David Frum Quotes

Indeed, one of the least-talked-about dangers of our ever-expanding entitlement culture is that it threatens the viability of these necessary programs for those who genuinely need and use them as a bridge to a better life.

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.

Over time, Europeans have come to rely on governments to protect them from the rougher facets of private enterprise and to look after them in old age.

Too many Mainers are dependent on government handouts. Government dependency has not - and never will - create prosperity.

I believe welfare makes you lazy and unproductive.

The government is becoming the family of last resort.

One side of the American psyche wants smaller government, lower taxes, and more choices for individuals, even if those choices increase risk. The other wants a strong social safety net to protect the weakest among us, even if it costs more to minimize risk.

I knew that good people who wanted to be a part of the American dream have become trapped in dependency because the federal government and the state government had made it in their economic interest not to take a job because the benefits that they didn't work were better. I changed that.

One of the things that made the marriage between liberty and popular sovereignty possible was the welfare state. Democracy has three parts. It has liberty, it has popular sovereignty, and it has a social safety net as well

Our whole way of life is dedicated to the removal of risk. Cradle to grave we are supported, insulated, and isolated from the risks of life—and if we fall, our government stands ready with Bandaids of every size.

Is our national goal to place as many people on welfare, food stamp support, as we can possibly put on that program? Is that our goal? Is that a moral vision for the United States of America, just to see how many people we can place in a situation where they're dependent on the federal government for their food?

In Denmark we're so privileged. You get money to study, you get money if you're sick and you get money if your hand hurts. It's hard to be critical of people who are sick getting money, but in Denmark everyone gets money thrown at them and it makes them lazy.

The stabilizing influence of the modern social welfare state emerged only after World War II, nearly 200 years on from the 18th-century beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.

The cradle-to-grave welfare state diminishes individual initiative and can breed a pervasive sclerosis.

The welfare state, which grew out of post-war solidarity, has for decades been based on the principle that those who pay into the system are entitled to expect that the safety net will be there for them when they fall on hard times.

The Left loves the poor so much it creates more of them every time it gets into power.

There is much in American society which I admire, but I have long held the view that the absence of an effective safety net in that country means that too many needy citizens fall by the wayside. That is not the path that Australia will tread. Nor do we want the burdens of nanny state paternalism that now weigh down many economies in Europe.

The welfare state has always been judged by its good intentions, rather than its bad results.

Too many Americans now believe that the checks they receive every month from the unemployment office - like the checks they get from the welfare office, from Medicare, from Social Security - are inalienable rights. They are not.

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.

I'm opposed to giving people money for doing nothing.

The long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization of the population.

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 welfare state shields people from the consequences of their own mistakes, allowing irresponsibility to continue and to flourish among ever wider circles of people.

The policies advocated by the welfare school remove the incentive to saving on the part of private citizens.