Economy And Technology - ILANA MERCER

“It’s beyond silly to believe in the autonomy of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is nothing more than meta-programing by mega-programmers.”—ILANA Mercer, “Conservation IS Conservative: BLM? Black-And-Yellow Lives Matter,” August 4, 2022
“Big Tech bullies don’t have to entertain Nick Fuentes or Richard Spencer in person in their kitschy McMansions. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Sundar Pichai (Google), Tim Cook (Apple) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) only have to tolerate the pixelated, written or spoken words of their ideological enemies. Make them!”—ILANA Mercer, “Centralize Liberty: The Solution To Wicked, Woke Tech (Part 3),” September 23, 2021.
“Civil Rights law must be applied evenly. In the cause of neutralizing Deep Tech, it is but a small thing to extend the prohibition against certain forms of discrimination to innocent thought criminals. Develop a powerful civil-rights based argument in defense of the rights of law-abiding individuals to expressed their worldviews without being excommunicated socially and financially. Then take it to the Supreme Court of the United States.”—ILANA Mercer, “Centralize Liberty: The Solution To Wicked, Woke Tech (Part 3),” September 23, 2021.
“By Deep Tech decree, some Americans are worth more than others, based not on their actions, but on the voiced thoughts in their heads. This cannot stand. The letter of the law needs changing. Do it.”—ILANA Mercer, “Centralize Liberty: The Solution To Wicked, Woke Tech (Part 3),” September 23, 2021.
“With respect to financial de-platforming: Barring someone from PayPal is like prohibiting a passenger from crossing the English Channel by high-speed train, via ferry and by means of 90 percent of airplanes. ‘Sure, some options remain for you to explore, you hapless loser. Go to it!'”—ILANA Mercer, “Justice Thomas’ Solution to Big Tech’s Social And Financial Excommunication,” August 12, 2021.
“The anti-trust impetus is misguided as it conflates corporate size with anti-competitive practices: the larger, the more monopolistic. However, reducing the size of an entity–a corporation–doesn’t necessarily alter its nature. When a malignant cell divides, it doesn’t grow less potent. To the contrary, it innervates and enervates more spheres. Likewise breaking up Big Tech. Smaller malignancies metastasize and kill just as well.”—ILANA Mercer, “Big Tech’s Financial Terrorism And Social Excommunication (Part 1: The Problem),” August 5, 2021.
“When Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, and Amazon were growing up, they wanted to be government. Now they are!”—ILANA Mercer, “Deep Tech: Locked Down And Locked Out, First By The State, Then By Silicon Valley,” January 14, 2021.
“In defending Deep Tech’s prerogative to visit economic and social violence on innocent individuals and businesses by tossing them off their enormous, irreplaceable platforms, for speech not to their liking—you are not defending the rights of private property to merely conduct itself as it wishes. Rather, you are marching down the pirate’s plank, on a ship of state commandeered by pirates, who’re in competition with the state.”—ILANA Mercer, “Deep Tech: Locked Down And Locked Out, First By The State, Then By Silicon Valley,” January 14, 2021.
“The profit-structure within many a Deep Tech company is reminiscent of that of a Petrostate. Billions flow top down, from these sheik-dominated organization—Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos—to their pet political fiefdoms, within each of their respective companies. There, navigating politics is more valuable than making products.”—ILANA Mercer, “Deep Tech: Locked Down And Locked Out, First By The State, Then By Silicon Valley,” January 14, 2021.
“Work for Deep Tech and you’ll quickly learn that it’s about minorities before merit, foreign over native born, women above everybody and everything, and white men who’re made to go to the back of the org—although, given their legendary facility with engineering, honky is made to do double duty for all the deadwood hired.”—ILANA Mercer, “Deep Tech: Locked Down And Locked Out, First By The State, Then By Silicon Valley,” January 14, 2021.
“The men and women of Deep Tech no longer have products on their megalomaniacal, petty minds, but politics.”—ILANA Mercer, “Deep Tech: Locked Down And Locked Out, First By The State, Then By Silicon Valley,” January 14, 2021.
