John Mica Quotes

What do you think the appropriate role of government is in society? The way I look at this job is, you want me to do X? Well, is the private sector doing X with any kind of success? Because if they are, I'd rather have them do it than have us do it.

If the government wants to do social policy, it should not be done in a quasi-public company. If you have a mortgage guarantee company which is done by the U.S. government, it should be guaranteed by the originators, i.e., the shareholder.

Government has a habit of blaming the private sector for its own failings while taking credit for advances we in fact owe to the private sector.

Our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.

We should distinguish carefully skepticism about Big Government from contempt for all government.

While we may argue about the size of government, the Republican Party has not been a party that says, 'I want to destroy government.'

I believe that smaller government is better government. But I also believe that in the areas where government does play a legitimate role, we should demand that it is done better.

Obama is trying to paint us as a caricature, as if we're some bizarre individualists who are hardcore libertarians. It's a false dichotomy and intellectually lazy. Of course we believe in government. We think government should do what it does really well, but that it has limits.

My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.

Fiscal conservatism is just an easy way to express something that is a bit more difficult, which is that the size and scope of government, and really the size and scope of politics in our lives, has grown uncomfortable, unwieldy, intrusive and inefficient.

The fact is that America has been at her most prosperous when government and the private sector have been not at war, but in a wary, if often underplayed, alliance. History is unmistakable on this point.

Silicon Valley is constantly saying that the government is irrelevant and powerless. But that's because most people there have never seen it get serious.

History tells us that America does best when the private sector is energetic and entrepreneurial and the government is attentive and engaged. Who among us, really, would, looking back, wish to edit out either sphere at the entire expense of the other?

Big government doesn't work! It just doesn't work!

No one has yet succeeded in reducing the size or scope of the federal government.

Liberals often don't see the problems, and conservatives don't see the promise, of government.

The issue isn't more or less government. It's dumb vs. smart government.

I don’t want to kill the government. I just want to shrink it down to a small enough size that I can flush it down the toilet.

The question today is not whether the government is too small or too small, but whether or not it works

The problem is that the energy in the Republican Party today is not directed at how to make government work better. It is directed against government.

The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.

The CARFA Act is about accountability in the federal government: making sure that taxpayers are getting their money's worth and not being defrauded. This is a bipartisan concept, and it is worthy of broad support across the Congress.

The Federal Communications Commission needs to listen and serve the American people, not special interests.

It comes down to the simple idea that government has grown substantially under Barack Obama, and government has been a failure in American's lives, and Hillary Clinton wants to grow government even further. I think Donald Trump wants to restrain government and shrink government.

I think a lot of people on both sides have extremely naive views of what government is capable of.