Choose Poorly?

“Let people have the power to choose poorly so they may then choose wisely!” -Stanton Skerjanec

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Believe Yourself

“There are two basic mindsets that people have about their talents, their abilities, and their smarts. One mindset leads to success. The other leads to being stuck in the rat race, to stagnating in your life while others succeed. Your response to failure or to seemingly insurmountable obstacles will tell you which dominates your thinking.

There is power in what you believe about yourself.”

-Robert Kiyosaki

Empire or Republic?

“In the same year that the Declaration of Independence was adopted, Edward Gibbon published the first volume of his masterpiece, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

The Founding Fathers were well aware of the transition – natural, and perhaps inevitable – from republic to empire. They had studied it in the Roman example. They had seen how it drew power into a few hands… and corrupted them.

They tried to prevent it from happening in the New World, putting in place limits… circuit breakers… and checks and balances… to keep the government from becoming too big, too ambitious, or too powerful.

Even then, they were doubtful that it would stick. ‘We give you a republic…’ Franklin wrote to posterity, ‘if you can keep it.’….

Time and scale have changed the nature, not just the age and the size, of the United States of America. It has become something the Founding Fathers had tried to avoid… and almost certainly wouldn’t like….

Citizens still have the right to life, liberty, and property – but only to the extent that the feds allow.

They can keep their firearms, for example, but the feds can label them terrorists… and kill American citizens.

They still have the right to express themselves under the protection of the First Amendment, unless their opinions are considered ‘hate speech,’ or the feds – or their agents at Facebook and Google – just don’t like what they say.

Your property is still safe, too; but under the doctrine of civil forfeiture, the police can take your money, your cars, and your house… with no due process of law….

Empires are very different from republics. They are no longer by, for, and of the people. They’re too big… too complex… with too many fingers in too many pies for the people or their elected representatives to keep up with.

So power migrates to the center. There, where the CIA, NSA, Pentagon, NIH, FBI, IRS, and dozens of other agencies… along with the corporate headquarters of hundreds of big industries… and thousands of pressure groups, lobbyists, factotums, hacks, think tanks, NGOs, powerful families, and apparatchiks reside, is where the real power flows.

There, too, in Rome as in Washington, the power congeals.”

-Bill Bonner

Why Money?

“Why do we use money?…  the social function of money is to facilitate economic calculation.

Money cannot do this if its future purchasing power is subject to violent swings because of political intervention….  sound money has desirable properties such as a predictable purchasing power.” -Robert Murphy

Easy Persistence

“That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do; not that the nature of the thing itself has changed, but our power to do it has increased.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Best Discipline

“Doing first things first is a very simple discipline.  But its transformative power is immense.  It can change your life—literally overnight.  It changed my life.  Several times, in fact.  It’s the single best technique I know for change.” -Mark Ford

Life Validation

“Don’t let someone else validate you.” -James Altucher

In other words, control your self and control your life.  Don’t give someone else the power over you.