“Quislings such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter quickly colluded in flagrant violation of the American pro-competition sensibility, and flouting the spirit, if not the letter, of civil rights law, to financially segregate, banish and cripple irksome people and enterprises, Parler, in our example.”—ILANA Mercer, “Deep Tech: Locked Down And Locked Out, First By The State, Then By Silicon Valley,” January 14, 2021.
“Deep Tech restricts speech to comport with its censorious, progressive and politically correct, do-or-die guiding lodestars.”—ILANA Mercer, “Deep Tech: Locked Down And Locked Out, First By The State, Then By Silicon Valley,” January 14, 2021.
“Financial de-platforming is when you are barred from banking or transacting via PayPal.It teeters on violating another’s natural right to make a living. For how do you make a living if you can’t bank? Do you revert to a barter economy (a book for some bread)? Go underground? Hunker in home-based industries? Keep afloat by word of mouth? Go door-to-door? Oh, I know: Beat the tom-tom drum, if your email service is severed, given that our email accounts and other server-supported facilities are currently under threat, too, with nary a remedy from fat-cat representatives.”—ILANA Mercer, “Deep Tech: Locked Down And Locked Out, First By The State, Then By Silicon Valley,” January 14, 2021.
AS A COINAGE, DEEP TECH is superior to Big-Tech. It better captures the deforming power and tentacular reach into state and civil society of the high-tech monopolists.”—ILANA Mercer, “Deep Tech: Locked Down And Locked Out, First By The State, Then By Silicon Valley,” January 14, 2021.
“Deep Tech: My preferred term for the high-tech sector, as it denotes how deeply have the head honchos of high-tech penetrated and poisoned the American public and private sectors.”—ILANA Mercer, “MAGA Patriots: The Best of People In The Worst of Times,” January 7, 2021.
“America’s giants of industry … are cosmopolitans who believe consumption alone makes the world go round. Community? That’s when you press flesh with George and Amal Clooney, at the World Economic Forum in Davos!”—ILANA Mercer, “Who Invited The World To Infect America?” April 30, 2020.
“Bill Gates, the point-person, the pinhead who pontificates about pandemic best practices, he was among the powerbrokers who decided, with his benefactors in D.C., that the ‘new economy’ would hum not in America, but in China and India.”—ILANA Mercer, “Who Invited The World To Infect America?” April 30, 2020.
“Misguided, mediocre and frightfully monolithic minds are monopolizing one of the Internet’s most powerful, intellectual means of production: Twitter.”—ILANA Mercer, “The Anatomy of A Twitter Blocking — My Own,” June 27, 2019
“I loathe corporate ‘economic elephantiasis and gigantism,’ untethered to corporeal communities.”—ILANA Mercer, 2018.
“The attitude of American business toward economic growth is rooted not in healthy, community-based practices (stateside and abroad), but in some aberrant economic gigantism; in an economic elephantiasis undergirded by hubris and greed.”—ILANA Mercer, “Who Invited The World To Infect America?” April 30, 2020.
“Purchasing patterns drive prices up or down. Through their competitive bidding, consumers raise the price of a commodity. In this unhampered market, rising prices of face-masks, respirators, hand sanitizers and the like has signaled to established manufacturers and new entrepreneurs that there are profits to be made in these industries. Only fools flout these signals. For without profits and prices there is no production.”—ILANA Mercer, “Unmasking Statist, Socialist Propaganda About ‘Face Masks,’” March 5, 2020.
“Prices are crucial. They are the street signs of the economy. The thing the socialists will soon insist on controlling (‘price-controls’) and suppressing are the vital signs of the economy. In particular, scarcity and high prices are vital signals. Mask these natural market indices, and you kill off the knowledge needed by manufacturers and entrepreneurs to decide whether to rush into the production of surgical face masks and N-95 respirators. Remove the precious profit motive from mask-making—and any other production process—and you kill off the incentive to produce.”—ILANA Mercer, “Unmasking Statist, Socialist Propaganda About ‘Face Masks,’” March 5, 2020.
