Small Government Quotes

“Deregulation is a transfer of power from the trodden to the treading. It is unsurprising that all conservative parties claim to hate big government.”
― George Monbiot

“Politicized science is like a prostitute with an STD.
You know she has been fucked by a dirty politician.”
― A.E. Samaan

“Light-touch government works more efficiently in the presence of social capital. Police close more cases when citizens monitor neighborhood comings and goings. Child welfare departments do a better job of “family preservation” when neighbors and relatives provide social support to troubled parents. Public schools teach better when parents volunteer in classrooms and ensure that kids do their homework. When community involvement is lacking, the burdens on government employees—bureaucrats, social workers, teachers, and so forth—are that much greater and success that much more elusive.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

“That government is best which rules least," quoted in Torbet. Leland was a Baptist spokesman and pastor who knew Thomas Jefferson, circa 1760. No, I did not know him personally.”
― Robert G. Torbet, History of the Baptists

“The vitriol and viciousness is the inevitable result of a government increasingly deciding the vital aspects of people's lives.”
― A.E. Samaan

“The most appropriate governmental powers are negative-those, that is, that protect the small and the weak from the great and powerful, not those by which the government becomes the profligate, ineffectual parent of the small and weak after it has permitted the great and powerful to make them helpless.”
― Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture

“The idea that government “helps” us somehow is, in strict libertarian terms, a mere superstition.”
― Todd Seavey, Libertarianism For Beginners

“From this point of view, government is the constant, all-pervading, systematic violator of property rights and the “misallocator” of resources. It takes resources away from the highest-valued uses to which free individuals otherwise would put them and steers them toward lower-valued uses. Government constantly destroys happiness.”
― Todd Seavey, Libertarianism For Beginners

“One of the founding European settlements of what would become the United States, Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, first attempted communal farming on the “assumption that it was the most fitting economic arrangement for a unified religious community. Growing hungry and despairing of the experiment, however, the settlers soon switched to individual family plots, which proved far more fruitful. As the governor of the colony observed, the farmers were far more industrious in tending family plots than they were working the communal grounds. The lesson would be relearned, with a much higher body count, by communist regimes in the twentieth century after their attempts at collective farming.”
― Todd Seavey, Libertarianism For Beginners