Liberty, Rights, Classical Liberalism, Paleolibertarianism

GAZA: “Like any good libertarian, a natural-rights thinker’s reasoning about genocide—the intentional murder of the many—will be derived from reasoning about the crime of homicide. Mass murder, essentially, is when ‘the natural right of the individual to exist’ has been sundered many times over.”—ILANA Mercer,“Genocide Is A Crime, Not A War Crime: Israel Is Waging Genocide, Not War,” September 20.
GAZA: “The paleolibertarian’s fidelity is to natural-law principles anchored in thinking as ancient and as true as Cicero’s. The foreign policy of the conservative hard right is largely a reductive, national-interest-focused statism. By virtue of its crass pragmatism, the national-interest camp only ever debates whether the U.S. government or Israel should or shouldn’t act on their divine rights as judge, jury and executioner. It is never over what’s right, what’s wrong, and what’s plain wicked.”—ILANA Mercer, “Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-Law Principles Vs. National-Interest Statism,” June 9, 2024
GAZA: “To the extent the law, most law—local or international or tribal—upholds no more than natural rights, the law is good. To the extent it violates the right to life, liberty, and property—the law is bad. In the matter of Israel’s genocidal program against the Palestinians of Gaza; it is my position that, it matters not who upholds Gazans’ inalienable right to life, liberty and property, just so long as someone does.”—ILANA Mercer, “Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-Law Principles Vs. National-Interest Statism,” June 9, 2024
GAZA: “The individual’s natural right to life antedates the state apparatus.”—ILANA Mercer, Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-Law Principles Vs. National-Interest Statism,” June 9, 2024
GAZA: “The opposition among the national-interest camp to the only flaccid response mounted against Satan-on-earth rests on theoretical abstractions. The confused camp commits the Sin of Abstraction—the sin of escaping into theory, and, in so doing, avoiding reality, the reality of Israel’s real sins, real crimes, the crime of all crimes.”—ILANA Mercer,
“Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-Law Principles Vs. National-Interest Statism,” June 9, 2024
GAZA: “When broad statements and assessments about aggregate group characteristic are both true and crucial to our understanding; libertarian methodological individualists needn’t demand that these be expunged from our formulations.”—ILANA Mercer, “The Jewish State Is Genocidal, But Is Israeli Society Sick, Too?,” May 21, 2024.
GAZA: “Methodological individualism correctly practiced means that generalizations are to be considered, while each and every individual is treated on his merit.”—ILANA Mercer, “The Jewish State Is Genocidal, But Is Israeli Society Sick, Too?,” May 21, 2024.
“Methodological individualism does not mandate that aggregate group traits be denied. Rather, methodological individualism correctly practiced means that generalizations are to be considered, while each and every individual is treated on his merit, and not conflated with the group.”—ILANA Mercer, “The Jewish State Is Genocidal, But Is Israeli Society Sick, Too?,” May 21, 2024.
GAZA: “Methodological individualism correctly practiced means that generalizations are to be considered, while each and every individual is treated on his merit.”—ILANA Mercer,
“As a woman of the libertarian hard-right and as a reactionary, I cast reactionaries as enlightened conservators.”—ILANA MERCER, in Libertarian Autobiographies: Moving Toward Freedom in Today’s World, Jo Ann Cavalo and Walter E. Block (eds.),. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, Chapter: A Woman of the Libertarian Right: ilana mercer
“THE GULF BETWEEN principles and practice, doxa and praxis, is eternal—all the more so when it comes to the politician. When you think of a GOP candidate, in particular, you think of neither creed nor action, but, rather, of a list of talking points and policy positions to the exclusion of bedrock principles. ‘God, groceries and gas’ was how one gaseous hack smugly summed it up.”—ILANA MERCER, “RFK, Jr.: Authentic Americanism That Loves Liberty, Loathes Lockdowns, Upbraids Abe,” May 18, 2023
“To label Democrats as radicals is to compliment them. I’m a radical reactionary; a radical for free-speech, a radical for property rights, for localism, for individual liberty. See what I mean? The ‘radical’ adjective is not necessarily pejorative.”—ILANA Mercer, “Say It! The DemonCrats Are The Party Of Perverts,” October 27, 2022
“Had they been functioning as they were intended to; the monarchy and the House of Lords could have served as checks on the demotic and demonic forces of the United Kingdom’s ‘mass-democracy.'”—ILANA MERCER, “Mourning The Queen— But Did Elizabeth II Drop The Ball?” September 15, 2022
“Her Majesty’s acts were of constitutional omission, if not unconstitutional commission.”—ILANA MERCER, “Mourning The Queen— But Did Elizabeth II Drop The Ball?” September 15, 2022
“Since Democracy is uppermost on everybody’s minds these days—defending it, exporting it, upholding it—it behooves me to remind fetishists of this political dispensation that Trudeau’s Liberal government’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act passed by a ‘decisive‘ vote of 185 to 151 in the House of Commons. Democratically. Barring the Canadian Conservatives and the Bloc Quebecois; by democracy’s measure, a ‘majority’ had agreed with Trudeau’s tyranny against the truckers.”—ILANA MERCER, “Hard Racial Truths About WHO Trudeau And Biden Despise,” Feb 24, 2022.