“The World is the American multinational’s labor marker. The housing market in the U.S. reflects that reality. Unburdened by brains, pundits and politicos remain incurious as to why supply and demand in housing can never be brought into a semblance of a balance in such a perversely global labor market.”—ILANA Mercer, “Homeless In Seattle, Part 2: Tech Sucks The Soul Out Of The City,” Townhall.com, October 10, 2019.
“Development fiends and fanatics all hunger for the revenues that come from ‘dense housing,’ namely ‘any housing that’s attached to another unit, often in taller buildings: apartments, condos, town homes, row houses.’”—ILANA Mercer, “Homeless In Seattle, Part 2: Tech Sucks The Soul Out Of The City,” Townhall.com, October 10, 2019.
Homeless in Seattle: “Imagine being priced out of your homeland’s housing market. For good. That’ll drive a person to seek solace in mind-altering substances.”—ILANA Mercer, “Homeless In Seattle, Part 1: High-Tech Harm The Homeless,” Townhall.com., September 30, 2019.
“America is a market place for goods and services. A mighty one at that. It’s a market place to which millions arrive each year to make a living and engage in acts of acquisitiveness. America is a territory for trade. But is it a nation? Other than commerce and consumption, what is the glue that binds us together?”—ILANA Mercer, “Do We Still Have A Country? Part I,” Townhall.com, July 18, 2019.
“Free trade is an unknown ideal, to echo Ayn Rand’s observations. What goes for ‘free trade,’ rather, is trade managed by bureaucratic juggernauts—national and international—central planners concerned with regulating, not freeing, trade; whose goal it is to harmonize labor, health, and environmental laws throughout the developed world. The undeveloped and developing worlds generally exploit labor, despoil land and kill off critters as they please. —ILANA Mercer, “Why The Mighty USA Must Beg Mexico To Police Its Border,” Townhall.com, June 21, 2019.
“What’s wrong with doing well enough with the labor available in the country? Or, with a view to training American talent? Or, with a mind to paying more for local labor? As it stands, business is permitted to petition The State to import the world at a price heavily subsidized by disenfranchised American taxpayers.”—ILANA Mercer, “U.S. Business Itching to Import Cheap Labor,” Townhall.com., September 20, 2018
“The attitude of business toward economic growth is rooted not in healthy, community-based practices (stateside and abroad), but in some aberrant economic gigantism; in an economic elephantiasis undergirded by greed.”—ILANA Mercer, “U.S. Business Itching to Import Cheap Labor,” Townhall.com., September 20, 2018
“Far be it from me to endorse tariffs as a means of reducing trade deficits. I am only here questioning the totemic attachment free-traders have to trade deficits, given that Americans live under conditions of systemic debt and state-managed trade that is anything but free.”—ILANA MERCER, “Trade Deficits In The Context Of State-Managed Trade And Systemic Debt,” Townhall.com, March 16, 2018
On trade deficits: “Our improvident government’s debts, liabilities and unfunded promises exceed the collective net worth of its wastrel citizens. Given these historic trends, it seems silly to dismiss the yawning gap between U.S. exports and U.S. imports as an insignificant economic indicator.”—ILANA MERCER, “Trade Deficits In The Context Of State-Managed Trade And Systemic Debt,” Townhall.com, March 16, 2018
On trade deficits: “Because of decades of credit-fueled, consumption-based living, the defining, current characteristic of our economy is debt—micro and macro; public and private. Unless one is coming from the pro-debt Keynesian perspective, is this not an economically combustive combination?”—ILANA MERCER, “Trade Deficits In The Context Of State-Managed Trade And Systemic Debt,” Townhall.com, March 16, 2018
“The GDP measure is itself a state-driven metric. Official GDP numbers are deceptive because they chart—and include—the growth of government debt. In order to come to grips with America’s real economic prognosis, one would need to tease apart the indubitably modest economic growth from the monstrous accretion of public debt. Defined, tracked and manipulated by the D.C. political machine, GDP is a political construct. It statistically conflates the growth of debt with economic growth.”—ILANA Mercer, “Busted: Scripture-Twisting Reverend Pushing Borderless U.S.,” December, 13, 2017
“The price of labor in the high-tech labor market is a function of a political, artificially created, ceaseless supply of immigrants. Prattle about the price at which American workers will do certain work is meaningless without a reference to borders and to the thing they bound—communities. Render asunder the quaint idea of borders—and the world is your labor market; communities be damned. Realize that this ceaseless supply of labor is maintained not through peaceful market forces, but through the use of political power, wielded by wealthy men and women with access. At work here is their Brave New Borderless World, not the invisible hand we love.”—ILANA, “Why Tax Breaks Won’t Stop High-Tech, H-1B Human Trafficking,” Constitution.com, November 16, 2017.”
