Aphorisms

I feel like Confucius today. The following lines are distilled from past blogs. I hope you can digest them.

The thing about the truth is that someone has to tell it. If not told, the lie wins the day and destruction ensues. We need more truth tellers.

Beware of the person who criticizes selfishness and greed. He’s picking your pocket.

Beware the person who says he only wants to help people. He’s helping himself.

Beware the person who asks for your blind trust. Notice how nervous he is.

Listen to the little bird that constantly shows up on your window sill. He’s trying to tell you something.

Politicians always hide from you what they are doing with their left hand by showing you an empty right hand.

They keep saying they inherited a bad economy; but Bush's bad economy was created by Obama's socialist principles. It was a failure of socialism, not a failure of capitalism, that got us here.

You can't get a good result by doing more of what caused the bad result.

Economic principles are real principles. They are not just opinions. You can’t get a bad result by doing something in 1934 and then a good result by doing it in 2009. The result will be bad both times.

Beware of broken windows that you must pay to fix. There is a vandal afoot; usually the government.

The savages will whine about their need without the sense to save the seed.

We may marvel at the image of leadership but do we notice that we are becoming poor?

When the value of your money is diminishing, someone is stealing from you.

The impulse of our leaders to “do something” is a clue to the fact that they are doing the wrong thing. Sometimes doing nothing is better.

If you do something and it doesn’t work, this is a sign that you should stop doing it.

It is always better to just leave people alone rather than meddle in their lives.

If you want to help the poor, don’t help them.

It is thought that if a person "cares" for others, it means he is a good person. I beg to differ. Care for yourself and you are a good person.

In order for the government to be empathetic towards one person, it must do harm to the person who pays for the empathy.

Sacrifice has two sides…the giver and the taker. To accomplish sacrifice, you must make the giver feel guilty for having to much and this necessarily makes the taker feel guilty for taking it. This is why there is so little gratitude today.

The slave gets the lash; the master gets the gold. There is a lesson here.

Beware of professional parasites at your door. Don’t let them in; they are casing the joint.

Beware of fence builders. Fences keep people out; but they also keep people in.

The man who claims the moral authority to tell you what to do is a self-exalted petty chiseler.

All dictators demand sacrifice. That is how they destroy continents.

Beware a leader who asks for sacrifice. It is you who will sacrifice.

It isn’t the poor that the politicians want to help; it is the rich they want to destroy.

We should educate our youth about how to identify the truth rather than uncritically accept the lies. It would be cheaper since you'd only have to teach them once; rather than constantly repeat the lies.

Freedom is the gateway to accomplishment, to cooperation, to reason and to happiness. Anything else is slavery.

What is freedom? Freedom is the ability to make a decision with your own mind to do something that benefits you and only you. If you lose this freedom, you are a slave who must wait for the commands of your master. You will be fed when he wants to feed you and you will die when he wants you to die.

What does a person with “too much” money do with that money when he is allowed to keep it? Most of the time, he invests it in a bank. The bank then loans it to people who buy homes, cars, start businesses, etc., all of which create jobs for people. Now you know why our government’s stimulus programs aren’t working.

What are your weak spots? Quite simply they are your beliefs that sacrifice for the common good is proper and that your government is trying to help people. As long as you believe these lies, they have a blank check to draw out the value of everything you produce.

The idea of altruism, of sacrifice, makes it possible for people to declare that it is moral to re-distribute wealth - but no one has bothered to look at history to see if wealth is ever created in a society based upon that principle.

The only thing that fascism destroys is the people.

The only thing a government can do is coerce the people.

All re-distribution schemes equalize results. Once re-distribution takes hold, productive people will slow down because they know their product will be given to others. And the less productive people will slow down because they know they'll get more anyway. This is why no socialist system ever works. This is not an opinion. It is a historically proven fact. We are proving it again today.