Political Theory

Recorded at Jekyll Island, Georgia; 26 February 2010.

"Every tyranny must necessarily be grounded upon general popular acceptance."

I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.

From the audio version of Against Intellectual Property. Narrated by Jock Coats.

"There is no such thing as a nonspeculative investment.… In a changing economy action always involves speculation. Investments may be good or bad, but they are always speculative."

"The default position of the world is despotism. In the sweep of things, liberty is the exception."

"The fragment on classes was actually written prior to the initial publication of Volume 1 of Capital in 1867. Marx died in 1883. That he never returned to the fragment strongly suggests that he had no satisfactory theory of class."

In order to answer these questions, we must realize that government is an agency for coercion, and we should understand how man reacts to coercion or in the absence of coercion.

Obama's White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is run by Cass Sunstein. Sunstein and Vermeule's paper on conspiracies theories, e.g. JFK, TWA 800, global warming fraud, MLK killed by feds,concludes that some theories create problems for government to solve.

The political machine is familiar to Americans. While it may lead to gross abuses, experience shows that some sort of behind-the-scenes organization may be useful to the functioning of democratic institutions.