On Trade deficits: “Voluntary exchanges are by definition advantageous to their participants. Costco, my hair stylist and the GTI dealer—all have products or skills I want. Within this voluntary, mutually beneficial relationship, I give up an item I value less, for something I value more: a fee for the desired product or service. My trading partners, whose valuations are in complementary opposition to mine, reciprocate in kind. Ceteris paribus (all other things being equal), there’s nothing wrong with my running a trade deficit with Costco, my hair stylist or my GTI dealer, as I do—just as long as I pay for my purchases. However, the data demonstrate that Americans, in general, are not paying for their purchases”—ILANA (March 11, 2016)
“I don’t know that Trump favors protective tariffs, import quotas or export subsidies. I do know that we don’t have free trade. What goes for ‘free trade’ is trade managed by powerful bureaucracies—national and transnational international—central planners concerned with regulating, not freeing, trade; whose goal it is to harmonize labor, health, and environmental laws throughout the developed world. The undeveloped and developing worlds do as they please. My understanding is that Trump simply wants to make these agreements and organs work for the American people.”—ILANA (March 11, 2016)
“Be it Hillary Clinton or burn-the-wealth Bernie Sanders—both agree that it is up to them, the all-knowing central planners, to determine how much of your life ought to be theirs to squander.”—ILANA (October 16, 2015)
“Where, pray tell, are those ‘made in Russia’ labels? Other than crude and commodities; Kalashnikovs (AK-47s) and Vodka —what does post-communist Russia peddle?.'”—ILANA (March 20, 2015)
“President Roosevelt had his lucid moments. Or moment, rather. According to Paul Jonson, ‘When asked what single book he would put into the hands of a Russian communist, Roosevelt replied: ‘The Sears, Roebuck catalog.'”—ILANA (March 20, 2015)
“Sears, Roebuck was one of the great American companies which, through mass production and mass marketing, made available to America’s own Kulaks the luxuries that were previously enjoyed only by her rich.”—ILANA (March 20, 2015)
“Obamacare is a marketplace in the same way the Knockout Game is a game.”—ILANA (February 14, 2014)
“Inegalitarainism is a feature of a free economy. If history is anything to go by, certain minorities will achieve prosperity from poverty, no matter how gravely the state and society impede them. Jews did it in Europe. Levantines and Indians in Africa and the Middle-East. Chinese in southeast Asia and everywhere else they go. Europeans in South Africa.”—ILANA (December 20, 2013)
“Contra the economic reductionism of the lite libertarian, free-market capitalism is a necessary but insufficient condition to sustain freedom in a country of South Africa’s complexion.”—ILANA (December 20, 2013)
“What the good [free-market] economists are loath to let on is that a free market is a market in which groups and individuals are differently represented. Parity in prosperity and performance between differently able individuals and groups can be achieved only by playing socialist leveler.”—ILANA (December 20, 2013)
“The non-stop monetary stimulus results in a rise in prices, stocks included. Homes too. And an increase in the price of an item is not the same as an appreciation in its value.”—ILANA (October 18, 2013)
“Our staggeringly pompous president is incapable of comprehending that a businessman cannot pay a worker in excess of his productivity and hope to stay solvent, and that an act of force—a law—will not make medical manna fall from the heavens.”—ILANA (October 4, 2013)
On John Maynard Keynes: “It would appear that the Keynesian faithful have foisted on free-market capitalists an unfalsifiable theory. Evidence that contradicts it, Keynesian kooks enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory. Besides, public works, economic protectionism, cheap money, ‘deficit-financed government spending,’ and ‘the animal spirits of the spendthrift in the service of boosting ‘consumption demand’: Doesn’t Keynesianism simply appeal to the worst in human nature?”—ILANA (August 23, 2013)
“The alleged lack of funding for police in a rich tax base that pays through the proverbial nose in property taxes is invariably a result of the perennial and inescapable misallocation of funds in centrally-managed, politically driven systems.”—ILANA (June 21, 2013)
