F.H. Buckley > Quotes

“It’s time to ask why [the United States] is the only country in the world where we permit our children to be saddled with tens — sometimes hundreds — of thousands of dollars of debt before they begin to earn a penny.”
― F.H. Buckley

“Technological change, globalization, genetic advantages, even greed, are to be found everywhere, and can’t explain why we are more immobile than the rest of the First World. What those countries lack, however, is an elite with the clout of America’s New Class. The New Class is apt to think it has earned its privileges through its merits, that America is still the kind of meritocracy that it was in Ragged Dick’s day, where anyone could rise from the very bottom through his talents and efforts. Today’s meritocracy is very different, however.”
― F. H. Buckley, The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America

“Anton Chekhov said that, when the audience sees a loaded pistol on the wall in act 1, it must go off by act 3.”
― F.H. Buckley, The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America

“Nineteenth century industrial society had created a new class of slaves,”
― F. H. Buckley, The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America

“Our schools and universities are like the old Soviet department stores whose mission was to serve the interests of the sales clerks and not the customers.”
― F. H. Buckley, The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America

“Fuller’s procedural categories provide an inadequate definition of the rule of law. A legal regime might offer generality, publicity, clarity, consistency, constancy over time, and congruency with regulators, and still be a legal system from Hell. It might weaken property rights and impose civil liability on the flimsiest of grounds, all the while conforming to Fuller’s idea of law.”
― F.H. Buckley, The American Illness: Essays on the Rule of Law

“the enemies of promise.”
― F. H. Buckley, The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America

“Trial lawyers minded to defend America’s high litigation levels sometimes argue that, were they lower, we would require a greater degree of regulation. This assumes that litigation and regulation are substitutes: more of one, less of the other. That argument would be more persuasive if the regulatory burden were higher in other countries with lower litigation levels. That’s not the case, however. When first-world regulatory regimes have been compared, American regulatory law stands out as more detailed, complex, legalistic, and adversarial.”
― F.H. Buckley, The American Illness: Essays on the Rule of Law

“Lincoln is properly remembered as a champion of democracy, but there was a good bit of Otto von Bismarck in him as well.”
― F.H. Buckley, American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup

“many foreign investors view the U.S. legal environment as a liability when investing in the United States.”21 Skeptics deride such statements as self-serving, but they are hard to ignore in the present economic environment. U.S. multinationals shed 864,000 U.S. jobs in the first decade of this century. The jobs are coming back, mind you, just not here. During the same period, U.S. multinationals increased employment overseas by 2.9 million.22 Similarly, the U.S. share of global foreign direct investment declined from 31 percent in 1980 to 13 percent in 2006.”
― F.H. Buckley, The American Illness: Essays on the Rule of Law

“Priest notes that part of the cost of American tort law comes from its unpredictability. Robert Kagan offered one example. A Japanese chemical company decided not to market an air freshener in the U.S. that it sells in large volumes in Japan because of the threat of some difficult-to-anticipate theory of liability. The product is designed to neutralize the smell of tobacco smoke. Even though the company could not see how the product might prompt litigation, it thought that American trial lawyers might be able to come up with some novel theory of liability.”
― F.H. Buckley, The American Illness: Essays on the Rule of Law

“no legal system is as consistently as pro-plaintiff as that of America, and that might give both sides pause. Comparative law is a two-way street. To take but one example, discussed by Michael Trebilcock, the Canadian Supreme Court has imposed damages caps for non-pecuniary losses, but when similar rules were enacted here by state legislatures, they were often struck down by state Supreme Courts. What is mandated there is prohibited here. If we are told to look to foreign law when it comes to capital punishment, then, we might also do so for the private law questions discussed in this book.”
― F.H. Buckley, The American Illness: Essays on the Rule of Law

“. It would also be helpful if (magically) we knew how many of a country’s lawyers were active in the practice of law, and how many of them were transactional lawyers. Finally, we would want to know whether lawyer-legislators are on average more likely to support legislation that promotes litigation.”
― F.H. Buckley, The American Illness: Essays on the Rule of Law

“What corruption is for poor countries, lobbying is for rich ones, a means of obtaining political influence through the expense of money.9 No other country has anything like the number of American lobbyists who load up legislation with interest group bargains.”
― F.H. Buckley, The American Illness: Essays on the Rule of Law

“According to Fuller, laws should be (1) general, (2) publicly promulgated, (3) prospective (i.e., not retroactive), (4) clear, (5) consistent (i.e., not contain any contradictions), (6) practicable (i.e., not demand the impossible), (7) constant over time, and (8) congruent with the actions of officials. If we accept that list as defining the rule of law, America’s departures from it will be apparent to readers of this book.”
― F.H. Buckley, The American Illness: Essays on the Rule of Law

“the needs of Americans take priority over the interests of non-Americans, that what is denied non-Americans must be paid for by what is given to Americans. That’s a lesson as old as the distinction between strangers and brothers in Deuteronomy, but it’s one that right-wing ideologues, with their desire for open borders and their willingness to ship jobs offshore, had failed to hear. They had a perfect fidelity to principle, but an indifference to fellow Americans. And that’s what was dead in conservatism.”
― F. H. Buckley, The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America

“The natural aristocracy, said Jefferson, was one of virtue or talents, and he contrasted this with an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth. The latter, he said, was a “mischievous ingredient in government,” which he trusted would be rejected in popular elections.5 All very well, replied Adams impishly, but “what chance have Talents and Virtue in competition with Wealth and Birth?” Or beauty, he added, no doubt recalling how he had been mocked as ‘His Rotundity.’ “Beauty, Grace, Figure, Attitude, Movement, have in innumerable Instances prevailed over Wealth, Birth, Talents, Virtue and every thing else.”6 Then there was the natural deference paid to eminent families.”
― F. H. Buckley, The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America

“there is little reason to think that interest group pressure is invariably benign, where a concentrated rich group (e.g., an industry association) competes against a dispersed and poorly organized group (e.g., consumers).”
― F.H. Buckley, The American Illness: Essays on the Rule of Law

“It is conventional to distinguish between thick and thin definitions of the rule of law.12 A thick definition would include democratic institutions and the protection of personal and religious freedom. As I define it, a thin definition of the rule of law would include substantive private law rights: contracts are enforced and private parties are protected from looting by the state or other private parties. Countries that adhere to a thick definition are attractive places to live; countries that adhere to a thin definition are attractive places to do business.”
― F.H. Buckley, The American Illness: Essays on the Rule of Law