EPIGRAMS from Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State & the Demise of the Citizen (1999)
+ Comments or criticisms on the individual epigrams are welcome.
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There is no way to criminalize our way to utopia.
Government is ourselves – armed with clubs.
Paternalism is a desperate gamble that lying politicians will honestly care for those who fall under their power.
There is no trigger guard on political ambition.
The people must be subdued before they can be saved.
The first duty of today’s citizen is to assume the best of government, while government agents assume the worst of him.
The quest for a political mechanism to force government to serve the people is the modern search for the Holy Grail.
The fiction of majority rule provides a license to impose unlimited controls on the majority and everybody else.
Each law enacted in a momentary panic is a permanent conquest of new territory for the State.
The Night Watchman State has been replaced by Highway Robber States – governments in which no asset, no contract, no domain is safe from the fleeting whim of politicians.
Politicians and bureaucrats understand how to advance their own power far better than citizens understand how to defend their liberty.
So much of political philosophy throughout history has consisted of concocting reasons why people have a duty to be tame animals in politicians’ cages.
Politicians are more anxious to control citizens than to protect them.
Elections usually do little more than reveal comparative popular contempt for competing professional politicians.
The defects in any system of choosing and anointing rulers outweigh the risks of letting people run their own lives.
The surest effect of exalting government is to make it easier for some people to drag others down.
The growth of government is like the spread of a dense jungle, and the average citizen can hack through less of it every year.
Trusting government nowadays means dividing humanity into two classes: those who can be trusted with power to run other people’s lives, and those who cannot even be trusted to run their own lives.
All of your epigrams are great but the dense jungle analogy is my favorite. The obvious solution is to clear cut the forest. Unfortunately, even suggesting some minor thinning of the Sacred Growth is taboo. How businesses and individuals can be expected to comply with or even begin to understand a tiny fraction of one million pages of federal laws is beyond me. Since most congressmen usually don’t read the bills that they pass, one can assume that they have no better understanding than the average tax serf who is burdened with the monetary costs and further loss of freedom. The Sacred Growth has encouraged production in more regulatory-free environments like China.
Marc – Thanks for the comment. That line is also one of my favorites.
Some great stuff there to add to the quotes list at my place. Are you angling to be the first person quoted twice? 😉
“Each law enacted in a momentary panic….” Nice one there Bovard…..words to live by in this era of Bad Banks. The most basic thing about Congress is that it is oblivious. It stares down the Mall toward the Memorial to the Executive that made them most irrelevant, bows its head in solemn awe and then returns to the well of the Congress to vote for another Military/Security measure that continues to erode their now far gone relevancy. This long-standing lack of any cause and effect recognition must be why they fail to detect the irony in their little banker crucifixion last week.
Sunni – I’m glad you liked some of these one-liners!
Sunni has a zippety, thought-provoking website at http://www.sunnimaravillosa.com/.
I especially appreciate her pathbreaking peanut butter recipes!
Dirk, yep – cause-and-effect don’t have much lobbying clout in DC.
Maybe Obama needs to appoint a czar to fix this??