Kevin D. Williamson > Quotes

“The difference between communism and socialism is that under socialism central planning ends with a gun in your face, whereas under communism central planning begins with a gun in your face.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

“It was not for nothing that Adam Smith wrote that “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” The romantic notion of politics holds that Big Business is synonymous with capitalism and the archenemy of socialism. In fact, Big Business is reliably against most of what must go into any modern definition of capitalism: free trade, free enterprise, free markets, and the impartial rule of law. Big Business reliably seeks to use the state to seek advantages in trade and to crush smaller (and often more innovative) competitors.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

“It would be difficult to find in the United States any profession so dedicated to socialism as that of educators, and difficult to find any argument for socialism as popular as the cause of public education.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

“The United States in the twenty-first century is not very much like nineteenth-century Prussia (Prussia today isn’t much like Prussia then, either), but we still use its educational methods. We would never think of using its transportation methods (horsepower was literally horsepower), its communication methods (telegraphs), or its military technology (muzzle-loaders and bayonets). But government-run systems have a way of preserving themselves well past any rational point, which is why the United States still maintains the helium reserve it established for dirigible warfare—presumably to fight those nineteenth-century Prussians.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

“Health care and education are too important NOT to be left to the free market.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Dependency Agenda

“Notably, far from being a proto-socialist, Bolívar was a man who traveled with a copy of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, a man who so admired Thomas Jefferson that he sent a favored nephew to study at the University of Virginia, which Jefferson had designed.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

“Peons must have conformity. The instinct to seek it is in their souls. It is what makes them peons. It is the essence of peonhood”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“Idealistic socialists in the West usually will tell you that 'socialism' is anything other than what actual socialist governments have achieved in the real world. What is important to keep in mind is that socialism is not a particular set of political conditions, but a specific kind of economic arrangement. Socialism is not identical with left-wing politics, and socialism is not confined to the Left. The various kinds of political systems that have arisen from socialist economies, from Soviet authoritarianism to India’s 'license raj,' are in no small part responses to the inadequacies and contradictions inherent in socialist systems of production and distribution—systems that seek to ignore or to subvert the laws of economics.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

“the necessary thing from the socialists’ point of view is not egalitarian economic outcomes, but state control.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

“Outrage is intoxicating, and like other intoxicants, it makes people stupid.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that American families pay 26 percent more for milk than they would pay if they paid real prices, i.e. the prices set by a free market. Whoever’s interest is being looked after, it isn’t the interest of the guy on a tight budget staring down a dry bowl of Count Chocula.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

“The proximate cause of Detroit’s bankruptcy is its inability to make good on debts owed to the funds paying out pensions and health care benefits to current and retired city workers. Those obligations make up the great majority of Detroit’s $20 billion or so in outstanding debt.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, What Doomed Detroit

“Donald Trump and Paris Hilton share an occupation: publicity whore. Paris Hilton is better at it.”
― Kevin D. Williamson

“Detroit is an extreme example of the fact that public-sector employment has become in effect a supplementary welfare state, with salaries and benefits – and, above all, pensions – entirely disconnected from legitimate municipal purposes. Unionized public-sector employees with a high degree of political discipline fortified by narrow financial self-interest become an unstoppable constituency, and the government becomes its own special-interest group.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, What Doomed Detroit

“Barack Obama spent eight years offering himself as the American super-ego, and Americans responded by electing their id. President Trump is as normal as diabetes.”
― Kevin D. Williamson

“Of all the stupid and destructive products of 1960s-style liberation politics, the effective abolition of marriage (and hence of family, properly understood) will, in the end, turn out to be the worst. And spare me your banal self-justifications: “I divorced my child’s mother, but I’m a good father!” “I was never married to my child’s father, but I’m a good mother.” I’m sure you think you are.

You aren’t.

Statistically speaking, your domestic situation is about as healthy for your children as would be your picking up a drug habit. (Yes, yes, I’m sure that you are the special-snowflake exception to the rule. One of these days, a three-legged horse might win the Kentucky Derby, too.) The numbers are the numbers.

Strange thing: Wildly different philosophical and religious orientations all point to the same central fact of human life. In Genesis, it’s “male and female he created them.” In Plato, we spend our lives seeking the lost half of ourselves from which we were separated by the gods. In good ol’ Darwinian terms, the getting of healthy offspring is the very purpose of life itself. We parted ways with the chimps a few eons ago, and somewhere along the way we developed habits and institutions that helped us to connect our libidos with one of our most useful and uniquely human traits: the ability to engage in long-term planning, even beyond our own lives.

And then, around 1964, we said: “To Hell with it, let’s just be chimps.”