“A negative duty requires only that we refrain from injuring others in the real sense (as opposed to the bogus, snowflake sense, which encompasses hurt feelings). I have no qualms about imposing the harmless negative duty of tolerance on intolerant tyrannical entities—business or bureaucracy—when in violation of individual, natural rights. All the more so considering that the commodities the Tech overlords must be enjoined to tolerate are harmless, ethereal pixels, words wafting into the ether.”—ILANA Mercer, “Centralize Liberty: The Solution To Wicked, Woke Tech (Part 3),” September 23, 2021.
“Natural rights antedate the state apparatus. It matters not who restores or upholds authentic negative rights violated—state or federal authority—just so long as someone does.”—ILANA Mercer, “Centralize Liberty: The Solution To Wicked, Woke Tech (Part 3),” September 23, 2021.
“Noam Chomsky, a progressive ‘intellectual,’ wants to see the unvaccinated underclass reduced by the state to a ‘Hunger Games’ type fight to survive: sequestered, waiting until dark to scrounge for scraps.”—ILANA MERCER, “Self-Ownership And The Right To Reject The Pharma-State’s Hemlock,” Oct 28, 2021.
“As the West careens toward the Covid-centered anthill society, nobody identifies and defends the individual’s dominion over his body and his right to reject the Pharma-State’s Hemlock prescription for that body. As emphasized, Republicans’ case against Covid mandates indirectly capitulates to coercion.”—ILANA Mercer, “Self-Ownership And The Right To Reject The Pharma-State’s Hemlock,” October 28, 2021
“Were our representatives to frame the vexatious question of vaccine mandates in the correct language of natural rights—self-ownership and individual privacy—we’d get the right answers, more likely to be followed by rights-upholding legislation.”—ILANA MERCER, “Self-Ownership And The Right To Reject The Pharma-State’s Hemlock,” Oct 28, 2021.
“Disarmed of the firearm of truth, analytical and empirical—without standing our ground on the immutable truths of aggregate groups differences, while we take care to treat each individual on his or her merit—we conservatives are rendered intellectually defenseless.”—ILANA MERCER, “Murray’s Empirical Wisdom Confirms ‘Into The Cannibal’s Pot’s’ Analytical Truths,” Jun 17, 2021
“Libertarians who live by the axiom of nonaggression will always prefer the man who proceeds against the State, to the man who destroys private property. That is because the state is governed by aggression; whereas the institution of private property is rooted in peaceful, just and voluntary transactions between consenting participants.”—ILANA Mercer, “Trumpeting The Hardcore Libertarian Take On Jan. 6 Capitol Incident,” February 4, 2021.
“Like us or not, the radical, libertarian propertarian—who does not live inside and off the Beltway; a certain kind of libertarian, the good kind—distinguishes clearly between those who, like Black Lives Matter, would trash, loot and level private property—the livelihoods and businesses of private citizens—and between those who would storm the plush seats of state power and corruption.”—ILANA Mercer, “A Hardcore Libertarian Take on the Storming of the Capitol Building,” January 21, 2021.
“In libertarian law, the legislator has no place in a voluntary exchange between adults, as dodgy and as dangerous as these may be (like dwarf tossing).”—ILANA Mercer, 12.11.12 @ 5:52 pm, Barely A Blog.
“Natural rights antedate the state apparatus and the federal scheme. And although federalism is an excellent principle, it is not a religion.”—ILANA Mercer, “Bring In The Feds! Protection Of Natural Rights Trumps Federalism,” July 24, 2020.
“When it comes to natural rights, the level of decision-making is immaterial; what matters is the decision. No one has the right to threaten lives and livelihoods (that includes the Internal Revenue Service). By logical extension, it matters not who upholds those inalienable rights to work and walk about Seattle and Denver unmolested—which state or federal official—just so long as someone does.”—ILANA Mercer, “Bring In The Feds! Protection Of Natural Rights Trumps Federalism,” July 24, 2020.
“While Mencken’s libertarian acolytes and admirers focus on his disdain for The State as the leitmotif of his writings—Mencken’s war on the ‘dishonest, insane, intolerable and tyrannical’ U.S. government was, arguably, the least controversial thread in his voluminous oeuvre.”—ILANA Mercer, “H.L. Mencken: Misfit In 21st-Century America,” June 29, 2020.
“So long as no real violence and aggression are involved, the right to pre-judge and, consequently, to associate or dissociate in accordance with one’s prejudgments—this is the prerogative of a free person, and, by extension, of a free group of people, living in voluntary association.”—ILANA Mercer, “An Anti-Semite Asks & Is Answered: Is Israel Racist? (Part 1),” December 9, 2020.
“Is freedom of association racist? Is exclusion racist? Only if you are of the progressive Left. Both vicious and violent, the progressive Left believes that one is compelled by egalitarian, humanistic dogma to accept everyone into your midst on pain of punishment.”—ILANA Mercer, “An Anti-Semite Asks & Is Answered: Is Israel Racist? (Part 1),” December 9, 2020.
