vanity & distraction

I often quote myself; it adds spice to my conversation.

George Bernard Shaw

Cold sober, I find myself absolutely fascinating.

Katharine Hepburn being interviewed on the Dick Cavett Show, 1973

While trying not to think too hard about Hurricane Charley, I offer three of my favorite self-quotes:

Political capitalism (government run for a capitalist elite) has been a great evil. Everyone can see that, no matter what their rhetoric. But the evil has been in the politics and not in the capitalism. Without understanding that, the vast majority look to politics for the solution, for the weapon they believe they need to fight capitalism.

bkMarcus

Civilization has two children: the Market, and the State. Almost everything good about civilization seems to have come out of the Market, out of cumulative systems of voluntary exchange. Almost everything bad about civilization seems to have come out of the State, out of the organized use and threat of violence.

bkMarcus

Straw-man “individualism”: The position that individual rights always supersede group rights.

Stated this way, individualism seems unreasonable — seems in fact like a call for dogmatically privileging one entity over another.

True individualism is both far more reasonable and far more radical for it denies the very existence of such a thing as “group rights”.

According to individualism, no one’s rights ever supersede anyone else’s rights because all rights are equal and compatible.

bkMarcus, BlackCrayon Dictionary