Ilana Mercer - Government Quotes

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But public works, economic protectionism, cheap money, 'deficit-financed government spending,' and 'the animal spirits of the spendthrift' in the service of boosting 'consumption demand'... Doesn't Keynesianism simply appeal to the worst in human nature?

Ilana Mercer
The military is government. The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government, chief of which is its liberalism. Like the government, the military is freighted with pathological political correctness.

Ilana Mercer
Working for government ought to be one of the most dangerous jobs ever. Occupational hazard might just get us a better class of parasite.

Ilana Mercer
A balanced-budget requirement implies is that government has the constitutional right to spend as much as it takes in; that government is permitted to waste however much revenue it can extract from wealth producers, and that the bums must merely bring into balance what was stolen (taxes) with what is squandered (spending).

Ilana Mercer
'You didn't build that' will be Obama's political epitaph: With these remarks, Obama has come out of the closet as a most odious collectivist, who believes religiously that government predation is a condition for production. Or, put simply, that the parasite created the host.

Ilana Mercer
If not by design at least by default; reflexively if not intentionally, government operatives work to retain their positions and increase their sphere of influence.

Ilana Mercer
Adding an overarching tier of tyrants—the EU—to European governments has benefited Europeans as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man.

Ilana Mercer
In a free society, the 'vision thing' is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a 'visionary' bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government... the poorer and less free the people.

Ilana Mercer
Opposing the policies of the American state is not synonymous with opposing 'America.' It is possible to disavow every single action taken by the U.S. government and still love the 'little platoons' of America, as Edmund Burke described a man's social mainstay—his family, friends, coreligionists, coworkers. By logical extension, it is dishonest to malign those who assign the 'bad' category to the state, on the ground that they hate 'America.'

Ilana Mercer
If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government—the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be.

Ilana Mercer
Liberty is not an aggregate social project. Every individual has rights. And rights give rise to obligations between all men, including those who are in power. That men band in a collective called 'government' doesn't give them license to violate individual rights.

Ilana Mercer
By the standards of honest, if unorthodox, accounting, government workers don't pay taxes, but are paid out of taxes. In other words, they pay taxes out of money confiscated from taxpayers, who, in turn, pay taxes twice: on their own income and on the income of members of the bureaucracy. At the very least, this should disqualify state workers from voting.

Ilana Mercer
Most matters previously subject to state jurisdiction have been pulled into the orbit of the judiciary. So much for Alexander Hamilton's promise, in Federalist No. 78 (May 28, 1788), that the Judiciary would be the weakest of the three branches of his proposed government.

Ilana Mercer
The nice men in periwigs who came up with the Fourth Amendment were recklessly naive to imagine that branches of a government, each of whose power is enhanced when the power of the other branches grows, would serve to check one another.

Ilana Mercer
Antitrust laws ought to be deployed, not against business, but to bust this two-party monopoly, which subverts competition in government and rewards the colluding quislings with sinecures in perpetuity.

Ilana Mercer
Government jobs are not an addition to the country's payroll; they are an increase in the nation's payload.

Ilana Mercer
Distinguish we must between the right of the people the world over to be free and our obligation to free them. We have a solemn [negative] duty not to violate the rights of foreigners everywhere to life, liberty and property. But we have no duty to uphold their rights. Why? Because the ostensible upholding of the negative rights of the world's citizens involves compromising the negative liberties of Americans—our lives, our liberties and our livelihoods. A just government's duty is to its own citizens first.

Ilana Mercer
The voluntary free market is a sacred extension of life itself. The free market—it has not been unfettered for a very long time—is really a spontaneously synchronized order comprising trillions upon trillions of voluntary acts that individuals perform in order to make a living. Introduce government force and coercion into this rhythm and you get life-threatening arrhythmia. Under increasing state control, this marketplace - this magic, organic agora - starts to splutter, and people suffer.

Ilana Mercer
Government commissions are where accountability goes to die.

Ilana Mercer
Conservatives question government programs. War is a government program. If they hope to retain a modicum of philosophical integrity, conservatives will have to include a critique of the state's warfare machine in their case against its welfare apparatus.

Ilana Mercer
Demonstrators for a government takeover of medicine have a right to discuss their demands, but no right to enact these demands. … 'Rights, as our founding fathers conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but freedoms of action.

Ilana Mercer
Europeans have come to realize that adding an overarching tier of tyrants—the EU—to their own government has benefited them as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man.

Ilana Mercer
The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports the same inherent malignancies and perverse incentives of government, down to the racial-spoils system.

Ilana Mercer