“The freedom to exclude is not racist. Rather, it is the inherent right of free individuals, living severally or collectively.”—ILANA Mercer, “An Anti-Semite Asks & Is Answered: Is Israel Racist? (Part 1),” December 9, 2020.
“Acts considered illegal and immoral when enacted by one individual against another’s person and property are still illegal and immoral when perpetrated by the many. To wit, one hungry person may not break into another’s home in search of sustenance. By logical extension, millions of desperadoes cannot invade territories sustained by millions of others in search of their heart’s desire.”—ILANA Mercer, “Do We Still Have A Country? Part I,” Townhall.com, July 18, 2019.
“Not giving someone something they demand or desire is a negative act. Or, more accurately, an inaction. You are not actively doing anything to harm that person by denying them something. Unless, of course, what you are denying them is their right to their life, their right to their liberty, their right to their property. Those are the only things you may not deny to innocent others. Interlopers at the border do not have a right to, or a lien on, your liberty and property.”—ILANA Mercer, “Do We Still Have A Country? Part I,” Townhall.com, July 18, 2019.
“The right of a nation to stop The World from flooding its communities amounts to upholding a negative right. In other words, by stopping trespassers at their borders, Americans are not robbing invaders of the trinity of life, liberty and property. All Americans are asserting is their right to be left alone. What we are saying to The World is what we tell our disobedient toddlers every day, ‘No. You can’t go there.’”—ILANA Mercer, “Why The Mighty USA Must Beg Mexico To Police Its Border,” Townhall.com, June 21, 2019.
“In democracy … the demos rules like a despot.”—ILANA Mercer, “Bernie’s Degeneracy: That’s Democracy For Ya,” April 25, 2019, WND.COM.
“The American government is charged purely with upholding the law, no more. Why so? Because government has police and military powers with which to enforce its ‘values.’ A free people dare not entrust such an omnipotent entity with policing values, at home or abroad, for values enforced are dogma.”—ILANA Mercer, “Kamala’s Collectivist Values Village,” Unz Review, March 14, 2019.
“When you hear an appeal to ‘permanent values’—’the values that make our country great,’ to quote Clinton and the current crop of Democratic candidates—know you are dealing with world-class crooks. These crooks want to swindle you out of the freedom to think and believe as you wish. For in the classical conservative and libertarian traditions, values are private things, to be left to civil society—the individual, family and church—to practice and police.”—ILANA Mercer, “Kamala’s Collectivist Values Village,” Townhall.com, March 15, 2019.
“Self-government, and not imposed government, implies that society, and not The State, is to develop value systems. The State’s role is to protect citizens as they go about their business peacefully, living in accordance with their peaceful values.”—ILANA Mercer, “Kamala’s Collectivist Values Village,” Townhall.com, March 15, 2019.
“The crucial difference between lite libertarians and the Right kind is that, to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional–a value, an idea that’s untethered from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, religion, culture, values. Bluntly put, the principles of American freedoms were not developed by progressive, libertine ladies, marching in pussy dunce caps; by the suffragettes or the LGBTQ community and their program. Are those significant facts? You bet!.”—ILANA Mercer, Big League Politics, Interview With Ilana Mercer, November 23, 2018.
“Modern-day Americans, some of whose ancestors were brought together by a ‘profound intellectual and emotional attachment to individual liberty,’ possess little by way of social capital to unify them.”—ILANA Mercer, “How the Disunited States Can Survive,” American Greatness, November 3, 2018.
“If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government—the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be. Put differently, matters previously subject to state jurisdiction have been pulled into the orbit of the judiciary.”—ILANA Mercer, “Whodunit? Who Meddled With Our Democracy?” Part 2, The Heartland Institute, May 18, 2018.
“Ours was never a country conceived as a democracy. To arrive at a democracy, we Americans destroyed a republic.”—ILANA Mercer, “Whodunit? Who Meddled With Out Democracy? (Part 1)” February 10, 2018, Townhall.com.
“Complaints about the damage done to our “democracy” by outsiders are worse than silly. Such damage pales compared to what we Americans have done to a compact rooted in the consent of the governed and the drastically limited and delimited powers of those who govern.”—ILANA Mercer, “Whodunit? Who Meddled With Out Democracy?” February 10, 2018, Townhall.com.
“From the fact that a man or a community of men lacks the intellectual wherewithal or cultural and philosophical framework to conceive of property rights—it doesn’t follow that he has no such rights, or that he has forfeited them. Not if one adheres to the ancient doctrine of natural rights.”—ILANA Mercer, “Everyone Has Property Rights Whether He Knows It Or Not,” Mises Wire, October 11, 2017.
“When you hear an appeal to ‘permanent values’—’the values that make our country great,’ to quote Clinton—know you are dealing with world-class crooks. These crooks want to swindle you out of the freedom to think and believe as you wish. For in the classical conservative and libertarian traditions, values are private things, to be left to civil society—the individual, family and church—to practice and police.”—ILANA Mercer, “Beware The Values Cudgel,” February 5, 2017.
