A Quote by Olympia Snowe
My concept of government's role in people's lives is that it is limited but legitimate, and essential when people have nowhere else to turn.
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Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited.
Anyone who believes in the essential role government can play in improving people's lives must also be the toughest critics of those who abuse the public trust.
Governments having failed the people, the people are entirely justified in assuming for themselves an essential role in government. Where a government takes proper measures to protect the people under its care, such a proceeding might have been thought both unnecessary and unjustifiable: But here it is quite the Reverse.
I think that people who believe in limited government would benefit greatly by studying the logic in government itself and the role of power as a corruptive mechanism in leading finally to unlimited government.
The point is, is that when you elect a politician, it has nothing to do with their personality. Politicians perform a function, a role in government. And the role of city government is not one that serves the people, unless the people make them do what the people want.
When governments fail us, what else can people do except take to direct action? When corporate power can so dominate government policy-making that whole communities are placed at risk, where else can people turn?
My quarrel is not with the legitimate role of government but with the unlimited role of government.
I had to sign the paper to shut down the government. It's terrible.... [But] what the shutdown showed many, many people is the importance of the role of government. And as frustrated [as people get with] Washington, there are so many things [the government does] that are so important to people's lives every day. The panda cam, paying small businesses their loans - these are all things that shut down.
I feel that if people investigate the emergence of government, of State power - if they examine the logic of State power historically, and more specifically in the United States - they will find that the concept of limited government is not tenable once they adopt some type of libertarian principle.
It's the role of us to run our government, the government by the people, for the people, and I don't think our government is listening to the people. It's our role as patriots to question them, because we elected them. And if they're not fairly and accurately representing us, it's the job of the people, the patriots, to take their country back.
The whole Jeffersonian ideal was that people are temporarily in government. Government is not the basic reality. People are. The private sector. And government is just a limited power to make things go better.
And I don't think that government has a role in telling people how to live their lives. Maybe a minister does, maybe your belief in God does, maybe there's another set of moral codes, but I don't think government has a role.
I think there are people in this Congress who actually believe that government does not have a benign role in the lives of the people, except as an engine to redistribute the wealth of the Nation upwards.
God ordained and established civil government, but only to serve the common good. A civil government that oppresses its people and acts contrary to the people's interests deposes itself, ceases to be a legitimate government, and, therefore, citizens are no longer obligated by Scripture to obey it.
Nowhere else in the world do the laws on firearms become the playthings of politicians and lobbyists intent on manufacturing cultural conflict. Nowhere else do elected officials turn the matter of taking a gun to church into a searing ideological question. But then, guns are not a religion in most countries.
Government has the role of suiting people for freedom. People aren't made for freedom spontaneously. There's sort of a 19-year race between when people are born and when they become adults. And government has a role in making them, at the end of 19 years, suited to be upright, trustworthy repositories of popular sovereignty.
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