And here we are.”
― Kevin D. Williamson

“The intersection of authoritarian politics with homoeroticism is a subject of some historical interest, from the Nazi enthusiasm for the sculptures of Josef Thorak and Arno Breker to the Italian Futurists’ ritual rejection of all things feminine. That mostly petered out around the time Francisco Franco stopped rocking that fur in official portraiture, though it has made occasional ignominious appearances in Democratic politics too. But the combination of homoerotic fascination and gay panic that marks the Trump movement is truly remarkable, something unseen in American politics. It”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Case Against Trump

“Populists of the Trump variety and the Sanders variety (who are not in fact as different as they seem) are not wrong to see these corporate cosmopolitans as members of a separate, distinct, and thriving class with economic and social interests of its own. Those interests overlap only incidentally and occasionally with those of movement conservatives — and overlap even less as the new nationalist-populist strain in the Republican party comes to dominate the debate on questions such as trade and immigration. Under attack from both the right and the left, free enterprise and free trade increasingly are ideas without a party. As William H. Whyte discovered back in 1956, the capitalists are not prepared to offer an intellectual defense of capitalism or of classical liberalism. They believe in something else: the managers’ dream of command and control.”
― Kevin D. Williamson

“While I would not support importing German- or Austrian-style restrictions on political speech and”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“Like Don Corleone, I don’t judge a man for how he makes his living. What I judge a man for is something else: Not the desire to have an audience, to make money, all that sort of thing, but the abject, craven, humiliating need to be loved by strangers. I mean the emptiness that a certain kind of man or woman tries to fill with adulation, characteristic of the man who cannot stand in front of a crowd without being possessed to deliver corny prepackaged applause lines, who will kiss the collective ass of the mob—and any mob will do—because that mob ass simply must be kissed.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“The problem for mass democracy is that the demos does not think. It cannot. It lacks the requisite apparatus.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“Rich” ... is the point at which the marginal utility of an additional dollar for personal consumption and investment is effectively zero. I think that this is a good definition for a couple of reasons: One, because people have different preferences, that point comes at very different wealth and income levels for different people, which is why there are so many people of relatively modest means who dedicate some non-trivial portion of their incomes to charity rather than to their own personal desires. Second, it accounts for the fact that while the value of an additional dollar for personal consumption may be zero, the value of deciding for one’s self how any additional dollars are to be disposed of is not zero. That is why there are so many people who work diligently to minimize their tax bills while giving away millions or billions of dollars to charitable ends. The position is not, contra the protestations of our progressive friends, an inconsistent one.”
― Kevin D. Williamson

“The charges of ‘white privilege’ or ‘rape apologist’ are thrown around only because we no longer accuse people of being witches or communists when we wish to destroy them.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“Nor does it matter which symbols the enemies of human freedom choose: freedom is not less endangered if attacked in the name of anti-Fascism or in that of outright Fascism.”9”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“Socialism’s main defects are the inability of political decision-makers to make rational decisions without the information provided by prices generated by marketplace transactions; the misalignment of incentives and resources; and the subjugation of economic necessities to political mandates with no basis in material economic reality. It is the last of these, above all, that makes socialism dangerous. As Mises’s colleague F. A. Hayek argued in The Road to Serfdom, central planners frustrated by their inability to mold the economic world to their will inevitably are tempted to run roughshod over the rights and interests of the individuals they purport to serve. Sometimes this takes the relatively innocuous form of high-handed officials in the Canadian public-health service denying a procedure or timely access to care; sometimes it takes one of the diverse forms explored with such horrific vigor by Kim Jong Il.”
― Kevin D. Williamson

“You can’t shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater" is an abominably stupid cliché that has empowered more mob rule than the AK-47.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“In this way, streitbare Demokratie necessitates the abolition of private life. Which is to say, it necessitates the incorporation of everything into the political project: every business,59 every church,60 every voluntary organization,61 every ill-advised tweet by a fourteen-year-old kid who later goes on to win the Heisman trophy,62 every pronoun,63 every word spoken on every college campus and in every coffee shop,64 every prayer65,66—everything. Like any parasite, it is opportunistic, and like any cancer, it spreads.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“The difference between Duterte’s death squads and Antifa is only that the American blackshirts engage in relatively petty violence that generally stops short of murder and more spectacular forms of terrorism.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“I am at the moment tired of my country, its people, their rages and ecstasies, their talk.”
― Kevin D. Williamson

“O problema do capitalismo são os capitalistas. O problema do socialismo é o socialismo.” — Willi Schlamm, ex-socialista austríaco”
― Kevin D. Williamson, O livro politicamente incorreto da esquerda e do socialismo