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Unchecked, government social programs are a security threat because they weaken the ultimate line of defense: the free-born citizen whose responsibilities are not subcontracted to the government.

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
Government
Citizens
Responsibilities
Line
Programs
Security
Citizen
Lines
Defense
Responsibility
Threat
Free
Program
Born
Ultimate
Unchecked
Social
Whose
Weaken

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Mr Hughes's current claim of bisexuality has the whiff of artful centrist positioning about it: bi- is the proportional representation of sexuality in a world where most of us - straight or gay - operate a first-past-the-post system.
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The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government 'security,' large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time - the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff.
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How do you 'invest in the future'? By borrowing $188 million every hour. That's what the Government of the United States is doing. It's spending one-fifth of a billion dollars it doesn't have every hour of every day of every week - all for your future!
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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.
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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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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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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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Jesse Jackson's living depends on the maintenance of an African-American victim culture
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You can't uninvent things, you can only make them obsolete... Ronald Reagan understood that the surest method of neutralising any weapon is to make it obsolete.
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Can't spell, can't spot fake Shakespeare, can't tell one wacky foreigner from another: it's increasingly obvious that Barbra is some deep sleeper planted by the Republicans to discredit the very concept of activist celebrities. Poor old Democrats, in thrall to her fundraising: people who need Barbra are the unluckiest people in the world.
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The law functions as formal embodiment of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it.
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In Britain, everything is policed except crime.
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LBJ held up Detroit as a model of what the Great Society could accomplish. He was right.
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After all, [female genital mutilation is] a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure. True, a lot of us hapless western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don't demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest.
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The trouble with the social-democratic state is that, when government does too much, nobody else does much of anything.
Mark Steyn
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The most basic of conservative principles is that if you reward bad behavior you get more of it.
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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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In Europe, nothing is certain except death and welfare, and why let the former get in the way of the latter?
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Question: How much do you have to invest in the future before you've spent it and no longer have one?
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For Al Gore and Paul Ehrlich and Co., whatever the problem, the solution is always the same. Whether it's global cooling, global warming, or overpopulation, we need bigger government, more regulation, higher taxes, and a massive transfer of power from the citizens to some unelected self-perpetuating crisis lobby.
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