The Sanity Inspector over at Protein Wisdom has a classic quote highlighted from Frederic today that is worthy of passing on:

The claims of these organizers of humanity raise another question which I have often asked them and which, so far as I know, they have never answered: If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? The organizers maintain that society, when left undirected, rushes headlong to its inevitable destruction because the instincts of the people are so perverse. The legislators claim to stop this suicidal course and to give it a saner direction. Apparently, then, the legislators and the organizers have received from Heaven an intelligence and virtue that place them beyond and above mankind; if so, let them show their titles to this superiority.

I see also from the Wikipedia entry for Bastiat that the Mises Organization has two PDFs of his collected works, Volume 1 and Volume 2. I have added these to my reading list.

There are, I’m sure, some that would call these “community organizers” something not-so-nice — like Greedy Bastards. But these sort of people cannot recognize that their progressive, enlightened betters are arranging the lives of the unwashed masses for their own good. They are, simply put…

And in the meantime, many of our political overlords have only one question…

The phrase “oil addiction” has come into common use…in his speech the other night, Obama generalized this to “addiction to fossil fuels.”

A little historical perspective…

Before we were addicted to oil, we were addicted to coal.

…

Before we were addicted to coal, we were addicted to wood.

…

Much of the talk about oil and alternative energy ignores a key point: in the United States, very little oil is used for electricity generation. Hence, all those solar cells and wind turbines, even should they achieve enough scale to represent a material part of U.S. electrical generation, don’t directly cut oil consumption.

Ellipses are mine.

Perhaps another way to state it?

I can certainly understand those in the society who see President Obama’s election as a triumph of progress and a turn towards “the greater good.”

I certainly hope that President Obama has a successful presidency. The problem is that I think in order to have a successful presidency, he will have to repudiate many of his campain promises and the left-leaning politics of his consituents. I advise those who support him to read both “Basic Economics” by Thomas Sowell and “The Road to Serfdom” by Friedrich Hayek. I’ll wait….

So I think President Obama’s election was a triumph for some, I fear that his economic policies will lead to an entirely different place. And, unfortunately, some in our society will blame his race for this failure. And therein lies the tragedy.

As a practicing physician, I compare where we are today to a physician who commits malpractice. We have a patient with cancer. They have a secondary pneumonia because of the cancer. We are going to treat the pneumonia. We are going to give the antibiotics, we are going to give something to lower the temperature, we are going to give something to suppress the cough, we are going to give something to thin the mucous, but we are not going to fix the cancer. We are going to ignore the cancer.

Let me tell you what the cancer is. The cancer is Congresses that, for years upon years, have totally ignored the Constitution of the United States and taken us to areas where we have no business being. There is no way you can justify, in the U.S. Constitution, that the country ought to be the source of mortgages for homeowners in this country. Yet Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac control 70 percent of the mortgages in this country.

I plan on voting for this bill. I support that we have to do something now. But how we got here is very important if we are going to fix things in the future….

If anybody in America is mad about this situation, there is only one place they need to direct their anger and it is right in the Congress of the United States.

I’m slightly in favor of the bail-out. However, I could also see this becoming a political boondoggle that will haunt our nation for a long, long time. That ‘sense of needing to do something’ can quickly lead to poor legislation. Witness the ‘Smoot-Hawley Tarriff Act’, socialized medicine schemes and other intrusions of government into areas where it doesn’t belong.

Perhaps we are giving the nation something to ‘thin the mucous’.

Or perhaps…