Plunder and Deceit Quotes

“In Federalist 51, Madison explained the essential balance between the civil society and governmental restraint: “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections of human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”7”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“The national debt—that is, the unfunded liabilities and fiscal operating debt—amounts to tens of trillions of dollars. The Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office, and numerous other public and private institutions have sounded warning alarms about the oncoming crash. But no serious or effective steps have been taken to address this simmering financial and economic implosion.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“Much of the so-called environmental movement today has transmuted into an aggressively nefarious and primitive faction. In the last fifteen years, many of the tenets of utopian statism have coalesced around something called the “degrowth” movement. Originating in Europe but now taking a firm hold in the United States, the “degrowthers,” as I shall characterize them, include in their ranks none other than President Barack Obama. On January 17, 2008, Obama made clear his hostility toward, of all things, electricity generated from coal and coal-powered plants. He told the San Francisco Chronicle, “You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal . . . under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. . . .”3 Obama added, “. . . So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”4 Degrowthers define their agenda as follows: “Sustainable degrowth is a downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet. It calls for a future where societies live within their ecological means, with open localized economies and resources more equally distributed through new forms of democratic institutions.”5 It “is an essential economic strategy to pursue in overdeveloped countries like the United States—for the well-being of the planet, of underdeveloped populations, and yes, even of the sick, stressed, and overweight ‘consumer’ populations of overdeveloped countries.”6 For its proponents and adherents, degrowth has quickly developed into a pseudo-religion and public-policy obsession. In fact, the degrowthers insist their ideology reaches far beyond the environment or even its odium for capitalism and is an all-encompassing lifestyle and governing philosophy. Some of its leading advocates argue that “Degrowth is not just an economic concept. We shall show that it is a frame constituted by a large array of concerns, goals, strategies and actions. As a result, degrowth has now become a confluence point where streams of critical ideas and political action converge.”7 Degrowth is “an interpretative frame for a social movement, understood as the mechanism through which actors engage in a collective action.”8 The degrowthers seek to eliminate carbon sources of energy and redistribute wealth according to terms they consider equitable. They reject the traditional economic reality that acknowledges growth as improving living conditions generally but especially for the impoverished. They embrace the notions of “less competition, large scale redistribution, sharing and reduction of excessive incomes and wealth.”9 Degrowthers want to engage in polices that will set “a maximum income, or maximum wealth, to weaken envy as a motor of consumerism, and opening borders (“no-border”) to reduce means to keep inequality between rich and poor countries.”10 And they demand reparations by supporting a “concept of ecological debt, or the demand that the Global North pays for past and present colonial exploitation in the Global South.”11”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“CAN WE SIMULTANEOUSLY LOVE our children but betray their generation and generations yet born?”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“I begin this chapter with President Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Speech on January 11, 1989. President Reagan encouraged the rising generation to “let ’em know and nail ’em on it”—that is, to push back against teachers, professors, journalists, politicians, and others in the governing generation who manipulate and deceive them: An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties. But now, we’re about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs [protection]. So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important—why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, 4 years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who’d fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, “We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.” Well, let’s help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual. And let me offer lesson number one about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen, I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven’t been teaching you what it means to be an American, let ’em know and nail ’em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.1”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing in The Communist Manifesto, declared: “In bourgeois society . . . the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past.”13 This view is shared by contemporary statists, including the current occupants of the White House. On May 14, 2008, the future First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, while campaigning for her husband, Barack Obama, proclaimed: “We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history. We’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.”14 On October 30, 2008, when the polls showed him the likely winner of the upcoming presidential election, Barack Obama shouted during a campaign stop days before the vote: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”15”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“Individual sovereignty—that is, the unalienable individual rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—is denounced as a quaint and outdated notion of a bygone era, as are the traditions, customs, and institutions that have developed over time and through generational experience. They must give way to notions of modernity and progressivism, hatched by self-anointed and deluded masterminds who claim to act for “the greater good” and “the public interest,” requiring the endless reshuffling and rearranging of society.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“A healthy civil society and vibrant republic ultimately cannot survive without a properly functioning constitutional system.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“Sum and Khatiwada found that youth employment is linked to lower rates of teen pregnancy and reductions in crime, particularly among young men. Simply put, “high rates of idleness among men reduce their work experience and their future earnings potential, thus making criminal activity more attractive.”45”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“In his farewell address to the nation after serving two terms as president, George Washington urged his fellow citizens to “avoid . . . the accumulation of debt not only by shunning occasions of expense but by vigorous exertions to discharge the debts, not throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“We’ve become an immoral people demanding that Congress forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another. Deficits and runaway national debt are merely symptoms of that real problem.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“The federal government makes, executes, and adjudicates the laws. It even determines the extent to which it will comply with the Constitution, which was established in the first place to prevent governmental arrogation.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“Ultimately this is not merely about dreary yet didactic statistics but, as Dr. Williams insisted, it is about morality. The devastating consequences of wealth redistribution, intergenerational thievery, massive federal spending, endless borrowing, and unimaginable debt accumulation on American society, and most particularly on the ruling generation and future generations, are a travesty. Stealing from the future does not establish the utopia promised by the statists. It is the rising generation’s grave moral failure.