Quotes About Government

It's time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy,' said Albert Shanker, long-serving President of the American Federation of Teachers.

Throughout history, the characteristic feature of the nation state is its monopoly of violence.

So if gangsters become governments, does this mean that governments began as gangsters?

Fascism and communism were and are religions of the state.

The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation – that is to say, in crime.' Perhaps we have left all that behind, and the state is now evolving steadily towards benign and gentle virtue. Perhaps not. Tudor

The truth is that the wild west was without much government, but it was very far from lawless, or even violent.

Economists are quick to speak of 'market failure', and rightly so, but a greater threat comes from 'government failure'.

For most of history, the state has been an 'ever-present predator and all-around abuser of human rights'

And even modern governments have an element of the crime syndicate about them. Police forces repeatedly harbour criminals all over the world: the US Department of Homeland Security is only a little more than a decade old, but in 2011 over three hundred of its employees were arrested for crimes such as drug smuggling, child pornography and selling intelligence to drug cartels. Like

Many people are bothered about the number of privately owned guns in the United States, but what about publicly owned ones? In recent years the United States government (not the military) has purchased 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition, enough to shoot the entire population five times over.

This was socialism without the state. There is no doubt that it would have continued to expand and evolve.

Anyway, if you really want to see the Arpanet as the origin of the internet, please explain why the government sat on it for thirty years and did almost nothing with it until it was effectively privatised in the 1990s, with explosive results.

Giving money to poor people is not a sustainable solution to poverty. So how do you help poor people? Do you instruct, plan and order their lives with expertise and lots of government, or do you get them freedom to exchange and specialise, so that prosperity can evolve? Friedrich

the state has socialised the cost and privatised the reward. That

The more a country adopted central planning, the better its education system did, but the worse its economic performance – not least because, like Egypt, it churned out many would-be bureaucrats trained to do the central planning.

Many modern accounts of the history of eugenics present it as an example of the dangers of letting science, genetics especially, out of control. It is much more an example of the danger of letting government out of control.

George Washington said that 'Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. Government is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master.

The ten most violent countries in the world in 2014 – Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and North Korea – are all among the least capitalist. The ten most peaceful – Iceland, Denmark, Austria, New Zealand, Switzerland, Finland, Canada, Japan, Belgium and Norway – are all firmly capitalist.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Britain and the United States made huge contributions to science with negligible public funding, while Germany and France, with hefty public funding, achieved no greater results either in science or in economics. 'The industrialised nations whose governments invested least in science did best economically,' says Kealey, 'and they didn't do so badly in science either.

China, meanwhile, was heading the other way, into stagnation and poverty. China went from a state of economic and technological exuberance in around AD 1000 to one of dense population, agrarian backwardness and desperate poverty in 1950. According to Angus Maddison's estimates, it was the only region in the world with a lower GDP per capita in 1950 than in 1000. The blame for this lies squarely with China's governments.

Tyranny happens when a society turns against itself, with one part usurping the power of [the] whole and applying it to the exploitation of the rest. Corruption, or misdirection of public effort for private gain, is one common feature of tyranny.... Government through fear is another common feature of tyranny, since it it through fear that one part of society can induce the other to betray its own interests.

And the civil state is the actual state that results from the attempt to build a bridge from the state of nature to the state of reason. Its aim is to induce naturally rebarbative human beings to behave as if they were reasonable.

In a democracy, says Spinoza, "the welfare of the whole people, not the ruler, is the supreme law

Market is not the opposite of regulation or government any more than swim meet is the opposite of swimming pool. Every market needs its rules, these rules necessarily come from outside the market itself, and they aren't always written down.