“A natural-rights libertarian values the life of the innocent individual. Only by protecting each individual’s rights—life, liberty and property—can the government legitimately enhance the wealth of the collective. Only through fulfilling its night watchman role can government legitimately safeguard the wealth of the nation. For each individual, secure in his person and property, is then free to pursue economic prosperity, which redounds to the rest.”—ILANA Mercer, “Barcelona and Beyond: How Politicians & Policy Wonks Play God With Your Life,” Daily Caller, August 21, 2017.
“Thomas Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.”—ILANA Mercer, “The Declaration of Independence No Longer Expresses the American Mind,” American Thinker, July 4, 2017.
“Contemporary Americans are less likely to read the Declaration of Independence now that it’s easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.”—ILANA Mercer, “The Declaration of Independence No Longer Expresses the American Mind,” American Thinker, July 4, 2017.
“The category of ‘criminal’ (according to incontrovertibly correct libertarian political theory) entails the outlaw criminal class—it needs no introduction—and the legalized criminal class: the politicians.”—ILANA, “Jihad’s Triumph On Westminster Bridge,” Townhall.com, March 30, 2017.
“In Cool Britannia, the moniker the Island acquired in the times of trendy Tony Blair, the only way disarmed Britons may shoot a savage is with … a camera.”—ILANA, “Jihad’s Triumph On Westminster Bridge,” Townhall.com, March 30, 2017.
“The idea of the American ‘creedal nation,’ which is supposed to unite us all in ‘a common commitment to a set of ideas and ideals,’ is abstract and inorganic. This creed comes from above, not from below. It’s a state religion reflexively developed to bring about compliance.”—ILANA, The Daily Caller, “What Rep. Steve King’s ‘Racist’ Statements Teach,” March 20, 2017.
“The States now act as coequal partners in the administrative tyranny President Trump is trying to break.”—ILANA, “Coequal in Tyranny: The Ninth Circuit’s Rules for Radicals,” Townhall.com, February 13, 2017
“Through an appeal to values, the State aggrandizes itself. A limited government, serving an ostensibly free people, must thus never enforce values.”—ILANA, “Beware The Values Cudgel,” The Daily Caller (February 2, 2017)
“Because our form of government is incompatible with the enforcement of values, the American People can’t and mustn’t welcome into their midst civilizations whose values are inimical to the survival of their own.”—ILANA, “Beware The Values Cudgel,” The Daily Caller (February 2, 2017)
“Self-government, and not imposed government, implies that society, and not The State, is to develop value systems. The State’s role is to protect citizens as they go about their business peacefully, living in accordance with their peaceful values.”—ILANA, “Beware The Values Cudgel,” The Daily Caller (February 2, 2017)
“Candidates who talk about the Constitution ‘in depth’ are dishonest. For there is no Constitution left to talk about. That thing died over the course of centuries of legislative, executive and judicial usurpation.”—ILANA (January 22, 2016)
“It’s inevitable: In an anarcho-capitalistic universe, fundamentally different and competing views of justice (right and wrong) will arise. And while competing, private protection agencies are both welcome and desirable; an understanding of justice, predicated as it is on the natural law, does not allow for competing views of justice.”—ILANA Mercer, “Libertarian Anarchism’s Justice Problem,” April 10, 2015
“The libertarian anarchist invariably falls into sloth. Forever suspended between what is and what ought to be, he settles on a non-committal, idle incoherence, spitting venom like a cobra at those who do the work he won’t or cannot do: address reality as it is. This specimen has little to say about policy and politics for fear of compromising his theoretical virginity. Suspended as he is in the arid arena of pure thought, the garden-variety libertarian anarchist will settle for nothing other than the anarchist ideal. And since utopia will never be upon us, he opts to live in perpetual sin: the sin of abstraction.”—ILANA Mercer, “Libertarian Anarchism’s Justice Problem,” April 10, 2015.
On The Private Production of Defense: “A belief in the immutably just nature of the natural law must elicit questions about the wisdom of the private production of defense, especially in the case of violent crime, as this could, in turn, give rise to legitimate law-enforcement agencies that uphold laws for communities in which natural justice has been perverted (in favor of Sharia law, for example).”—ILANA Mercer, “Libertarian Anarchism’s Justice Problem,” April 10, 2015.
On The Private Production of Defense: “To let the victim of a crime forfeit—or choose his own form of—redress for certain misdemeanors is fine. Many legal solutions are a result of mediation and other perfectly private solutions to non-violent offenses. To leave punishment for murder, rape and other violent crime to the vicissitudes of the victim or his proxies is, however, unacceptable. The likelihood that in a stateless state-of-affairs, a victim or her proxies will choose to let a violent offender go free in favor of financial restitution cannot be ignored or tolerated. It matters not that such an eventuality may be rare, or that similar injustices occurs under the state. These should never happen. Not under the state. Not under anarchy. Furthermore, does the voluntary forfeiture of just retribution not imply, in the case of murder, that the right to life is a right the victim’s surrogates may choose to alienate or relinquish at will? How else does one construe this position? The danger of reducing justice, in cases of violent crime like homicide, to a negotiated deal amounts to moral relativism and is a recipe for nihilism.”—ILANA Mercer, “Libertarian Anarchism’s Justice Problem,” April 10, 2015.
