Posted by Remember Jefferson on 02/22/09
Last updated 02/22/09

South Carolinians, please take the time to write your elected officials!  We must see these bills passed.

Representative L. Kit Spires
326D Blatt Bldg.
Columbia, S.C. 29201

Representative Spires,

     Recent legislation has been introduced in South Carolina that I believe is of vital importance to our state's right of sovereignty. The stated purpose of this bill, H 3509, is: To affirm the rights of all states including South Carolina based on the provision of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. For too long has the Ffederal government been overstepping its bounds and violating the agreements made over 200 years ago in the document we call our Constitution. It is time to take a stand against these violations and reclaim our state.
     As a representative in the South Carolina House, your elected position is tied even more so to your state, and yours alone, rather than the so-called "bigger picture" in Washington. This is considered a very honorable position by any who support state sovereignty; by any who believe that the "bigger picture" ought to be much smaller. Our state House ought to be one of the most important government bodies to South Carolinians, and a reaffirmation of our rights would help to make it such once again.
     I am a South Carolinian, and so I am concerned with the affairs of South Carolina first and foremost. Let us return to our rightful form. Let us become focused upon our individual states' rights once more, as we were meant to be. I see the state sovereignty bills as one of the most important pieces of legislation to have been introduced in a very long time. It is the interference of Washington where it has had no right to interfere that has gotten us into this mess. In this critical era, it is bills such as H 3509 that can help to get us out of it and put us back onto the right track. The time to act is now.
     As your constituent, it is my wish that you immediately review and cosponsor bill H3509. I would also encourage you to be vocal in your support, and help us to convince all South Carolina legislators to sponsor it. It is time to take back what is rightfully ours and stop further encroachment upon our borders by the federal government. I will look forward to seeing your name soon added to this legislation.

Sincerely,
Taylor Byerly

Senator Nikki G. Setzler
510 Gressette Bldg.
Columbia, S.C. 29201

Senator Setzler,

     Recent legislation has been introduced in South Carolina that I believe is of vital importance to our state's right of sovereignty. The stated purpose of this bill, S 424, is: To affirm South Carolina's sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution over all powers not enumerated and granted to the federal government by the United States Constitution. For too long has the federal government been overstepping its bounds and violating the agreements made over 200 years ago in the document we call our Constitution. It is time to take a stand against these violations and reclaim our state.
     As a senator in the South Carolina Senate, your elected position is tied even more so to your state, and yours alone, rather than the so-called "bigger picture" in Washington. This is considered a very honorable position by any who support state sovereignty; by any who believe that the "bigger picture" ought to be much smaller. Our state Senate ought to be one of the most important government bodies to South Carolinians, and a reaffirmation of our rights would help to make it such once again.
     I am a South Carolinian, and so I am concerned with the affairs of South Carolina first and foremost. Let us return to our rightful form. Let us become focused upon our individual states' rights once more, as we were meant to be. I see the state sovereignty bills as one of the most important pieces of legislation to have been introduced in a very long time. It is the interference of Washington where it has had no right to interfere that has gotten us into this mess. In this critical era, it is bills such as S 424 that can help to get us out of it and put us back onto the right track. The time to act is now.
     As your constituent, it is my wish that you immediately review and cosponsor bill S 424. I would also encourage you to be vocal in your support, and help us to convince all South Carolina legislators to sponsor it. It is time to take back what is rightfully ours and stop further encroachment upon our borders by the federal government. I will look forward to seeing your name soon added to this legislation.

Sincerely,
Taylor Byerly

Posted 02/22/09 Jeffersonian Columbia, SC

This is right on!

Posted 02/22/09 Talbert Black Jr Lexington, SC

Great letters! They are going on the district page!

Posted 02/24/09 mitheralhammer Pelion, SC

I just wanted to personally thank you for your excellent letter writing and inform you that I have used your letters verbatim, less you name of course, to email both of our members of the general assembly. Again, Thank you for the extra effort.

Posted 02/26/09 Remember Jefferson Pelion, SC

Of course - anything for liberty! And thank you for helping to let our representatives know its time to take back our country!

Posted 05/04/09 EqualParent Columbia, SC

How would these bills affect our Constitutional rights? We have both enumerated AND unenumerated rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution. Sometimes these bills seem "good", but end up causing more bad than ever imagined. Just look at Roe vs. Wade. I am an advocate for "equal parenting", which most states do not uphold, much less recognize.

