Quotes About Government

For the postwar peace, he preferred to minimize direct government intervention and manipulate the economy through fiscal and other incentives.

Margaret Thatcher, like George W. Bush and Tony Blair after her, never hesitated to augment the repressive and information-gathering arms of central government.

Since 1973, however, free-market theorists had re-emerged, vociferous and confident, to blame endemic economic recession and attendant woes upon 'big government' and the dead hand of taxation and planning that it placed upon national energies and initiative. In many places this rhetorical strategy was quite seductive to younger voters with no first-hand experience of the baneful consequences of such views the last time they had gained intellectual ascendancy, half a century before.

Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime efforts. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another. And since the experience of the interwar years had clearly revealed the inability of capitalists to protect their own best interests, the liberal state would have to do it for them whether they liked it or not.

The idea that it was the state's business to know what was good for people—while we accept it uncomplainingly in school curriculums and hospital practices—smacked of eugenics and perhaps euthanasia.

here, it was not until the mid-1970s that a new generation of conservatives felt emboldened to challenge the 'statism' of their predecessors and offer radical prescriptions for dealing with what they described as the 'sclerosis' of over-ambitious governments and their deadening impact upon private initiative.

For three decades following the war, economists, politicians, commentators and citizens all agreed that high public expenditure, administered by local or national authorities with considerable latitude to regulate economic life at many levels, was good policy.

privatization reverses a centuries-long process whereby the state took on things that individuals could not or would not do.

we lose faith not just in parliamentarians and congressmen, but in Parliament and Congress themselves.

What we have been watching is the steady shift of public responsibility onto the private sector to no discernible collective advantage.

Relations between the Facist regime and the American government were rapidly cooling. Italian newspapers did nothing to help, charging that Jews ruled the United States. They offered a list of the all-Jewish makeup of what was said to be the likely next American cabinet, headed by the President Bernard Baruch and Vice President Albert Einstein. Leon Trotsky was slated to be secretary of war; the face that he was neither American nor lived in the country was apparently no impediment.

In most Western countries the extreme differential in power needed to enslave doesn't exist, and the idea of slavery is abhorrent. When most of the population has a reasonable standard of living and some financial security (whether their own or assured by government safety nets), slavery can't thrive.

If a government has no motivation to guarantee human rights within its borders, those rights can disappear. If those whose rights are violated cannot find protection, they are unlikely to accuse and fight those with guns and power.

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth . . . in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is . . . also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. . . . It clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived.

A man's soul is as full of voices as a forest; there are ten thousand tongues there like all the tongues of the trees: fancies, follies, memories, madnesses, mysterious fears, and more mysterious hopes. All the settlement and sane government of life consists in coming to the conclusion that some of those voices have authority and others not.

In short, economic prosperity required trade, but political stability required welfare states.

For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God" (Rom. 13:1). God

The President of the United States is an asshole! The King and Queen of England, and all members of Parliament and the House of Lords are assholes! The Pope is an asshole! Rip his picture up, fair viewers! Rip it up now!" He looked away from the Teleprompter then, face grave. "I could continue reading, but it's safe to say every world government and religious leader is, in fact, an asshole

In the end, the Declaration was not a rejection of government power in general but rather a condemnation of the British crown for depriving the colonists of the government they needed. In order to reframe the Declaration as something rather different, the Committee to Proclaim Liberty had to edit out much of the document they claimed to champion.

Together, these political and economic rights rested on a pedestal inscribed "Constitutional Government designed to Serve the People." And that, in turn, stood on a more substantial foundation: "Fundamental Belief in God."7

Oklahoma lingered so long as a territory because of who lived there. The familiar image of territories as "empty" lands awaiting enough inhabitants to sustain a government is badly misleading. The reason Congress held territories back from statehood wasn't that no one lived in them but because the wrong people did.

Paul Weyrich, who was a cofounder of the Heritage Foundation, gave a talk in 1980 where he laid out what would become the blueprint for GOP victory. He chastised the audience for believing in "Good Government" where they wanted "everybody to vote." "Well, I don't," he said, because "our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.

The ad urged readers to make their own declaration of independence in 1951. "Declare that government is responsible TO you—rather than FOR you," it continued. "Declare that freedom is more important to you than 'security' or 'survival.' Declare that the rights God gave you may not be taken away by any government on any pretense.

The Utah Power & Light Company, meanwhile, cut right to the chase in a full-page ad with the alarmist headline "How many 'Independence Days' have we left?" The utility company implored readers to "pray for help in maintaining man's closeness to God, in preserving man's God-given rights and responsibilities against those who would make you dependent upon a socialistic, all-powerful government." 53