“Like gun laws, spy laws, courtesy of the Surveillance State, oppress only law-abiding, harmless individuals.”—ILANA (December 4, 2015)
“The paleolibertarian grasps that liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure.”—ILANA, “Steigerwald, Oy Gevalt!” Target Liberty, January 14, 2015
Like left-liberals, “lite libertarians”—they’re the kind that is afflicted with the same spineless conformity; a deformation of the personality euphemized as political correctness—are incapable of appreciating a script or book; a painting or symphony; a stand-up routine, if only because the material and its creator violates the received laws of political correctness.”—ILANA, The British Libertarian Alliance, January 14, 2015
“To be vested in linguistic accuracy is to be vested in the truth. The closer the language we use approximates reality—and, by extension, the truth—the greater the likelihood that our actions will follow.”—ILANA (September 18, 2015)
“Guns are not the root cause of man’s evil actions. Neither are the multiplying categories of the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Evil is part of the human condition, always has been, always will be. Evil can’t be wished away, treated away, medicated away or legislated away. Evil is here to stay. Bad people do bad things. Deal, as they say in the hood.”—ILANA (September 4, 2015)
“Yankees are fond of citing Confederacy officials in support of slavery and a war for slavery. Most Southerners, however, were not slaveholders. All Southerners were sovereigntists, fighting a ‘War for Southern Independence.’ They rejected central coercion. Southerners believed a union that was entered voluntarily could be exited in the same way.”—ILANA (June 26, 2015)
“The Articles of Confederation, which were usurped in favor of the Constitution at the Philadelphia convention, are better founding documents than the Constitution.”—ILANA (April 10, 2015)
“The individual living in America as it was meant to be would be free to run his business as he wishes, associate with those he likes, dissociate from those he dislikes or disapproves; hire, fire, rent to or evict from, invest and disinvest, speak and misspeak at will. This hypothetical free man is at liberty to bruise as many feelings as he likes, so long as his mitts stop at the next man’s face. So long as he harms nobody’s person or property, our mythic man may live as he wishes to live.”—ILANA (April 3, 2015)
“Tyranny strives for uniformity.”—ILANA (March 13, 2015)
A Modest Libertarian Proposal: “The Monster State refuses to protect its people from plagues. It welcomes high-risk travelers from the Ebola hot-zones. Simultaneously, it quarantines aspiring fighters for Jihad here at home, in the West, so that the homeland is the only arena in which they can act-out. The nightwatchman state of classical liberalism would keep killers out of the country, not in the country.”—ILANA (January 23, 2015)
“No individual should be arrested for harboring wicked thoughts or hanging out with wicked people. But when he leaves the Occident with the intent to train to wage war on his neighbors—this Jihadi must be stopped from re-entering the good country. Let the West’s homegrown Jihadis wander from the killing fields of one crap country to another, like the nomadic hired guns they are.”—ILANA (January 23, 2015)
“If not by design at least by default; reflexively if not intentionally, government operatives work to retain their positions and increase their sphere of influence.”—ILANA (October 17, 2014)
“Working for government ought to be one of the most dangerous jobs ever. Occupational hazard might just get us a better class of parasite.”—ILANA (October 3, 2014).
“By going on the defensive… libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone and deserve to be purged from ‘polite’ company.”—ILANA (“Fee-Fi-Fo-Fem, I Smell The Blood Of A Racist,” May 16, 2014)
“Whether arrived at through reason or revelation… natural law is the highest law known to man. It is anchored in the very existential nature of man and is therefore a priori just.”—ILANA (“Why The Land Belongs To Bundy,” April 25, 2014)
“If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government—the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be.”—ILANA (January 24, 2014)
“The nice men in periwigs who came up with the Fourth Amendment were recklessly naive to imagine that branches of a government, each of whose power is enhanced when the power of the other branches grows, would serve to check one another. The idea of a judiciary that would police the executive as an arm of a self-correcting tripartite government was worse than naive.”—ILANA (January 3, 2014)
On “the inglorious history of American freedom and federalism”: “In the rare event that the Supreme Court refuses to play along—there is always a perfectly legal, extra-constitutional, quasi-legislative, quasi-executive, quasi-judicial, ‘independent’ regulatory commission or executive agency to kill off or override constitutional protections.”—ILANA (January 3, 2014)
“Lite libertarianism Vs. paleolibertarianism: “A crucial difference between lite libertarians and the Right kind is that to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional–a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values. Conversely, the paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure.”—ILANA (December 20, 2013)
Against Dog-Ate-My-Homework Argumentation: “For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society, and the lite libertarian saddles the state. In its social determinism, the lite libertarian’s ‘the-state-made-me-do-it’ argumentation apes that of the left’s ‘society-made-me-do-it’ argumentation. Both philosophical factions implicate forces outside the individual for individual- and aggregate group dysfunction.”—ILANA (December 20, 2013)
