The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about 'social justice' all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get re-elected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice.
The politician in my country seeks votes, affection and respect, in that order.
Politicians as a class are dangerous, that people who are seeking power over us are not, by definition, our friends.
I've been a politician and so I'm sometimes cynical about what politicians won't do. When I hear a politician say something that makes no sense whatsoever, I think there's one of two things there: There's money or the promise of money.
The beauty and riddle in studying the motives of any politician is in trying to decide what is idealism and what is self-interest, and often we are left to conclude that the answer is a mixture of the two.
Asking politicians to vote themselves out of power is like asking rabbits not to multiply, it ain't natural.
You can drive yourself crazy trying to peer into a person's soul--or you can do the sensible thing: ask not what inner motives drive a politician's policy choices but instead whether those choices are good for the country.
Politicians need human misery. ... Government's a disease masquerading as its own cure.
What is obnoxious about the motives of politicians - whatever those motives may be - is that politicians must announce their motives as visionary and grand.
Our politicians want to keep us in a negative state because they can easily manipulate us.
You can bet the rent money that whatever politicians do will end up harming consumers. ... Economic ignorance is to politicians what idle hands are to the devil. Both provide the workshop for the creation of evil.
There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money.
In America, politicians do whatever to get re-elected, and a lot of decisions that were being made at that time by Kennedy were certain not to get him re-elected.
There is more selfishness and less principle among members of Congress than I had any conception of, before I became President of the U.S.
