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

 

1) “When you or I write a check there must be sufficient funds in our account to cover to the check, but when the Federal Reserve writes a check there is no bank deposit on which that check is drawn. When the Federal Reserve writes a check, it is creating money.” The Boston Federal Reserve, “Putting It Simply”

 

2) “Sending good people in to reform a state is like sending virgins in to reform a whorehouse.” Anonymous

 

3) “Let them march all they want, so long as they continue to pay their taxes.” Alexander Haig. Secretary of State to President Ronald Reagan

 

4) “It would take a salary of $396,536 today (2013) to equal in purchasing power a $35,000 income in 1980.” John Williams, Shadowstats.com

 

5)  “Inflation has also eroded savings.  $10,000 in the bank in 1980 would need to have grown to $113,296 in 2013 to be of equal value. That banked $10,000 in 1980 would have to yield about 8% compound interest over 33 years to equal $113,296 today.  That never happened.” John Williams, shadowstats.com

 

6) “If corporations are people then they should be executed for mass murder.” Roseanne Barr

 

7) “I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.” Mahatma Gandhi

 

8) “The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.” John Kenneth Galbraith

 

9) “The Banks own the Senate.” Illinois Senator Dick Durbin

 

10) “The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank… sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent rewards in the business world.” Professor Carroll Quigley, “Tragedy and Hope”

 

11) “The world will soon wake up to the reality that everyone is broke and can collect nothing from the bankrupt, who are owed unlimited amounts by the insolvent, who are attempting to make late payments on a bank holiday in the wrong country, with an unacceptable currency, against defaulted collateral, of which nobody is sure who holds title.” Anonymous

 

12) “The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.” —  Harry S Truman, 33rd US President

 

13)  “No amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack, nor the atomic bomb, nor anything. You can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.” Robert A. Heinlein

 

14) “A ballot is just a substitute for a bullet. If your vote isn’t backed by a bullet, it is meaningless. Without the bullet, people could ignore the election outcome. Voting would be pointless. Democracy has violence at its very core!” Muir Matteson, “The NonViolent Zone”

 

15) “Thus we can see that – at least at the level of economics – democracy is a sort of slow-motion suicide, in which you are told that it is the highest civic virtue to approve of those

who want to rob you.”  Stefan Molyneux

 

16) “The idea that the State is capable of solving social problems is now viewed with great scepticism – which foretells a coming change. As soon as scepticism is applied to the State, the State falls, since it fails at everything except increasing its power, and so can only survive on propaganda, which relies on unquestioning faith.”  Stefan Molyneux

 

17) “Corporations are legal fictions created by the State to shield executives from liability… It’s like if I had a little hand-puppet, and I went to rob a bank, and the hand-puppet held the little gun and told people to hand over all the money, and then the hand-puppet grabbed the money and ran out, and then I got caught and I handed the hand-puppet over the police and then the police tried the hand-puppet, put the hand-puppet in jail, and I get to keep all the money.”  Stefan Molyneux

 

18) “Politicians are propaganda, the people with guns are the enforcers and the media is the enthusiastic lapdog who enables the entire behavior and acts as the verbal abuser against those who deviate from nodding their heads at the vast statues of evil that we inherited.” Stefan Molyneux

 

19) “The continual manufacture of enemies is essential to the growth of the fascist state.” Stefan Molyneux

 

20) “If men are good, you don’t need government; if men are evil or ambivalent, you don’t dare have one.” Robert LeFevre

 

21) “I would define government as a group of men who sell retributive justice to the inhabitants of a limited geographical area at monopolistic prices.” Robert LeFevre

 

22) “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.” Milton Friedman

 

23) “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” Milton Friedman

 

24) “Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.” Milton Friedman

 

25) “I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.” Milton Friedman

 

26) “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.” Milton Friedman

 

27) “Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.” Milton Friedman

 

28) “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.” Will Hunting

 

29) “Government’s three major funding sources are not voluntary exchanges of value. They are taxation, money printing, and borrowing (with no intention of ever paying back the loan). More accurate terms would be: robbery, counterfeiting, and loan fraud.” Muir Matteson, “The NonViolent Zone”

30) “The problem with the state isn’t a bad politician here or there. It’s not just the Republicans. It’s not just the Democrats. (It’s not limited to any party in any country.) The problem is the state. It creates opportunities for plunder and abuse that are enormously attractive to anyone with the potential capacity to use it to exploit others.” Gary Chartier, Conscience of an anarchist

 

31) “The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.” The Rothschild brothers of London writing to associates in New York, 1863.

