Brenton

“Does affirmative action place minority students in colleges where they're likely to fail while depriving other applicants of the chance to attend the most challenging schools where they are capable of succeeding? Does rent control drive up the cost of housing, depriving property owners of the same opportunity to profit as any other investor while driving down the quality and quantity of the housing stock? Do minimum wage laws reduce the number of entry-level jobs, making it harder to escape from poverty? Because compassion, by its nature, subordinates doing good to feeling good, these are questions the warm-hearted rarely pursue.”
― William Voegeli, Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State

“The United States, with the greatest ability and the weakest desire to finance a welfare state, winds up in the middle of the pack in terms of the absolute value of the resources devoted to it. By 2003...America's per capita Public Expenditures were greater than those in Japan, Spain, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, while lower than those in Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, Denmark and Sweden.”
― William Voegeli, Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State

“If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus--more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.”
― Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

“Etymologically, "compassion" means to suffer together. "Together," however, is different from "identically." Compassion is not the same as selflessness, and not really the opposite of selfishness. Rather, it provides a basis for helping other people that is materially disinterested but emotionally self-regarding. As Rousseau wrote in Emile, "When the strength of an expansive soul makes me identify myself with my fellow, and I feel that I am, so to speak, in him, it is in order not to suffer that I do not want him to suffer. I am interested in him for love of myself..." Or, as Jean Bethke Elshtain has said, "Pity is about how deeply I can feel. And in order to feel this way, to experience the rush of my own pious reaction, I need victims the way an addict needs drugs.”
― William Voegeli, Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State