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L. K. Samuels

169 quotes

“To accept the legitimacy of the state is to embrace the necessity for war.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Iraq and the Roots of War," California Freedom (June 2007).
“The more complexity, the more unpredictability and therefore the more uncontrollability. You cannot control what you cannot predict.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at the Libertopia Festival, San Diego, CA (August 30, 2013)
“Without chaos there would be no creation, no structure and no existence. After all, order is merely the repetition of patterns; chaos is the process that establishes those patterns. Without this creative self-organizing force, the universe would be devoid of biological life, the birth of stars and galaxies—everything we have come to know.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chaos Gets a Bad Rap: Importance of Chaology to Liberty", Strike-The-Root (Feb. 18, 2015)
“The problem of complexity is at the heart of mankind’s inability to predict future events with any accuracy. Complexity science has demonstrated that the more factors found within a complex system, the more chances of unpredictable behavior. And without predictability, any meaningful control is nearly impossible. Obviously, this means that you cannot control what you cannot predict. The ability ever to predict long-term events is a pipedream. Mankind has little to do with changing climate; complexity does.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Real Science Behind Changing Climate", LewRockwell.com, August 1, 2014.
“Why do the Progressive Big Media, Democrats, elites, and Democratic Socialists feel duty-bound to create false realities? Why must they silence, obstruct or distort any truthful voice before it can ever be heard? And why do they rush to judgement before the facts can be sorted out? The answer is rather simple; socialists and collectivists have no other choice. By hard experience, they learned over 100 years ago that their ideology was devoid of facts and reality. They had to sacrifice truth in order to hide the inevitable failures of socialism.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: No Truth in Socialism: Why the ‘Crisis of Marxism’ Matters” American Thinker (Aug. 7, 2021)
“In reality, there is no truth in socialism, because it has never worked. Still smarting from the hard lessons of history, today's Marxist socialists have learned to swiftly bury truth and any truth-seekers, before they can become entombed themselves.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: No Truth in Socialism: Why the ‘Crisis of Marxism’ Matters” American Thinker (Aug. 7, 2021)
“Freedom does not guarantee wealth or success; it guarantees only the individual’s right to pursue them. Despite political promises of personal security from hunger and poverty, government cannot lessen the plight of the poor. Rather, the welfare state prolongs poverty and nurtures people’s dependence on handouts. This is no accident. There is no better way to control members of society than to make them insecure and eager to accept any type of legislation in exchange for a so-called free lunch.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Libertarians say: what about individual rights? The question boils down to this: how many robbers must there be before robbery is no longer a crime? How many rapists must there be before it is no longer rape? We all know logic. A crime is a crime, no matter how many people are involved. If the majority of a town goes out and lynches someone, it is still murder. Majority rule often leads to mob rule, which tramples on individual rights and self–ownership.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Governments are terrorists, but they hide their actions behind the label of nationalism and patriotism: war becomes defense; theft becomes “taxation”; slavery becomes 'conscription'; terrorism becomes 'defense.' Few people question the violations; rather, if they do protest, it is because the government is oppressing the 'wrong' group of people, and not because they regard coercion itself as wrong.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? How do you keep a wave upon the sand?' These words from The Sound of Music bring out the elusive nature of chaos. In life, most things cannot be captured for long. It is like trying to encapsulate time itself.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Order is not universal. In fact, many chaologists and physicists posit that universal laws are more flexible than first realized, and less rigid—operating in spurts, jumps, and leaps, instead of like clockwork. Chaos prevails over rules and systems because it has the freedom of infinite complexity over the known, unknown, and the unknowable.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The field of economics is not exempt from the consequences of chaos and complexity. Marketplaces are indeterminate; value is subjective; and outcomes are subject to interpretation. Economic forecasting is just as nebulous, being based on the probability of statistical information that may or may not be accurate.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because information is often biased, outdated, or inadequate, command-based systems rely on obtuse information to produce blunt solutions. Wielding force like drunken revelers, political systems gamble on the singularity of direction to fix a multiplicity of problems, woefully ignorant that one size does not fit all. Blinded by political ideologies, they rarely act to solve underlying problems. Karl Hess (1923-1994), a former presidential speech writer, noted this condition, observing, ‘Politicians occasionally do the right thing—but only after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.’”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Complexity has the propensity to overload systems, making the relevance of a particular piece of information not statistically significant. And when an array of mind-numbing factors is added into the equation, theory and models rarely conform to reality.