“A balanced-budget requirement implies is that government has the constitutional right to spend as much as it takes in; that government is permitted to waste however much revenue it can extract from wealth producers, and that the bums must merely bring into balance what was stolen (taxes) with what is squandered (spending).”—ILANA (March 1, 2013)
“Like any voluntary exchange of goods, ‘gouging’ amounts to free people exchanging property to which they hold title. Each relinquishes something he values less (money/goods/labor) for something he values more (money/goods/labor). Prices are like a compass. Pegged to supply and demand they ensure the correct allocation of resources. Without market prices, supply and demand cannot be brought into balance and, by extension, consumer need cannot be satisfied, especially in times of great scarcity.”—ILANA (February 8, 2013)
“Facebook went to market. The stock exchange got crowded. The equivalent of a traffic jam ensued. But thanks to invidious resentment toward big, ‘bad,’ business, coupled with the quest for headlines—a good thing has been portrayed as something that went sour.”—ILANA (May 25, 2012)
“Business, in contrast to Barack Obama, is a positive-sum game.”—ILANA (May 25, 2012)
“Facebook users love it and cannot imagine life without. Yes, they complain endlessly—but largely because they can. Unlike government (and CNN’s Anderson Cooper), you can keep private enterprise honest. Business aims to please its constituents, the consumers. Complaints encourage compliance.”—ILANA (May 25, 2012)
“‘You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave!’ Those are the chorus lyrics to ‘Hotel California,’ the haunting rock classic by the Eagles. Americans who try ‘running for the door’—in the evocative words of Glenn Frey, and the Dons Felder and Henley—soon discover that they ‘are all just prisoners here …’ Prisoners of Uncle Sam’s device. An American who chooses to live and work overseas cannot escape the Internal Revenue Service. The United States is perhaps the only country ‘to tax its citizens on income earned while they’re living abroad.'”—ILANA (April 20, 2012)
“Government failure invariably results in budgetary increases. How much kinkier does it get than when failure amounts to success?”—ILANA Mercer, “Uncle Sam Turns Tricks (And Stiffs Sex Workers),” May 11, 2012.
“Europe has a long way to go if it wishes to approximate the degree of economic and legal harmonization accomplished by Uncle Sam, and to become one nation under inflation.”—ILANA Mercer, “One Nation Under Inflation,” December 2, 2011)
“What a balanced budget requirement implies is that the government has the right to spend as much as it can take in. There is nothing constitutional (or just) about fine-tuning—increasing or decreasing—state spending to coincide with a supposed sovereign people’s acquisitive abilities and economic energies.”—ILANA Mercer (July 22, 2011)
“The United States has already passed on as the world’s economic leader. Having flouted Thomas Jefferson for too long, America has succumbed to public debt, the ‘fore horse for oppression and despotism,’ after which ‘taxation will follow, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.'”—ILANA Mercer (June 3, 2011)
“Just how backward is Barack? Such an intellectual laggard is the country’s commander-in-chief as to frame the massive spending he is directing as a ‘key investment in our future.’ The wherewithal for the largess exhibited by Mr. Obama’s menagerie of moron has been siphoned off from the private economy (and from China).”—ILANA Mercer (April 15, 2011)
“The Securities and Exchange Commission operates with the understanding that competition in capital markets must proceed from a level playing field. All investors are entitled to the same information advantage irrespective of effort and abilities. In a word, information socialism.—ILANA Mercer (November 26, 2010, and June 19, 2002)
“Government jobs are not an addition to the country’s payroll; they are an increase in the nation’s payload.” —ILANA Mercer (June 25, 2010)
On The Trade Deficit: “There is nothing wrong with my running a trade deficit with Costco, my hair stylist, or my GTI dealer, as I do—just so long as I pay for my purchases. The data demonstrate that Americans, in general, do not.” —ILANA Mercer (July 16, 2010 )
