When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state … This violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
I have never understood why it is “greed” to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.
The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.
Voting is the engine that drives our democracy. It needs a 21st Century update. We need to move past partisanship and start to see the humanity in people.
An appeal is when you ask one court to show its contempt for another court.
Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.
What is the use of being elected or re-elected unless you stand for something?
When more of the people’s sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government and expenses of its economical administration, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of free government.
President Stephen Grover Cleveland, Second Annual Message (December 1886).