1813: The same pol. parties that agitate the U.S. have existed through all time. Whether the power of the people or of the elite should prevail were questions which kept the states of Greece & Rome in eternal convulsions.
The policy of the Am. govt. is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits.
A character of good faith is of as much value to a nation as to an individual. The moral obligations constitute the law of nations as well as individuals.
I place ec. among the 1st & most important virtues and pub. debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. We must make our election between ec. & liberty or profusion & servitude.
If we let Wash. tell us when to sow & when to reap the Nation shall soon want for bread.
A rebuke to Cong. “How could it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150 lawyers whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing & talk by the hour.”
The basis of our govt. being the opinion of the people, the very 1st object should be to keep that right; & were it left to me to decide whether we should have govt. without newspapers or newspapers without govt., I should unhesitatingly prefer the latter.
Wise & frugal govt. which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry & improvement & shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.
Abe Lincoln
1864—By general law life & limb must be protected, yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life, but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures otherwise unconst. might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong I assumed that ground & now avow it.
Montesquieu, 1748—Forms of Govt.
Each has a special relationship to its people. When that relationship is changed that form of govt. is doomed. 1—Dictatorship—Fear (can’t survive if people no longer fear the dictator). 2—Monarchy—respect & affection for the Crown. 3—Rep. Govt.—There must be virtue among the people.
Winston Churchill
Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse pulling a sturdy wagon.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1935
The Fed. govt. must & shall quit this business of relief. Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual & moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to Nat. fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.
F.D.R., Pittsburgh, Oct. 19, 1932
Most of this new govt. created credit has been taken to finance the govt.’s continuing deficits. The truth is that the burden is absorbing their resources. All this is highly undesirable & wholly unnecessary. It arises from one cause only and that is the unbalanced bud. and the continued failure of this admin. to take effective steps to balance it. If that budget had been fully & honestly balanced in 1930 as it could have been, some of the 1931 collapse would have been avoided. Even if it had been balanced in 1931 as it could have been, much of the extreme dip in 1932 would have been obviated. . . . Would it not be infinitely better to clear this whole subject of obscurity—to present the facts squarely to the Cong. and the people of the U.S. & secure the one sound foundation of permanent econ. recovery—a complete & honest balance of the Fed. Bud.?
John F. Kennedy Re: His Tax Cut
Our true choice is not between tax reduction on the 1 hand & the avoidance of large Fed. deficits on the other. Our economy stifled by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance the budget. Just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits.
Woodrow Wilson
America is sauntering thru the mazes of pol.’s with easy nonchalance. But presently there will come a time when she’ll be surprised to find herself grown old—a country crowded, strained, perplexed. When she will be obligated to fall back upon her conservatism—obliged to pull herself together, adopt a new regimen of life, husband her resources, concentrate her strength, steady her methods, sober her views, restrict her vagaries, trust her best, not her average members.
Cicero
The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, the pub. debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered & controlled. Assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. The mob should be forced to work & not depend on govt. for sustenance.
F.D.R.
The doctrine of reg. & legis. by masterminds in whose judgment and will all the people may gladly & quietly acquiesce has been too glaringly apparent in Wash. Were it possible to find masterminds so unselfish, so willing to decide unhesitatingly against their own personal interest—such a govt. might be to the interest of the country but there are none such on the pol. horizon.
Frederic Bastiat Addressing Nat. Assembly—France, 12/12/1849
The govt. offers a cure for the ills of mankind. It promises to restore commerce, make agri. prosperous, expand industry, encourage arts & letters, wipe out poverty, etc. etc. All that is needed is to create some new govt. agencies & to pay a few more bureaucrats.
Bastiat
When a nation is burdened with taxes nothing is more difficult or impossible than to levy them equally. What is still more difficult however is to shift the tax burden onto the shoulders of the rich. The state can have an abundance of money only by taking from everyone especially from the masses.
The state is the fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.
The state quickly understands the use of the role the pub entrusts to it. It will be the arbiter, the master of all destinies. It will take a great deal hence a great deal will remain for itself. It will multiply the number of its agents . . . it will end by acquiring overwhelming proportions.
