A Quote by P. J. O'Rourke
Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.
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You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.
In the 1960s, the public demanded seat belts in cars, but automakers balked. Not until government intervened did seat belts become standard equipment. Now, no one would consider buying a vehicle without this basic safety feature.
Nothing is more deceptive or more dangerous than the pretence of a desire to simplify government. The simplest governments are despotisms; the next simplest, limited monarchies; but all republics, all governments of law, must impose numerous limitations and qualifications of authority, and give many positive and many qualified rights.
You have countries that have lived beyond their means, with bloated governments, huge trade deficits, and people living off the government. Then you have others where poor people are working hard and underconsuming and their governments are buying all this debt and propping up the extravagant countries. All of this has to change. There's a tremendous moral hazard involved with this system.
You know, it's cigarettes that killed Jerry Garcia. Everyone thinks it's heroin, but it wasn't. It was cigarettes.
The federal government gets a lot press, and that's what the media talks about, but your state and local governments, in many ways, have more impact on your life than the federal government does.
Human beings are psychologically far more afraid of bugs than they are of driving a car, whereas people get killed by cars every single day, and there is hardly ever a story of people getting killed by bugs.
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.
By government giveaway programs, individuals are often hurt far more than they are helped. The recipients of these programs become dependent on the government and their dignity is destroyed. Is it compassionate to enslave more and more people by making them a part of the government dependency cycle? I think compassion should be measured by how many people no longer need it. Helping people to become self-sufficient is much more compassionate than drugging them with the narcotic of welfare.
Has the center of gravity shifted such that all governments have greater powers and fewer restrictions than they ever had, and are empowered by technology in a way that no government ever was in the past?
It's as if people used the invention of seat belts as an opportunity to take up drunk driving.
It is of the greatest importance that people and governments in many more countries than ours should realize that it is more dangerous to have access to nuclear arms than not to possess them.
Because of their chemical composition e-cigarettes are at least as harmful to your health as regular tobacco cigarettes are.
Why Hollywood has killed so many movie stars with cigarette smoking, with the romanticization of it from John Wayne to Humphrey Bogart, all those people had cancer, died of it, and sold cigarettes their whole career.
If you give the government the right to determine the consumption of the human body, to determine whether one should smoke or not smoke, drink or not drink, there is no good reply you can give to people who say, More important than the body is the mind and the soul, and man hurts himself much more by reading bad books, by listening to bad music and looking at bad movies. Therefore it is the duty of the government to prevent people from committing those faults. And, as you know, for many hundreds of years governments and authorities velieved that it was their duty.
Government prohibitions do always more mischief than had been calculated; and it is not without much hesitation that a statesman should hazard to regulate the concerns of individuals, as if he could do it better than themselves.
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