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Greggums' Blog

The Blog of Greggums

Created on 2005-08-23 13:45:58 (#8099345), last updated 2009-06-24

230 comments received, 327 comments posted

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124 Journal Entries, 0 Tags, 0 Memories, 0 Virtual Gifts, 6 Userpics

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Name:	Greg
Location:	Finksburg, Maryland, United States

Bio

Profound Quotes:

"Yet, as we know, history is continuous rather than fragmentary; and what appear at first sight to be its most decisive breaks will on more mature consideration be found to exemplify the dictum of 'plus ca change'. As in the development of species, so in the development of ideas or moulds of thought, sudden and radical change is unknown."
- Romilly Jenkins

"We know that voluntary exchange among individuals held morally responsible under the rule of law creates both prosperity and an unparalleled diversity of human choices. Such a model also has been a precondition of individuation and freedom. By contrast, regimes of central planning create poverty and occasion ineluctable developments toward totalitarianism and the worst abuses of power."
- Alan Charles Kors

"There's an irony inherent in a system like our own that identifies the individual as the fundamental unit of political, social and economic order. Because it shears the individual of the republican virtues cultivated within communities of tradition in the name of empowering him, it actually makes the individual subject to tyranny. Limitless emancipation in the name of progress is, it turns out, the final and most binding mechanism of control.
"When the oldest sources of order – which are at root religious – are abandoned along with their traditions and taboos, the resulting void of meaning is by necessity filled with some ideology promising one form or another of perfect happiness in the here and now. And these systems of self-salvation creep not toward liberation, but toward total control."
- Caleb Stegall

"Only prices generated in a capitalist economy can encapsulate the scattered and otherwise ungatherable information needed for rational economic activity, and individuals responding to price signals in the marketplace ensure the most efficient allocation of resources as is practically possible. But there are moral and social implications as well. For tradition, in Hayek's view, plays a role similar to that of the price system, embodying the inchoate moral insights of millions of individuals scattered across countless generations, and sensitive to far more information than is available to any individual reformer or revolutionary."
- Edward Feser

"Conservatism is neither identity politics for Christians and/or white people nor right-wing Progressivism. Rather, it is opposition to all forms of political religion. It is a rejection of the idea that politics can be redemptive. It is the conviction that a properly ordered republic has a government of limited ambition. A conservative in Portugal may want to conserve the monarchy. A conservative in China is determined to preserve the prerogatives of the Communist Party. But in America, as Friedrich Hayek and others have noted, a conservative is one who protects and defends what are considered liberal institutions in Europe but largely conservative ones in America: private property, free markets, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, and the rights of communities to determine for themselves how they will live within these guidelines. This is why conservatism, classical liberalism, libertarianism, and Whiggism are different flags for the only truly radical political revolution in a thousand years. The American founding stands within this tradition, and modern conservatives seek to advance and defend it. American conservatives are opposed on principle to neither change nor progress; no conservative today wishes to restore slavery or get rid of paper money. But what the conservative understands is that progress comes from working out inconsistencies within our tradition, not by throwing it away."
- Jonah Goldberg

Pithy and Profound Quotes:

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary."
- James Madison

"[T]he dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe."
- Tom Wolfe

"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."
- Ronald Reagan

"History ascribes to the victor qualities that may or may not actually have been there. And similarly to the defeated."
- Karl Rove

"There is properly no history; only biography."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson