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One lesson of Sept. 11 is that a government that tries to do everything is likely to do most of it badly.

Mark Steyn

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Mark Steyn
Age: 64
Born: 1959
Born: December 8
Film Critic
Journalist
Music Critic
Pundit
Writer
City of Toronto
Lessons
Government
Everything
Trying
Sept
Tries
Badly
Lesson
Likely

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But, once you get a taste for shutting people up, it's hard to stop. Why bother winning the debate when it's easier to close it down?
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[We] assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty?
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For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ's Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.
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To expect the government to save you is to be a bystander in your own fate.
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If the IMF is correct (a big if), China will be the planet's No.1 economy by 2016. That means whoever's elected in November next year will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world's dominant economic power.
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Every power grab is the new base camp for the next power grab.
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If gun control bore any relation to homicide rates, Washington, DC would be the safest place in the country.
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The industrial powerhouse of 1950 [Detroit] is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases.
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We are the source of our problems not mysterious sinister foreigners overseas.
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Appeasement is a vote to live in the present tense, to hold the comforts of the moment.
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The essence of a government health care system - for people who have never lived under it and don't know - is waiting, waiting, waiting. You wait for everything. You wait for years for operations that are routine in America.
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We immigrants can sometimes sound a little hysterical about this because we come from places that have tried this and we know where it leads. Anybody who's lived in countries with socialized health care knows that it becomes the dominant political issue.
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The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death.
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Once you accept you're a child in the government nursery, why shouldn't Nanny tell you what to do?
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The minute health care becomes a huge, unwieldy, expensive government bureaucracy it's a permanent feature of life and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
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The progressive Left can be in favor of Big Government or population control but not both. The mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse. There is no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital - and that's before anyone invented unsustainable welfare systems.
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There is no conceivable amount of money worth telling the world that you were beaten up by Liza Minnelli.
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When the family dies, the nation follows.
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We're on the brink of a world in which the wealthiest nations, from Canada to Norway to Japan, can barely project meaningful force to their own borders while the nickel 'n' dime basket-cases go nuclear.
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