“A propagandized population has a hard time choosing worthy heroes. It is high time Americans celebrate the Anti-Federalists, for they were correct in predicting the fate of freedom after Philadelphia.”—ILANA (December 6, 2013)
“This gun owner is no gun nut; but a right-to-self-defense fanatic.”—ILANA (November 22, 2013)
“Certain bedrock principles—arguably a true conservative mindset—dictate a respect for life. A life-conserving sensibility means that guns are meant for self-defense, not for needless killing.”—ILANA (November 22, 2013)
“If not illegal, let us remember that the IRS’s activities are immoral. The IRS’s business is legalized theft. Theft is wrong, whether it is committed by an individual or a group. In a just society, the moral strictures that apply to the individual must also extend to the collective. Immoral acts that are forbidden severally cannot be sanctioned collectively. The citizen must not steal. Neither should The State. House Republicans are aiming ostensibly to make an agency of thugs practice theft and intimidation with greater fairness, when they should demolish the den of iniquity and vice that is the IRS.”—ILANA (July 12, 2013)
“Contemporary Americans are less likely to read The Declaration of Independence now that it is easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.”—ILANA (July 5, 2013)
“What Edmund Burke said about the House of Commons in his day applies in spades to a House packed with the likes of Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash. ‘Designed as a control for the people,’ the House has become a control ‘upon the people.'”—ILANA (June 21, 2013)
“Come every Memorial Day—more aptly called ‘Dying For Nothing Day’—we direct a commonplace saying at members of a military that has not defended authentic American liberties for decades. It is, however, to a young man such as NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that we should say: ‘Thank you for your service, Mr. Snowden.'”—ILANA (June 14, 2013)
“There are excellent arguments to be made for an armed citizenry and an unarmed police force. In the United Kingdom, however, both the people and the police have been disarmed. No wonder ‘bobbies’ carrying wooden truncheons are often late to the crime scene; it’s a miracle that they pitch up at all.”—ILANA (May 24, 2013)
About “those invincibly stupid special interests who’re piping up for the privacy of the press, as opposed to fighting for the privacy of all Americans …”—ILANA (May 17, 2013)
“The great Roman statesman Cicero observed that, ‘Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.’ In our ignorance of the values that form part of our history and heritage, we Americans have become perpetual children.”—ILANA (May 10, 2013)
“It is a smart libertarian who retains a healthy contempt for politicians, even the libertarian ones. Ultimately, they’re all empire builders, who see nothing wrong in using fame and the public dime to peddle their influence and their products. The people—at least those who’ve never fed at the ‘public’ trough, unlike every single politician and his aide—are always morally superior to the politicians. In all, some politicians are less sickening than others, but all fit somewhere along a sick-making scale.”—ILANA (March 1, 2013).
“The positive man-made law is not a libertarian lodestar.”—ILANA (March 1, 2013)
“A right that can’t be defended is a right in name only. If you cannot by law defend your life, you have no right to life. If you cannot defend your property, you have no right of private property. And if you cannot defend your liberty, you are not a free man. It follows that inherent in the idea of an inalienable right is the right to mount a vigorous defense of the same rights.”—ILANA (January 18, 2013)
“The American Founding Fathers were sophisticated thinkers. Some were scientists and inventors. …all were familiar with the idea of humanity’s unstoppable progress. In the Bill of Rights they authored a timeless document of individual liberties, setting limits to government power. The document was never meant to recalibrate individual liberties in light of each era’s technological innovations.”—ILANA (January 18, 2013)
“Austerity is a euphemism among politicians and their media pack animals for ‘long term retrenchment and reform’ in the public sector. Implicit in their critique of “austerity” is that inflicting pain on the state apparatus will inevitably destroy society. Au Contraire. State and society should never be conflated. In fact, the bigger the state the smaller the civil society.”—ILANA (February 24, 2012)
“Socialism is humanity’s second nature. All politicians do is turn human vice into votes.”—ILANA (September 30, 2011)
“Europeans have come to realize that adding an overarching tier of tyrants—the EU—to their own government has benefited them as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man.”—ILANA (September 9, 2011)
“Libertarianism Lite”: Ordinary, gun-toting, homeschooling, bible-thumping Middle Americans remain unmoved by people who draw their paycheques from foundations, think tanks, and academia, and wax orgiastic about MTV and Dennis Rodman. This stuff might appear sophisticated, but it is reductive and shallow—a post-graduate cleverness that lacks philosophical depth.”—ILANA (July 8, 2011)
“Like or dislike her, the British Queen is harmless. Her role is purely ceremonial. Conversely, life and death are in the hands of the monarch who sits in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”—ILANA (May 20, 2011)
“The heroic movement for democracy in Egypt dovetails with an ongoing flirtation with fascism in the US; the twilight of individual sovereignty in the US contrasts with its rise in Egypt.”—ILANA ( February 19, 2011)
“I’ve yet to hear liberty deprived peoples the world over stand-up for the tea-party patriots. When they do – I’ll gladly galvanize on their behalf. Until then, I wish the Egyptians better luck with their next ‘son of 60 dogs’ – that’s an Egyptian expression for political master. But that’s about it.”—ILANA (February 4, 2011)
