A Quote by John Fund
As government grows, its increased power to grant favors or inflict pain attracts more people who would abuse the system.
Related Quotes
More and more people are becoming aware that government has nothing to give them without first taking it away from somebody else-or from themselves. Increased handouts to selected groups mean merely increased taxes, or increased deficits and increased inflation.
Madison understood that if you want to protect rights from government abuse, you would be wise not to give government the power in the first place that can be used to abuse rights. That is a lesson we have forgotten. As we have asked government to do more and more for us, we have forgotten that a government big enough to give us everything we want will be powerful enough to take everything we have.
Because government has tremendous power, it attracts people who are eager to game the system, obtaining by force of law what they could never achieve through consensus.
Even if someone wanted a purely free-market, competitive media system, it would require extensive government regulation to set up those markets. All our largest media companies are based on the grant of explicit government monopoly privileges and licenses, or franchises, or subsidies. The government didn't come in after the system was in place, it built the system in the first place.
If you're a limited government conservative, I feel your pain. Your man Mr. Bush has exploded the size of government, ballooned the deficit and increased government power so dramatically that he claims the right to eavesdrop on your conversations without a warrant.
If we had a flat tax code rather than a 70,000-page document full of cronyism and favors, bureaucrats and elected officials wouldn't have the power to do you any favors. That's what we need. You would have to compete on your own on a level playing field, but that's not what the government permits now.
Once the pain-body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn't really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others. If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.
Gawker started out speaking the truth to power, and then it became about bullying anyone who didn't conform to their social justice orthodoxy. They wanted to inflict pain on people with no platform simply for the sake of inflicting pain.
In worship an increased power steals its way into the heart sanctuary, an increased compassion grows in the soul. To worship is to change.
I knew Richard E. Grant, and I went to him and said "Would you like to [play Kafka in the film]?" and he said yeah, and then suddenly I had all these people who were happy to come along. We got a little bit of money from Scottish Screen to pay for it. I got so many favors because I knew people in the business. I was in a remarkably good position. I got so many favors from people. I got the Monty Python technical people.
Modern Democrats aren't the first political party to abuse power - far from it. Obama isn'??t the first president to abuse executive power - not by a longshot. But he has to be the first president in American history to overtly and consistently argue that he's empowered to legislate if Congress doesn'??t pass the laws he favors. It's an argument that's been mainstreamed by partisans and cheered on by those in media desperate to find a morsel of triumph in this presidency.
Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it ... We should grant power over our affairs only to those who are reluctant to hold it and then only under conditions that increase that reluctance.
Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.
When people abuse these freedoms to enrich themselves at the expense of others, then the public will demand the government to step in. That is how government grows, and how freedom is diminished.... When financial meltdowns occur, the public's outrage drives government to take over part of the private sector. When the government does so, it replaces irresponsible executives with unaccountable bureaucrats. That takes us out of the frying pan and into the fire.
How can those who are invested with the power of government be prevented from the abuse of those powers as the means of aggrandizing themselves? ... Without a strong constitution to counteract the strong tendency of government to disorder and abuse there can be little progress or improvement.
Under our system of three branches of government, the courts ultimately are the checks on the legislative and executive branches when they exceed or even abuse the limits of their power.
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