Roger Scruton Quotes

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.

The welfare state inhibits the maturation of its young citizens into responsible adults

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

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.

A welfare state is frightened of every poor person who tries to get in and every rich person who tries to get out.

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 US, for historical reasons, mistrusts the concept of a welfare state, and this mistrust shows itself nakedly under present US government, which commits uncounted billions of the national wealth to what it calls defence, and is close-fisted in giving money to plans which would ameliorate the grinding poverty of a great part of its people. Quite simply, in Canada you could not get away with that.

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.

Social security is the most successful government program in our nation's history. We are not going to cut social security! We are going to expand social security!

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?

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.

Democrats are firm believers in the welfare state for their own constituents, whether that's a crack addict mother of five or a Wall Street banker.

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.

The welfare state is an assault on families.

It's not the job of government to help the poor. The church is the mechanism that God put on earth to help the poor.

Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state, whether in Western Europe or on this side of the Atlantic.

Any measure that establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives it an administrative form thereby creates an idle and lazy class, living at the expense of the industrial and working class.

The welfare state may be well-intentioned, but it is a Ponzi scheme

The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.

France must not be the only country to have a high level of welfare protection and few obligations incumbent on those who receive benefits.

Ironically, in the full-fledged transfer society, where governments busy themselves redistributing income by means of hundreds of distinct programs, hardly anyone is better off as a result.

In 1923 there were no government benefits for immigrants except one: Freedom!

Once Congress establishes that one person can live at the expense of another, it pays for everyone to try to do so.

The Social Security Act offers to all our citizens a workable and working method of meeting urgent present needs and of forestalling future need. It utilizes the familiar machinery of our Federal-State government to promote the common welfare and the economic stability of the Nation.

President Obama's recommended reduction in the tax deduction for charitable giving reflects his fundamental belief that only the government can or should help the poor. He wants to keep the impoverished directly dependent on the government - and the Democratic Party - for their daily bread.