid.
30 Jacob E. Cooke, ed., The Federalist, (Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press: 1961), 320.
31 Ibid., 321.
32 Senate Subcommittee on The Constitution Staff, "History: Second Amendment Right To 'Keep and Bear Arms'", 7.
33 Bickford & Veit, 5:1460-1462. Attempts to find the original Militia Act of 1792 as passed by Congress, were fruitless. [I've since found it -- this is old text.]
34 Elliot, 4:423.
35 Elliot, 4:411-412.
36 10 USC -311. Similar provisions exist in many state codes -- see California Military & Veterans Code, sec. 120-123.
37 Senate Subcommittee on The Constitution Staff, "History: Second Amendment Right To 'Keep and Bear Arms'", 11.
38 110 U.S. 1060-1061.

George Mason, Article 13 of The Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776:
"That a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people trained to arms, is the proper, natural and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies in time of peace should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power."

George Mason, Framer of the Declaration of Rights, Virginia, 1776, which became the basis for the U.S. Bill of Rights, 3 Elliot, Debates at 425-426:
"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them..." (Also see "Debates" at 380.)

Index

QUOTATIONS from MISCELLANEOUS PEOPLE on MISCELLANEOUS SUBJECTS

Hungarian Traditional:
May you live a thousand years, and I, a thousand less one day; that I might never know the world without you.

C. A. R. Hoare, noted computer scientist:
"I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Robert Anson Heinlein, noted author (especially science fiction):
"A generation which ignores history has no past - and no future."

Dave James
"Although I can accept talking scarecrows, lions, and great wizards of emerald cities, I find it hard to believe there is no paperwork involved when your house lands on a witch."

Joseph Sobran, one-time Editor of the National Review (1995):
"If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal.
If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative.
If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate.
If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist."

Voltaire (1764):
"In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party [part?] of the citizens to give to the other."

Pericles (430 B.C.):
"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you."

(Unknown):
"Talk is cheap -- except when Congress does it."

Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher (1820-1903):
"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."

Edward Langley, Artist (1928 - 1995):
"What this country needs are more unemployed politicians."

Thomas Jefferson:
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep, voting on what to eat for dinner; Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote."

James Bovard, Civil Libertarian (1994):
"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."

From an eulogy for Joseph P. Overton, as quoted in Lawrence W. Reed's article "Joseph P. Overton: Character for a Free Society" published in the October, 2003, issue of The Freeman/Ideas on Liberty:
"The world needs more men who do not have a price at which they can be bought; who do not borrow from integrity to pay for expediency; who have their priorities straight and in proper order; whose handshake is an ironclad contract; who are not afraid of taking risks to advance what is right; and who are honest in small matters as they are in large ones.

"The world needs more men whose ambitions are big enough to include others; who know how to win with grace and lose with dignity; who do not believe that shrewdness and cunning and ruthlessness are the three keys to success; who still have friends they made twenty years ago; who put principle and consistency above politics or personal advancement; and who are not afraid to go against the grain of popular opinion.

"The world needs more men who do not forsake what is right just to get consensus because it makes them look good; who know how important it is to lead by example, not by barking orders; who would not have you do something they would not do themselves; who work to turn even the most adverse circumstances into opportunities to learn and improve; and who love even those who have done some injustice or unfairness to them. The world, in other words, needs more true leaders. More to the point, the world needs more Joe Overtons."

Take this quiz mentally:
1. Name the five wealthiest people in the world.
2. Name the last five Heisman trophy winners.
3. Name the last five winners of the Miss America contest.
4. Name ten people who have won the Nobel or Pulitzer Prize.
5. Name the last half dozen Academy Award winners for best actor & actress.
6. Name the last decade's worth of World Series winners.

How did you do?

The point is, none of us remember the headliners of yesterday. These are no second-rate achievers. They are the best in their fields. But the applause dies. Awards tarnish. Achievements are forgotten. Accolades and certificates are buried with their owners.