Ilana Mercer

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The rights to life, liberty and property were not meant to be subject to the vagaries of majority rule.

Ilana Mercer is a classical liberal writer, born in South Africa, and has lived in Israel, Canada and the United States. Mercer writes WorldNetDaily 's longest-standing, exclusive, paleolibertarian weekly column, “Return to Reason.” Her essays have appeared in Globe and Mail, Calgary Herald, Ottawa Citizen, Vancouver Sun, The Financial Post, Orange County Register, The American Spectator, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and other venues. She is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, an independent, non-profit, economic policy think tank.

Sourced [edit]

  • From the fact that many libertarians believe that the state has no legitimacy, they arrive at the position that anything the state does is illegitimate. This is a logical confusion. Consider the murderer who happens on a scene of a rape while fleeing the law, saves the woman, and pounds the rapist. Is this good deed illegitimate because performed by a murderer?
  • A brave nation fights because it must; a cowardly nation fights because it can.
  • Liberals retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian idea that traumatic toilet training is destiny.
  • In a free society, the ‘vision thing’ is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a ‘visionary’ bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government... the poorer and less free the people.
  • The only kind of marriage liberals had ever glorified is the gay kind. But thanks to Michael Schiavo, the sanctity of marriage is fast becoming a liberal sacrament, with the proviso it has to involve 'mercy killing.' It took Michael Schiavo's devoted efforts to starve and dehydrate his wife to restore liberal faith in the institution.
  • Our adventurous foreign policy might be a necessary precondition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one.
  • The National Education Association is the al-Qaida of education.
  • The free flow of people across borders is not to be confused with the free flow of goods across borders. Free trade is a positive-sum game. Contrary to illegal immigration, it is always invited, consensual and hence mutually beneficial to the parties involved.
  • Antitrust laws ought to be deployed, not against business, but to bust this two-party monopoly, which subverts competition in government and rewards the colluding quislings with sinecures in perpetuity.
  • Gays have become colossal bores. Once interesting and iconoclastic, all they seem to crave nowadays is the State’s pension and seal of approval. They ought to go back to the days of the Stonewall Riots, when the police’s violations of privacy—and private property—were the object of their anger and activism.
  • According to the disease theory of delinquency, the arsonist has 'pyromania,' the thief 'kleptomania,’ and Bill Clinton is not promiscuous, but a ‘sex-addict.’
  • On the unfalsifiable theory of global warming:"Evidence that contradicts the global warming theory, climate kooks enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory; every permutation in weather patterns—warm or cold—is said to be a consequence of that warming or proof of it.
    • "Reincarnation of the Reds," WorldNetDaily.com, December 29, 2006, The Colorado Springs Gazette, January 17, 2007, and The Orange County Register, "The Reds Have Become Greens," January 19, 2007.
  • Whatever open-border libertarians think about immigration law, once the immigration scofflaw steals, trespasses, or vandalizes private property, said alien is guilty of crimes. To say, moreover, that the state’s laws made masses of men and women commit such crimes is to voice the philosophy of determinism, not individualism.
  • Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn.
  • Rights give rise to legal claims. Ultimately, the more rights animals are granted, the greater the legal lien exercised on their behalf against the liberty and property of people.
  • Like environmentalists, politicians generally privilege flora and fauna over folks. (NIMBYs excepted. Senator Edward Kennedy is a not-in-my-backyard environmentalist: he opposes wind farms in Nantucket Sound, offshore from his Hyannis Port compound.)
  • Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.
  • Profits and prices are the street signs of the economy. Only fools flout them. The much–maligned price system works not only to secure supply but to conserve.
  • Barack the boy was raised by his white maternal grandparents; his Kenyan father abandoned him. The qualities Americans appeared to find universally appealing in the ambitious, affable Obama—his confidence and calm, and his commitment to community and kin, education and excellence—these came from Kansas, not Kenya.
  • If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, men would have long-since priced themselves out of the market.
  • The rights to life, liberty and property were not meant to be subject to the vagaries of majority rule.
  • Demonstrators for a government takeover of medicine have a right to discuss their demands, but no right to enact these demands. ... 'Rights, as our founding fathers conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but freedoms of action.
  • Still – and for all Obama's heavy hinting to the contrary – Islam has no "human rights." The ideas of individual rights and the dignity of man are distinctly Western, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. And while dialogue is dignified; dhimmitude is not, even if it achieves a desired, if temporary, effect.

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