If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every state, county, and parish, and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision for the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, everything from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress. -- James Madison
The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If "Thou shalt not covet" and "Thou shalt not steal" were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free. -- John Adams
The claims of these organizers of humanity raise another question which I have often asked them and which, so far as I know, they have never answered: If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? -- Frederic Bastiat
Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame and danger that their acts would otherwise involve... But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn't belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish that law without delay ... No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic. -- Frederic Bastiat
Our rulers will become corrupt, our People careless. The time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis Is while our rulers are honest and ourselves united. From the conclusion of this war, we shall be going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the People for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but In the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which will not be knocked off at the conclusion of the war, will remain on as long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire In a convulsion. The people will be taxed for fifteen-sixteenths of their production. They will themselves pay the wages for those who place the shackles upon their own hands and feet. -- Thomas Jefferson, excerpted from "Comments and Notes on the State of Virginia"
The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the States are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign affairs. Let the General Government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our General Government may be reduced to a very simple organization, and a very inexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants. -- Thomas Jefferson
No, my friend, the way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to. Let the national government be entrusted with the defence of the nation, and its foreign and federal relations; the State governments with the civil rights, laws, police, and administration of what concerns the State generally; the counties with the local concerns of the counties, and each ward direct the interests within itself. It is by dividing and subdividing these republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations, until it ends in the administration of every man's farm by himself; by placing under every one what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best. What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian senate. -- Thomas Jefferson
I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. And to preserve their Independence, We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run Into such debt, as that we must be taxed In our meat and In our drink, In our necessaries and our comforts, In our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours In the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling our mis-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by thinking ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers Our land-holders, too, like theirs, retaining Indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs but held really In trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, In foreign countries, and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and the glory of the nation. This example reads to us the salutary lesson, that private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagances. And this Is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle In one Instance becomes a precedent for the second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society Is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, Indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general In this world, have mistaken for the natural, Instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore-horse of this frightful team Is public debt. Taxation follows that, and In Its train wretchedness and oppression. -- Thomas Jefferson
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human liberty; it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. -- William Pitt
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. -- C.S. Lewis