 

32) “The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. With something so important, a deeper mystery seems only decent.” John Kenneth Galbraith (1908- ), former professor of economics at Harvard, writing in ‘Money: Whence it came, where it went’ (1975).

 

33) “The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is, perhaps, the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banks can in fact inflate, mint and un-mint the modern ledger-entry currency.” Major L L B Angus.

 

34) “I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create money. And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hand the destiny of the people.” Reginald McKenna, as Chairman of the Midland Bank, addressing stockholders in 1924.

 

35) “The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.” William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England in 1694, then a privately owned bank

 

36) The real truth of the matter is,as you and I know, that a financial
element in the large centers has owned the government ever since
the days of Andrew Jackson… -Franklin D. Roosevelt
(in a letter to Colonel House, dated November 21, 1933)

 

37) “I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of  credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most  completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a  Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.” Woodrow Wilson a few years after having signed into law the Federal Reserve Act of 1913

 

38) “History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance.” James Madison

 

39) “I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.” George W. Bush, June 18, 2002

 

40) “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” George Orwell

 

41) “Today 200 of the world’s richest people now control more than $3 trillion between them, after they collectively gained $8.4 billion just yesterday.” Greg Guenthner

 

42) “One of the traditional methods of imposing Statism or Socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care to people who possibly can’t afford it. The doctor begins to lose freedoms. It’s like telling a lie and one leads to another. First you decide the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided amongst the various doctors by the government, but then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically. So a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town. The government says to him ‘You can’t live in that town. They already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else.’ From here it’s only a short step to dictating where he will go. This is a freedom that, I wonder whether any of us have the right to take from any human being. Take it into your own occupation or that of your husband. All of us can see what happens. Once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man’s working place, working methods, and determine his employment, from here it’s a short step to socialism to determining his pay and pretty soon your son won’t decide when he’s in school, where he will go and what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.” Ronald Reagan 40^th US President

 

43) “Since the general civilization of mankind I believe there are more abridgments of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment by those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations.” James Madison 1788 Virginia Convention

 

44) “…if I contracted cancer, I would never go to a standard cancer treatment centre. Only cancer victims who live far from such centres have a chance.” Dr. Charles Mathe, French cancer specialist

 

45) “There are several cures for cancer, but there’s no money in them. They’re natural, effective, and inexpensive, no expensive drugs are involved but they require quite a lot of self-discipline from patients. It costs millions to fund research and clinical trials needed to produce a new cancer drug that can be patented and sold. Often these drugs create more illness. It has been said that the key to success in the health business is to pull off the trick of making people patients for life. Consider how many people who registered a couple of abnormal blood pressure readings have been kept on medication until the medication killed them, when a quick fix course of drugs supported by major changes of diet and lifestyle would have returned their physical condition to an unmedicated healthy state.” Dr. Robert Atkins, MD, of Atkins Diet

 

46) “A study of over 10,000 patients shows clearly that chemo’s supposedly strong track record with Hodgkin’s disease (lymphoma) is actually a lie. Patients who underwent chemo were 14 times more likely to develop leukemia and 6 times more likely to develop cancers of the bones, joints, and soft tissues than those patients who did not undergo chemotherapy.” Dr. John Diamond, M.D

 

47) “We have a multi-billion dollar industry that is killing people, right and left, just for financial gain. Their idea of research is to see whether two doses of this poison is better than three doses of that poison.”  Dr. Glenn Warner

 

48) “As a chemist trained to interpret data, it is incomprehensible to me that physicians can ignore the clear evidence that chemotherapy does much, much more harm than good.” Dr. Alan C. Nixon, past president of the American Chemical Society

 

49) “Most cancer patients in this country die of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy does not eliminate breast, colon, or lung cancers. This fact has been documented for over a decade, yet doctors still use chemotherapy for these tumors.”

 

50) “Whenever you find yourself in the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” Mark Twain