Ilana Mercer - State Quotes

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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?

Ilana Mercer
The United States has already passed on as the world's economic leader. Having flouted Thomas Jefferson for too long, America has succumbed to public debt, the 'fore horse for oppression and despotism,' after which 'taxation will follow, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.

Ilana Mercer
Disaffected, disadvantaged, disenfranchised is how progressives prefer to depict the Muslim murderers in their midst. After all, progressives hail from the school of therapeutic thought that considers crime to have been caused, not committed. Misbehavior is either medicalized and outsourced to state-approved experts, or reduced to the fault of the amorphous thing called society.

Ilana Mercer
Immoral acts that are forbidden severally cannot be sanctioned collectively. The citizen must not steal. Neither should The State.

Ilana Mercer
Good immigrants come to America to be part of the 'little platoons' that make up its glorious private economy: the people of Nike, Apple, Microsoft, Starbucks, McDonald's, Amazon, Google, Marriot, Mattel, FedEx, Costco, Coca-Cola, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Fred Meyer, Overstock. com, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, and millions of local franchises run by innovative, everyday Americans. Bad immigrants come to America to partake of the state.

Ilana Mercer
Opposing the policies of the American state is not synonymous with opposing 'America.' It is possible to disavow every single action taken by the U.S. government and still love the 'little platoons' of America, as Edmund Burke described a man's social mainstay—his family, friends, coreligionists, coworkers. By logical extension, it is dishonest to malign those who assign the 'bad' category to the state, on the ground that they hate 'America.'

Ilana Mercer
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.

Ilana Mercer
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.

Ilana Mercer
Those of us who want the U.S. to stay solvent—and out of the affairs of others—recognize that sovereign nation-states that resist, not enable, our imperial impulses, are the best hindrance to hegemonic overreach.

Ilana Mercer
Most matters previously subject to state jurisdiction have been pulled into the orbit of the judiciary. So much for Alexander Hamilton's promise, in Federalist No. 78 (May 28, 1788), that the Judiciary would be the weakest of the three branches of his proposed government.

Ilana Mercer
The sight of the Yazidis driven up the arid, exposed mountain range, chased by the militant Sunni of the Islamic State (ISIS), conjures Masada, A. D. 73, where Jews chose to die on their own terms.

Ilana Mercer
By the standards of honest, if unorthodox, accounting, government workers don't pay taxes, but are paid out of taxes. In other words, they pay taxes out of money confiscated from taxpayers, who, in turn, pay taxes twice: on their own income and on the income of members of the bureaucracy. At the very least, this should disqualify state workers from voting.

Ilana Mercer
The night-watchman state of classical liberalism would keep murderers out of the country, not in.

Ilana Mercer
The voluntary free market is a sacred extension of life itself. The free market—it has not been unfettered for a very long time—is really a spontaneously synchronized order comprising trillions upon trillions of voluntary acts that individuals perform in order to make a living. Introduce government force and coercion into this rhythm and you get life-threatening arrhythmia. Under increasing state control, this marketplace - this magic, organic agora - starts to splutter, and people suffer.

Ilana Mercer
Iraq hasn't suddenly 'slipped back into' this backward and benighted state. It was bombed there by a mulish military power which didn't know Shiite from Shinola.

Ilana Mercer
Conservatives question government programs. War is a government program. If they hope to retain a modicum of philosophical integrity, conservatives will have to include a critique of the state's warfare machine in their case against its welfare apparatus.

Ilana Mercer
The prototypical WASP is flabby in body and mind. He is fearful and easily cowed. He erupts in tears at a drop of a hat. He is gripped by the culture of apology, and flagellates over sins he has not committed. His eternal state of expiation is driven not by goodness, but by insufferable self-righteousness.

Ilana Mercer
Ever ask yourself why so many northern and sub-Saharan Africans flocked to Libya? As bad as it was before the West targeted it for 'reform'—and thus paved the way for the daily privations of the Islamic State—Libya was still one of the mercantile meccas in this blighted and benighted region.

Ilana Mercer