A Quote by P. J. O'Rourke
It is very hard now to shock people into thinking about government regulation and the extent of government involvement in life.
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I think that the spirit of America is still very much one of where people want to work hard and the majority of people want to work hard. They want to be entrepreneurs. But when you have that all taken away with government regulation or with government overbearance of taxation, you start to wonder whether if it's even worthwhile because who are you really working for? Are you working for yourself, are you working for the government? In the end, this wealth distribution scheme that's at the heart of the current political administration is an inherently wrong one.
I would like to suggest to you that the extent to which government in America has departed from the original design of in habiting the destructive actions of man and invoking a common justice; the extent to which government has invaded the productive and creative areas; the extent to which the government in this country has assumed the responsibility for the security, welfare, and prosperity of our people is a measure of the extent to which socialism has developed here in this land of ours.
[The government involvement in the economy] is so overwhelming and beyond anything we have ever seen, that we risk moving this country away from a government of the people to a government of the regulators.
In any socialist government, they must destroy all alliances other than your alliance to the government, and they want the government to become your God. That for you to totally depend upon government. So we become slaves to government, through taxation, through regulation, through all kinds of restrictions, that makes us not free anymore.
History has tried hard to teach us that we can't have good government under politicians. Now, to go and stick one at the very head of the government couldn't be wise.
I'm not against government involvement in times of need. I am for recognizing that big public companies will continue to cut jobs in an effort to prop up stock prices, which in turn stimulates the need for more government involvement.
Can I say one other thing that`s very important? I`m indebted to Donald Trump for a long time, we`ve had this problem that people disliked government. And the health care bill has shown reminded people and Donald Trump has shown people there is something a lot worse than government. It`s not government. That as bad as they might have thought the government was on health care, it`s now created people that the absence of government healthcare is even worse.
It's clear that there has to be some play between the vitality of invention in economic life and some regulation of it, and in some ways the great ideological wars of the 20th century that cost so many lives had to do with whether to have managed economies directed by government or economies directed by the free movement of capital, which is only partially subject to government regulation.
One of the reasons some of the advocates of ever larger government and more government intrusiveness get nervous about discussions of the actual cost of government is that they fear if the people had a discussion about what government costs, the true cost of taxes, that they might not want as much government as they are presently getting.
'Freedom' means a lot to conservatives, but they have such a narrow sense of what it means. They think a lot about freedom from - freedom from government, freedom from regulation - and precious little about freedom to. Freedom to is absolutely something that has to be safeguarded by good government, just as it could be impaired by bad government.
Now we are in the second term of the government of a united nation and the government has done very well. One thing they have done, one thing people could not be blind to, was the achievement this government has made in giving human beings dignity, which they did not enjoy before. They now have dignity.
Although I held public office for a total of sixteen years, I also thought of myself as a citizen-politician, not a career one. Every now and then when I was in government, I would remind my associates that "When we start thinking of government as 'us' instead of 'them,' we've been here too long." By that I mean that elected officeholders need to retain a certain skepticism about the perfectibility of government.
I think the American people said, look, you know, we can't control what every government does to its people, but we shouldn't be aiding and assisting a government in having these kinds of repressive prisons. It added to the public outcry against our involvement in Vietnam.
The federal government, state governments will not do without that tax revenue from tobacco no matter what. I've always thought it was one of the most contradictory setups that we have, because everything said publicly about the product is intended to besmirch it, impugn it, and do the same thing to the people that use it. And yet here's the government scoring, I mean, you want to talk about obscene profits, the government doesn't do a damn thing but stick its hand in. The government taxes tobacco at every stage. It taxes tobacco when the farmer's thinking about planting it.
Whenever government proposes to get involved in the regulation of trade, just be very, very careful about who's behind this proposal, what their motives are.
When government gets too big, freedom is lost. Government is supposed to be the servant. But when a government can tax the people with no limit or restraint on what the government can take, then the government has become the master.
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