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In sharp contrast to the modus operandi of swarm dynamics, political bodies are ill-equipped to protect the integrity of their components and lack the collective wisdom for synchronization. Instead, highly layered command-based systems invade, institutionalize, and indoctrinate society with centralized directives, straitjacket bureaucracies, and self-serving officialdom. These systems hungrily feast on what others have created, cannibalizing other people’s resources like a tribe of pragmatic headhunters.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Under complexity science, the more interacting factors, the more unpredictable and irregular the outcome. To be succinct, the greater the complexity, the greater the unpredictability.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What can go wrong will go wrong, because political objectives are so narrowly defined. Without a great breadth of elasticity, a system has countless ways in which to crash and burn, since only one pathway has been designated, by legislated or dictated law, as the correct flight plan. It takes no great statistician to figure out the low probability of an errant political objective landing successfully in one precise landing spot. With so many possible routes in which to fail, government programs seem to boomerang every which way.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Despite the absence of physical equality in nature, political systems engage in grand endeavors to dictate perfection and equality in a universe devoid of both. In their egalitarian and quixotic quest to redistribute wealth, they rob Peter to pay Paul, which only creates a state of dependency, not of equality. Any attempt to impose equality can only bring about more inequality. Rev. William J. H. Boetcker expressed this same insight in 1916, writing, 'You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.'”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Various sociopolitical movements are oriented to the nostrums of ‘social justice,’ favoring entitlements for all those with economic disparity. They struggle for what is scientifically impossible: equality of outcome. They want everyone to end up with the same amount of wealth—billions of people all possessing the same numerical affluence.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To the political elite, statecraft is predicated on the notion that society is theirs to put into some type of hegemonic order. It is immaterial whether this institutionalized order actually helps society or instead puts it into a chokehold that slowly squeezes the air out of life. To the authorities, supremacy is always the primary objective.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every system that has existed emerged somehow, from somewhere, at some point. Complexity science emphasizes the study of how systems evolve through their disorganized parts into an organized whole.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Complexity has always been difficult to resolve and to understand. Evolutionary biologists were among the first scientists to recognize this problem, when they dug their way toward new theories about evolution. They discovered that matter does not lack purpose.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Disorder is more exacting, arising when coercion is substituted for coordination—preventing members in a system from determining their own destiny. History is littered with examples of excluded parts rising up to confront those exclusive few who claim they are representing the whole.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Chaos provides order. Chaotic agitation and motion are needed to create overall, repetitive order. This ‘order through fluctuations’ keeps dynamic markets stable and evolutionary processes robust. In essence, chaos is a phase transition that gives spontaneous energy the means to achieve repetitive and structural order.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When it comes right down to physical war and bloodshed, governments don’t protect people; people protect governments.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If an emerging system is born complex, there is neither leeway to abandon it when it fails, nor the means to join another, successful one. Such a system would be caught in an immovable grip, congested at the top, and prevented, by a set of confusing but locked–in precepts, from changing.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Simplicity in a system tends to increase that system’s efficiency. Because less can go wrong with fewer parts, less will. Complexity in a system tends to increase that system’s inefficiency; the greater the number of variables, the greater the probability of those variables clashing, and in turn, the greater the potential for conflict and disarray. Because more can go wrong, more will. That is why centralized systems are inclined to break down quickly and become enmeshed in greater unintended consequences.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Decentralized systems are the quintessential patrons of simplicity. They allow complexity to rise to a level at which it is sustainable, and no higher.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A self–organizing system acts autonomously, as if the interconnecting components had a single mind. And as these components spontaneously march to the beat of their own drummer, they organize, adapt, and evolve toward a greater complexity than one would ever expect by just looking at the parts by themselves.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Complexity scientists concluded that there are just too many factors—both concordant and contrarian—to understand. And with so many potential gaps in information, almost nobody can see the whole picture. Complex systems have severe limits, not only to predictability but also to measurability. Some complexity theorists argue that modelling, while useful for thinking and for studying the complexities of the world, is a particularly poor tool for predicting what will happen.