Robert E. Wright > Quotes

“The statist view of redistribution ignores that forcibly taking resources from one person and giving to another breeds animosity and contempt in both parties.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“As James Madison noted “where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.” Hence no man had any incentive other than to do what was strictly necessary to live through the day. That is the recipe for poverty.12”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“Only governments that consistently protect human rights, and foremost the rights to life, liberty, and property, stimulate growth and development.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“When completely voluntary, the temperance movement, even perhaps its “total abstinence” policy, was salutary. When it became politicized, however, great evil lurked.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“Many of those favoring temperance, and later outright prohibition, were nativists opposed to immigrants, who tended to be “wet” Catholics.117”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“The United States became one of the world’s most religious nations because of religious liberty, which is to say competition for acolytes, not state funding or large endowments.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“Limited government meant, in part, not establishing religious monopolies, even in colonies, like Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, at first dominated by members of a single denomination.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“Mob violence menaced the persons and property of the abolitionists,” Douglass reminded listeners in 1855, “and their very homes became unsafe for themselves and their families. Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Utica, were under mob law.” Such violence redounded to the success of the antislavery movement, though, because, as Douglass noted, “for every advocate struck down, ten new ones stood up. With them obstacles were converted into facilities, hinderances into helps, curtailment into increase, and curses into blessings.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“Disestablishment meant disassociating church and state, which had often commingled to the point that governments controlled church doctrine and personnel, forced people to attend the official church and pay for it, used the church to provide civil functions, and restricted the religious and politic rights of “dissenters.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“Eternal vigilance was crucial because “love of power, and proneness to abuse it, … predominates in the human heart.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“Although some abolition societies relied more heavily on “the multiplication and circulation of tracts” than others did, some abolitionists placed great weight on tracts. If they could help to bring down the Corn Laws and thus free the poor of England from ancient “aristocratic restrictions” on their liberty, tracts could free bondsmen from their masters.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“Both for- and nonprofit voluntary associations are so good at solving social problems that most people do not even realize the problems they would face if they did not exist. This is why economist Oliver Williamson lamented that “failure to understand the main purpose of the corporation has been the source of much confusion and ill-conceived public policy.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“the Founders knew that the key to economic prosperity is good institutions, particularly limited governments that provide crucial public goods, especially protection of the rights triad for large segments of the population, if not everyone. A desert island with good institutions, they learned from Adam Smith, was more likely to prosper permanently than was a richly-endowed nation with a despotic or feeble government.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“As De Tocqueville understood, voluntary associations and governments often clash because they pit decentralized, market decision-making against centralized, politicized power.3”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“Although generally dominated by Protestant men, lyceums played an important but often overlooked role in the women’s rights movement, both by showcasing the knowledge and skills of female lecturers and by spreading liberal ideas about women’s abilities and natural rights to male and female audience members alike.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“Despite the widespread proliferation of the printed word in the first half of the nineteenth century, lyceums remained “an important element in our social progress” because “oral instruction” remained a necessary and effective pedagogical tool. Lyceums were part of a panoply of voluntary associations that functioned very much like the extension or continuing education courses of the twentieth century. Such institutions spurred a knowledge boom that helped to drive U.S. economic growth by increasing human capital, or what at the time was called “useful knowledge,” which could encompass anything from brewing beer to learning Hebrew to knowing how to apply manure properly to different crops.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“Where the state waxes, individual initiative wanes,”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“De Tocqueville concisely summarized the crowding out problem: “The more government takes the place of associations, the more will individuals lose the idea of forming associations and need the government to come to their help. That is a vicious circle of cause and effect.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“Why does the Third Sector’s independence matter? Most importantly, governments do a dreadful job of maintaining people’s dignity.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“The most challenging governance issue always entails ensuring that the organization remains on task, generating profits if a for-profit or fulfilling its mission if a nonprofit. That means maintaining organizational focus, minimizing the potential for malfeasance (wrongdoing on the part of the organization or its leaders), and raising the costs of fraud or theft within the organization.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“ultimate responsibility for spiritual and worldly success or failure rested with each individual.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“Universal education was the panacea that would save the Republic, not destroy it, advocates argued. In the end, though, it led to the state teaching students to be statists.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“Elizabeth Cady Stanton headed New York’s Women’s State Temperance Society because, as she explained it, women who lacked legal rights could not protect themselves or their children from intemperate husbands.120”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“The Third Sector’s loss of independence constitutes a major political governance problem. The Independent Sector rendered Americans independent of political manipulation. Its slow demise has aided and abetted the infantilization of the citizenry. As credit union guru James W. Brown put it, “when the people depend too much on government, they become subjects of the government rather than masters of it.”5”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“In 1829 alone, a half million Americans read Jeremiah Evarts’ William Penn Essays on the Present Crisis in the Condition of the American Indians against removal, the most successful American political tract since Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“The 1821 Quincy Report in Massachusetts and the 1824 Yates report in New York both concluded it was best to leave charity largely to voluntary efforts.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding

“Most Americans learn to worship government regulation in their public schools, where neoclassical economics is seldom taught, and rarely well when it is even attempted. The Marxist view of inter- and intraclass conflict instead holds sway.”
― Robert E. Wright, Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding