51) “The success of small nation-states continues even today. If you look at the World Bank’s list of the richest nations in the world (as measured by GPD per capita at purchasing power parity), you see Luxembourg, Qatar, Macau, Singapore, Norway, Kuwait, Brunei, Switzerland, and Hong Kong. Perhaps Macau and Hong Kong, as parts of China, should not be included, in which case you add the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates (similar nations appear on the International Monetary Fund’s list).
The U.S. excepted, the common characteristic of all these nations is that they are small. Switzerland (7.9 million) and Hong Kong (7 million) have the largest populations; Singapore and Norway both have around 5 million. The rest are below 3.5 million.
Some of these nations — Qatar, Norway, Brunei, Kuwait, and the US — benefit because of their oil. But why then do other oil-producing nations such as Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, China, Nigeria, or Venezuela, which all have much more dubious social structures, not feature?
Other small nations — Luxembourg and Switzerland, for example — appear on the list because of their competitive tax rates and banking. But these are legislative options that are open to other countries in the world.
In 1950 and 1970, the USA, with its currency tied to gold, freedoms, low taxes, property rights, and semiautonomous states, topped the list. As its government has grown and its power become centralized, its ranking has fallen.
In a small state, there is less of gap between those at the top and bottom, there is more transparency and accountability, it is harder for the state to hide things, there is more monitoring, less waste and more dynamism. Small is flexible, small is competitive — small really is, as economist E.F. Schumacher said, beautiful.
Even states in the U.S. should seriously consider dropping out of the union. Their people would thrive because of it.
If a region wants an expansive government, lots of regulation, and a large welfare state, it can vote for it. If it wants low, transparent taxes, it can vote for that. In such a small environment, political change can actually happen. People can get the government they want. New parties can spring up. Welfare is easier to administrate. It’s easier to change or adapt laws and regulations. Competition between states will improve governance and productivity. Each region would benefit from increased pride, flexibility, dynamism, and responsibility. It would be a return to diversity.
A country breaking up into smaller entities does not mean there need be barriers between the two: There can still be trade; there’s no need for border checkpoints and tariffs. There can still be exchange; it just means the disintegration of large, unnecessary, overruling bureaucratic bodies.” Dominic Frisby
52) “Concentrated power is the enemy of liberty.” Ronald Reagan
53) “Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty.” President Calvin Coolidge
54) “To have a planner, rather than individual consumers, dictate demand and influence supply, in any market, be it home mortgages or healthcare, necessarily imposes simultaneous shortages and surpluses, wasting resources, as disparate individual desires are efficiently ignored in subjugation to the central state.” Mike Maloney
55) “The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda – a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.” H.L. Mencken
56) “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.” John Taylor Gatto
57) “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” Carl Sagan
58) “An Indian bride without gold is like rice without salt, bland.”
59) “If you concede to the very idea of an income tax then you believe the government owns 100% of your income, they are entitled to make a gift of whatever is left over to you, that you do not have any entitlement to the fruits of your labor, and that the government owns you. The morality behind any income tax is corrupt. When the income tax, IRS, and Federal Reserve Law passed in 1913 the income tax brackets where 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%, and the highest income tax bracket 5%. It turned out that 97% of the population did not qualify for 1% income tax so it was a “tax the rich” law and it had these very low non-burdensome taxes. During WW II and in the 1950s the highest income tax was 92%. The people who pay much income tax employ many people. If they spend all their time moving their currency around so they don’t have to pay as much to the federal government, they’re wasting their time. They need to do things to create more jobs and prosperity. Almost everything the government does limits prosperity. Regarding deficit spending, when the government spends a new unit of currency into circulation it gets its purchasing power by diluting the currency supply and stealing the purchasing power from all the other units of currency. The net gains when doing deficit spending is at most zero, but because the government has all these frictional jobs. There is almost nothing you get from the government that you would actually open up your wallet and pay for. Would you pay the IRS to hire accountants, CPA, and force you to fill out all those forms? All these frictional jobs and people have to get paid somehow. It all comes out of the prosperity of the entire economy. When the government whips up currency to do some deficit spending or sell bonds it doesn’t stimulate the economy. It warps the economy and the net is always less than zero. It destroys prosperity. It does not create prosperity.” Mike Maloney
60) “If we agreed that a single gold coin was going to be the entire world currency supply we could estimate the number of atoms in that one troy ounce of gold which I have done. I believe it comes to 95 sextillion which is something like 50 quadrillion times the entire currency supply of the planet. You could put that one gold coin in a vault, put it where people can see it, where there’s cameras, lights, and high security. You could give every atom a serial number and circulate those serial numbers digitally and just agree that’s our currency and there is plenty there in one ounce of gold. It doesn’t matter how many units of currency there are. What matters is the number times the purchasing power of each currency unit. If the number of currency units mattered Columbia would be one of the richest countries on the planet since I paid $1 million pesos to take a cab ride from the airport to the hotel. Regarding Zimbabwe, each $100 trillion Zimbabwe bill would have more purchasing power than all the currency on the planet. This hyperinflation event has happened many times including the French Revolution, Peru in the 1980s etc. When they run one currency into a hyperinflation, nobody trusts the second currency.” Mike Maloney
61) “If you are afraid to speak out against tyranny, you are already a slave.”
