Huey Long Quotes

All's the government should do is keep the taxes and regulations at a manageable rate, keep a decent standing army and get out of the way.

He is guilty if he wastes the money of the people, the taxes which they have paid, in luxury, pomp, and debauchery. He who should improve the morals of the people, be the guardian of the law, and improve their education should not pervert them by his bad example.

The economy cannot be run in an institutional, juridical, or political vacuum: the state has its role to play, guaranteeing personal freedom, a stable currency, and efficient public services

A national debt is the price of liberty.

The bottom line is that the federal government is an important partner in addressing issues like funding our public schools, fixing our crumbling roads and infrastructure, protecting our natural resources and ensuring that healthcare is affordable and protects people with pre-existing conditions.

The founders understood that concentrations of power in either government or the economy are dangerous, threatening the rule of the people. That’s why they curbed monopolies and strictly limited the corporate form, largely confining its use to educational institutions and churches and sometimes public-works projects. They wanted the people to govern the nation, not an elite, whether that elite resided in government or business.

Santa Fe is a quiet little town, and is kept clean and in good order. The governor, Lopez, was common soldier at the time of the revolution, but has now been seventeen years in power. This stability of government is owing to his tyrannical habits, for tyranny seems as yet better adapted to these countries than republicanism. The governor’s favorite occupation is hunting Indians …

A well conducted government must have an underlying concept so well integrated that it could be likened to a system of philosophy. All actions taken must be well reasoned, and all financial, political and military matters must flow towards one goal, which is the strengthening of the state and the furthering of its power.

Global capitalism means that people are no longer confined by the decisions of national elites. These could be the local monopolies, the local powers, politicians, and so on. By making local powers compete or by bypassing them altogether, globalization gives people more freedom to decide.

All this activity is directed by the King in person, and only by him. Besides, he looks after the whole public administration in all its branches With such care and thoroughness that not a thaler [note: a monetary unit] is spent unless he has given his signature. Those who do not see it cannot believe that there is any man in the world, however intelligent and able he may be, who can settle so many things personally in a single day as Frederick William the First, who works from 3 o'clock in the morning till 10, and spends the rest of' the day in looking after and drilling his army....

The experience of the United States is a happy disproof of the error so long rooted in the unenlightened minds of well-meaning Christians, as well as in the corrupt hearts of persecuting usurpers, that without a legal incorporation of religious and civil polity, neither could be supported. A mutual independence is found most friendly to practical Religion, to social harmony, and to political prosperity

The administrative process is, in essence, our generation’s answer to the inadequacy of the judicial and legislative processes. It represents our efforts to find an answer to those inadequacies by some other method than merely increasing executive power.

Too many conservatives in our country want to run up enormous deficits in the hope that someone else will pay for it. This is not conservativism; it is alchemy or lunacy.

The great obstacle in the way of reform is neither American nor English, it is simply human. All that we know, by past experience, of the attempts of man to provide himself with a government, makes it most unlikely that an effort, repeated every four years, on the part of one hundred millions of people, to elect a single officer as the chief of state, should succeed. It seemed reasonable enough when the Constitution was framed for 3,000,000 people, leading a simple agricultural life. All democracies of which the world has had any experience, have been small … Our desire to create a ‘world Power’ out of the Federal machine is a fiasco, full of shame and disappointment.

By its nature, government is not subject to the profit-and-loss test, to the domination by the consumers, of the free market …. it need serve no one except itself. The only limit on government is the enormously wide one of people rising up to refuse to obey its orders (including taxes); short of such revolution, however, there is little to limit government or to check the entrenchment or burgeoning of its elite.

Whoever reviews the operations of government in this country since the Revolution, will find few, even of the most questionable measures of administration, about which the best instructed judgment might not have doubted at the time, but of which he may affirm, with certainty, that they were indifferent to the greatest part of those who concurred in them.

For the past several years the United Nations has proclaimed Canada to be "The Best Place In The World To Live." But if you value individual and economic liberty, you are not likely to agree…What is it about Canada that the UN sees as especially praiseworthy and, by implication, the model to be emulated by other regimes? Could it be high taxation, centralized power, wealth redistribution between regions, and social engineering?

Government doesn’t always work the way its supposed to. Sometimes you have to use brute force, bring people together …

Public authorities should not simply wait until they are asked for information. They should develop policies that take essential information to the people before they ask for it. Such positive actions can be much more cost-effective, and of greater practical utility, than is the case when departments wait passively for the submission of inquiries.

The importance of supervising the business of great railways and industrial combinations and the necessary investigation and prosecution of unlawful business methods are another necessary tax upon Government which did not exist half a century ago.

We should keep faithfully the pledges we have given not to increase taxation, but this should not deter us from making every effort to rid our State of the disgrace of its illiteracy

In this country I am my own master and may do as I please

New Yorkers pay a price of untold millions to the great private monopolies every year an excessive price because these monopolies use their power to defeat effective regulation.-

As liberty can never subsist without equality, nor equality be long preserved without an agrarian law, or something like it; so when men’s riches are become immeasurably or surprisingly great, a people, who regard their own security, ought to make a strict enquiry how they came by them, and oblige them to take down their own size, for fear of terrifying the community, or mastering it.

There are no checks and balances if the government is wrong, if a private entrepreneur makes a mistake, he goes bankrupt, the losses are cut, if he bets wrong, he loses, if the government bets wrong, they just get bigger, they just appropriate more money, it's a bottomless pit, because they either get it from the tax payers or run it off a printing press.