“Far from comprising discrete parts, the economy is ineluctably interconnected. The trade deficit belongs to a nation enmeshed in debt. From the fact that America purportedly ran trade surpluses during the Great Depression it does not follow that the nation’s current trade deficit is inconsequential as economic indices go. It could just as well mean that the economic fundamentals today are worse than they were during the Great Depression, since this country has never before been so deeply in hock as it currently is.” —ILANA Mercer (July 16, 2010)
“The voluntary free market is a sacred extension of life itself. The free market—it has not been unfettered for a very long time—is really a spontaneously synchronized order comprising trillions upon trillions of voluntary acts that individuals perform in order to make a living. Introduce government force and coercion into this rhythm and you get life-threatening arrhythmia. Under increasing state control, this marketplace – this magic, organic agora – starts to splutter, and people suffer.”—ILANA Mercer (April 23, 2010)
“The hi-tech endeavor is all about (older) Americans and Asians uniting to supply (younger) twittering twits with the playthings that keep their brainwaves from flatlining.”—ILANA Mercer (February 19, 2010)
“Government consuming what it appropriates, prints or pirates from the nation’s dwindling savings cannot generate plenty; it can only destroy or crowd wealth out.”—ILANA Mercer (July 10, 2009)
“Understand: government has no means to generate or create wealth. To sustain its projects and parasites it must feed off the private, productive economy.”—ILANA Mercer, “Federal Reserve Conjures Trillions In Coin Out Of Thin Air, July 10, 2009
The Bernanke coin-conjuring magic is to our money as Diprivan drips were to Michael Jackson’s mortality.”—ILANA Mercer (July 10, 2009)
“A beastly bureaucratic feeding frenzy cannot awaken the slumbering beauty that is the private economy.”—ILANA Mercer (July 10, 2009)
“Contra the kook Keynes, government consumption is a zero-sum-game: the more plans and planners, czars and czarinas Obama adds to his ranks, the fewer you’ll be adding to yours.”—ILANA Mercer (July 10, 2009)
“Once Fellini-style consumption gives way to Puritan-worthy production, jobs driven by sustainable market forces will germinate and grow.”—ILANA Mercer (July 10, 2009)
“Keynes was to economics as Katrina was to New Orleans.”—ILANA Mercer (July 10, 2009)
“A JOBLESS RECOVERY is the equivalent of a housewarming for the homeless. This sophistic term is a political construct, not an economic one, meant to coat the entrenched, systemic effects of endemic, employment-killing government policies with a patina of scholarly respectability.”—ILANA Mercer (July 4, 2009)
“Allow me to dispel distaff America’s claims of disadvantage with a decisive argument: If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, men would have long-since priced themselves out of the market.”—ILANA Mercer (March 13, 2009)
On central planning: “The thing we call the ”economy’ is no more than the trillions upon trillions of voluntary, capitalistic acts individuals perform in order to make a living. The economy responds poorly to economic planning and planners. Introduce government force and coercion into this synchronized spontaneous order, and it starts to splutter.”—ILANA Mercer (March 6, 2009)
“The defining characteristic of the Unites States is debt—public and private. America is a debtor nation. Socialism is secondary to state squandering—and a consequence of it.”—ILANA Mercer (February 20, 2009)
“Let us give credit where it’s due. Was Bush not first to break the bank? And if deficit spending is a salve for insolvency, why did Bush’s non-stop spending not ward off the depression?”—ILANA Mercer (February 6, 2009)
“A natural shift must take place in the economy from a credit-fueled, consumption-based economy, to one founded on savings, investment and production.”—ILANA Mercer (January 16, 2009)
“Compared to the United States government, Bernie Madoff is a mere babe in grand larceny boot camp.”—ILANA Mercer (January 16, 2009)
“Politicians and theoreticians who claim the natural laws of economics can be violated with impunity are proffering politics, not economics.”—ILANA Mercer (November 28, 2008)
“The laws of economics are natural, universal laws. One cannot violate them without repercussions. It follows from this that to adhere to the economic laws of nature is to be faithful to truth and justice.”—ILANA Mercer (November 28, 2008)
