Quotes from Michael Lind

Libertarians are not the brightest lights in the candelabra, a fact that is evident from the alternatives they tend to offer to public prevention of private abuses. For example: if you don't like working a hundred hours a week for twenty-five cents a day, then find another employer! It is obvious to intelligent people, if not libertarians, that more generous employers will price themselves out of a market whose standards are set by the most rapacious.

For realists, war is like surgery-a painful and dangerous activity that is sometimes necessary ... A pacifist is like a Christian Scientist who is against surgery even when the alternative is the crippling or death of the patient.

Page 37: Article 1, Section 2, of the Constitution counted each slave (usually treated in the law as chattel property) as three fifths of a person in determining Southern representation in the House of Representatives (this compromise, it should be noted, served Northern interests; had each slave been counted as a complete person for purposes of congressional representation, the South would have had even more representatives in Congress).

Page 199: According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Statistics, more than 20 percent of all imports to the United States come from foreign subsidiaries or affiliates of U.S. multinational corporations. … This is why American business is so adamantly opposed to tariffs—not fear of foreign retaliation, but fear of tariffs on products from American-owned industrial plantations.

Page 286: Common sense on this subject tends to be warded off by ritual invocation of the cliché that we are "a nation of immigrants." In fact, the United States is not a nation of immigrants, and never has been. At no point in American history have people born abroad constituted more than a minority of the U.S. population

In the absence of a global government that could raise taxes to fund a global welfare state, the free movement of people among countries would overburden and destroy existing national welfare states, or else empower right-wing populists to defend welfare states for natives against immigrants, as is happening both in the U.S. and Europe.

In the words of President Lyndon Johnson when he signed the 1965 immigration reform act: "This is a simple test, and it is a fair test. Those who can contribute most to this country—to its growth, to its strength, to its spirit—will be the first that are admitted to this land."21

Page 278: As Talmudic scholar Jacob Neusner observes: "theologically and historically, there is no such thing as the Judeo-Christian tradition. It's a secular myth favored by people who are not really believers themselves.