Quotes About Government

We already have a place where anarchy and liberty are given absolute free rein – it's called the jungle, and right wing Americans are welcome to go there any time they like. It's their spiritual "home", after all: no government tells anyone what to do in the jungle, and everyone is armed to the hilt, ready to fight to the death.

Brazilian government provided him with a thirty-one-square-mile region of rain forest. The land is off-limits to everyone except this man.

Cornelius Fudge

Officer Of The Ministry Of Magic (Omm)

We are witnessing the total collapse of a bad idea. Obamaism, a quasi-socialist commitment to a more powerful government at home and an abdication of American leadership around the world, is being exposed as a historic calamity. It is fueling domestic fear and global disorder and may well lead to a world war.

Many governments see it [disease prevention] as an internal business," said the WHO's director-general. "There is a basic gut feeling that this is my problem, I will deal with it in my way. Now, in a globalized world, any disease is one airplane away. It is not a provincial or national issue, it's a global issue.

Not only does free trade have nothing to do with democracy, but in most cases throughout history the two have been inimical. Free trade prospered only at the expense of democracy and the freedom of the majority.

Take the president of the United States, for example,' he says. 'I'm not talking about George Bush specifically as much as I'm generally talking about the position of president. What an awesome responsibility that must be to lead a country under the most scrutiny.

Private investors traditionally had been obliged to take losses when debtors defaulted, but it became apparent that the U.S. Government was not about to relinquish its creditor hold on the Allies. This intransigence obliged them to keep tightening the screws on Germany.

The neo-rentier objective is threefold: to reduce economies to debt dependency, to transfer public utilities into creditor hands, and then to create a rent-extracting tollbooth economy. The financial objective is to block governments from writing down debts when bankers and bondholders over-lend.

The financial alternative to classical economics calls itself "neoliberalism," but it is the opposite of what the Enlightenment's original liberal reformers called themselves. Land rent has not ended up in government hands, and more and more public services have been privatized to squeeze out monopoly rent. Banks have gained control of government and their central banks to create money only to bail out creditor losses, not to finance public spending.

The aim of predatory lending in much of the world is to obtain labor to work off debts (debt peonage), to foreclose on the land of debtors, and in modern times to force debt-strapped governments to privatize natural resources and public infrastructure.

Cancelling debts was politically easiest when governments or public institutions (temples, palaces or civic authorities) were the major creditors, because they were cancelling debts owed to themselves. This is an argument for why governments should be the main suppliers of money and credit as a public utility.

Today's monopolization of affluence by a rentier class avoiding taxes and public regulation by buying control of government is the same problem that confronted the classical economists. Their struggle to create a fairer economy produced the tools most appropriate to understand how today's economies are polarizing while becoming less productive.

In effect, he ruled that no writedowns are legal. No government's debt can be written down if any holder disagrees, regardless of how voluntarily they may be negotiated or how reasonable they may be.

despite "the ease with which US corporations can walk away from their creditors is breathtaking," no such leeway or adjustment exists when it comes to nations and their governments. The intent is to subordinate government power to Wall Street and London bankers.

Today's mainstream political and economic theories deny a positive role for government policy to constrain the large-scale concentration of wealth.

A false alarm is sounded that government budget deficits will increase consumer prices — with no discussion of how private-sector credit deflates economies. The problem is that credit is debt — and paying debt service to bankers and bondholders (and various grades of loan sharks) leaves less income available to spend on goods and services. So debt deflation is today's major problem, not inflation.

Popular morality blames victims for going into debt – not only individuals, but also national governments. The trick in this ideological war is to convince debtors to imagine that general prosperity depends on paying bankers and making bondholders rich – a veritable Stockholm Syndrome in which debtors identify with their financial captors.

This unique ability of the U.S. Government to borrow from foreign central banks rather than from its own citizens is one of the economic miracles of modern times. Without it the war-induced American prosperity of the 1960s and early 1970s would have ended quickly, as was threatened in 1973 when foreign central banks decided to cut their currencies loose from the dollar, letting them float upward rather than accepting a further flood of U.S. Treasury IOUs.

The euro and the ECB were designed in a way that blocks government money creation for any purpose other than to support the banks and bondholders. Their monetary and fiscal straitjacket obliges the eurozone economies to rely on bank creation of credit and debt. The financial sector takes over the role of economic planner, putting its technicians in charge of monetary and fiscal policy without democratic voice or referendums over debt and tax policies.

Why is it so hard to explain the basis of state authority? The most likely reason is that there is no explanation for political authority, because political authority is a fiction.

Government is an extremely prominent and fundamental feature of the structure of our society. We know that people tend to have a powerful bias in favor of the existing arrangements of their own societies. It therefore stands to reason that, whether or not any government were legitimate, most of us would have a strong tendency to believe that some governments are legitimate, especially our own and others like it.

The only way for government to express the needs and desires of Americans is if Americans speak up and get involved.