Robert M. Hutchins
The American experiment of leaving ed. to 50 states & 40,000 school boards is drawing to a close. Fed. aid to education formally on a massive scale is inevitable & the sooner it comes the better.
Leonard Read
Inflation is a device for siphoning govt. property into the coffers of govt. Successful hedging would require finding a form of property that cannot be confiscated. It does not exist. Pare govt. back to size; that is the only way to protect private property against confiscation.
Arthur Krock “Memoirs”
As a Wash. eyewitness of governmental and other public action through the years I formed the opinion that the U.S. merits the dubious distinction of having discarded its past & its meaning in one of the briefest spans of modern hist. Among the changes are—fiscal solvency & confidence in a stable $ driven from the national & foreign mkt. place by continuous deficit spending, easy credit, & growing unfavorable balance of payments in the international ledger of the U.S.; the free enterprise system shackled by organized labor & a govt.-managed economy; the govt. transmuted into a [welfare] it subsidized from Wash. & spoiled generations young to old led to expect the govt. to provide for all their wants, free of any of the requirements of responsible citizenship.
Vladimir Lenin
The way to take over a country is to debauch the currency. Through a continuous policy of inflation a govt. can quietly & unobservedly confiscate the wealth of its citizens.
Calvin Coolidge
The Nat. which forgets its defenders will itself be forgotten.
Paul McCracken on Pub. Debt
If we carry the arithmetic of projected savings flows & probable financing in ’75 to its logical end we arrive at the interesting conclusion that the savings stream might well fall some short of what will then be required for financing.
Economists traditionally have tended to ignore these financial questions, but pressure in the cap. mkts. during the last few years remind us about the need to bring together savings & investment or savers & borrowers in an orderly way through the cap. mkts.
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br /> Randolph E. Paul, Under Sec.—Treasury—“Taxation For Prosperity” p. 217
The point is that taxes may be imposed, wholly apart from the revenue-producing qualities, to achieve desired effects on particular occasions . . . On this higher level taxes may be used to express public policy on the distribution of wealth & income; progressive income & estate taxes perform this function. They may be used to subsidize or penalize particular industries and econ. groups.
Late Sumner Slichter Hvd.
The tax hist. of the U.S. in recent years has been fairly sensational. A visitor from Mars would suspect that a communist 5th columnist was writing the laws for the purpose of making private enterprise unworkable.
William Gladstone 100 Years after Our Constitution
I consider the const. to be the more remarkable political advance ever accomplished one time by the human intellect.
Anonymous
When the courts sub. their will for that of the legis. appealing to what ought to be law when they can find no law & what ought to be the const. when that document itself gives not the slightest justification for asserting the new prin. then we have reached the end of the road.
Will Rogers
We will never get anywhere with our finances till we pass a law saying that every time we appropriate something we got to pass another bill along with it stating where the money is coming from.
Nation Magazine Letter from Woman Who Fled Poland Before Martial Law
Among many of our American born friends it is not fashionable to be enthusiastic about Am. There is Vietnam, drugs, urban & racial conflict, poverty & pollution. Undoubtedly this country faces urgent & serious problems. But we newcomers see not only the problems but also democratic solutions being sought & applied. I love Am. because people accept me for what I am. They don’t question my ancestry, my faith, my pol. beliefs. When I want to move from one place to another I don’t have to ask permission. When I need a needle I go to the nearest store & get one. I don’t have to stand in line for hours to buy a piece of tough fat meat. Even with inflation I don’t have to pay a day’s earnings for a small chicken. I love Am. because Am. trusts me. I don’t have to show an identity card to buy a pair of shoes. My mail isn’t censored, my phone isn’t tapped, my conversation with friends isn’t reported to the secret police.
Letter I Received from Cub Scout
I love America because you can join Cub Scouts if you want to. You have a right to worship as you please.
Mark Hawley, Seattle, Wash.
If you have the ability you can try to be anything you want to be. I also like Am. because we have about 200 flavors of ice cream.
