James Bovard Quotes

The sheer number of government employees and welfare recipients effectively transforms the purpose of government from maintaining order to confiscating as much as possible from vulnerable taxpayers.

Government welfarism, with its ever-increasing army of pensioners and other beneficiaries, is fatally easy to launch and fatally easy to extend, but almost impossible to bring to a halt - and quite impossible politically to reverse, no matter how obvious and catastrophic its consequences become.

Government aid programs have been endlessly expanded, and the government has sought to maximize the number of people willing to accept handouts..... Roughly half of all Americans are dependent on the government, either for handouts, pensions, or paychecks.

The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.

Too many Mainers are dependent on government handouts. Government dependency has not - and never will - create prosperity.

The crisis of democracy in the West is not the result of falling in love with another system. In Europe and America people who are disillusioned with democracy do not dream about the Chinese model or any other form of authoritarian rule. They do not dream about government that controls Internet and puts in prison those daring to disagree.

I am not alone in thinking that we are at a tipping point ecologically and morally and politically. Democracy cannot survive without a vibrant middle class, yet the policies of one of the parties has been committed to wiping it out for 30 years.

Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.

Nothing can destroy democracy in America faster than a political-military crisis.

It seems paradoxical that a region so dependant on the Federal government decried government influence.

In 54 years of its existence, Pakistan has not been able to find a workable model of democracy

Representative democracy is in crisis in the United States.

I think that our own crisis of democracy is in its own way affecting our ability to leverage in the same way that we used to in the world.

Civilization as we know it today would be in jeopardy if the Republicans win the Senate.

Not only has the number of government employees multiplied in recent decades, but the rise of government unions further stacks the political odds against private citizens.

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.

Voters who live off taxpayers are the Democrats' ace in the hole. The Democrats created big programs and never let the recipients forget it. This gives them an initial advantage of tens of millions of votes in any presidential election.

If we have more people on the receiving end of government - more people as the middle class becomes sucked in more and more to these entitlement programs, for example - then we're going to be in a place where it's going to be hard to go back. It's going to be hard to go back again. It's going to be hard to take away stuff. It's not impossible.

The seeds of today's runaway government were planted when it was decided that government should help those who can't help themselves. From that modest, compassionate beginning to today's out-of-control mega-state, there's a straight, unbroken line. Once the door was open, once it was settled that the government should help some people at the expense of others, there was no stopping it.

That is, I think that what I do, that democracy in Venezuela hasn't really worked well since the [Ugo] Chávez era and that it has gotten even worse since the last elections, in which the Maduro government lost control of the House, of the country's legislature.

Recipients of transfers set a bad example for others, including their children, other relatives, and friends, who see that one can receive goods, services, or money from the government without earning them. The onlookers easily adopt an attitude that they, too, are entitled to such transfers. They have fewer examples of hardworking, self-reliant people in their families or neighborhoods.

The real issue, as far as Democrats are concerned, is the number of people receiving something from the government. This is exactly what Franklin Delano Roosevelt had in mind when he created this monster. And Clinton is planning to expand it beyond Roosevelt's wildest dreams.

American critics of welfare statism are often surprised to learn that countries like West Germany, with a much more comprehensive welfare state and a statistically larger public sector, have fewer government employees per capita than the United States does.

There are millions receiving government payments who have come to consider them as an earned right, who of course find them inadequate, and who are outraged at the slightest suggestion of a critical re-examination of the subject. The political pressure for constant extension and increase of these benefits is almost irresistible.

Government is so big today that more than half the population gets a major part of its income from the state.