Quotes About Government

Many Americans nowadays maintain that their government has a moral imperative to bring Third World countries the benefits of democracy and human rights, even if these goods are delivered by cruise missiles and F-16s.

The only sure way to stop global warming is to stop economic growth, which no government is willing to do.

Thomas Jefferson no hizo al Estado responsable de la felicidad de sus ciudadanos. En cambio, solo buscó limitar el poder del Estado. La idea era reservar para los individuos una esfera privada de elección, libre de la supervisión estatal.

governments could subsidize universal basic services rather than income.

When you live under such an oligarchy, there is always some crisis or other that takes priority over boring stuff like healthcare and pollution.

In the early twenty-first century, politics is consequently bereft of grand visions. Government has become mere administration. It manages the country, but it no longer leads it.

As everyone from ancient times till today knows, clerks and accountants think in a non-human fashion. They think like filing cabinets. This is not their fault. If they don't think that way their drawers will all get mixed up and they won't be able to provide the services their government, company or organisation requires.

In Singapore, as befits that no-nonsense city state, they followed this line of thinking even further, and pegged ministerial salaries to the national GDP. When the Singaporean economy grows, ministers get a raise, as if that is what their job is all about.

Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form or humans will come to live in "digital dictatorships.

The NSA may be spying on our every word, but to judge by the repeated failures of American foreign policy, nobody in Washington knows what to do with all the data. Never in history did a government know so much about what's going on in the world – yet few empires have botched things up as clumsily as the contemporary United States. It's like a poker player who knows what cards his opponents hold, yet somehow still manages to lose round after round.

By the early 1990s, thinkers and politicians alike hailed "the End of History," confidently asserting that all the big political and economic questions of the past had been settled and that the refurbished liberal package of democracy, human rights, free markets, and government welfare services remained the only game in town.

If, however, you want to retain some control of your personal existence and of the future of life, you have to run faster than the algorithms, faster than Amazon and the government, and get to know yourself before they do. To run fast, don't take much luggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy.

In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data processing.

Incluso Estados Unidos, ultracapitalista, se ha dado cuenta de que la protección de la libertad requiere al menos algunos servicios de bienestar facilitados por el gobierno. Los niños hambrientos no tienen libertades.

Sin embargo, en las últimas décadas, la situación se ha invertido, y la visión de Bentham se ha tomado mucho más en serio. Cada vez más gente cree que los inmensos sistemas establecidos hace más de un siglo para fortalecer la nación deberían en verdad estar al servicio de la felicidad y el bienestar de los ciudadanos. No estamos aquí para servir al Estado: él está aquí para servirnos.

Without government planning, economic resources and scientific research, individuals will not get far in their quest for happiness.

Never in history did a government know so much about what's going on in the world – yet few empires have botched things up as clumsily as the contemporary United States. It's like a poker player who knows what cards his opponents hold, yet somehow still manages to lose round after round.

No one was lying when, in 2011, the UN demanded that the Libyan government respect the human rights of its citizens, even though the UN, Libya and human rights are all figments of our fertile imaginations. Ever

Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst political system in the world, except for all the others.

Heavy taxation means that a large part of all available capital accumulated in one place – the state coffers – and consequently more and more decisions have to be made by a single processor, namely the government.

Finally, in 1880, the British government took the unprecedented step of legislating that all timetables in Britain must follow Greenwich. For the first time in history, a country adopted a national time and obliged its population to live according to an artificial clock rather than local ones or sunrise-to-sunset cycles.

Cuando los gobiernos y los negocios capitalistas consideran la posibilidad de invertir en un proyecto científico concreto, la primera pregunta suele ser: «¿Nos permitirá este proyecto aumentar la producción y los beneficios? ¿Producirá crecimiento económico?». Un proyecto que no pueda salvar estos obstáculos tiene pocas probabilidades de encontrar un patrocinador.

The collapse of the family and the local community and their replacement by the state and the market.

In the late 1830s the Chinese government issued a ban on drug trafficking, but British drug merchants simply ignored the law. Chinese authorities began to confiscate and destroy drug cargos. The drug cartels had close connections in Westminster and Downing Street – many MPs and Cabinet ministers in fact held stock in the drug companies – so they pressured the government to take action. In 1840 Britain duly declared war on China in the name of 'free trade'.