Roger Scruton Quotes

Economic planning is nothing more than the forcible superseding of other people's plans by the powerful elite backed up by the brute force of government.

We will do whatever the government tells us to do, which is a critically important principle of the Chinese market economy, and there is nothing more for discussion about it.

A government that seizes control of the economy for the good of the people, ends up seizing control of the people for the good of the economy.

It is the work of the state to think for the people and plan for the people.

The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars and revolutions is its anticapitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties were eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise.

[Socialistic] economic planning, regulation, and intervention pave the way to totalitarianism by building a power structure that will inevitably be seized by the most power-hungry and unscrupulous.

Government central planning means over-riding other people's plans.

The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans. He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute preeminence of his own plan.

The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.

What is politically defined as economic planning is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by Government officials.

Central planning, judicial activism, and the nanny state all presume vastly more knowledge than any elite have ever possessed.

We have been living amidst one of the great revolutions of human history, and we hardly know it: the penetration of the State into every aspect of human life and society. Some people regard this as good and "progressive," others regard it as tyrannical; but either way, it's a fact, a transformation as great as, say, the Industrial Revolution. Absolutely nothing is now beyond the scope of State power.

Socialists don't like ordinary people choosing, for they might not choose Socialism.

Free enterprise democracy has proven the best system by far for maximizing freedom, prosperity, and happiness. Dictatorship, Soviet style communism, and hereditary aristocracy have proven about the worst environments for people to achieve all three of these goals.

I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn't be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn't be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters - who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.

The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime... It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien.

Christianity is the enemy of liberty and civilization. It has kept mankind in slavery and oppression. The Church and the State have always fraternally united to exploit the people.

How did an allegedly free people spawn a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every orifice of the body politic?

It is worth noting that the people today who so vehemently wish to sweep religion from all public spaces and institutions are also the same people who consistently oppose freedom. They want only one God &emdash; the state, which of course they intend to run.

In Fascism the State is not a night-watchman, only occupied with the personal safety of the citizens.

In the early 1990s, there was a debate among economists over shock therapy versus a gradualism strategy for Russia. The people in Russia who believed in shock therapy were Bolsheviks a few people at the top that rammed it down everybody's throat. They viewed the democratic process as a real impediment to reform.

The inefficiency of political control of an economy has been demonstrated more often, in more places, and under more varied conditions, than almost anything outside the realm of pure science.

If we fail to adapt, we fail to move forward.

It is absurd to expect governments to descend gradually, step-by-step into barbarism - as if there was a train schedule to political hell and people could get off at any stop along the way.

Everything you heard about me is true. . . . I am not a free marketer. . . . I believe in the heavy hand of government.