We've been ruled by men who live by illusions:
—The illusion that you can spend money you haven't earned without eventually going bankrupt or falling into the hands of your creditors;
—The illusion that real jobs can be conjured into existence by government decree like rabbits out of a hat;
—The illusion that there is some other way of creating wealth than by hard work and satisfying your customers;
—The illusion that you can have freedom and enterprise without believing in free enterprise.
Jordan Peterson to Piers Morgan: “I don’t know if guys in the UK understand how sad it is for us in Canada and in the United States, to watch what you’re doing to yourself.”
"It is the Communists' intention to make people think that personal success is somehow achieved at the expense of others.
It is the Communists' aim to discourage all personal effort and to drive men into a hopeless, dispirited, gray herd of robots who have lost all personal ambition, who are easy to rule, willing to obey and willing to exist in selfless servitude to the State."
— Ayn Rand
The economic enemies of democracy are those who would impose on people systems of production and distribution based on compulsion, not on people's choice.
Many live under systems whose rulers know only too well the connection between economic and political freedom, for they suppress economic freedoms precisely to prevent that political freedom which would ultimately follow.
But are there not closer to home some trends and fashions of thought which contain, in more respectable guise, the seed of the same danger? There are.
If some powerful group of producers says to us: “You've got to buy our product, whether or not you want it, we'll force you to do so by use of monopoly power or political muscle,” then those producers are taking away from their fellow citizens an economic freedom—and that is true, even if we were feeble enough to vote to allow it because we thought: “Anything for a quiet life”.
Oh, I've heard that phrase in my political lifetime. “Anything for a quiet life”. And if we voted for that we would be taking away our economic freedoms, and our economic freedoms underpin our political freedoms, and our political freedoms, our democracy.
And if they are prepared to rob us of our economic freedoms, what is to stop them from trying to take away other freedoms as well?
Let us never forget:
Democracies can, and in the past have, voted for measures which lead to their own destruction. The job of democratic leaders is to warn that measures which may seem easy or even popular, which may end some immediate conflict, must be resisted if in the end they risk destroying democracy itself.