All posts by admin

I want, and I think the country needs, people who know how …

I want, and I think the country needs, people who know how to do things. The plain truth is that government is by nature inefficient. We can’t make it more efficient by selecting people who’ve always worked in government. The idea the Founding Fathers had was for citizens legislators, not for a permanent ruling class. In that I think I am in agreement with the intentions of the framers of our Constitution. Tom Clancy
Executive Orders, 1996

Senator, the thing we forget is why we’re here and what …

Senator, the thing we forget is why we’re here and what we’re trying to do. The government doesn’t provide productive jobs. That’s not what we’re supposed to do. … The job of government is to protect the people, to enforce the law, and to make sure people play by the rules, like the umpires on a ball field. It’s not supposed to be our job, I think, to punish people for playing the game well. Tom Clancy
Executive Orders, 1996

Whether great works of literature by Voltaire or George Eliot have been …

Whether ‘great works of literature’ by Voltaire or George Eliot have been published anonymously should be irrelevant to our analysis, because it sheds no light on what the phrases ‘free speech’ or ‘free press’ meant to the people who drafted and ratified the First Amendment. Similarly, whether certain types of expression have ‘value’ today has little significance; what is important is whether the Framers in 1791 believed anonymous speech sufficiently valuable to deserve the protection of the Bill of Rights. And although the majority faithfully follows our approach to ‘content-based’ speech regulations, we need not undertake this analysis when the original understanding provides the answer. Clarence Thomas
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in McIntyre v. Ohio Board of Elections, 514 U.S. 334 (1995)

We want exactly 100% of the companies to be excellent, to be …

We want exactly 100% of the companies to be excellent, to be the best representatives of the most promising industries. We have no time for non-excellent companies, in the name of diversity or anything else. So what am I saying? Am I anti-diversification? Well, no, not specifically. I am anti-dilution, and that is what many people tend to do in the name of diversification of assets. I am also perfectly comfortable with people who know a great deal about a specific industry to concentrate their investments within the best companies of that sector. The key factor is the level of knowledge, not the level of concentration. Bill Mann
April 24, 2000, fool.com

For the past two years a number of Washington politicians have been …

For the past two years a number of Washington politicians have been insisting that a cut, to be a cut, must be a decrease in spending, not a decrease in the increase in spending. That such a semantic argument should even be necessary is a measure of just how deeply the culture of spending had become ingrained in Washington. That it has met with only limited success is a measure of just how powerful are the forces behind continued deficit spending. John Steele Gordon
In Hamilton’s Blessing, as quoted in Forbes, June 2, 1997