Posted by Remember Jefferson on 02/21/09
Last updated 02/21/09

Something of an addition to the last blog, here's another passage from Atlas Shrugged that I think we would all appreciate.  It is much longer than Francisco d'Anconia's speech (please read my last blog before this about the root of money, if you haven't already.  You'll certainly enjoy that one!), so I'll just post a few clips.  Follow the link for the rest (just skip past the website's introduction).  Remember, this book was written more than half a century ago.

http://conservablogs.com/bluecollarmuse/2008/10/06/socialisms-lying-promise/

a bit out of order, but I'll paste this on up first:

"It didn't take us long to see how it all worked out. Any man who tried to play straight, had to refuse himself everything. He lost his taste for any pleasure, he hated to smoke a nickel's worth of tobacco or chew a stick of gum, worrying whether somebody had more need for that nickel. He felt ashamed of every mouthful of food he swallowed, wondering whose weary nights of overtime had paid for it, knowing that his food was not his by right, miserably wishing to be cheated rather than to cheat, to be a sucker, but not a blood-sucker. He wouldn't marry, he wouldn't help his folks back home, he wouldn't put an extra burden on ‘the family.' Besides, if he still had some sort of sense of responsibility, he couldn't marry or bring children into the world, when he could plan nothing, promise nothing, count on nothing. But the shiftless and irresponsible had a field day of it. The bred babies, they got girls into trouble, they dragged in every worthless relative they had from all over the country, every unmarried pregnant sister, for an extra ‘disability allowance,' they got more sicknesses than any doctor could disprove, they ruined their clothing, their furniture, their homes - what the hell, ‘the family' was paying for it! They found more ways of getting in ‘need' than the rest of us could ever imagine - they developed a special skill for it, which was the only ability they showed.

 

back to the beginning:

"Well, there was something that happened at that plant where I worked for twenty years. It was when the old man died and his heirs took over. There were three of them, two sons and a daughter, and they brought a new plan to run the factory. They let us vote on it, too, and everybody - almost everybody - voted for it. We didn't know. We thought it was good. No, that's not true, either. We thought that we were supposed to think it was good. The plan was that everybody in the factory would work according to his ability, but would be paid according to his need.

"We voted for that plan at a big meeting, with all of us present, six thousand of us, everybody that worked in the factory. The Starnes heirs made long speeches about it, and it wasn't too clear, but nobody asked any questions. None of us knew just how the plan would work, but every one of us thought that the next fellow knew it. And if anybody had doubts, he felt guilty and kept his mouth shut - because they made it sound like anyone who'd oppose the plan was a child-killer at heart and less than a human being. They told us that this plan would achieve a noble ideal. Well, how were we to know otherwise? Hadn't we heard it all our lives - from our parents and our schoolteachers and our ministers, and in every newspaper we ever read and every movie and every public speech? Hadn't we always been told that this was righteous and just? Well, maybe there's some excuse for what we did at that meeting. Still, we voted for the plan - and what we got, we had it coming to us. You know, ma'am, we are marked men, in a way, those of us who lived through the four years of that plan in the Twentieth Century factory. What is it that hell is supposed to be? Evil - plain, naked, smirking evil, isn't it? Well, that's what we saw and helped to make - and I think we're damned, every one of us, and maybe we'll never be forgiven ...

"Do you know how it worked, that plan, and what it did to people? Try pouring water into a tank where there's a pipe at the bottom draining it out faster than you pour it, and each bucket you bring breaks that pipe an inch wider, and the harder you work the more is demanded of you, and you stand slinging buckets forty hours a week, then forthy-eight, then fifty-six - for your neighbor's supper - for his wife's operation - for his child's measles - for his mother's wheel chair - for his uncle's shirt - for his nephew's schooling - for the baby next door - for the baby to be born - for anyone anywhere around you - it's theirs to receive, from diapers to dentures - and yours to work, from sunup to sundown, month after month, year after year, with nothing to show for it but your sweat, with nothing in sight for you but their pleasure, for the whole of your life, without rest, without hope, without end ... From each according to his ability, to each according to his need ...

"We're all one big family, they told us, we're all in this together. But you don't all stand working an acetylene torch ten hours a day - together, and you don't all get a bellyache - together. What's whose ability and which of whose needs comes first? When it's all one pot, you can't let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim that he needs a yacht - and if his feelings are all you have to go by, he might prove it, too. Why not? If it's not right for me to own a car until I've worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage on earth - why can't he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the ability not to have collapsed? No? He can't? Then why can he demand that I go without cream for my coffee until he's replastered his living room? ... Oh well ... Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his own need or ability. We voted on it. Yes, ma'am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars - rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn't belong to him, it belonged to ‘the family', and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his ‘need' - so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife's head colds, hoping that ‘the family' would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because it's miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm - so it turned into a contest between six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that his need was worse than his brother's. How else could it be done? Do you care to guess what happened, what sort of men kept quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got away with the jackpot?

