Quotes About Government

The law is designed to help us live. It has no other justification. If it cannot do that, if it operates only theoretically, the law will fail us." Senator Stevens stares

It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.

It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.

We live in a world where justice equals vengeance. Where private profit drives public policy.

It's not surprising that the Rudd Government is slowly turning Work for the Dole into a training program. The idea that 'the world owes people a living' is strong inside the Labor Party. This is why even a normally sensible frontbencher like Martin Ferguson once called Work for the Dole 'almost evil'.

Quite soon, the Rudd Government's attempts to stave off a recession by fiscal sugar hits and propping up uncompetitive businesses will come to seem like putting off the inevitable at unsustainable cost. The public, if not the government, will come to appreciate, in former British Prime Minister Jim Callaghan's words, that 'you can't spend your way out of a recession'. It

La oración del reino está diseñada para promover la agenda del reino de Dios, que es la manifestación visible del gobierno integral de Dios en todas las áreas de la vida.

the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.

A democracy of permanent consensus will not long remain a democracy.

During the long century of constitutional liberalism, from Gladstone to LBJ, Western democracies were led by a distinctly superior class of statesmen.

And once we cease to value the public over the private, surely we shall come in time to have difficulty seeing just why we should value law (the public good par excellence) over force.

Why does this matter? Because—as the Greeks knew—participation in the way you are governed not only heightens a collective sense of responsibility for the things government does, it also keeps our rulers honest and holds authoritarian excess at bay.

Why are we so sure that some planning, or progressive taxation, or the collective ownership of public goods, are intolerable restrictions on liberty; whereas closed-circuit television cameras, state bailouts for investment banks 'too big to fail', tapped telephones and expensive foreign wars are acceptable burdens for a free people to bear?

If 1989 was about re-discovering liberty, what limits are we now willing to place upon it? Even in the most 'freedom-loving' societies, freedom comes with constraints. But if we accept some limitations—and we always do—why not others? Why

Serbian shelling of Sarajevo resumed. When NATO planes bombed Bosnian Serb installations in response, the Serbs seized 350 UN peacekeepers as hostages. Terrified for the fate of their soldiers, Western governments importuned the UN and NATO to desist. The international presence, far from constraining the Serbs, now offered them additional cover.

Margaret Thatcher's notorious bon mot: "there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and families".

If social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear.

The idea that those in authority know best—that they are engaged in social engineering on behalf of people who do not understand what is good for them—was not born in 1945, but it flourished in the decades that followed.

It says something about the mood of the time that a New Labour government with an overwhelming parliamentary majority and nearly 11 million voters at the 2001 elections should nonetheless have been moved to respond in this way to the propaganda of a neo-Fascist clique which attracted the support of just 48,000 electors in the country at large: one-fifth of 1 percent of the vote and only 40,000 more votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party. France

From the late 19th century until the 1970s, the advanced societies of the West were all becoming less unequal. Thanks to progressive taxation, government subsidies for the poor, the provision of social services and guarantees against acute misfortune, modern democracies were shedding extremes of wealth and poverty.

Governments, in short, now increasingly farm out their responsibilities to private firms

If government is the problem and society does not exist, then the role of the state is reduced once again to that of facilitator.

tax farming is absurdly inefficient. In the first place, it discredits the state, represented in the popular mind by a grasping private profiteer. Secondly, it generates considerably less revenue than a well-administered system of government collection, if only because of the profit margin accruing to the private collector. And thirdly, you get disgruntled taxpayers.

two world wars had habituated almost everyone to the inevitability of government intervention in daily life.