Two new officials were confirmed for posts at the ONDCP: David Mineta as Deputy Director of Demand Reduction, and Benjamin Tucker as Deputy Director of State, Local and Tribal Affairs.
I was doing a little quick checking into these folks and when I googled Benjamin Tucker, I found some fascinating quotes….
To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury. — Benjamin Tucker
Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government, are interconvertible terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy. — Benjamin Tucker
At first I thought, well, this is an interesting choice… but quickly realized that, unless they dug him up from the grave, this is a vastly different Benjamin Tucker.
“To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury. — Benjamin Tucker”
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the War on Drugs.
Lumpen proles always pay for their chains while singing the praises of the oppressors.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you government regardless of it’s particular foibles (communist, dictatorship, socialist, democracy, monarchy, theocracy)
“The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.” ~ H.L. Mencken
“When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost… All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre….” ~ H.L. Mencken
“In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having ever been asked, a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practise this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot — which is a mere substitute for a bullet — because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency, into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.” – Lysander Spooner
Gotta be a different guy. Right? Anybody know?