Christie Hefner Quotes

Paternalism is the method of government activism most amenable to an impoverished public sector.

I wrote my thesis on welfare policy.

In my youth, I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

If you throw a welfare state into the middle of a democracy, it’s very hard to get rid of the beast.

The Left loves the poor so much it creates more of them every time it gets into power.

Liberals want to manage the damage with government programs to take care of those who have fallen between the cracks. Populists want to fix the cracks so that people don't fall in the first place.

Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.

You know, I think that the Republicans have made it really clear that they want to end the so-called social safety net from cradle to grave.

Why is it is claimed that if people won't or can't take care of their own needs, that people in government can do it for them?

To Republicans, I humbly suggest that we make it possible for Democrats to give up their quest for redistribution of income and wealth by our acceptance of an appropriate role for government in financing those public goods and services necessary to secure a social safety net below which no American would be allowed to fall.

There was no welfare state, and people had to rely mainly on the Poor Law - that was all the state provided. It was very degrading, very humiliating. And there was a means test for receiving poor relief.

The Left likes to think of itself as the bulwark of progressive liberal individualism, and yet it seeks to progressively coerce others to fund every social program under the sun via majority rule.

I don't believe in welfare.

I think governments can't do much.

The government is becoming the family of last resort.

My concept of government's role in people's lives is that it is limited but legitimate, and essential when people have nowhere else to turn.

Government just simply can't do everything for everyone.

This desire for equity must not lead to an excess of welfare, where nobody is responsible for anything.

Government has a role as well in what is referred to as redistributive justice.

What the government gives it must first take away.

…people consider the things which government does for them to be social progress, but they consider the things the government does for others as socialism.

A mature welfare state is always broke.

We're moving more and more toward user fees, but the people who use social service programs obviously don't have the ability to pay for them.

The more we spend on social spending the more we create an appetite for more social spending.

One of the things that made the marriage between liberty and popular sovereignty possible was the welfare state. Democracy has three parts. It has liberty, it has popular sovereignty, and it has a social safety net as well