Ted Sorensen Decision in The White House
Public opinion—often erratic, inconsistent, arbitrary & unreasonable—frequently hampered by myths & misinformation, by stereotypes & shibboleths & by innate resistance to innovation—for these reasons Pres. must not be bound by pub. opinion. He must reign in Wash. but he must also rule.
ON LIBERTY
Thomas Wolfe
To every man his chance, to every man regardless of his birth his shining golden opportunity. To every man the right to live, to work, to be himself & to become whatever his manhood & his vision can combine to make him. This seeker is the promise of Am.
John Adams at Signing of Dec. Independence
Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart to this vote. It is true that in the beginning we aimed not at independence. But there’s a divinity that shapes our ends. I know the uncertainties of human affairs. But I see through this day’s business. We may die, die as colonists; die as slaves; die it may be on the scaffold. Be it so. But while I live, let me have a country or at least the hope of a country, at least the hope of a country, and that a free country. But whatever be our fate, be assured, that this declaration will stand. . . . All that I have, and all that I am and all that I hope to be in life I am now ready to stake upon it; and I leave off as I began, that live or die, survive or perish, I am for the declaration.
Thomas Jefferson
If a nation expects to be ignorant & free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was & what never will be.
The last hope of human liberty in the world rests on us. Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press.
John Stuart Mill & Daniel Webster
If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint stock companies, the U’s and the family charities were all of them branches of the govt. If the emps. of all of these diff. enterprises were appt’d and pd. by the govt. and looked to the govt. for every ride in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular const. of the legis. would make this country free otherwise than in name.
A state which dwarfs its men in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands—even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.
Alexis De Tocqueville
The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.
It daily renders the exercise of the free agency of this race of man less useful & less frequent; this govt. grad. this race of man of all the uses of the individual man. This govt. has predisposed this race of man to endure these individually, small & petty erosions of individ. liberty & often to look upon them as benefits. It covers the whole surface of svc. with a network of small complicated rules. A network of individually uniform rules thru which the most orig. minds & most energetic characterize cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man has not been shattered; it has been softened, bent and guided. Men are seldom forced to act, but are constantly prevented from acting. The Nat. is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid & industrious animals & govt. is the shepherd.
Pope Pius 12th, End WWII
When I took up my little sling and aimed at communism I also hit something else. I hit the force of that great socialist revolution which under the name of liberalism spasmodically, incompletely & somewhat formlessly has been inching its ice cap over this nat. for 2 decades. Though I knew it existed, still I had no idea of its extent or the depth of its penetration or the fierce vindictiveness of its revolutionary temper—which was the reflex of its struggle to keep & advance its pol. power.
Anonymous
The real Am. idea is not that every man shall be on a level with every other, but that every man shall have the liberty without hindrance to be what God made him. The office of govt. is not to confer happiness but to give men the opp. to work out happiness for themselves.
Edmund Burke on The Threat of Socialism
A perfect equality will indeed be produced—that is to say equal wretchedness, equal beggary, and on the part of partitioners a woeful, helpless and desperate disappointment. Such is the event of all compulsory equalizations. They pull down what is above; they never raise what is below; they depress high & low together, beneath the level of what was originally the lowest.
Winston Churchill
Socialism is the phil. of failure, the creed of ignorance, the gospel of envy. Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings while the inherent virtue of Soc. is the equal sharing of miseries.
On The Labor Party Prog. 1945
I do not believe in the power of the state to plan & enforce. No matter how numerous are the committees they set up, or the ever growing hordes of officials they employ, or the severity of the punishments they inflict or threaten, they cannot approach the high level of internal economic production achieved under free enterprise. Personal initiative, competitive selection, the profit motive, corrected by failure & the infinite processes of good housekeeping & personal ingenuity, these constitute the life of a free society. It is this vital creative impulse that I deeply fear the . . .
Woodrow Wilson
A revolution is taking place which will leave people dependent on govt. Finding mkts.
will develop into fixing prices & finding employment. Next step will be to furnish employment or in default pay a bounty or dole. Those who look with apprehension on these tendencies do not lack humanity but are influenced by the belief that the result of such measures will be to deprive the people of character & liberty.
The Notes: Ronald Reagan's Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom Page 2