Quotes from F.H. Buckley

It's time to ask why [the United States] is the only country in the world where we permit our children to be saddled with tens — sometimes hundreds — of thousands of dollars of debt before they begin to earn a penny.

Anton Chekhov said that, when the audience sees a loaded pistol on the wall in act 1, it must go off by act 3.

What corruption is for poor countries, lobbying is for rich ones, a means of obtaining political influence through the expense of money.9 No other country has anything like the number of American lobbyists who load up legislation with interest group bargains.

there is little reason to think that interest group pressure is invariably benign, where a concentrated rich group (e.g., an industry association) competes against a dispersed and poorly organized group (e.g., consumers).

According to Fuller, laws should be (1) general, (2) publicly promulgated, (3) prospective (i.e., not retroactive), (4) clear, (5) consistent (i.e., not contain any contradictions), (6) practicable (i.e., not demand the impossible), (7) constant over time, and (8) congruent with the actions of officials. If we accept that list as defining the rule of law, America's departures from it will be apparent to readers of this book.

Fuller's procedural categories provide an inadequate definition of the rule of law. A legal regime might offer generality, publicity, clarity, consistency, constancy over time, and congruency with regulators, and still be a legal system from Hell. It might weaken property rights and impose civil liability on the flimsiest of grounds, all the while conforming to Fuller's idea of law.

It would also be helpful if (magically) we knew how many of a country's lawyers were active in the practice of law, and how many of them were transactional lawyers. Finally, we would want to know whether lawyer-legislators are on average more likely to support legislation that promotes litigation.

Lincoln is properly remembered as a champion of democracy, but there was a good bit of Otto von Bismarck in him as well.