P. J. O'Rourke Quotes About Government
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Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.
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The three branches of government number considerably more than three and are not, in any sense, 'branches' since that would imply that there is something they are all attached to besides self-aggrandizement and our pocketbooks. ... Government is not a machine with parts; it's an organism. When does an intestine quit being an intestine and start becoming an asshole?
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Whenever government proposes to get involved in the regulation of trade, just be very, very careful about who's behind this proposal, what their motives are.
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Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else.
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The Three Branches of Government: Money, Television, and Bullshit
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It is very hard now to shock people into thinking about government regulation and the extent of government involvement in life.
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What would annoy the most people most often? That is the true left-wing test of government intervention.
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Think of what big governments have gotten up to in this century : not one, but two world wars, the gulag, the holocaust, aerial bombing of civilian population centers, the Berlin Wall, nuclear explosions, the post office. A wicked individual might want these, but he wouldn't have the cash and connections to get them. A villainous corporation could afford them but has to market the products. The Vietnam draft would be a tough sell for even the most fiendish businessmen. "Get shot! Get killed! Get diseases from foreign women who despise you in their hearts!"
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The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.
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In theory, taxes should be like shopping. What I buy is government services. What I pay are my taxes.
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Microeconomics is about money you don't have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of.
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Seriously. It was running out at Rolling Stone. First of all, they didn't feel the need for a dissident conservative voice in a world where certain conservative aspects had become intellectually dominant. I would actually argue against that, but on the surface of it, in the [Bill] Clinton years the market economy triumphed, certain libertarian ideas became ordinary, and certain early-20th-century ideas about centralization of government and economic planning and socialism with a small "s" had obviously gone out the window. The Cold War was over, blah blah blah.
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No government proposal more complicated than "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" ever works.
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If we're free to do what we want, why does government always have a plan for us?
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Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government does it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.
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There's a very good reason that governments aren't supposed to compete with private-enterprise companies. Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force.
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Social Security is a government program with a constituency made up of the old, the near old and those who hope or fear to grow old. After 215 years of trying, we have finally discovered a special interest that includes 100 percent of the population. Now we can vote ourselves rich.
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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.
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Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it.
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During the mid-1980s dairy farmers decided there was too much cheap milk at the supermarket. So the government bought and slaughtered 1.6 million dairy cows. How come the government never does anything like this with lawyers?
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The question nowadays is not what makes government work. The question is how do we make it stop.
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There are twenty-seven specific complaints against the British Crown set forth in the Declaration of Independence. To modern ears they still sound reasonable. They still sound reasonable, in large part, because so many of them can be leveled against the federal government of the United States.
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Government conspiracy? They can't even deliver our mail and it's got our address on it and everything!
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The government is huge, stupid, greedy and makes nosy, officious and dangerous intrusions into the smallest corners of life - this much we can stand. But the real problem is that government is boring. We could cure or mitigate the other ills Washington visits on us if we could only bring ourselves to pay attention to Washington itself. But we cannot.
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Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. This is why most news about government sounds as if it were federally mandated -- serious, bulky and blandly worthwhile, like a high-fiber diet set in type.
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How a peaceful, uncrowded place with ample wherewithal stays poor is hard to explain. How a conflict-ridden, grossly over-populated place with no resources whatsoever gets rich is simple. The British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing.
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[Friedrich] Hayek is not protesting that things like child labor and stuff are good. He's just trying to show that when government undertakes to make everything good for everybody, this is what happens. And he addresses it to socialists of all parties.
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Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.
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A pleasant natural environment is a good - a luxury good, philosophical good, a moral goody-good, a good time for all. Whatever, we want it. If we want something, we should pay for it, with our labor or our cash. We shouldn't beg it, steal it, sit around wishing for it, or euchre the government into taking it by force.
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The inherent purpose of American government is let people seek their own goals and to encourage them to be responsible on the various adventures they have on their way to those goals, good, bad, and otherwise.
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