A Quote by John F. Kennedy
I know few significant questions of public policy which can safely be confided to computers. In the end, the hard decisions inescapably involve imponderables of intuition, prudence, and judgment.
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But, that’s the whole point of corporatization - to try to remove the public from making decisions over their own fate, to limit the public arena, to control opinion, to make sure that the fundamental decisions that determine how the world is going to be run - which includes production, commerce, distribution, thought, social policy, foreign policy, everything - are not in the hands of the public, but rather in the hands of highly concentrated private power. In effect, tyranny unaccountable to the public.
It is a universal and fundamental political principle that the power to protect can safely be confided only to those interested in protecting, or their responsible agents - a maxim not less true in private than in public affairs.
In a mass television democracy - which all of us nowadays have - it is impossible to take basic political decisions with long-term consequences without the public knowing it, without the public understanding at least some of it, without the public forming its judgment, heterogeneous as it may be.
[Prudence] is the virtue of that part of the intellect [the calculative] to which it belongs; and . . . our choice of actions will not be right without Prudence any more than without Moral Virtue, since, while Moral Virtue enables us to achieve the end, Prudence makes us adopt the right means to the end.
I never think of the word legacy. It doesn't mean anything. You do the right thing, in my judgment, and things will work out. That's what drives me. I'm not looking for legacy or history books or whatever. I know what we've done here has saved a significant number of lives. The burden is not on me. It's on the politicians who made the decisions to limit what we're doing. They're the ones who are going to pay a price, in my judgment, if crime significantly increases.
There is an old maxim which states that good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from poor judgment. I think something similar can be said of government policy, to wit: Good policy comes from experience, and experience comes from poor policy.
Most decisions are seat-of-the-pants judgments. You can create a rationale for anything. In the end, most decisions are based on intuition and faith.
We make pictures. At the end of the day, we create something potentially significant that did not exist at the beginning of the day. We go forward, despite the uncertainty. Because this is an act of love and passion, which defies reason and prudence.
The only realistic view is that a human life arises gradually, which is not much help in making personal decisions or devising public policy.
What often happens with these Islamist regimes, there are differing philosophies in terms of how fast to go in getting to where everybody wants to end up, which is Sharia. That is the ultimate objective for all of these places. But they have different strategies on the speed with which they’re going to get there, and the strategies involve foreign policy.
Prudence does not mean failing to accept responsibilities and postponing decisions; it means being committed to making joint decisions after pondering responsibly the road to be taken, decisions aimed at strengthening that covenant between human beings and the environment, which should mirror the creative love of God, from whom we came and towards whom we are journeying.
A much more radical conclusion . . . that, so far as I know, is shared by only a very few students of public choice [is]: that government employees or people who draw the bulk of their income from government by other means should be deprived of the vote . . . It is another example of the opening up of alternatives for investigation and the presentation of new conceivable policy options characteristic of public choice, rather than a policy that all its students favor.
The process for producing public policy in Congress is flawed. The process itself kills policy ideas through the bypassing of the rules and procedural decisions that limit discussion.
To know whether you can trust a particular intuitive judgment, there are two questions you should ask: Is the environment in which the judgment is made sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence? The answer is yes for diagnosticians, no for stock pickers. Do the professionals have an adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities? The answer here depends on the professionals' experience and on the quality and speed with which they discover their mistakes.
Climate change is happening, and humans are significant contributors, and that raises some really important policy questions.
If the means to which the government of the union may resort for executing the power confided to it, are unlimited, it may easily select such as will impair or destroy the powers confided to the state governments.
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