"But that wasn't all. There was something else that we discovered at the same meeting. The factory's production had fallen by forty percent, in that first half year, so it was decided that somebody hadn't delivered ‘according to his ability.' Who? How would you tell it? ‘The family' voted on that, too. We voted which men were the best, and these men were sentenced to work overtime each night for the next six months. Overtime without pay - because you weren't paid by time and you weren't paid by work, only by need.

"Do I have to tell you what happened after that - and into what sort of creatures we all started turning, we who had once been humans? We began to hide whatever ability we had, to slow down and watch like hawks that we never worked any faster or better than the next fellow. What else could we do, when we knew that if we did our best for ‘the family,' it's not thanks or rewards that we'd get, but punishment? We knew that for every stinker who'd ruin a batch of motors and cost the company money - either through his sloppiness, because he didn't have to care, or through plain incompetence - it's we who'd have to pay with our nights and our Sundays. So we did our best to be no good.

"There was one young boy who started out, full of fire for the noble ideal, a bright kid without any schooling, but with a wonderful head on his shoulders. The first year, he figured out a work process that saved us thousands of man-hours. He gave it to ‘the family,' didn't ask anything for it, either, couldn't ask, but that was all right with him. It was for the ideal, he said. But when he found himself voted as one of our ablest and sentenced to night work, because we hadn't gotten enough from him, he shut his mouth and his brain. You can bet he didn't come up with any ideas, the second year.

"What was it they'd always told us about the vicious competition of the profit system, where men had to compete for who'd do a better job than his fellows? Vicious, wasn't it? Well, they should have seen what it was like when we all had to compete with one another for who'd do the worst job possible. There's no surer way to destroy a man than to force him into a spot where he has to aim at not doing his best, where he has to struggle to do a bad job, day after day. That will finish him quicker than drink or idleness or pulling stick-ups for a living. But there was nothing else for us to do except to fake unfitness. The one accusation we feared was to be suspected of ability. Ability was like a mortgage on you that you could never pay off. And what was there to work for? You knew that your basic pittance would be given to you anyway, whether you worked or not - your ‘housing and feeding allowance,' it was called - and above that pittance, you had no chance to get anything, no matter how hard you tried. You couldn't count on buying a new suit of clothes next year - they might give you a ‘clothing allowance' or they might not, according to whether nobody broke a leg, needed an operation or gave birth to more babies. And if there wasn't enough money for new suits for everybody, then you couldn't get yours, either.

Posted 03/19/09 galtgulch Southborough, MA

I enjoyed reading Atlas Shrugged the first time, understood more the second time I read it, appreciated its relevance for us more and more on subsequent reads over the years. It also helps to go on to read Ayn Rand's journal The Objectivist Newsletter which is well worth reading even if you have read The Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism:The Unknown Ideal which include essays from the journal. Ayn Rand wrote book reviews about books by Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and F.Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, and others such as the philosopher of reason, Brand Blanshard, Reason and Analysis and the wonderful History of the Warfare Between Science and Religion in Christiandom by Andrew Dickson White co founder of Cornell University. Wm

Posted by Remember Jefferson on 02/19/09
Last updated 02/21/09

I was looking for a reference earlier, but while I had the passage up on my computer I thought I'd share it.  For those of you who haven't gotten around to reading that mammoth, but undeniabley worth-while, book called Atlas Shrugged, here's a little interesting snippet about money.

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor--your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made--before it can be looted or mooched--made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.'

"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss--the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery--that you must offer them values, not wounds--that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade--with reason, not force, as their final arbiter--it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability--and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality--the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth--the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money--and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich--will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt--and of his life, as he deserves.

"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard--the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money--the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law--men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims--then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, 'Account overdrawn.'

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world? You are.

"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood--money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves--slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers--as industrialists.

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money--and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being--the self-made man--the American industrialist.

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose--because it contains all the others--the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity--to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide-- as, I think, he will.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other--and your time is running out."

Posted 02/19/09 Fu Manchu Belleville, MI

Thanks for posting this, I've been wanting to tackle this beast... Now more than ever!

Posted 02/19/09 Mike in Virginia Fredericksburg, VA

Francisco's speech on money is one of my two favorite parts of Atlas Shrugged. The other is the narrative of the bum who was found in the vestibule of Dagny's railroad car and formerly worked at the Twentieth Century Motor Company. It seems to me that we are seeing Atlas Shrugged playing out. I almost expect to log on in the morning and find out the Directive 10-289 has been issued. I do think we are approaching the final meltdown, and the result will either be a totalitarian police state or several independent regions within the US.

Posted 02/19/09 Felegund Jonesville, KY

I just finished the book last week. It's a beautiful work, and I can certainly see why the liberals despise her. Personally, Mike, I found Galt's discourse over the radio to be one of the highlights, though it's a tough read to do in one section. And I would give my life to see the world of Galt's Gulch played out in America.

