—Christopher I. Thoma

In centrally planned economies, we have seen the planners overwhelmed by the task of trying to set literally millions of prices and keep changing those prices in response to innumerable and often unforeseeable changes in circumstances. It was not remarkable that they failed so often. What was remarkable was that anyone had expected them to succeed, given the vast amount of knowledge that would have had to be marshalled and mastered in one place by one set of people to make such an arrangement work. Lenin was only one of many theorists over the centuries who imagined that it would be easy for government officials to run economic activities—and the first to encounter directly the economic and social catastrophes to which that belief led, as he himself admitted.

—Thomas Sowell
Basic Economics, 4th ed. (2011)

—Jason Peters
“Tone Deaf Experts in the Hour of Grift,” Front Porch Republic.com (August 10, 2022)

—A Priest character
in The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos (1937), translated by Pamela Morris

Laws against hate speech protect and fortify the ideological worldview of those who enforce them—and here I don’t mean cops, but the politicians, the law profs, the prosecutors, the judges, and (most importantly) the media elites who beam the spotlight of their antagonism on some group they find noxious while giving others a pass. What makes hate speech a crime is not what the perp actually does or intends to do, but what the victim claims to feel—and de facto, only certain groups are accredited as victim groups. . . . For Christians, hate speech laws are a lose-lose proposition. We have excellent reasons to doubt the elites will accord us victim status, and excellent reasons to believe the same elites will find crimes in our ordinary evangelical discourse.

—Paul Mankowski, S.J.
Diogenes Unveiled, ed. P. Lawler (Ignatius, 2022)

—Psmith
Chapter 32 of Mike by P. G. Wodehouse

Plato says in a well-known passage in his Republic that something good can result only if those men come into positions of rule who have no liking for it. His meaning doubtless is, that ability being assumed, unwillingness to rule is a good guarantee that a man will rule truly and ably, whereas an ambitious man may only too easily become one who abuses his power to tyrannize, or one whom a liking for rule brings into an obscure dependence upon those whom he is supposed to rule, so that his rule becomes an illusion.

This remark may also be applied to other situations where something really serious has to be done. Ability being assumed, it is best that the person in question should have no liking for the task. For doubtless it is true, as the proverb says, that liking makes the work go swiftly, but real seriousness only appears when a man with ability is compelled by a higher power against his liking to undertake the work—so it stands with ability opposed to liking.

—S. Kierkegaard
The Instant, No. 1, Part 1 (May 24, 1855)

—1 Timothy 3:1

—Traditional profession
made upon election to the office

—St. John Chrysostom