62) “In order to be effective, truth must penetrate like an arrow and that is likely to hurt.” Wei Wu Wei
63) “We have allowed our nation to be over-taxed, over-regulated, and overrun by bureaucrats. The founders would be ashamed of us for what we are putting up with.” Ron Paul
64) “In order to be effective, truth must penetrate like an arrow and that is likely to hurt.” Wei Wu Wei
65) “In 2006, Russia tried to ban the words “euros” and “dollars” from the media and official speech. Now, one lawmaker wishes to ban the use of dollars in Russia at all. The lawmaker, Mikhail Degtyarev, said the dollar was like a Ponzi scheme. He warned that the Russian government would have to bail out Russians holding onto dollars in the event of dollar collapse. ‘If the U.S. national debt continues to grow, the collapse of the dollar system will take place in 2017’ said Mr. Degtyarev of the Liberal Democrat Party.” Jeff Berwick 11/14/13
66) “Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.” Napoleon Bonaparte
67) “Bend over and grab your ankles” should be etched in stone at the entrance to every government building and every government office.”
68) “Liberty isn’t given to us; it is taken by us, and if not, we will not have it.”
69) “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what’s for dinner – and Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.”
70) “The truth is like a lion. You don’t have to defend it. Let it loose. It will defend itself.” St. Augustine
71) “Natural ability of people to solve their problems has been forcibly restricted throughout history.” Stefan Molyneux
72) “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” Henry David Thoreau
73) “It’s been easier to convince people to hand over half their income, their children to war, and their freedoms in perpetuity – than to engage them in seriously considering how roads might function in the absence of taxation.” Stefan Molyneux
74) “The myth that war is good for a capitalist economy is easily debunked by rational economics – war is good for government income, and for the income of those who supply war materials, but disastrous for everyone else.” Stefan Molyneux
75) “The possibility of corruption, and/or error is often considered to be an airtight argument against anarchy, when in fact it is an airtight argument for anarchy and against Statism.” Stefan Molyneux
76) “It took just a little more than a century for the US – founded on the idea of limited government, institute the income tax, take control of the money supply and the educational system and begin its catastrophic expansion.” Stefan Molyneux
77) “Paper constitutions have the same long-term value as paper money; also, like paper money, they lend a false sense of security to the holder. What constitution has ever kept the government from rewriting or discarding it throughout history? Just look at Latin America and Europe: one could make a bonfire with the constitutions they have gone through in the last 500 years.
But the heart of the matter is this: Concentrated power that legalizes robbery to fund itself will always win in the end. It always wins because the State steals from those who work, so that State-connected interests do not need to work to put food on the table, and can thus occupy their days working to consolidate their power. The consolidated power is eventually turned on those whom the original, limited power was intended to serve. And because the victims have to work for a living, they do not have the means of fighting back.” Stefan Molyneux
78) “The school system is designed to teach obedience and conformity and prevent the child’s natural capacities from developing.” Noam Chomsky
79) “If the government offered as much assistance to people starting small businesses as it does to people who refuse to work, America may not be as screwed up as it is.”
80) “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” Thomas Sowell
81) “You really want a level playing field? Then get rid of the State. Then the power is truly in the hands of the masses. Because “the Market” really is just “the People” spending their money and deciding who gets rich based on who best serves them by bringing them commodities and comforts.” Gary Gibson
82) “There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.” Fredrick Hayek
83) “We don’t even have a Secretary of the Treasury, we have a Secretary of the Debt because there is no Treasury, the Treasury is empty, all we’ve got are liabilities.” Peter Schiff
84) “I, like all other citizens in this country, am essentially on parole – one mistake away from being re-incarcerated.” Jeffrey A. Tucker
85) “Subject – derived from the Latin word ‘subiectus’, meaning ”lying beneath”
86) “The State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.” Henry David Thoreau
87) “War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.” Thomas Carlyle
88) “There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want, merely because you think it would be good for him.” Robert Heinlein
89) “Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty.” Emma Goldman
90) “Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.” Voltaire
91) “A man is but the product of his thought, what he thinks, he becomes.” Mahatma Gandhi
92) “Show me the person and I’ll show you the felony.” Harvey Silverglate, author and lawyer
93) “The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.” John Hay
94) “Noncooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good.” Gandhi
95) “The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.” Max Stirner
96) “The limitation of tyrants is the endurance of those they oppose.” Frederick Douglas
97) “If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so.” Thomas Jefferson
98) “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.” Henry David Thoreau
99) “This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.” Plato
100) “There comes a time when a moral man can’t obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust.” Martin Luther King
101) “The times call for courage. The times call for hard work. But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher. They are nothing less than the future of human liberty, which means the future of civilization.” Henry Hazlitt
102) “Show me the person and I’ll show you the felony.” Harvey Silverglate, author and lawyer
103) “Government is a broker in pillage and every election is a sort of advance auction in stolen goods.” H.L. Mencken
104) “The few who govern take care to nourish those opinions, and that is no easy task, for the opinions needed to make the many submit to the few are often at variance with observable fact. The success of government thus requires the acceptance of fictions, requires the willing suspension of disbelief, requires us to believe that the emperor is clothed even though we can see that he is not.” Edmund Morgan
105) “To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be [placed] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.” Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
A practitioner of Eastern Healing arts with degrees in Acupuncture and Chinese medicinal herbs, I have always questioned the status quo, a path which led me to peaceful anarchism. Through my journey, I have worn many hats, that of a classical pianist, avid chess player, philosopher, comedian, and now father of two little anarchists. My wife brands me as a Cultural Critic, but I am simply following my thirst for knowledge and passion for writing.