Posted 02/19/09 Mike in Virginia Fredericksburg, VA

Felegund, I loved Galt's speech too. An entire philosophy condensed into 50 or so pages. (btw, it took Rand 2 years to write that speech.) Although it is great, it is somewhat laborious, so my vote goes to the other two: a terrific explanation of why money is good, and a vivid description of what happens to people in a socialist system. What counts in the end, of course, is that the book is great and that it has influenced many thousands of people. It is the book that started me on the road to understanding liberty.

Posted 02/19/09 Remember Jefferson Pelion, SC

Mike in Virginia and Felegund - my other favorite parts as well! And all so frighteningly applicable to todays world... Fu - like I said, its a beast! But you want regret the time spent on it, I promise! I think that everybody ought to read this book... It might perhaps enlighten a good portion of America! If they still read....

Posted 02/19/09 madmikee Östersund, Sweden

i'm reading it, we're having to choose books to read and review in school so i thought this would be a good opportunity to read it. btw, i talked to my english teacher (she's from Canada) and she said she'd read it and that it was a great book. she sort of agrees with the philosophy in it and you know how rare it is to find people, especially teachers, who do that!=) granted it's not really a public school (publically funded though) but it still feels like there is some hope in the world! I'm just around page 70, but it's already hard to put it aside, so you should really read it Fu=)

Posted 02/19/09 Mike in Virginia Fredericksburg, VA

Fu, when you read it, your only regret will be that you didn't read it years earlier. I first read it in 1990, and I read it again about every 3 years. Actually, I'm about due for another go around. Two other favorite parts for me, fellow fans: (1) when Dagny is waiting outside of someone's office, knowing that simply turning the unlocked doorknob and walking in will reveal the secret she is pursuing; the degree of honor and respect that it took not to do so was awesome; (2) when Dagny could have seen another thing that had mystified her simply by repeating some words, but knew she could only say them when she could truly live by them: "I swear by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another to live for mine." I kept those comments slightly vague so as not to ruin the plot for any who haven't read the book.

Posted by Remember Jefferson on 02/15/09
Last updated 02/16/09

Unfortunately I can't take the time to properly express myself tonight (though I will be sure to do so this week!), but I just wanted to write a quick blog about the upcoming bills in my state.  I am overjoyed, to put it mildly!, that H 3509 and S 424 (the state sovereinty bills) are being introduced here.  Lets get to work, South Carolinians, to see it passed!  This is one of the largest steps taken towards reclaiming our rights in a very long time, and I don't wish it to fail based on a lack of action and enthusiasm on our part.  If ever there was a piece of legislation for us to get excited about, this is it.

I want to raise my children in a world freer than that I was raised in.  I want to create for them a society that they can be proud of.  I want to be able to teach my children the visions of Jefferson as something more than an abstract, long-forgotten idea - but rather, show them America as the embodiment of that vision.  Am I asking for much?  Sometimes I fear, perhaps.  I fear that the state of possibility and promise that an infant, free America found herself in may not be found again.  I fear that such simplistic, yet infallible logic of a free libertarian (a reminder, or for those reading my blog for the first time, I mean the philosophy when I say libertarian, unless I specifically cite the party) society will not be reinstated in my lifetime.  As sad as this makes me, as outraged and wronged as I may feel, it motivates me even more to do whatever I can to return us to our rightful state.  I will not leave this battle alone for the next generation to shoulder.

Posted 02/16/09 Talbert Black Jr Lexington, SC

There is lots of enthusiasm that I have seen so far! Lets keep it rolling. The senate bill is much stronger than the house bill. I'd rather see it be the one signed by Sanford!

Posted by Remember Jefferson on 02/08/09

Google books offers The Jeffrson Cyclopedia: over 1000 pages long quotatations and writings of Thomas Jefferson organized by topic.  The site also has a link to download the entire file as a PDF.

http://books.google.com/books?id=icGh3NxREIIC

Posted 02/08/09 Fu Manchu Belleville, MI

SWEET!!!

Posted 02/08/09 MidWestLadyFarmer Winigan, MO

Just reading a few pages will open some minds and eyes to our thoughts and beliefs. If only the majority of people were interested in learning about our true heritage.

Posted 02/08/09 crashnct Round Rock, TX

Good find

Posted 02/08/09 illuminati hater Las Vegas, NV

This an awesome, awesome find Jefferson. I just got done downloading, and will start going through it later today.

Posted 02/08/09 Talbert Black Jr Lexington, SC

Just downloaded it. We will use it for home school when our daughter is a little older.

Posted 02/08/09 patriotfilms North Bergen, NJ

Nice find. Thanks for the post.