Ralph Raico Quotes

(P170) In his passion to malign moneymaking, Keynes even resorted to calling on psychoanalysis for support. Fascinated like most of the Bloomsbury circle by the work of Sigmund Freud, Keynes valued it above all for the "intuitions" which paralleled his own, especially on the significance of the love of money . In his Treatise on Money, Keynes refers to a passage in a 1908 paper by Freud, in which he writes of the "connections which exist between the complexes of interest in money and of defaecation" and the unconscious "identification of gold with faeces." This psychoanalytical "finding" - by the man Vladimir Nabokov correctly identified as the Viennese Fraud - permitted Keynes to assert that love of money was condemned not only by religion but by "science" as well.

With virtually no knowledge of or interest in history, the masses simply take their unprecedented high living standards under capitalism for granted.

Liberalism is, in fact, the ideology of the capitalist revolution that prodigiously raised the living standards of the mass of people; a doctrine gradually elaborated over several centuries, which offered a new concept of social order, encompassing freedom in the only form suited to the modern world. Step by step, in practice and theory, the various sectors of human activity were withdrawn from the jurisdiction of coercive authority and given over to the voluntary action of self-regulating society.

The nation as such is not a large subject that has needs, that works, practices economy, and consumes ... Thus the phenomena of "national economy" ... are, rather, the results of all the innumerable individual economic efforts in the nation and ... must also be theoretically interpreted in this light ... Whoever wants to understand theoretically the phenomena of "national economy" ... must for this reason attempt to go back to their true elements, to the singular economies in the nation, and to investigate the laws by which the former are built up from the latter.

The chief value of the rule lies in preventing an immediate and obvious but inferior good from replacing a longer-range, less obvious but superior one.

As liberals, men like Richter viewed socialism as the great modern counter-revolution, and believed that the achievement of the socialist goal would lead both to appalling poverty and state absolutism. There was nothing in the socialist doctrine of the time that would suggest otherwise.

(P58) It is curious how, with his stark Darwinian outlook, his elevation of war to the central place in human history, and his racism, as well as his fixation on "great leaders," Churchill's worldview resembled that of his antagonist, Hitler.

Winston Churchill was a man of blood and a politico without principle, whose apotheosis serves to corrupt every standard of honesty and morality in politics and history.

The current disfavor into which socialism has fallen has spurred ... the frenzy to proclaim oneself a liberal. Many writers today have recourse to the strategem of inventing for oneself a liberalism according to one's own tastes and passing it off as an evolution from past ideas.

What is the free market? Well, the free market, [we're told] is really a terrible, inhuman kind of arrangement, because it treats people like commodities. But how does the government treat people? Like garbage-worse than garbage. Not like commodities, but like nothing. We libertarians understand that we are not humane, we are not compassionate. It's the leftists and the liberals, they're the ones who are human and compassionate, but you'd better not get in their way.