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The Economy and Taxes
"When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the top marginal tax rate was at 70 percent. When he left office in 1989, the top marginal rate was down to 28 percent. Liberal logic (an oxymoron if there ever was one) would thus suggest that the government would collect less money in taxes because the rates have been cut. Right? Wrong. Actual revenues nearly doubled, from $550 billion to about $991 billion. How did that happen? If the liberals would stop ridiculing so-called "trickle-down" economics for a while and take an honest look at reality, they would understand."
"Cuts in marginal tax rates spur economic growth by providing entrepreneurs an incentive to invest their marginal tax dollars, causing many of them to earn more money and pay more taxes on their earnings, albeit at a lower marginal rate, and create new jobs. Again, this is an application of Adam Smith's "invisible hand." These new jobs result in a bigger employment base and, thus, more taxpayers. More taxpayers translates to higher tax revenues - even at lower marginal rates."
- Rush Limbaugh
"[John Maynard] Keynes was one of the most influential thinkers of our century, and his influence has been almost entirely bad. Since time immemorial, governments have debased their currency, misappropriated their people's wealth, and diverted the proceeds from productive investment to garish monuments to themselves. It was Keynes who supplied governments with arguments - and since Keynes was Keynes, brilliant arguments - to justify this outrageous conduct. If John Maynard Keynes had never lived, the Western world might still be the overtaxed, inflationary statist mess that it is, but at least the people responsible for the mess would have to pretend to be embarrassed about it. Instead, Keynes' fertile and subtle mind manufactured a huge armoury of clever defences of bad public policy. Since the publication of his 1936 masterwork The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, opponents of profligacy in government and state manipulation of the economy have had to contend not merely with the usual selfishness and cowardice of politicians but also with the subversive power of Keynes' mordant and glittering mind."
- David Frum
"Instead of high tax rates with low production, government can raise the same amount of revenue through low tax rates that will apply to the high production base that will result from lessening taxes and increasing incentives."
- Jack Kemp
"No nation in history has ever taxed itself to prosperity."
- Rush Limbaugh
Government Bureaucracies
"It's no accident that capitalism has brought with it progress, not merely in production but also in knowledge. Egoism and competition are, alas, stronger forces than public spirit and sense of duty. In Russia, they say, it is impossible to get a decent piece of bread. Perhaps I'm overpessimistic concerning state and other forms of communal entreprise, but I expect little good from them. Bureaucracy is the death of any achievement. I've seen and experienced too many dreadful warnings, even in comparatively model Switzerland. I'm inclined to view that the state can only be of use to industry as a limiting and regulative force."
- Albert Einstein
"When the growth of a bureaucracy passes beyond control, it becomes a law unto itself. The process is self-fulfilling. The failure of each new intrusion compels it to intrude again. More people are hired, more programmes devised to occupy them, until the bureaucracy's original purpose is obscured. No longer is it there to administer the law, for the law has been buried. It is there to minister to itself."
- Kenneth McDonald
"Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem."
- Ronald Reagan
"Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."
- Thomas Paine
"I am a firm believer in the ideas of Malthus when it comes to bureaucrats. For their expansion in numbers and projects is fixed precisely by Malthus' principle that the size of the population is determined by the amount of available food. If we vote 800 million francs for government services, the bureaucrats will devour 800 million; if we give them two billion, they will immediately expand themselves and their projects up to the full amount."
- Frederic Bastiat
"You can walk into a Wal-Mart store today and have your credit card approved in 2.3 seconds. And yet, it takes the Veterans' Department six weeks to answer your letter. We [conservative] Republicans see the efficiency of Wal-Mart and UPS; and we want to change the government to be as courteous, efficient, speedy and effective as those companies. The [liberal] Democrats see those companies, and they want to apply litigation, regulation, and taxation to make sure the companies become more like the government."
- Newt Gingrich
"Excessive governmental responsibility encourages a lack of responsibility in the citizen. From this excess and this absence, in fact, have arisen the revolutions and rebellions with which France's history is so replete. Centralization perpetuates the crises it was created to dispel."
- Alain Peyrefitte
"Is democracy in danger in Ontario? That's what the Mike Harris government's critics say. In the early 1990s, when Bob Rae wanted to force every private-sector employer to choose his workforce by racial quota, democracy was apparently in fine shape. But since 1995, democracy has supposedly been battered and bludgeoned. What sins against democracy is the Harris government alleged to have committed? Just read the angry letters and op-eds in the newspapers for a list. It amalgamated the six municipalities of Metro Toronto, even though the mayors of those municipalities objected. It shut down boards of education even though the school trustees objected. It reformed Rae's labor law even though the union bosses objected. Time and time again, the critics charge, the Harris government has tried to reform bloated, incompetent and wasteful functions of government, ruthlessly ignoring the wishes of those who profit from the bloat, incompetence and waste."
"Defenders of the Harris government think of democracy as a political system in which the majority gets to decide, at election time, the great political questions of the day. By that definition, the Harris government is superbly democratic: Ontario is getting what it voted for. But the critics believe in quite a different theory of democracy. To them, it's a system in which between elections, the beneficiaries of government spending quietly use their control of the bureaucracy to make sure nothing happens that displeases them."
"The one sort of person who is never heard in "consultations" - who by definition can never be heard, is the ordinary citizen unrepresented by any lobbying group. That is why we have elections - so citizens, not in groups but as individuals, can choose which political philosophy to give a mandate to. Harris, similarly, has been accused of disregarding the advice of his civil servants, relying instead on the small group of advisors who crafted the original Common Sense Revolution manifesto. There, he is indeed guilty as charged. But that's because the Ontario civil service is the bitterest opponent of Harris' reforms. Harris was elected to cut taxes and reduce government. The bureaucracy wants to enlarge government and raise taxes. How is it "democratic" to substitute the demands of the bureaucracy for the commands of the people?"
"The people who condemn the Harris government's methods are really angry about its policies. The critics believe in more government spending, higher taxes and more privileges for trade unions. That's what the fight is about. And on all those issues, it's important to remember the people spoke in 1995 and spoke in favor of the policies Harris argued for. The many sensible people who continue to favor those policies should not be fooled by bogus accusations from self-interested bureaucrats that a government is somehow betraying democracy when it keeps its promises."
- David Frum
The Politics of Redistribution
"We must focus on the creation of wealth, rather than the redistribution of wealth."
- Newt Gingrich
"Government cannot create wealth; it can only destroy it or confiscate it and redistribute it."
- Rush Limbaugh
"Government's legitimate role in a free society is to protect the citizens and their property from encroachment and to require the observance of contracts. Once a government steps outside that role, the power it exercises becomes political power. It is political power, funded from everyone's taxes, that the hosts of advocacy groups manipulate to further their private causes. Whereas governmental power is used legitimately to protect us and our property from acts by other citizens to encroach upon it or to break contracts, political power is used to force citizens who are not in breach of the law to do things they don't want to do."
- Kenneth McDonald
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."
- Robert Heinlein
"The law can be an instrument of equalization only as it takes from some persons and gives to other persons. When the law does this, it is an instrument of plunder."
- Frederic Bastiat
"When you rob Peter to pay Paul, Peter is discouraged from working harder while Paul doesn't need to work as hard as he did before, or even at all. The economy begins to contract, tax revenues decline, governments borrow to make up the difference by selling bonds to the private banks, and guess who buys the bonds from the banks? Not Paul, who is a recipient of some of the borrowed money, but Peter who has been discouraged from taking the risks that are inseparable from the creation of wealth and is looking for a safe return on his dwindling capital. And as the borrowing grows, and the interest bill grows with it, so does the government's presence grow as well, leading to the comment of the French economist Bertrand de Jouvenel: 'The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the state.'"
- Kenneth McDonald
But...
"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on Paul's support."
- George Bernard Shaw
The Legacy of Pierre Elliot Trudeau
"In his sixteen years of office Pierre Elliot Trudeau made himself a nuisance by inserting the tentacles of government where they had no place to be: in the private lives of the citizens. The man who declared that there was no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation set about making its presence felt in every room of the house."
- Kenneth McDonald
"Nearly every move that [Former Prime Minister Brian] Mulroney made while in office was governed not by his own budgets, but by Trudeau's fiscal legacy. During his sixteen years in power, Trudeau turned the nearly balanced books he had inherited into a $38.5 billion deficit and increased the national debt by 1,200 per cent, from $17 billion to more than $200 billion. By the time Mulroney took over, less than 15 per cent of the annual budget was made up of discretionary spending, so that he was robbed of any manoeuvring room to pay for the many promises he had made."
- Peter C. Newman
"[Trudeau's] attacks might move a few in Quebec who are nostalgic about the past. It is a concentrate of thirty years of his worst calumnies dribbling with contempt for an insecure society that could never quench his thirst for power. Outside Quebec, Trudeau finds himself in the company, amongst others, of marginals and extremists to whom he gives not leadership, but a justification for their prejudices."
- Jean Pare
The Left
"Political morality is a morality of consequences, not intentions. You may intend to achieve a peaceful, non-racist South Africa - but if the predictable consequences of your actions is civil war and dictatorship, then you are behaving immorally. You may intend to create world peace - but if the predictable consequence of your action is military adventurism by the Soviet Union, then you are behaving immorally. You may intend to lift the downtrodden up from their poverty - but if the predictable consequence of your action is economic dislocation and decline, then you are behaving immorally. Political morality is about responsibility, not showing off. To be responsible, though, you have to think, and the contemporary left is distinguished by its principled refusal to think. Only slogans are acceptable to it: "Free Canada, Trade Mulroney"; "Refuse the Cruise"; "Boycott Grapes." Whatever its other intellectual errors, the left understands human psychology. Chanting and yelling can indeed stifle questions and doubts, at least for a while. Still, the evidence is on virtually every one of the Left's most treasured beliefs. They are all wrong. The planned economy doesn't work, appeasing the Soviets doesn't work, Third World revolutions don't work. It takes considerable gullibility and ignorance to be unaware of how spectacularly, disastrously wrong these delusions are - and gullibility and ignorance are not moral virtues."
- David Frum
"The Left is dead. The Rae New Democrats helped kill it, the Chrétien Liberals helped kill it, and the Harris Conservatives helped kill it."
- Hugh Segal
"If you are not a liberal at age 20, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at age 40, you have no brain." (He was half right, at least.)
- Winston Churchill
"If I had to point out the characteristic trait that differentiates socialism from [a proper view of the political economy], I should find it here. Socialism includes a countless number of sects. Each on has its own utopia, and we may well say that they are so far from agreement that they wage bitter war upon one another. Between M. Blanc's organized social workshops and M. Proudhon's anarchy, between Fourier's association and M. Cabet's communism, there is certainly all the difference between night and day. What then, is the comon denominator to which all forms of socialism are reducible, and what is the bond that unites them against natural society, or society as planned by Providence? There is none except this: They do not want natural society. What they want is an artificial society, which has come forth full-grown from the brain of its inventor... They quarrel over who will mould the human clay, but they agree that there is human clay to mould. Mankind is not in their eyes a living and harmonious being endowed by God Himself with the power to progress and to survive, but an inert mass that has been waiting for them to give it feeling and life; human nature is not a subject to be studied, but matter on which to perform experiments."
- Frederic Bastiat
"A liberal is a man who is willing to spend somebody else's money."
- Carter Glass
"A communist is a man who has nothing, and is willing to share it with the world."
Anonymous
"Socialism and federalism are necessarily political opposites, because the former demands that centralized concentration of power which the latter by definition denies."
- Felix Morley
"We recognize the right of every man to perform services for himself or to serve others according to conditions arrived at through free bargaining. Communism denies this right, since it places all services in the hands of an arbitrary, central authority. Our doctrine is based on private property. Communism is based on systematic plunder, since it consists in handing over to one man, without compensation, the labour of another. If it distributed to each one according to his labour, it would, in fact, recognize private property and would no longer be communism. Our doctrine is based on liberty. In fact, private property and liberty, in our eyes are one and the same; for one man is made the owner of his own services by his right and his ability to dispose of them as he sees fit. Communism destroys liberty, for it permits no one to dispose freely of his own labour. Our doctrine is founded on justice; communism, on injustice. This is the necessary conclusion from what we have just said."
- Frederic Bastiat
The Liberal Media Bias
"Let's start with the question of bias. The practice of journalism has altered significantly since I began my political journey in the 1960s. Prior to then, journalists were expected to be neutral in their treatment of public figures and public issues. Editors insisted that reporters keep their personal and political opinions out of their stories. There was no quicker way for a political reporter to find himself back on the police beat than to start mixing commentary with reportage. The right or power to express opinions was reserved for columnists and editorial writers, and their columns and editorials were clearly labelled as such. It was sort of like the health labels on today's cigarette packages - you could read that stuff at your peril. Times have changed, for the worse. A casual examination of any newspaper today will reveal stories that claim to report on events, but that are actually replete with the biases and opinions of the reporter. Stories distributed by The Canadian Press, the national news-gathering collective, are filled these days with descriptive words and phrases that clearly indicate what the writer thinks about the events, views or people he or she is describing - and what he or she thinks any right-minded person should think about them. If someone in the news examines issues from a conservative point of view, that individual is almost invariably identified in journalists' stories as "right-wing." The Fraser Institute of Vancouver is invariably described in new reports as "the right-wing Fraser Institute" whenever they issue a report or analysis. Yet organizations or individuals expressing views contrary to the Fraser Institute's are never described as being "left-wing." In the years since I entered public life, journalists have come to see themselves as advocates or as adversaries in relation to established institutions, particularly the institutions of government. With some of the younger journalists, objectivity is no longer an ideal to pursue, but rather a term of opprobrium. It is instructive to compare the national media's treatment of the Mulroney Conservative administration with their treatment of the Chrétien Liberal administration. The ferocity of the attacks by journalists on possible mistakes made by the Mulroney government is burned into the memory of everyone who was active in federal politics in the 1980s and 1990s. The media were in pitbull mode throughout the Mulroney years; when Chrétien came to office, they turned into poodles."
- John Crosbie
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