9 Quotes by Michael Lind

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

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.

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.

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 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.

Because of our peculiar electoral law, the American government is divided between two parties. The American people are not.

In the course of the twenty-first century what may be called the “capital wage” could be added to the labor wage and the social wage, so that middle-class Americans – not merely an affluent minority – might derive income from three sources rather than just two.

The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.

Libertarianism and communism are equally crazy in opposite ways. Libertarians believe that it is possible to privatize everything without anarchy, while communists believe that it is possible to socialize everything without tyranny.