Quotes About Government

He now subjected the Articles of Confederation to a searching critique. He thought the sovereignty of the states only enfeebled the union.

Imagining that the companies would be quite lucrative, Washington had no qualms about businessmen booking large profits as long as their work served the public weal and provided a model for future government action.

Right before Adams left office, Congress had enacted the Judiciary Act, which created new courts and twenty-three new federal judgeships so as to spare Supreme Court justices the onerous task of riding the circuit.

42 The government was obviously withdrawing its support.

No less ideologically hostile to government than his father, Jack saw the need to mute his public anger.

In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fickleness, and folly."15 Increasingly Hamilton despaired of pure democracy, of politicians simply catering to the popular will, and favored educated leaders who would enlighten

While marking time in Princeton in July, Hamilton drafted a resolution that again called for a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. This prescient document encapsulated many features of the 1787 Constitution: a federal government with powers separated among legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and a Congress with the power to levy taxes and raise an army.

The constant session of Congress cannot be necessary in times of peace," said Thomas Jefferson, who wanted to replace it with a committee.64 Slowly but inexorably, the future battle lines were being drawn between those who wanted an energetic central government and those who wanted rights to revert to the states.

Whatever Hoar's injury, he departed in gentlemanly fashion, sending Grant a gracious farewell note. In private, however, he broadcast his anger and "wished the government might be destroyed.

1791, the U.S. government granted patents for Parkinson's flax mill, even though he had admitted that they were "improvements upon the mill or machinery . . . in Great Britain."32 Clearly, the U.S. government condoned something that, in modern phraseology, could be termed industrial espionage. Building upon this precedent, Hamilton put the full authority of the Treasury behind the piracy of British trade secrets.

And didn't the new Constitution, by fostering a dominant central government, imitate the British model against which the colonists had rebelled?

Meanwhile, the secretive Senate met upstairs in a chamber without a spectator section. For the first five years, senators conducted their business behind closed doors.

Jefferson inwardly reviled Hamilton as a traitor to republican government. "What a fatal stroke at the cause of liberty; et tu Brute," he wrote in his diary.

Hamilton's achievements were never matched because he was present at the government's inception, when he could draw freely on a blank slate. If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.

The residence law that passed Congress in July 1790, establishing Philadelphia as the interim capital, dictated that all government offices relocate there by early December.

When it suited his convenience, Jefferson set aside his small-government credo with compunction.

On March 4, 1793, George Washington was sworn in for his second term as president

Many countries that Grant visited levied onerous taxes on their subjects to service massive debt and maintain standing armies, giving him a fresh appreciation of republican government in America. "The fact is we are the most progressive, freest and richest people on earth, but don't know it or appreciate it. Foreigners see this much plainer than we do.

The next incendiary issue was that some debt was owed by the thirteen states, some by the federal government. Hamilton decided to consolidate all the debt into a single form: federal debt.

It also reflected a profound political logic. Hamilton knew that bondholders would feel a stake in preserving any government that owed them money. If the federal government, not the states, was owed the money, creditors would shift their main allegiance to the central government.

liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power. . . . [T]he former rather than the latter is apparently most to be apprehended by the United States.

Via com bastante clareza que mais liberdade podia conduzir a uma maior desordem e, por uma dialética perigosa, de volta à perda da liberdade.

A sinking fund is a repository, set up apart from the general budget, for revenues to pay off debt.) It would sequester revenues from the sudden whims of grasping politicians who might want to raid the Treasury for short-term gain. The sinking fund would retire about 5 percent of the debt each year until it was paid off.

Both Hamilton and Madison were rational men who assumed that people often acted irrationally because of ambition and avarice. Madison wrote, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary.