Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what has worked with what sounded good. In area after area—crime, education, housing, race relations—the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.

Source: Thomas Sowell
Is Reality Optional?, 1993

Topics: Central Planning; Government, Domestic Policy; Government, Downfall

Progress is precisely that which the rules and regulations did not foresee.

Source: Ludwig von Mises

Topics: Progress

The notion of a farseeing and despotic statesman, who can lay down plans for ages yet unborn, is a fancy generated by the pride of the human intellect to which facts give no support.

Source: Walter Bagehot

Topics: Dictatorships

America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to “the common good,” but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance—and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.

Source: Ayn Rand

Topics: America, Heritage; Capitalism; Progress; Prosperity

American prosperity and American free enterprise are both highly unusual in the world, and we should not overlook the possibility that the two are connected.

Source: Thomas Sowell

Topics: America, Heritage; Capitalism; Progress; Prosperity

People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them.

Source: Frederic Bastiat

Topics: Government, Spending; Taxes

There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, showers its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.

Source: Andrew Jackson

Topics: Government, Limited

The need for Government is the need for force; where force is unnecessary, there is no need for Government.

Source: Rose Wilder Lane

Topics: Force; Government

The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.

Source: Ludwig von Mises

Topics: Government, Loss of Freedom; Government, Power

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