Government Role Quotes

Governments have nothing. They can't create anything, they never have. All they can do is steal from one group and give it to another

Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness….government in its best state is a necessary evil; in its worse state an intolerable one.

Although the free market is clearly the antithesis of state control of the economy, such as fascists advocate, the left-right dichotomy makes it seem as if fascists are just more extreme versions of “conservatives,” in the same sense in which socialism is a more extreme version of the welfare state. But this vision of a symmetrical political spectrum corresponds to no empirical reality. Those who advocate the free market typically do so as just one aspect of a more general vision in which government’s role in the lives of individuals is to be minimized, within limits set by a need to avoid anarchy and a need to maintain military defense against other nations.

The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, and to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.

There is only one kind of freedom and that's individual liberty. Our lives come from our creator and our liberty comes from our creator. It has nothing to do with government granting it.

State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management.

I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government. The one thing that's missing, but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash - a method whereby on the Internet you can transfer funds from A to B without A knowing B or B knowing A.

I am against market fundamentalism. I think this propaganda that government involvement is always bad has been very successful - but also very harmful to our society.

Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives

The whole duty of government is to prevent crime and to preserve contracts.

What government is best? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.

Government is not the answer to the problem - it IS the problem.

It's perfectly ordinary to be a socialist. It's perfectly normal to be in favor of fire departments.

There was a time that I questioned the government's role in abortion.

Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first a patron, the last a punisher.

American and world history show that if you want minimal government, you can have it—but only if you want almost everyone in your society also to be a dirt-poor, subsistence farmer. If you want a prosperous, growing modern economy, you need high specialization and a huge, complex, interdependent network of individuals, businesses, research centers and education. And only government has the authority or money to regulate that network and to regularly pump in the targeted funds needed to sustain and grow it.

The existence of a free market does not of course eliminate the need for government. On the contrary, government is essential both as a forum for determining the "rule of the game" and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided on.

You can't fall back on the private sector and say, 'You take care of the nation's banking system.' That's a fundamental function of the government, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and the FDIC, etc. All of those agencies have a major role to play there.

When markets fail, as they often do, collective action becomes imperative.

No government prospers by saying, 'I don't need to do anything. Just by being there, we have made the country thrive.'

The era of big government is over.

In the great fulfillment, we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it, and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.

We have to find ways in which, collectively, we agree there's some things that government needs to do to help protect us, that in this age of non-state actors who can amass great power, I want my government - and I think the German people should want their government - to be able to find out if a terrorist organization has access to a weapon of mass destruction that might go off in the middle of Berlin.

I don't know if the European Union contributes a great deal to espionage. At the union level, they talk about commerce and privacy. But to keep citizens safe, that remains a responsibility back in national capitals.

Governments have nothing. They can't create anything, they never have. All they can do is steal from one group and give it to another at the destruction of the principles of freedom, and we ought to challenge that concept.