“Voluntary exchanges are by definition advantageous to their participants. They involve giving up something one values less for something one values more and finding someone else with ‘opposite valuations.’ The H-1B visa holder forfeits his (apparently unexceptional) labor for a salary many times the salary he’d get in India or China or Pakistan. If he were not incalculably better off than he was in his previous life, he would not have taken a calculated risk in a plush American office.”—ILANA Mercer (November 18, 2008)
“The gargantuan, government give-away to the financial sector combined elements of fascism and socialism. However you define the Bush bailout – it was bad. Bad and bipartisan.”—ILANA Mercer (October 24, 2008)
“The progressive income tax is a good example of Karl Marx’s maxim, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’ America, the cradle of capitalism, clings to Karl. Russia, the cradle of communism, has abandoned him in favor of a flat—and very low—tax on income.—ILANA Mercer (October 24, 2008)
“’Bush’s bailout society‘ is an instantiation of the principles upon which ‘Bush’s ownership society’ was founded: credit for those who are not creditworthy.—ILANA Mercer (October 3, 2008)
“Is America ever going to understand that nothing can grow in the shadow of a State that has squandered trillions and makes up for it by printing more?—ILANA Mercer (October 3, 2008)
A crisis that was created by cheap credit must be corrected by less of the same.—ILANA Mercer (September 26, 2008)
“Bush’s ownership society, built as it was on quicksand, has metamorphosed into the bailout society.”—ILANA Mercer (September 26, 2008)
“Trade, not democracy, is also the best antidote to war. The more economically intertwined countries are, the less likely they are to go to war. Boycott Iran less and barter with it more and it’s bound to tone down its belligerence.”—ILANA Mercer (September 19, 2008)
“All in all, Exxon Mobil has done a smashing job of bringing oil to market considering the fly-in-amber policies it faces.”—ILANA Mercer (June 13, 2008)
On Glorious Gas: “The more efficient the source of energy, the less waste and pollution are involved in its conversion into energy. Think of the totality of the production process! The fewer resources expended in bringing a fuel to market, the cleaner and cheaper is the process.”—ILANA Mercer (June 13, 2008)
McCain’s pronouncements on pumping-up oil supply—the only way to satiate demand and reduce prices—are limited and delimited by the shamanic thinking he and Obama share: Godless humans are overheating the Goddess Gaia.”—ILANA Mercer (June 13, 2008)
“Profits and prices are the street signs of the economy. Only fools flout them. The much–maligned price system works not only to secure supply but to conserve.”—ILANA Mercer (June 13, 2008)
“Obama is an ass with ears when it comes to the economy. The same goes for Clinton. So Sen. McCain did not help himself (or us) by being charmingly self-deprecating about his understanding of the economy. He has allowed Obama and Clinton, infinitely more asinine than he, to assert their superiority.”—ILANA Mercer (March 28, 2008)
“Where Kemp-McCain economics meet Obama-Clinton “freakonomics” is in the unnatural and un-American idea that the government is entitled to a portion of your income; that it has a lien on your life and on what you acquire in the course of sustaining that life. Be it Hillary, Hussein or McCain—they all agree that it is up to the all-knowing central planner to determine how much of your life ought to be theirs.—ILANA Mercer (March 28, 2008)
“Forced to choose between various forms of enslavement, as we indeed are, then the flat tax is the second best option, revolution being the first.”—ILANA Mercer (March 3, 2008)
“CNN’s Lou Dobbs would do a great service to American innovators and middle class, if he waged his wordy war against their government, which has buried American business under a burdensome bureaucracy.”—ILANA Mercer (February 29, 2008)
“The marketplace doesn’t adjudicate the quality of art or pop culture—it does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the trillions of subjective preferences enacted by consumers. Aguilera (Christina) probably sells more than Ashkenazy (Vladimir) ever did. Britney outdoes Borodin. For some, this will be faith-inspiring, for others deeply distressing.”—ILANA (February 7, 2003)
“Politics is a form of sheltered employment.”—ILANA (February 8, 2008)
“Profits are the street signs of the free market—without profits there’d be no products.”—ILANA (February 8, 2008)
