Quotes About Government

As a practitioner of hindsight I know that Grandfather was trying to do, by personal initiative and with the financial resources of a small and struggling corporation, what only the immense power of the federal government ultimately proved able to do. That does not mean he was foolish or mistaken. He was premature. His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn't yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid.

The greatest power is not money power, but political power.

All the Congress, all the accountants and tax lawyers, all the judges, and a convention of wizards all cannot tell for sure what the income tax law says.

The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is, that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.

The sovereign has, under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights—the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn.

Dullness in matters of government is a good sign, and not a bad one - in particular, dullness in parliamentary government is a test of its excellence, an indication of its success.

The splitting of sovereignty into many parts amounts to there being no sovereign.

U]nder a presidential government a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.

The English constitution, in a word, is framed on the principle of choosing a single sovereign authority, and making it good: the American, upon the principle of having many sovereign authorities, and hoping that their multitude may atone for their inferiority.

Conservatives and liberals are kindred spirits as far as government spending is concerned. ... Since government has no resources of its own, and since there's no Tooth Fairy handing Congress the funds for the programs it enacts, we are forced to recognize that government spending is no less than the confiscation of one person's property to give it to another to whom it does not belong -- in effect, legalized theft.

The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting but to give us a modicum of protection against congressional tyranny.

Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual.

French economist/philosopher Frederic Bastiat (1801–50) gave a test for immoral government acts: "See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

There are many farm handouts; but let's call them what they really are: a form of legalized theft. Essentially, a congressman tells his farm constituency, "Vote for me. I'll use my office to take another American's money and give it to you.

Social Security is unsustainable because it is not meeting the first order condition of a Ponzi scheme, namely expanding the pool of suckers.

Our founders, in the words of Thomas Paine, recognized that, "Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

It's government people, not rich people, who have the power to coerce and make our lives miserable. Coercive power goes a long way toward explaining political corruption.

What our nation needs is a separation of "business and state" as it has a separation of "church and state." That would mean crony capitalism and crony socialism could not survive.

The moral tragedy that has befallen Americans is our belief that it is okay for government to forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another—that in my book is a working definition of slavery.

The 2000 election of George W. Bush as president gave Republicans what the Democrats have now, total control of the legislative and executive branches of government. When Bush came to office, federal spending was $1.788 trillion. When he left office, federal spending was $2.982 trillion.

The federal minimum wage is complemented by state laws that sometimes exceed the federal requirements. Federal and state minimum wage laws represent deliberate governmental intervention in the labor market to produce a pattern of results other than that produced in a free labor market.

How stupid is it of us to ask those who brought us "affordable" housing to now turn their attention to bringing us "affordable" health care?

Congress will raise taxes and/or slash promised Social Security benefits. Each year the situation will get worse since the number of retirees is predicted to increase relative to the number in the workforce paying taxes. In 1940, there were forty-two workers per retiree, in 1950 there were sixteen, today there are three, and in twenty or thirty years there will be two or fewer workers per retiree.

You men win your way into office and retain that office essentially by promising some Americans that you will give them the fruits of another man's labor. You also win office by promising one group of Americans that they will be given a right or privilege that will be denied other Americans.