Walter E. Williams Quotes
The difference between a thief and a congressman: When a thief steals your money, he doesn't expect you to thank him.
Williams, Walter E. More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well. Hoover Institution Press, 1999.
This was a poem on copyright infringement which he held wrong. In American history, there has always been a significant part of the American population who were opposed to copyright on both moral and public policy grounds. In the first decades of existence, the United States did not legally recognize copyright. American publishers copied and republished English works with no compunctions. Benjamin Franklin was one of the worst offenders for people who saw it as an offence. English publishers and some American authors lobbied heavily in America and finally got Congress to pass copyright legislation. However, with every new technology, the battle is fought anew, and large numbers of Americans will use copyrighted material contrary to existing law and feel morally justified in doing so, Publishers and other owners of intellectual property then over compensate and they have lobbied heavily to stop what they call piracy by impinging what used to be the legitimate rights of consumers, readers and scholars—even those who were not violating copyright. It is another of those American political issues that never gets settled and is battled in almost every generation.
Referring to American government of the 1880's:
She was a judge and a prosecutor before she had been a member of Congress.
Hurricane Katrina had destroyed most of the infrastructure of New Orleans and the levees were breached.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
This quotation was ridiculed at the time. Virginia had very lax political ethical laws and regulations for politicians and in that year, both the Republican Governor and the Republican Attorney General had accepted large gifts from businessmen of the state which in other states would have been considered as bribes and be illegal. The rules in Virginia were so lax, that expensive gifts were given to members of politician’s family. In one case that year, a businessman paid for the Governor’s daughter’s expensive wedding. With both houses of the state legislature also in Republican hands, there was no oversight or investigations. It was only though the efforts of the press that the facts emerged. Howell did not say or do anything about the situation. Although in 2013 it was Republicans who were corrupt, the same lax rules had prevailed for years and when they were in power the Democrats made no effort to tighten the ethics laws and rules.
Both the Republican and Democratic Parties were ripe with graft—the Democrats in control of many large city machines and the Republicans getting bribes and “donations” from the corporations.
Walter Edward Williams was an American economist, commentator, and academic.