“It’s high time Americans, who never tire of cramming their values down gagging gullets, remember that solvency is a virtue; bankruptcy a vice.”—ILANA Mercer (January 25, 2008)
“The freer a society, the less likely government is to placate the envious by taking from those they envy. In unfree societies, that’s precisely what governments do: pacify the multitudes by mulcting the few.”—ILANA Mercer (March 2, 2007)
“The concept of an income gap is meaningless in its circularity. Some people are richer than others. Some don’t like it. It’s called envy.”—ILANA Mercer (February 5, 2007)
“Antitrust laws ought to be deployed, not against business, but to bust this two-party monopoly, which subverts competition in government and rewards the colluding quislings with sinecures in perpetuity.”—ILANA Mercer (May 26, 2006)
“The Securities and Exchange Commission operates on an unconstitutional ex post facto basis—its victims have no way of foreseeing or controlling how vague law will be bent and charges changed in the course of seeking the desired prosecutorial outcome.”—ILANA Mercer (December 2, 2005)
Socialists: Their zero-sum economics dictate that one person’s plenty is another’s poverty.”—ILANA Mercer (August 19, 2005)
“Statists say that if not for the state, man would be unable to produce. That’s like saying that the tick created the dog! Production predates government predation. Government doesn’t produce wealth—it only consumes it.”—ILANA Mercer (Sixteen, the Number of the Beast, in Broad Sides, 2004)
“Got the aptitude to probe the field of fiber optics? Don’t. Instead, become a gym instructor to the multiplying population of menopausal gym-bunnies.“—ILANA Mercer, “‘EXPORTING’ HIGH-TECH JOBS: PART I,” December 12, 2003
“Real wealth is created only by the production and consumption of products, not of paper money. An abundance of goods, not money income, is what makes for an increase in wealth.”—ILANA Mercer (April 30, 2003)
“The Securities and Exchange Commission operates with the understanding that competition in capital markets must proceed from a level playing field. All investors are entitled to the same information advantage irrespective of effort and abilities. In a word, information socialism.”—ILANA Mercer (November 26, 2010, and June 19, 2002)
“In a command economy, government decides when the demand for anthrax tablets has been satisfied, but not in a free market. In a free market, consumers direct supply and demand. And in a free market, increased demand leads to increased supply, as producers compete with one another to meet the demand.”—ILANA Mercer, “Cipro Shortage: An Invented Scarcity,” October 25, 2001
“So crucial is our need for it, how can electricity possibly be left to bureaucrats whose bungling is rewarded with increased budgets; who fob bankruptcy onto taxpayers; whose incentives for making profits and avoiding losses are weak at best, and who regularly override the consumers’ vote with political expedients.”—ILANA Mercer, “How Not To Privatize The Power Grid,” February 2, 2001
“In a market in which the state has a hand, prices will never fully convey the information they relay in an unhampered market, and will invariably fail in guiding producers to meet consumer demand.”—ILANA Mercer, “How Not To Privatize The Power Grid,” February 2, 2001.
“Electricity is best entrusted to fully free markets. Only private enterprise raises initial capital voluntarily and applies careful entrepreneurial forethought to all endeavors. Left to their devices, entrepreneurs will, in the long run and in response to price signals, build more capacity—electricity-generating plants—and prices will inevitably fall. Only entrepreneurs in competition with one another have the incentive to satisfy the customer, on whom they depend for their very survival.”—ILANA Mercer, “How Not To Privatize The Power Grid,” February 2, 2001
“By protesting free trade, arm-chair anarchists are opposing both commerce and comity.”—ILANA Mercer (December 7, 2000)
“As an organ of the United Nations, the WTO should strike terror in the heart of any true freetrader. The organization is the concoction of international statists; a powerful bureaucracy concerned with managing, not freeing,trade; a central planner whose goal it is to harmonize labor, health,and environmental laws throughout the world.”—ILANA Mercer, “Free Trade, Not the WTO, Will Enrich the Third World,” December 7, 2000.

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