Frederic Bastiat Quotes

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

If you make people think that the wealth of the imperial house is the wealth of the nation, then no matter how large the income is, no one will ever complain.

The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively 'peaceful' the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society.

Government just simply can't do everything for everyone.

You cannot carry on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit.

Though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.

Government can’t deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch.

The more democratic governments bow to increasing demands of the electorate and spend money on public goods and services the more disgruntled the electorate becomes.

What concerns you and me is simply who is putting the money in, who is getting it out, and what good it does

You can tell an awful lot about a civilization by how it spends its money.

Wherever democracy has prevailed, the power of the State has been used in some form or other to plunder the well-to-do classes for the benefit of the poor.

It cannot be said that we dislike paying taxes for the welfare of those less well off than we are, so we develop a draping cover of economic and social theory.

Too often in Washington, we only look at the recipient side: How does the budget affect either those who receive or don't receive benefits.

I don't care if it's a dollar or two dollars. If I'm governor, people should have skin in the game.

Look, ideally I'd like to have free money to give to everybody. The reality is in government you have to choose and make decisions.

The growing inequality of wealth and income distribution is both a moral and economic problem. If the wealthy are unwilling to pay more taxes, then this is going to lead to spending cuts. And if you put off the table things like national defense, then you're going to end up cutting more and more out of programs that aid the poor. So, I think there are consequences to this idea that tolerance for inequality requires us to - to just do nothing to make the wealthy contribute a higher share of resources to fund the government.

In America, we are just moving the chairs around and spending huge amounts of money rather than having them go in making people's lives better.

The larger the slice taken by government, the smaller the cake available for everyone.

Doing good with other people's money has two basic flaws. In the first place, you never spend anybody else's money as carefully as you spend your own. So a large fraction of that money is inevitably wasted. In the second place, and equally important, you cannot do good with other people's money unless you first get the money away from them. So that force - sending a policeman to take the money from somebody's pocket - is fundamentally at the basis of the philosophy of the welfare state.

The truth is that the government cannot give if it does not take from somebody...It is not in the power of the government to make everybody more prosperous.

When any welfare scheme is being proposed, its political sponsors always dwell on what a generous and compassionate government should pay to Paul; they neglect to mention that this additional money must be seized from Peter.

We simply cannot afford to give the reigns of government so someone who will double down on trickle down

The issue should not be, we're going to tax you more to give you the services you want. The issue is, this is the wealthiest country in the world, and we're going to use that wealth to service human needs and not to service a military industrial corporate surveillance state.

The government and its chiefs do not have the powers of the mythical Santa Claus. They cannot spend except by taking out of the pockets of some people for the benefit of others.

Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is full of so- called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing. They tell us that the government can spend and spend without taxing at all; that it can continue to pile up debt without ever paying it off, because "we owe it to ourselves."