Quotes About Government

The difference between golf and government is that in golf you can't improve your lie.

It is obvious that there is no uniform pattern of government in Acts. The form of leadership was an historical development in which the apostles, elders, and the congregation shared.

Whatever right the Second Amendment protects is not as important as it was 200 years ago... The government should deconstitutionalize the subject by repealing the embarrassing Amendment.

Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government; it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early.

In Gladstone's mature years he lost faith not in God but in the ability of any government or state to act as the agent of God.

The republican form of government rests on representation: The people do not decide issues, they decide who will decide. Who, that is, will conduct the deliberations that "refine and enlarge" public opinion (Madison, Federalist No. 10). This system of filtration is vitiated by a plebiscitary presidency, the occupant of which claims a direct, unmediated, almost mystical connection with "the people.

Government breeds more government, and a lobbying infrastructure to defend itself.

Bushism is Reaganism minus the passion for freedom.

Global Warming Is Socialism By The Back Door.

The object of government," wrote Madison in Federalist 62, is "the happiness of the people."29 He and his fellow Founders conceived of happiness as Aristotle did, as a durable state of worthy satisfaction with life. To be worthy, satisfaction must flow from the vigorous employment of the faculties that make us human: individual reasoning and social participation. Happiness, therefore, is an activity.

Washington DC is happiest when in indignation overdrive.

The legislative branch writes laws, the head of the executive branch takes care that the laws are faithfully executed, at which point the judiciary is perpetually poised to scrutinize the content and application of the laws. Which makes the judiciary the epicenter of constitutional government.

The permutations of rent-seeking are as many as the administrative state is vast. Rent-seeking is the activity of attempting to increase one's income without increasing the quantity or quality of the goods or services offered to customers. It is the attempt to manipulate public power for private advantage—to get government to improve your economic circumstances by conferring a benefit on you or a handicap on your competitors.

In another dissent, which became famous and influential, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes asserted an almost unlimited government police power flowing from "the right of a majority to embody their opinions in law." Notice that Holmes' majoritarianism led him to assert an essentially unlimited right.

Progressives celebrated Holmes' assertion that government should be able to exercise almost untrammeled police powers as long as government asserts what would come to be called a "rational basis" for exercises of this power. And a mere assertion should suffice.

Sandel hankers for the muscular debates of yesteryear, when government was not big but had bigger ambitions than today's bland Leviathan has.

Our hatred of government is not caused mainly by government's goals, whatever their wisdom, but by government's techniques." Philip Howard

At this point, the Grumpy Economist becomes the Incredulous Economist: "If the central problem is rent-seeking, abuse of the power of the state to deliver economic goods to the wealthy and politically powerful, how in the world is more government the answer?

Law, rather than harnessing the passions, is increasingly pressed into their service.

Expansion in the mission of the federal government has created a belief in its effective power. Its ineffectiveness is therefore seen not as a systemic failure but as the result of a deliberate failure designed to benefit the powerful and harm the many.

The technocracy has the upper hand against the white working class, although it is a tenuous hand, as can be seen by the election of Donald Trump. But this is merely the opening confrontation. Pressure on the technocracy will build. America is heading toward an institutional crisis in which the competence of the technocracy and the institutions of the federal government will be questioned.

Inventing the government was the preface to inventing a nation. Governments can be machines, but nations have to accommodate the actual lives of people. People don't live abstract lives. They live real ones, within nations, and those nations give them a sense of who they are.

the same people who are taking this approach to any idea of sending an American accused to a court in the Hague are the very people demanding that my friend must be sent by Britain to the United States to disappear for the rest of his life for publishing documents which revealed war crimes.

If it moves tax it. If it keeps moving regulate it. If it stops moving subsidize it.