Ian Macleod Quotes

Most nanny-state initiatives begin on a local level.

If Singapore is a nanny state, then I am proud to have fostered one.

In several short years, Obama has fundamentally shifted the balance away from the individual and toward government, and has altered the national psyche from self-reliance to ever-growing reliance on government.

We don't want a busybody government - a boss - that butts into our lives every chance it gets to tell us how to work, how to play, where to live and on and on.

When government grows, it breaks the family.

Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.

As we seek to improve the management of the federal government, we should keep in mind that the government is not a private corporation. What may make sense for a large corporation may not always make sense for the federal government. In our quest for efficiency, we must not lose sight of the reasons why we enacted certain federal programs in the first place.

The country is carried comfortably down the river, and the function of Government is to occasionally put out an oar to prevent running into the bank.

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

No centralized bureaucracy, or so-called "paternal government," yet invented on earth, has been anything but a failure, or is it like to be anything else

Now we’re going to get big government.

The modern state...has made salvation its function. Therefore, Man is to be saved from poverty, sickness, death, ignorance, sin, war, superstition, and all things else by the saving state, which works steadily to create its divine order, the saving society. Every area the state wishes to invade and possess in the name of the welfare of man becomes its legitimate jurisdiction. A total sovereignty is asserted in the name of man. The state steadily denies the need of Christian theological order as it claims jurisdiction over every area …

We are all socialists now.

… creeping collectivism

As an ideologically based movement, socialism is no longer vital. Today it's a combination of democracy, rule of law and the welfare state, and I'd say a vast majority of Europeans defend this -- the British Tories can't touch the National Health Service without being beheaded.

Socialism is a wonderful form of government until you run out of other people’s money.

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

Liberalism is really piecemeal socialism, and socialism always attacks three basic social institutions: religion, the family, and private property. Religion, because it offers a rival authority to the state; the family, because it means a rival loyalty to the state; and property, because it means material independence of the state.

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.

We must recognize that personal freedoms diminish as the welfare state grows. The price of more and more public programs is less and less private freedom.

The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good - anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.

The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer's money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse. The black family- which survived slavery, discrimination, poverty, wars and depressions- began to come apart as the federal government moved in with its well-financed programs to “help.”

When poverty declines, the need for government declines, which is why expecting government to solve poverty is like expecting a tobacco company to mount an aggressive anti-smoking campaign.

The rearing of children is considered too important to be left to the individual and should be the responsibility of the state.

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.