Government Quotes - Page 408

Nowadays, the media have to be there to keep you from asking too many questions, from getting together with other people who might want to do the Jeffersonian thing and call out the government.

There's nothing new about the government protecting corporations and calling it the freeing of the world or bringing democracy to bereft nations.

Quite often governments are one way and the people are another.

As the Indian government has embraced greater economic openness, the creativity and expertise of the Indian workforce has been unleashed onto the world economic stage.

It is the policy of the federal government to use all resources at its disposal to make our financial system stronger.

I think all governments engage in intelligence gathering vis-a-vis other governments.

There is no way to stabilize the markets other than through government intervention.

There is a profound contrast between the effects of foreign aid and of voluntary private investment: foreign aid goes from government to government. It is therefore almost inevitably statist and socialistic.

New taxes are so unpopular that most 'social' handout schemes are originally enacted without enough increased taxation to pay for them. The result is chronic government deficits, paid for by the issuance of additional paper money.

A certain amount of taxes is of course indispensable to carry on essential government functions. Reasonable taxes for this purpose need not hurt production much.

Government relief tends constantly to get out of hand. And even when it is kept within reasonable bounds it tends to reduce the incentives to work and to save both of those who receive it and of those who are forced to pay it. It may be said, in fact, that practically every measure that governments take with the ostensible object of 'helping the poor' has the long-run effect of doing the opposite.

More and more people are becoming aware that government has nothing to give them without first taking it away from somebody else-or from themselves. Increased handouts to selected groups mean merely increased taxes, or increased deficits and increased inflation.

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.

Margaret Thatcher in Britain and soon after Ronald Reagan in the United States - both hard-line advocates of market fundamentalism - announced that there was no such thing as society and that government was the problem not the solution. Democracy and the political process were all but sacrificed to the power of corporations and the emerging financial service industries, just as hope was appropriated as an advertisement for a whitewashed world in which the capacity of culture to critique oppressive social practices was greatly diminished.

What many commentators have missed in the ongoing attack on Edward Snowden is not that he uncovered information that made clear how corrupt and intrusive the American government has become - how willing it is to engage in vast crimes against the American public.

Everyone is now considered a potential terrorist, providing a rational for both the government and private corporations to spy on anybody, regardless of whether they have committed a crime. Surveillance is supplemented by a growing domestic army of baton-wielding police forces who are now being supplied with the latest military equipment.

The nature of the issues facing U.S. students is a bit more complicated in the U.S. because the assault on the social state, until recently, has been more incremental [i.e. the stripping of public services and so forth], whereas in Britain with the rise of the conservative-liberal government, it was immediate and bold in its assault on the social state and higher education.

We also need to find a language capable of defending government as an element of the common good, one that does not define itself as both a punishing and corporate state. This is not merely a matter of redefining sovereignty, but also rethinking what is distinctive about the social state, social responsibility, and the common good.

If the government were to invest that money in higher education and public services, these would be far better investments. But administrators and academics in the U.S. for the most part don't make these arguments; instead they have retreated from defending the university as a citadel of public values and in doing so have abdicated any sense of social responsibility to the idea of the university as a site of inspired by the search for truth, justice, freedom, and dignity.

Many university presidents assume the language and behavior of CEOs and in doing so they are completely reneging on the public mission of the universities. The state is radically defunding public universities and university presidents, for the most part, rather than defending higher education as a public good, are trying to privatize their institutions in order to remove them from the political control of state governments. This is not a worthy or productive strategy.

What would happen to the individual if all the functions of the body were placed under the control of the consciousness is what would happen to a nation in which all individual activities were directed by government.

The government in business may waste time and money without rendering service. In the end the public pays in taxes. The corporation cannot waste or it will fall. It cannot make unfair rulings or give high-handed, expensive service, for there are not enough people willing to accept inferior service to make a volume of business that will pay dividends.

No government can guarantee security. It can only tax production, distribution and service and gradually crush the power to pay taxes. That settles nothing. It only uses up the gains of the past and postpones the developments of the future.

The Government is a servant and never should be anything but a servant. The moment the people become adjuncts to government, then the law of retribution begins to work, for such a relation is unnatural, immoral, and inhuman.

It is impossible to give a soldier a good education without making him a deserter. His natural foe is the government that drills him.