Category: Thought

Abraham Lincoln’s encouraging vision of “government of the people, by the people, for the people” raised hopes that have never been realized. But his name can no longer be used to justify the error that he could not have foreseen in 1863. He could not have envisaged that, a century after he was assassinated, government in the United States, and even more in Great Britain and Europe, would dominate economic life. If he had survived he would not now have approved of the dominant government that democracy has produced. For it is no longer “of” the people, “by” the people, “for” the people.
The application of economics to politics reveals a form of government that Lincoln would not have commended in 1900, 1945, or 2000. Government is now very different from the one based on the common people that Lincoln thought would prevail. Although his vision is still the most common encyclopedia definition of “democracy” Lincoln cannot now be claimed as the father of our 20th-21st-century form of democracy.
Lincoln would now see government not of, by, and for all the people but of, by, and for some kinds of people. He would see it not as of all the people but as of the political activists. He would see government not as by the people but as managed by the politicians and their officials. And he would see government not as for the ordinary people but as for the organized in well-run, well-financed, and influential business organizations, professional associations, and trade unions. It is government “of the Busy (political activists), by the Bossy (government managers), for the Bully (lobbying activists).”

Gordon Tullock, Government Failure: A Primer in Public Choice (2002)

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

Envy thou not the oppressor, and choose none of his ways.

Proverbs 3:31, King James Version

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in in progress to victory.

He who rejects liberty has no faith in human nature.

A journalistic purpose could be someone with a Xerox machine in a basement.

Government is a very great consumer, living not on its profits but on its revenues.

Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?

Bishop Butler, epigraph for The Moral Economy (1909) by Ralph Barton Perry.

Where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.

‘DO NOT GOVERN TOO MUCH,’ is a maxim which should be placed in large letters over the speaker’s chair in all legislative bodies. The old proverb, ‘too much of a good thing is good for nothing,’ is most especially applicable to the present time, when it would appear, from the course of our legislation, that common sense, common experience, and the instinct of self-preservation, are utterly insufficient for the ordinary purposes of life; that the people of the United States are not only incapable of self-government, but of taking cognizance of their individual affairs; that industry requires protection, enterprize bounties, and that no man can possibly find his way in broad day light without being tied to the apron-string of a legislative dry-nurse. The present system of our legislation seems founded on the total incapacity of mankind to take care of themselves or to exist without legislative enactment.

William Leggett, in an editorial in the Evening Post, March 11, 1835 — republished in A Collection of the Political Writings of William Leggett (1840) and titled “The Legislation of Congress”).