“The idea that the Founders were flawed, sinful men like you and me is current among a hefty majority of Americans, conservative too. It is wrong. Quite the reverse. The Founders are matchless today both morally and intellectually – their actions bespeak a willingness to forsake fortunes and risk lives for liberty, a concept and cause alien to contemporary Americans, who’re, mostly, bereft of both the mental and moral gravitas necessary to grasp it.”—ILANA (December 3, 2010 )
“The Transportation Security Administration attack dogs ought to be tagged, collared, and impounded.”—ILANA (November 19, 2010)
“The TSA onslaught is a quest for submission, not sex.” —ILANA (November 19, 2010)
“The founders were not democrats; they foresaw today’s pillage politics – and they understood that, unchecked, overbearing majorities would be more malignant than monarchs. All too well did the founders know that, granted a vote, the unpropertied masses would help themselves to the belongings of the propertied.”—ILANA (February 19, 2010)
“From the fact that most Americans want others to fund or subsidize their healthcare, it does not follow that they have such a right. A need is not a right. A man’s life, liberty and the products of his labor were not intended to be up for grabs by grubby, greedy majorities.”—ILANA MERCER (January 1, 2010)
“There is no such thing as absolute free speech; there are only absolute rights of private property. Speech is circumscribed by private property rights. You may deliver a disquisition in my virtual or actual living room only if I permit you to so do.”—ILANA MERCER (December 23, 2009)
“Many would argue that making some supply others with work, water, clothes, food, education and medical care will increase overall liberty in society. That won’t wash. Liberty is not an aggregate social project. Every individual has rights. And rights give rise to obligations between all men, including those who are in power. That men band in a collective called ‘government’ doesn’t give them license to violate individual rights.”—ILANA MERCER (January 1, 2010)
“By the standards of honest, if unorthodox, accounting, government workers don’t pay taxes, but are paid out of taxes. In other words, they pay taxes out of money confiscated from taxpayers, who, in turn, pay taxes twice: on their own income and on the income of members of the bureaucracy. At the very least, this should disqualify state workers from voting.”—ILANA (September 25, 2009)
“Rights, as our founding fathers conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but freedoms to act in the procurement of these goods.”—ILANA (August 14, 2009)
“A society that is reduced to the skeletal essence of the libertarian non-aggression axiom is not a civil society, but an “Idiocracy.”─ILANA (June 21, 2009)
“The rights to life, liberty and property were not meant to be subject to the vagaries of majority rule.”─ILANA (May 15, 2009)
“Man’s rights are immutable and inviolable not just because they are necessary for his physical survival and intellectual and psychological fulfillment, but because, bereft of absolute rights, his survival as a sovereign individual becomes impossible.”─ILANA (May 15, 2009)
“The problem with rights in the American social democracy is that the cockroaches in Congress decide how much of a man’s life is his and how much is theirs. The positive law has become the source of our rights.”─ILANA (May 15, 2009)
“Whether one defers to divine law or natural law, rights must be independent of the will of man. Congressional law was never intended to be the source of our rights.”─ILANA (May 15, 2009)
“Libertarian and leftist protest over any impediment to the free flow of people across borders is predicated not on the negative, leave-me-alone rights of the individual, but on the positive, manufactured right of human kind to venture wherever, whenever.”─ILANA (May 1, 2009)
“Whether one defers to reason or revelation for their justification–the natural rights of man remain inalienable. Rights are never lost—not when reason or religion is jettisoned. More often than not, however, rights are violated.”─ILANA (March 15, 2009)
“The right to pursue happiness has become a right to happiness, a home and healthcare.”─ILANA (February 20, 2009)
“McCain’s national greatness ‘conservatism’ sees the individual as a cog in the service of the collective. Contra McMussolini, the American Founders placed the individual before the collective, giving pride of place to individual liberties before duties.”—ILANA (September 12, 2008)
“A procedural default such as the failure to apprise a defendant of his consular contacts is never a violation of a natural right. ‘Consular rights’ are of a piece with Miranda rights and the Exclusionary Rule—technicalities tarted up as real rights.”—ILANA (August 8, 2008)
“If Thomas Jefferson begrudged the Normans’ malign influence on the natural law he cherished, imagine how he’d view our contemporary cultural conquistadors from the South, whose customs preclude natural rights and natural reason!”—ILANA (July 4, 2008)
“For the edification of libertarians prone to vulgar individualism, the Declaration is at once a statement of individual and national sovereignty.”—ILANA (July 4, 2008)
“In the land of the free and home of the brave hundreds of children can be rounded up and removed from their families based on a hunch or a hoax. No hue and cry will ensue—not from professional civil libertarians, nor from members of the un watchful dogs in the media, or from presidential candidates vying to uphold—or is it just to hold—the Constitution.”—ILANA (April 25, 2008)
“If only the high-minded Framers had written the Constitution with crooks in mind.”—ILANA (February 15, 2008)
About the futility of central planning: “Societies are built from the soil up, not from the sky down. And by the people, not the politicians.”—ILANA (January 4, 2008)
