Everyone but an economist knows without asking why money shouldn’t buy some things.

Arthur Okun, (cited in in the New York Review)

THE MASS of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, gaolers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.

Others—as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders—serve the State chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God.

A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

Henry David Thoreau, The Duty of Civil Disobedience

“Debt, the private money that has fueled capitalism since its inception, is coded in law and ultimately relies on the state to back it up,” by way of the courts under normal circumstances and through bailouts if a debtor is too big to fail:  The history of debt finance can therefore be retold as a story about how claims to future pay have been coded in law to ensure their convertibility into state money on demand, without suffering serious loss…. By dressing private debt in the modules of the legal code of capital, it is possible to mask the liquidity risk for a while, but not forever. Whenever investors realize that, contrary to their expectations, they may not be able to convert their debt assets into cash, they head for the exit; and if many do so simultaneously, this will precipitate a financial crisis.

Adam Tooze (quoting Katharina Pistor), "How ‘Big Law’ Makes Big Money," NYRB Feb. 13, 2020

Authority is not given in favor of the magistrate, but of the people.

Montaigne

Content yourself ... to swim in troubled waters without fishing in them.

Montaigne

He strikes at all who fears all.

Emperor Claudius, as quoted by Montaigne

Narrative is a lie... it sustains its power from a quite illogical juxtaposition of events, and perceived chain of causality- it is simply seditious, and cannot be trusted!

Chris Deliso, in the yet unpublished Third Emperor of California

...You have to remember that there are seven and a half billion people on earth and only about fifteen hundred or so of them are billionaires.  There's a kind of penumbra of rich people—another few hundred thousand—and a twilight zone of merely affluent people whose standard of living and location is basically the extent of their wealth, a kind of geopolitical fortune rather than a bankable one, and then basically everyone else is as poor as hell.

Nick Harkaway, Gnomon

I'm a fugitive from injustice
But I'm goin' to be free...

What About Me? Quicksilver Messenger Service

Let us boldly appeal to those who are in public affairs; let them lay their hands upon their hearts, and then say whether, on the contrary, they do not rather aspire to titles and offices and that tumult of the world to make their private advantage at the public expense. The corrupt ways by which in this our time they arrive at the height to which their ambitions aspire, manifestly enough declares that their ends cannot be very good. 

Michel de Montaigne