Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State & the Demise of the Citizen (<\/a>1999)<\/p>\n+ Comments or criticisms on the individual epigrams are welcome.<\/p>\n
**************************************************<\/p>\n
There is no way to criminalize our way to utopia.<\/p>\n
Government is ourselves – armed with clubs.<\/p>\n
Paternalism is a desperate gamble that lying politicians will honestly care for those who fall under their power.<\/p>\n
There is no trigger guard on political ambition.<\/p>\n
The people must be subdued before they can be saved.<\/p>\n
The first duty of today’s citizen is to assume the best of government, while government agents assume the worst of him.<\/p>\n
The quest for a political mechanism to force government to serve the people is the modern search for the Holy Grail.<\/p>\n
The fiction of majority rule provides a license to impose unlimited controls on the majority and everybody else.<\/p>\n
Each law enacted in a momentary panic is a permanent conquest of new territory for the State.<\/p>\n
The Night Watchman State has been replaced by Highway Robber States – governments in which no asset, no contract, no domain is safe from the fleeting whim of politicians.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Politicians and bureaucrats understand how to advance their own power far better than citizens understand how to defend their liberty.<\/p>\n
So much of political philosophy throughout history has consisted of concocting reasons why people have a duty to be tame animals in politicians’ cages.<\/p>\n
Politicians are more anxious to control citizens than to protect them.<\/p>\n
Elections usually do little more than reveal comparative popular contempt for competing professional politicians.<\/p>\n
The defects in any system of choosing and anointing rulers outweigh the risks of letting people run their own lives.<\/p>\n
The surest effect of exalting government is to make it easier for some people to drag others down.<\/p>\n
The growth of government is like the spread of a dense jungle, and the average citizen can hack through less of it every year.<\/p>\n
Trusting government nowadays means dividing humanity into two classes: those who can\u00a0 be trusted with power to run other people’s lives, and those who cannot even be trusted to run their own lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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. ************************************************** 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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