Wisdom in a Nutshell

Great thinking can often be characterized by its ability to by synthesized into a brief, pithy phrase that when pondered reveals all.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

The originally ratified Constitution recognized that and consequently only the House of Representatives was popularly elected and that electorate was only white, educated men. We were shield from the ignorance of the mass by appointment of Senators by state legislatures, appointment of an Electoral College with no mention of a popular election to choose our President, and the combination of Presidential appointment and Senatorial ratification of federal judges for our judiciary. We've thrown away those shields in the intervening 220 years.

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

That carefully honed thought might be the agenda of the Tea Party Movement. It describes the problem, indicts the behavior, and predicts the outcome all in brief.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

That could well have been the argument that could have scuttled the bestowal of the franchise on eighteen year olds. Or, in the future we could simply review the 2008 election.

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

At last, I've found the reason I got beaten so badly when I ran for state representative in Colorado and for Colorado Springs City council.

No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

The credo of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reed, Dick Durbin, Steny Hoyer, Charlie Rangel, Chuck Shumer, Barney Frank, et. al. has yet to be disproven.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.

The number of those folks seems to be growing like the Black Plague at a rat breeding festival.

The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

The total rationale of Democratic Party ideology in a single sentence.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Now we know where Rahm Emmanuel learned it.

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

Unfortunately that isn't the completion of the Obama agenda, it is only the starting point.

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.

Ain't that the truth.

Know who said these things? Just one man. He died in 1956. He defined curmudgeon and was predictably disliked by many. Still, he's worth reading.