Allan H. Meltzer Quotes

As a Coalition Government, we inherited a legacy of lack of trust and confidence in political system.

If, then, the control of the people over the organs of their government be the measure of its republicanism, and I confess I know no other measure, it must be agreed that our governments have much less of republicanism than ought to have been expected; in other words, that the people have less regular control over their agents, than their rights and their interests require.

I do strongly believe myself that members of the government who sit in the House of Lords should be accountable to the elected House because otherwise there is a democratic deficit, and that is wrong.

When governments become large, voters cannot exercise close oversight, otherwise known as political power.

I am not a politician... I only suffer the consequences.

Representative government demands an ongoing conversation between legislators and constituents.

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what's going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?

A government is republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direction of its concerns: not indeed in person, which would be impracticable beyond the limits of a city or small township, but by representatives chosen by himself and responsible to him at short periods.

In every country, politics is considered to be a waste of time.

We pride ourselves on our democracy, but when you see the way it actually works, I think it is worthy of contempt.

People are sick of the political system and the players in the system - BJP, Congress, Akalis. They want a good alternative and those who can deliver.

Unless the people can choose their leaders and rulers, and can revoke their choice at intervals long enough to test their measuresby results, the government will be a tyranny exercised in the interests of whatever classes or castes or mobs or cliques have this choice.

the whole flavor and quality of the American representative government turns to ashes on the tongue, if one regards that government as simply an inferior and rather second-rate sort of corporation.

It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.

Government is not infallible. Government is only an executive control, a centralized authority for the purpose of expressing the will of the people; before you have a government you must have the people. Without the people there can be no government. The government must be, therefore, an expression of the will of the people.

The natural cure for an ill-administration, in a popular or representative constitution, is a change of men.

There's a real danger in the way our representative government functions today. It functions properly only when paired with accountability.

The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.

When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening, foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us

India has been at the greatest loss because governments were run only for elections.

If there’s not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat — if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have? If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy.

The representative system of government is calculated to produce the wisest laws, by collecting wisdom where it can be found.

What the public does is not to express its opinions but to align itself for or against a proposal. If that theory is accepted, we must abandon the notion that democratic government can be the direct expression of the will of the people. We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilizations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern. We must say that the popular will does not direct continuously but that it intervenes occasionally.

Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress.

Most of us think of government as them. Yet government isn't Them: It's us.