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“Social Security and Medicare were sold to the public as insurance programs. They are not. As such, they now rely mostly on the “contributions” of younger workers and massive federal borrowing to subsidize them. Despite repeated and dire warnings about their unsustainable fiscal condition from the trustees appointed to oversee them, younger workers are compelled to continue to pay into these programs, from which they are unlikely to benefit upon their retirement and for which future generations will bear the brunt of their eventual collapse.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“Obama has repeatedly defied the limits of his constitutional authority, aggregating powers unto himself in ways past presidents have not. During more than six years as president, Obama has nullified laws, created laws, delayed the implementation of laws, and issued exemptions from and waivers to laws, much of which has been accomplished through executive branch rule making.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“Even now, with the expectation that a substantial percentage of newly naturalized aliens would vote for the Democratic Party’s 2016 nominee for president, the Department of Homeland Security’s Task Force on New Americans is reportedly focusing resources on urging 9 million green card holders (aliens and noncitizens) to become naturalized American citizens as quickly as possible, in hopes of influencing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.65”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“Incredibly, while native-born citizens accounted for 66 percent of the total population growth from 2000 to 2014, immigrants have accounted for 100 percent of employment growth.50 Therefore, the working-age population in America is growing faster than jobs are being created, and the increasing supply of immigrants makes”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“Consequently, while in the main and abstractly the rising generation may be distrustful of authority and people, younger people are also especially susceptible to seduction by demagogic politicians, propagandizing academics, charismatic cultural idols, and other authority and popular figures propounding splendid notions of aggressive government activism for and through such corresponding militant causes as “social justice,” “environmental justice,” “income equality,” and other corollaries of radical egalitarianism.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“Dr. Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University, notes that “There was a time when the purpose of taxes was to pay the inevitable costs of government. To the political left, however, taxes have long been seen as a way to redistribute income and finance other social experiments based on liberal ideology.”3 The consequences for the rising generation and future generations of the statists’ immoral, politically expedient, and economically ruinous behavior and policies are unambiguous as evidenced by statistic after statistic, which are mainly ignored, discounted, or excused by most of the media, academia, and, of course, governing statists. Nonetheless, there is no mistaking the eventual societal turmoil these facts and figures portend—evidence all Americans, and especially younger people, must heed.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“Ethnic pandering may improve the political lot of statist politicians looking for electoral advantage, it may serve the interests of self-appointed leaders of ethnic groups promoting balkanization and demographic advantage, and it may help incompetent foreign governments that prefer exporting their next generation to the United States rather than reforming their regimes and economic systems, but it certainly is not pursued in the best interests of America’s children and future generations, whose well-being is rarely considered in the making of these decisions.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“Consequently, statists relentlessly attack and manipulate the system with endless top-down interventions in human behavior, deceptive and outright false promises tied to government programs and entitlements, and coercive if not oppressive governmental actions, all intended to reshape not only society but the individual.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“As the nation has learned time and again, it is American military preparedness and superiority, in combination with a proactive and prudent foreign policy, that are likely to serve as a deterrent to military conflict and prevent large-scale, long-lasting wars. Should war occur—and at times war is unavoidable—the United States must ensure that its young service personnel are the best trained and equipped on the face of the earth.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“Consider some basic economic truths. If the government mandates that workers who are earning $7.25 must, overnight, be paid $10.10 an hour (or even $15.00 per hour) those new dollars must originate from some source. For example, if a fast-food restaurant that employs twenty individuals is required to pay some or all of them close to 30 percent more per hour, it must account for those dollars somewhere. The restaurant can try to sell more food, it can increase the cost of food, it can cut the hours of its employees, it can hire fewer workers, or it can lay off those currently employed.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“Dr. Milton Friedman, who was sympathetic to open-ended immigration, was also intellectually honest about its impracticability given the federal government’s massive welfare and entitlement programs. As he explained: “[I]t is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promised a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“Of course, many have benefited from Social Security over the decades, especially the elderly. But the overall structure, which as Roosevelt insisted at the outset, put politics before economics, was and is, in the end, economically and fiscally irrational and irresponsible.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“The devastating consequences of wealth redistribution, intergenerational thievery, massive federal spending, endless borrowing, and unimaginable debt accumulation on American society, and most particularly on the ruling generation and future generations, are a travesty. Stealing from the future does not establish the utopia promised by the statists. It is the rising generation’s grave moral failure.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“By cultivating agitation and balkanization almost nothing about the civil society is said to be true, right, or lasting and, therefore, worth preserving and perpetuating. Instead, much uproar is generated in the quest for utopian abstractions and societal transformation—the fundamental cause around which younger people have been encouraged and trained to rally, to their detriment and the jeopardy of subsequent generations, and to the benefit of the statist.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“However, the erosion of individual sovereignty, free will, and self-sufficiency necessarily give way to dependence, conformity, and finally tyranny.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“Still, it is argued that millions of people benefit from such programs. Of course, trillions of dollars in government expenditures over many years most assuredly benefit the recipients of subsidies or other related payments. But this does not change the arithmetic. The eventual collapse of a colossal government venture will indiscriminately engulf an entire society and economy, including its millions of beneficiaries and benefactors, resulting in widespread disorder and misery.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

“Many in the ruling generation have themselves become entrapped in economically unsustainable governmental schemes in which they are beneficiaries of and reliant on public programs, such as unfunded entitlements, to which they have contributed significantly into supposed “trust funds” and around which they have organized their retirement years. They also find self-deluding solace in the politically expedient and deceitful representations by the ruling class, which dismisses evidence of its own diversion and depletion of trust funds and its overall maladministration as the invention of doomsayers and scaremongers.”
― Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future