James Bovard Quotes

I don't like a lot of social programs either because it makes you non-productive.

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.

Compassion is good but politicians have turned compassion into the welfare state.

Welfare makes you dependent upon someone to take care of you.

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

I don't believe in welfare.

Asking the government to help you for short periods of time is different than asking the government to take care of you for the rest of your life.

There are very few people on welfare who like it.

Even in the United States, 'you have a sort of welfare state, even if you don't want to admit it -- you don't allow people to die on the street.

We have spent trillions of dollars on welfare, where we put people in bondage so they can't be all that they're capable of being.

The more the state gives to its citizens, the less they have to earn. That is the basic concept of the welfare state - you receive almost everything you need without having to earn any of it. About half of Americans now pay no federal income tax - but they receive all government benefits just as if they had paid for, i.e., earned them.

So you've got these regular, middle-class voters who don't hate the government as much as the Kochs do. They're Republicans, but they still want government programs. They want Social Security, they want Medicare. They need it.

Liberals measure compassion by counting the number of people receiving government help.

And he said that 47%-that's pretty high-47% of Americans are basically welfare bums who are mooching off the government. And then he said, 'My job is not to worry about those people.' You know, where do people get this stuff that Mitt Romney is a heartless, calculating c**ksucker?

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.

To drive men from independence to live on alms, is itself great cruelty.

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.

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.

The welfare state shields people from the consequences of their own mistakes, allowing irresponsibility to continue and to flourish among ever wider circles of people.

You've got the Democratic Party that now depends on more government spending and actual building the dependence on government in order to increase their political party.

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

I don't think anybody should be expanding Medicaid. I think it's a mistake to create new and more expensive entitlement programs when we can't afford the ones we've got today. We've got to stop this culture of government dependence.

There's a lot of people out now around America who depend on checks from their fellow taxpayers being in the mailbox every day.

Today we are ending welfare as we know it.