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The inherent nature of complexity is to doubt certainty and any pretense to finite and flawless data. Put another way, under uncertainty principles, any attempt by political systems to ‘impose order’ has an equal chance to instead ‘impose disorder.’”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Government succeeds by failing: the more incompetence, the greater the potential reward in the arena of the public sector.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Without precise predictability, control is impotent and almost meaningless. In other words, the lesser the predictability, the harder the entity or system is to control, and vice versa. If our universe actually operated on linear causality, with no surprises, uncertainty, or abrupt changes, all future events would be absolutely predictable in a sort of waveless orderliness.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Money and generous benefits can easily alter a person’s political outlook. Ideology follows the money.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The parity pushers fail to see the subtle grays of complexity in all of its tortured and messy manifestations. With swords held high, they ride forth and exploit every possible weapon in the political arsenal. Equality is to be imposed, unevenness and nonlinearity banished to the nether world. Science is politicalized for mass consumption, and natural laws are summarily supplanted by ideological 'correctness.'”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Paradoxes often arise because theory routinely refuses to be subordinate to reality.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Things evolve to evolve. Evolutionary processes are the linchpin of change. These processes of discovery represent a complexity of simple systems that flux in perpetual tension as they teeter at the edge of chaos. This whirlwind of emergence is responsible for the spontaneous order and higher, organized complexity so noticeable in biological evolution—one–celled critters beefing up to become multicellular organisms.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The hallmark of evolution is its ability to process situations and generate order without relying on the crutch of a conscious designer. Most complex systems grow organically, solutions evolving through unguided and mindless forces, never reaching any final state.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“True change is evolutionary, not revolutionary. It is futile for political systems to force human beings to cooperate or construct social bonding structures. People already do that, naturally; it is evident in our evolutionary history.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Game theory brings to the chaos–theory table the idea that generally, societies are not designed, and that most situations don’t come with a rulebook. Instead, people have their own plans and designs on how things should fit together. They want to determine how the game is played, and they see societal designers as myopic busybodies who would imprison them with their theories.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The economics of Italian Fascism is often ignored or trivialized because so much of it is found in today’s world economies.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On numerous occasions, Benito Mussolini identified his economic policies with “state capitalism”—the exact phrase that Vladimir Lenin used to usher in his New Economic Policy (NEP).”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In essence, Mussolini’s fascism was simply an imitation of Lenin’s “third way,” which combined market-based mechanisms and socialism—similar to Red China’s “market socialism.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One could argue that Lenin’s politics were the first modern-day version of fascism and state-corporatism.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Socialism seeks to abolish capitalism outright, while fascism gives the appearance of a market-based economy, even though it relies heavily on the central planning of all economic activities.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mussolini found much of John Maynard Keynes’s economic theories consistent with fascism.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Italian Fascist theories of corporatism arose out of revolutionary and national syndicalism that often paralleled the activities of the trade unions, craft guilds and professional societies. Mussolini acknowledged Fascism’s socialist roots and influences. Among those whom he acknowledged as influencing Fascism were French Marxist Georges Sorel and French Revolutionary Unionist Hubert Lagardelle. Moreover, Mussolini was a union man: he decreed mandatory unionism for all Italian workers. It is true that Mussolini banned strikes, but Lenin had done the same in the Soviet Union.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mussolini doubled the number of Italian bureaucrats under an enormous bureaucracy of committees. By 1934, one Italian in five worked for the government.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In essence, the economics of Italian Fascism was Marxist and syndicalist-inspired—and far more left-wing socialist than the economies of many current western nations that embrace a mixed economy of socialism, welfarism and unionism.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“International socialists found it advantageous to hide both Mussolini’s and Hitler’s socialist, labor unionist, Marxist, and atheist pasts. One reason was that Hitler and Mussolini were independent of Moscow’s direct control, and they had the audacity to oppose the Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War. To pay for their insolence, the Soviets and their minions felt compelled to whitewash the collectivist-socialist ideology and history behind nationalistic socialism, determined to bury Hitler and Mussolini under a falsely inscribed tombstone.”
L. K. Samuels (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source