“Policy by definition addresses the collective, not the individual. Duly, the reality-based libertarian will seek to minimize political overreach, not mandate heaven on earth.”—ILANA (January 15, 2008)
“A right that can’t be defended is a right in name only.”—ILANA (August 6, 2003)
“Natural rights are not for governments to grant but to uphold.”—ILANA (June 25, 2004)
In unfree societies… governments pacify the multitudes by mulcting the few.”—ILANA (March 2, 2007)
“Murder subsequent to a home invasion is not a ‘robbery gone wrong,’ but is an organic extension of the invasion of a home. (And breaking into a country signals quite reliably a willingness to break yet more of the invaded country’s laws).”—ILANA Mercer, “JOE HORN: WANTED MAN…AND A HERO,” July 4, 2008
“All men are imbued with natural—but not necessarily political—rights. The laws of this country ought to respect the natural rights of all people, legal and illegal. Not so their demands for political and welfare privileges.”—ILANA (December 14, 2007)
“We have a solemn duty not to violate the rights of foreigners everywhere to life, liberty, and property. But we have no duty to uphold their rights. Why? Because upholding the negative rights of the world’s citizens involves compromising the negative liberties of Americans—their lives, liberties, and livelihoods. The classical liberal government’s duty is to its own citizens, first.”—ILANA (September 2, 2005)
“The sole role of a legitimate government is to protect … life, liberty, and property, not provide housing, food, education, health care, child benefits, emotional well-being, enriching employment, ad infinitum. Why? Because the former impose no obligations on other free individuals; the latter enslave some in the service of others.”—ILANA (June 27, 2007)
“Liberty is a simple thing. It’s the unassailable right to shout, flail your arms, even verbally provoke a politician, unmolested. Tyranny is when those small things can get you assaulted, incarcerated, injured and even killed.”—ILANA (September 28, 2007)
“Those demanding the Speaker channel ‘The Decider’ are on the side of concentration of power, and consequently, a further loss of power by the people.”—ILANA (April 6, 2007)
“A rational suspicion of power, upon which libertarians pride themselves, must be predicated on distrusting all power, not only American power.”—ILANA (May 18, 2007)
“A sizable majority of the people ‘receives in disbursements more than it pays in taxes.’ The minority funding the orgy ‘pays in taxes more than it receives back in disbursements.’ The latter, not the former, should have the vote.”—ILANA (April 24, 2007)
“Taxpayers ought to have the vote, not so tax consumers. And that goes for politicians, who pay taxes out of what they loot from the taxpayer.”—ILANA (April 24, 2007)
“The freer a society, the less likely government is to placate the envious by taking from those they envy.”—ILANA (March 2, 2007)
“In a truly free society, the kind we once enjoyed, one honors the right of the individual to associate and disassociate, invest and disinvest, speak and misspeak at will.”—ILANA (September 15, 2006)
“If the Constitution were binding and America still a republic of limited government, the president and his incontinent legislators would have to quit marking their territory around the world.”—ILANA (February 3, 2006)
“Casting a vote to give someone power does not make a man free; freedom is the knowledge that even if one doesn’t perform that ritual, nobody can exercise power over one’s life, liberty, and property.”—ILANA (December 18, 2005)
“Adding an overarching tier of tyrants—the EU—to European governments will benefit Europeans as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man.”—ILANA (June 8, 2005)
“In a free society, the ‘vision thing’ is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a ‘visionary’ bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government… the poorer and less free the people.”—ILANA (January 26, 2005)
“James Madison was not a democrat. He denounced popular rule as ‘incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.’ Democracy, he observed, must be confined to a ‘small spot’ (like Athens). Indeed, the Bush administration’s deafening demagoguery notwithstanding, democratic majoritarianism is thoroughly un-American.”—ILANA (September 16, 2004)
“Restoring the people’s ‘unalienable rights’ may well lie in Jeffersonian interposition and nullification, whereby states beat back the federal occupier by voiding unconstitutional federal laws.”—ILANA (September 24, 2004)
“Let’s pretend that it was constitutional to intentionally wage war on civilians—blacks included—to imprison without trial thousands of Northern citizens, jail—even execute—people who refused to take an oath of loyalty to Lord Lincoln, shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers, incarcerating editors and owners, and generally suspend the Bill of Rights, the writ of habeas corpus, and international law. If it endorsed—or even accommodated—what Lincoln did, including his ignoring of the Ninth and 10th amendments, and his violating of the Second, then the Constitution is categorically evil and self-contradictory.”—ILANA MERCER, “Taking America Back Means Taking Lincoln Down,” February 12, 2003
“Sometimes the law of the state coincides with the natural law.“ More often than not, natural justice has been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute.”—ILANA (March 20, 2002)
“From the fact that many libertarians believe that the state has no legitimacy, they arrive at the position that anything the state does is illegitimate. This is a logical confusion. Consider the murderer who happens on a scene of a rape while fleeing the law, saves the woman, and pounds the rapist. Is this good deed illegitimate because performed by a murderer?”—ILANA (July 31, 2002)

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