L. Neil Smith Quotes
To politicians, solved problems represent a dire threat - of unemployment and poverty. That's why no problem ever tackled by the government has ever been solved. What they want is lots of problems they can promise to solve, so that we'll keep electing them - or letting them keep their jobs in a bureaucracy metastasizing like cancer.
Smith, L. Neil. Lever Action: Essays on Liberty. Mountain Media, 2001.
New York’s highest court
We live in a time where people are losing confidence in the ability of Government to solve problems.
The public confidence in government had hit an historical low during the administration of George W. Bush during which his administration was riddled with ideologues who had little competence and less inclination to solve problems. However even in those cases where the Bush administration wanted to succeed, they usually failed producing such fiascos as Hurricane Katrina, the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, shipping nuclear weapons components my mistake to Taiwan, illegal disclosure of the identity of CIA covert agents, and others.
Ever since the Civil War, there has been an imbalance between the areas of the country with large unemployed populations and those areas where jobs were available. Even in 1870, the authorities were trying to get the unemployed to relocate but this was a hard thing to do at the time—physically, economically, and psychologically. It was not until the 2nd World War when huge numbers of Blacks migrated from areas of poor economic prospects in the South to areas of opportunity in the North. Also, note the classic welfare dilemma expressed whereby if humanitarian assistance is provided, people will not be desperate enough to move to areas with better opportunities.
Lester Neil Smith III, better known as L. Neil Smith, is an American libertarian science fiction author and political activist. His works include the trilogy of Lando Calrissian novels, all published in 1983: Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu, Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon, and Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka. He also wrote the novels Pallas, The Forge of the Elders, and The Probability Broach, each of which won the Libertarian Futurist Society's annual Prometheus Award for best libertarian science fiction novel. In 2016, Smith received a Special Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Libertarian Futurist Society.