Quotes

"Fascism and communism both promise "social welfare," "social justice," and "fairness" to justify authoritarian means and extensive arbitrary and discretionary governmental powers." - F. A. Hayek"

"Life is a Bungling process and in no way educational." in James M. Cain

Jean Giraudoux who first said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. Sir Winston Churchill

"summum ius summa iniuria" ("More laws, more injustice.") Cicero

As Christopher Hitchens once put it, “The essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law.”

"Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan

"Law is where you buy it." Raymond Chandler

"Why did God make so many damn fools and Democrats?" Clarence Day

"If I feel like feeding squirrels to the nuts, this is the place for it." - Cluny Brown

"Oh, pshaw! When yu' can't have what you choose, yu' just choose what you have." Owen Wister "The Virginian"

Oscar Wilde said about the death scene in Little Nell, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

Thomas More's definition of government as "a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a commonwealth.” ~ Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples

“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.” ~ Jonathon Swift

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

The Old DDR Defense - NSA Isn't as Bad as the Stasi, Insist Agency's Defenders

They aren't collecting our personal scents yet, they just stink! m/r

NSA Isn't as Bad as the Stasi, Insist Agency's Defenders - Reason.com

That's not as reassuring as they think

 | November 19, 2013

… “Victims of the fearsome Communist East German secret police say: not so fast” to comparisons ofNational Security Agency spying with the Cold-War era Stasi, the Post reports.
The spy agency for the communist “German Democratic Republic” [DDR: Deutsche Demokratische Republik] employed over a quarter of a million East Germans — nearly 1 in 50 — as agents or informants.
Anyone “who dared criticize their government” — even in private — “could wind up disappearing into its penal system for years.”
The Post quotes the director of Berlin’s prison museum saying “the Stasi was a lot worse.” So we’ve got that going for us.
Of course the Stasi was orders of magnitude worse than the National Security Agency. How comforting should that be?
We don’t need to invoke the Stasi to understand the dangers of the NSA’s dragnet data collection. We can look to our own Cold War history, when the political class built files on thousands of peaceful dissenters, swept up millions of Americans’ private communications and used the information gathered to amass and maintain power.  …
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