Hawaii Liberty Chronicles

City and State governments are cutting back in these hard economic times.  The bureaucratically minded are in a terrible bind for a new department to start up to stimulate the economy.  Everyone knows by now that nothing stimulates economies like government expansion and increased spending from taxpayer dollars!  The timing for a new Honolulu County department couldn’t be better with the crumbling fantasy of elevated steel on steel rail.

Honolulu desperately needs the DSW or Department of Silly Walks (following England’s Ministry of Silly Walks).  Our visionary Honolulu Mayor could lead the way… We Will Silly Walk!

The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government — lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.

~ Patrick Henry

Hat tip to former Maui resident now in Arizona, Warren Woodward, for sending this.

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says: “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.”

However, in government, education, and in corporate America , more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip.

2. Changing riders.

3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.

4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses.

5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.

6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.

7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.

8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.

9. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse’s performance.

10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.

11. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, costs less, has lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do other horses.

12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.

And of course….

13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are excellent reasons why they should go together. Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.

~ Lord Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

I’m convinced that today the majority of Americans want what those first Americans wanted: A better life for themselves and their children; a minimum of government authority. Very simply, they want to be left alone in peace and safety to take care of the family by earning an honest dollar and putting away some savings. This may not sound too exciting, but there is something magnificent about it. On the farm, on the street corner, in the factory and in the kitchen, millions of us ask nothing more, but certainly nothing less than to live our own lives according to our values — at peace with ourselves, our neighbors and the world.

~ Ronald Reagan, Nationally televised address, (July 6, 1976)

Impressed with a conviction that the due administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good Government, I have considered the first arrangement of the Judicial department as essential to the happiness of our Country, and to the stability of its political system; hence the selection of the fittest characters to expound the law, and dispense justice, has been an invariable object of my anxious concern.

~ George Washington, Letter to U.S. Attorney General Edmund Randolph (1789)

In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?

As a matter of general principle, I believe there can be no doubt that criticism in time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government … too many people desire to suppress criticism simply because they think that it will give some comfort to the enemy to know that there is such criticism. If that comfort makes the enemy feel better for a few moments, they are welcome to it as far as I am concerned, because the maintenance of the right of criticism in the long run will do the country maintaining it a great deal more good than it will do the enemy, and will prevent mistakes which might otherwise occur.

~ Robert A. Taft, Speech at the Executive Club of Chicago (19 December, 1941)

Once government does become involved in something, intellectual and institutional inertia tends to keep it there for good.  People lose their political imagination.  It becomes impossible to conceive of dealing with the matter in any other way.  Repealing the new bureaucracy becomes unthinkable.  Mythology about how terrible things were in the old days becomes the conventional wisdom.  Meanwhile, the bureaucracy itself, with a vested interst in maintaining itself and increasing its funding, employs all the resources it can to ensuring that it gets a bigger budget next year, regardless of performance.  In fact, the worse it does, the more funding it is likely to get–exactly the opposite of what happens in the private sector, in which those who successfully meet the needs of there fellow men are rewarded with profits, and those who poorly anticipate consumer demand are punished with losses.

~ Ron Paul, The Revolution, A Manifesto

Peter Schiff is interviewed on Lew Rockwell’s podcast.  A must listen.  Schiff called the current crisis last Summer.

He wrote The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets: How to Keep Your Portfolio Up When the Market is Down.

Since man created government to help secure and safeguard rights, it follows that man is superior to government and should remain master over it, not the other way around.

~ Ezra Benson Taft, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture 1953-1960

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

~ Milton Friedman

A government for the people must depend for its success on the intelligence, the morality, the justice, and the interest of the people themselves.

~ President Grover Cleveland

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

~ Thomas Jefferson

Governments never learn. Only people learn.

~ Milton Friedman