A Quote by James F. Cooper
Liberty is not a matter of words, but a positive and important condition of society. Its greatest safeguard after placing its foundations on a popular base, is in the checks and balances imposed on the public servants.
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Ours is a government of checks and balances. The Mafia and crooked businessmen make out checks, and the politicians and other compromised officials improve their bank balances.
We're somewhat lucky here in the United States, where we hope that the checks and balances hold out for many years to come and decades to come. But in a lot of countries, you don't have these checks and balances.
This used to be a government of checks and balances. Now it's all checks and no balances.
Truth matters. Checks and balances matter.
We are on the precipice of a crisis, a Constitutional crisis. The checks and balances, which have been at the core of this Republic, are about to be evaporated by the nuclear option. The checks and balances that say if you get 51% of the vote, you don't get your way 100% of the time. It is amazing, it's almost a temper tantrum.
Anarchism is for liberty, and neither for nor against anything else. Anarchy is the mother of co-operation, yes, just as liberty is the mother of order; but, as a matter of definition, liberty is not order nor is Anarchism co-operation. I define Anarchism as the belief in the greatest amount of liberty compatible with equality of liberty; or, in other words, as the belief in every liberty except the liberty to invade.
In a tripartite government with its checks and balances, we have lost the balances.
Liberty is the first condition of growth. Your ancestors gave every liberty to the soul, and religion grew. They put the body under every bondage, and society did not grow. The opposite is the case in the West - every liberty to society, none to religion. Now are falling off the shackles from the feet of Eastern society as from those of Western religion.
What we can do where we live is advocate again to bring back to life the 10th Amendment, to bring back to life those boundaries in our constitutional system that were supposed to be the critical checks in the checks and balances system. Without them, we lose - gradually, we lose our liberty.
Society has to be structured such that there are checks and balances, so that it can't be manipulated, for instance, for the profit of just some multinational company who's going to get rich on trying to legislate the environment.
One thing we know about government after the New Deal is that checks and balances through whistle-blowing is terrible policy.
We call ourselves public servants but I'll tell you this: we as public servants must set an example for the rest of the nation. It is hypocritical for the public official to admonish and exhort the people to uphold the common good.
Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.
We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.
Early on, America took one path and went down the advertising road, and in the UK they founded the BBC and developed a different kind of public broadcasting. There was a point where TV was so beholden to commercial interest that people - civil society - actually rose up and said, "This is ridiculous: we have our soap-selling soap operas, cigarette-sponsored news broadcast; we have our rigged quiz shows - let's put some checks and balances here."
There are checks and balances in science. There's somebody checking the people doing the science, and then there's somebody who checks the checkers and somebody who checks the checker's checkers.
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