Quotes About Government

Statist, liberty is not a blessing but the enemy. It is not possible to achieve Utopia if individuals are free to go their own way.

Not only is federal spending out of control, it is also inefficient and poorly monitored. A recent report issued by the comptroller general of the United States, Gene Dodaro, disclosed that duplicative or overlapping federal spending programs exist in 132 areas, from teacher training to job training.40 Dodaro also found that improper payments by eighteen different federal departments in 2012 cost the federal government a whopping $107 billion.41

In fact, so bad is the federal government's management of its massive resources that the General Accountability Office (GAO) found the accuracy of most of its financial reporting suspect.

The large amount of debt could also compromise national security by constraining defense spending in times of international crisis or by limiting the country's ability to prepare for such a crisis."14

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

Of course, the primary difference between the counterrevolution and the American Revolution is that the former seeks to destroy American society and impose autocratic rule, and the latter sought to protect American society and institute representative government.

In its latest audit of the federal government, the GAO concluded there are significant and material weaknesses in the accounting performed at all levels of the federal government.

These days, the law is frequently used by the statists against the individual—to exploit his labor and expropriate his property, to repress his free will and compel his conformity. Rather than securing liberty and ensuring justice through the Constitution's prescriptions and proscriptions, the statists' perversion of law has become the government's most potent weapon against its original purpose.

Thwarting the steadily growing tyranny of an illimitable federal government by re-establishing constitutional government is of paramount importance if future generations are to live and prosper in a free and open society.

THE LARGEST SINGLE COMPONENT of the federal budget, and perhaps the greatest and most financially devastating burden imposed on younger people and future generations, is the Social Security program. This is not a recent development. Since 1993, it has outspent defense appropriations. As a percentage of federal spending, Social Security's expenditures have ranged from 0.22 percent during World War II to 24 percent in 2013.1 And Social Security costs are actually skyrocketing.

Moreover, the bureaucracy will be of the noblest and most virtuous sort, with no personal, political, or ideological agenda, motivated solely and completely by its technical know-how in and public-spiritedness for the general good and welfare.

There is also no doubt that major market-oriented reforms and overhauls are required immediately to address unsustainable federal health-care entitlements and avoid the devastating economic and societal consequences awaiting younger people and future generations from decades of extravagance, political manipulation, and rampant bureaucratic intervention in the private health-care system.

But rather than disentangle from the federal Leviathan, the recent imposition of Obamacare demonstrates that ideology trumps rationality and the statists' impulse for even more coercive and disastrous designs are never quenched.

buried deep in its 2016 budget proposal, the Obama administration revealed . . . that its student loan program had a $21.8 billion shortfall last year, apparently the largest ever recorded for any government credit program.

The Democratic Party seeks to empower itself by breaching constitutional firewalls; skirting if not eradicating rules, traditions, and customs; adopting Marx's language of class warfare; and aligning with certain avowedly Marxist groups and ideological causes, among other things. Moreover, it is using the instrumentalities of the government for its political empowerment and purposes.

Although they self-identify as political independents, Pew Research reports that the rising generation "vot[es] heavily Democratic and for liberal views on many political and social issues," including "a belief in an activist government.

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

In plain English, the immense investment of tax dollars in a vast government-run educational infrastructure is buying young people a poor education. The data demonstrate there is no overall correlation between the dramatic spending increases in public education during the last several decades and academic achievement.

Indeed, under the guise of the coronavirus pandemic, the Democratic Party has widely expanded the scope and reach of the welfare state, not only doling out trillions of dollars to shore up its political and ideological base, but also ensnaring an ever-larger pool of individuals to government subsidies and transfer payments. The educational transformation has led, in many ways, to the societal transformation intended by the early progressive intellectuals.

The time is urgent for the ruling generation and the rising generation—that is, parents and their progeny—to step up in defense of their joint interests and in opposition to their common foe—a government unmoored from its constitutional beginnings and spinning out of control.

The banishment of the Constitution and republicanism, like the disembowelment of the Declaration of Independence and individualism, has been scrupulous. There is now a vast gulf between the government the progressives have constructed and the framers' Constitution.

The government should not force a way upon the people against their will, for to do so is tyranny by legislation. "There are two sorts of tyranny: a real one, which consists in the violence of the government, and one of opinion, which is felt when those who govern establish things that run counter to a nation's way of thinking" (3, 19, 3). •

It is essential, therefore, that in republican government, representatives avoid efforts intended to change the general spirit of the nation—that is, the legislator must help preserve and protect society, not eradicate it.

In the 2014 tax year, the top 20 percent of earners paid 84 percent of individual federal income taxes. Indeed, the top 1 percent of earners paid nearly half of the federal income tax. The bottom 40 percent of earners paid no federal income taxes. Even more, they receive federal government subsidies, including the Earned Income Tax Credit, amounting to tens of billions of dollars.