P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

With Government funding comes regulation.

Unlike private enterprise which quickly modifies its actions to meet emergencies — unlike the shopkeeper who promptly finds the wherewith to satisfy a sudden demand — unlike the railway company which doubles its trains to carry a special influx of passengers; the law-made instrumentality lumbers on under all varieties of circumstances at its habitual rate. By its very nature it is fitted only for average requirements, and inevitably fails under unusual requirements.

Taxes on capital, taxes on labor, inflation, bureaucratic regulation, minimum wage laws, are all - to different degrees - unnecessary slices of the wedge that stand between an individual's effort and reward for that effort.

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

We can get rid of red tape.

People feel that they're being required to meet all sorts of regulations and rules and requirements in their areas of work and MPs are not imposing those sort of restrictions on themselves.

When government grows, it breaks the family.

The sooner we rein in the red tape factory in Washington, D.C., the sooner small businesses can get back to creating jobs and helping more Americans find an honest day's work.

One must bear in mind that the expansion of federal activity is a form of eating for politicians.

Every election, a presidential candidate inevitably proposes a new cabinet agency. The idea is that this is the only way to solve a particular problem. Just create more government.

Government regulation is not a dangerous usurpation of your Constitutional rights. It's just a pain in the ass.

The only place you have real monopolies is where government provides them.

I do not expect monopoly to restrain itself.

The market economy does not automatically guarantee growth, social justice, or even economic efficiency; achieving those ends requires that government play an important role.

The best way for you to keep Government out of your business is to promote competition.

Being a fiscal conservative is not about slashing programs that help the poor, or improve health care, or ensure a social safety net. It's about insisting services are provided efficiently, get to only the people that need them, and achieve the desired results. Fiscal conservatives have hearts too — but we also insist on using our brains, and that means demanding results and holding government accountable for producing them

Government is not guaranteed to work right.

All bureaucracies have to be weeded and watched.

When people say they don't want a nanny state, they are, in fact, in a conflicted state of mind. On the one hand, they want to do whatever they want and not be stopped. On the other hand, if something goes wrong, they want to be rescued.

There is no room for politics in the Commerce Department.

With less regulation, I think you would see growth come back. Of course, there are situations where you need regulation. Antitrust regulation, for example, is a good idea because you want competition. But beyond that, it gets very difficult.

The biggest difference between the private sector and public sector is in the private sector, there's a sense of urgency because you have customers and you have competitors. Whereas in government, one of your major objectives is to not make any really big mistakes.

In general, we believe in regulation - just as long as it is fair and balanced.

Net neutrality rules have been premised on the incentives and ability of ISPs to engage in harmful conduct, not actual harms. I don't believe we should be regulating based on hypothetical problems.

You think Bill Gates would have dropped out of Harvard and toiled away creating Microsoft if he thought the government was going to take most of the company? Or Steve Jobs - drop out of Stanford to create Apple?