Government isn’t a good way to solve problems … [G]overnment is concerned mostly with self-perpetuation and is subject to fantastic ideas about its own capabilities. … [G]overnment is wasteful of the nation’s resources, immune to common sense and subject to pressure from every half-organized bouquet of assholes. … [G]overnment is distrustful of and disrespectful toward average Americans while being easily gulled by Americans with money, influence, or fame.
Tag: P. J. O’Rourke
(1947- ) U.S. humorist, journalist, and political commentator
Government control
When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state … this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.
Politics and government
Politics doesn’t work. Look at the parts of America where government has had the most power, where government has spent the most money. Look at the housing projects we’ve got the poor people in.
Limit corruption by limiting government
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things bought and sold are legislators.
Source of affluence
Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else.
Tenth Commandment
The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to egalitarians, to people obsessed with fairness, to American presidential candidates in the year 2000 — to everyone who believes that wealth should be redistributed. And that message is clear and concise: Go to Hell.
The core of liberalism
At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic, and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.
We’ve been nice to the liberals for too long
Bill [Clinton] hates them [refugees] and fears them, especially the Cubans. Bill knows the Cubans are crazy. Only crazy people would flee from a country with free medical care, guaranteed employment for life, and first-rate gun control. The president and his sanctimonious twit of a wife have worked for decades to build a society like this, and here people are taking their lives in their hands to get away from it … Let’s face facts about our disgusting political opponents. We’ve been nice to the liberals for too long. They’re thugs. The liberal dream is to control people, to oppress and exploit them for some ‘higher’ goal. And how are the liberals ever going to be able to control people brave enough to sail to Florida in a rum carton?… A civilized society should no more tolerate the presence of a liberal than the presence of a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, it may be argued that liberalism is worse than the KKK, insofar as Klansman only hate some people while liberals hate them all.
What freedom isn’t
Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It’s not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the ‘right’ to education, the ‘right’ to health care, the ‘right’ to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle. There’s only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
Democracies are not permanent
The eighteenth-century Scottish historian Alexander Tytler said: ‘A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury.’