Topic: Politics

Quotes

Chris Wickham, “Consensus and Assemblies in the Romano-Germanic Kingdoms: a Comparative Approach” (2017)

• Germanic peoples brought into the Roman empire the assumption, standard in the smaller-scale societies of the North, that political practice was at its base collective… There is a continuity in this respect which stretched from the small, face-to-face, polities of the North right up to very large, hierarchical and potentially anonymous ones such as Carolingian Francia. #
• Early medieval assemblies were different, and represent in almost all respects a break with the Roman past… The Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian thing has more in common with the Frankish placitum generale than the latter has with anything in the Roman world. #

Max Weber, Economy And Society (1968)

• The actual exercise of rule is governed by what the ruler and his administration can usually allow themselves in their dealing with traditionally deferential subjects without provoking them to resis­tance.#
• The fact that an economic system is thus dependent on protection by force, does not mean that it is itself an example of the use of force.#

Guenther Roth, Introduction to Economy and Society (1968)

• Under the conditions of mass suffrage, the leadership of the few rests on mass mobilization, and this in turn requires an effective party apparatus#
• Direct democracy, however, is inherently unstable, and wherever there is economic differentiation in the group, domination tends to fall ,into the hands of those who have the economic requisites for performing administrative and political tasks. This is, first of all, a matter of “economic availability,” not necessarily of high status; thus, managers of large-scale enterprises. teachers and medical doctors are less available than lawyers, country squires and urban rentiers.#

Erwin Dekker, The Viennese Students of Civilization (2016)

• As Hayek stresses time and time again, his concept of freedom defends the individual from the arbitrary will of others, but it does not defends him from the impersonal forces of the market, social norms, a governing morality, or the acceptance of not fully understood and hence incompletely justified norms.#
• The constitution is not a procedural prescription; it is a living and continued moral commitment to certain norms and values. Upholding it, cultivating it, therefore requires continued active support by the members of society.#

Leda Cosmides & John Tooby, “Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Heuristics, and the Law” (2006)

• Political debate in the present is often a struggle over how to characterize events in terms of ancestral situation-types, because alternative framings trigger different evolved moral heuristics.#

Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson, “The Rise and Decline of General Laws of Capitalism” (2015)

• If the primary threat from the top 1 percent share is political, then the main response should be related to monitoring and containing the political implications of the increase in top-level inequality—not necessarily catch-all policies such as the wealth taxes advocated by Piketty. Such policies should be explicitly related to the institutional fault lines of the specific society and should be conceived in the context of strengthening institutional checks against any potential power grab.#

Daniel Bell, “Jiang Qing’s Political Confucianism“ (2011)

• The real magic of elections, arguably, is that they seem to empower the people without really doing so.#

F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1945)

• It is infinitely more difficult rationally to comprehend the necessity of submitting to forces whose operation we cannot follow in detail than to do so out of the humble awe which religion, or even the respect for the doctrines of economics, did inspire. . . . The only alternative to submission to the impersonal and seemingly irrational forces of the market is submission to an equally uncontrollable and therefore arbitrary power of other men.#
• Who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?#
• Economic planning would not affect merely those of our marginal needs that we have in mind when we speak contemptuously about the merely economic. It would, in effect, mean that we as individuals should no longer be allowed to decide what we regard as marginal.#
• There is no justification for the belief that, so long as power is conferred by democratic procedure, it cannot be arbitrary . . . it is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary.#
• Democratic government has worked successfully where, and so long as, the functions of government were, by a widely accepted creed, restricted to fields where agreement among a majority could be achieved by free discussion; and it is the great merit of the liberal creed that it reduced the range of subjects on which agreement was necessary to one on which it was likely to exist in a society of free men. It is now often said that democracy will not tolerate “capitalism”. If “capitalism” means here a competitive system based on free disposal over private property, it is far more important to realize that only within this system is democracy possible. When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.#
• A movement whose main promise is the relief from responsibility cannot but be antimoral in its effect, however lofty the ideals to which it owes its birth.#
• The political ideals of a people and its attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives.#
• [Individualism] does not assume, as is often asserted, that man is egoistic or selfish or ought to be. It merely starts from the indisputable fact that the limits of our powers of imagination make it impossible to include in our scale of values more than a sector of the needs of the whole society, and that, since, strictly speaking, scales of value can only exist in individual minds, nothing but partial scales of value exist – scales which are inevitably different and often inconsistent with each other. From this the individualist concludes that the individuals should be allowed, within defined limits, to follow their own values and preferences rather than somebody else’s.#
• A complex whole in which all the parts must be most carefully adjusted to each other cannot be achieved through a compromise between conflicting views. To draw up an economic plan in this fashion is even less possible than, for example, successfully to plan a military campaign by democratic procedure. As in strategy it would become inevitable to delegate the task to the experts.#
• That socialism so long as it remains theoretical is internationalist, while as soon as it is put into practice, whether in Russia or in Germany, it becomes violently nationalist, is one of the reasons why “liberal socialism” as most people in the Western world imagine it is purely theoretical, while the practice of socialism is everywhere totalitarian.#

Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (1898)

• On the same grounds on which Calvinism rejected Rome’s theory concerning the world, it rejected the theory of the Anabaptist, and proclaimed that the Church must withdraw again within its spiritual domain, and that in the world we should realize the potencies of God’s common grace.#
• No political scheme has ever become dominant which was not founded in a specific religious or anti-religious conception.#
• For, indeed, without sin there would have been neither magistrate nor state-order.#
• I not only deplore that one stake [at which Servetus was burned], but I unconditionally disapprove of it; yet not as if it were the expression of a special characteristic of Calvinism, but on the contrary as the fatal after-effect of a system, grey with age, which Calvinism found in existence, under which it had grown up, and from which it had not yet been able entirely to liberate itself.#
• The Church may not be forced to tolerate as a member one whom she feels obliged to expel from her circle; but on the other hand no citizen of the State must be compelled to remain in a church which his conscience forces him to leave.#

Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth (1925)

• Judaism is a national life, a life which the national religion and human ethical principles embrace without engulfing. Jesus came and thrust aside all the requirements of the national life. . . . In their stead he set up nothing but an ethico-religious system bound up with his conception of the Godhead.#Quoted in Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (1951)

David Lipscomb, Civil Government (1913)

• Not only were these evil institutions God’s ordinances, but wicked men who directed them were recognized as his servants. They constituted the constituency or the subjects of these Divine institutions because God used them to accomplish his work of punishing sin, and destroying his enemies. In this sense, God ordained all the institutions of earth, and used the vilest sinners of earth as his servants. He used the rebellious and the wicked to punish his disobedient children, and to destroy others whose measure of wickedness was full; then in turn, he punished the wicked individuals and peoples that he had used, for doing the very work he had used them to accomplish, because they did it from a wicked, selfish, and cruel spirit.#
• As God appoints ministers having characters fitted to do the work for which he appoints them, and Nero was a chosen minister to do this work, it is clear that a true humble faithful Christian could not be chosen to do the same work.#

Luis Lugo, “Caesar’s Coin Revisited (comments on Man, Society, and the State)” (1996)

• The Vatican in its social thinking throughout most of the modern period did not sufficiently understand the varieties of liberalism with which it was dealing. Being based on the continent, it saw a more militantly secular type of liberalism with a whole metaphysics it correctly found to be offensive, and it did not appreciate until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century how the Enlightenment project had been moderated significantly in the Anglo-American tradition by pre-existing Christian sources.#

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (1946)

• Christianity will indeed accomplish many useful things in this world, but if it is accepted in order to accomplish those useful things it is not Christianity. Christianity will combat Bolshevism; but if it is accepted in order to combat Bolshevism, it is not Christianity: Christianity will produce a unified nation, in a slow but satisfactory way; but if it is accepted in order to produce a unified nation, it is not Christianity: Christianity will produce a healthy community; but if it is accepted in order to produce a healthy community, it is not Christianity: Christianity will promote international peace; but if it is accepted in order to promote international peace, it is not Christianity. Our Lord said: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.” But if you seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness in order that all those other things may be added unto you, you will miss both those other things and the Kingdom of God as well. #Quoted in Russell Moore, The Kingdom of Christ (2004)

Russell Moore, The Kingdom of Christ (2004)

• When the primary outlet of evangelical engagement with social and political matters is a political action committee rather than the community of the church, the shaping authority on matters of social and political outlook all too often becomes polling data or party platforms, rather than an authoritative text. Political solutions are then grounded in the social contract of a “moral majority” rather than by the righteousness of the coming Kingdom of God in Christ. In such a situation, when the “silent majority” is culturally marginalized, so is the witness of evangelical Christianity.#

Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (1951)

• Roman tolerance, like modern democratic tolerance, had its limits just because it was carried out as a social policy for the sake of maintaining unity. Whatever religion man followed, homage to Caesar was eventually required.#
• As he cannot derive the laws of medical procedure from the gospel when he deals with a case of typhus, so he cannot deduce from the commandment of love the specific laws to be enacted in a commonwealth containing criminals.#
• If we look to the revelation of God for knowledge of geology, we miss the revelation; but if we look to geology for faith in God, we miss both him and the rocks. If we make a rule for civil government out of the structure of the early Christian community, we substitute for the spirit of that community, with its dependence on Christ and his giving of all good gifts, a self-righteous independence of our own; if we regard our political structures as kingdoms of God, and expect through papacies and kingdoms to come closer to him, we cannot hear his word or see his Christ; neither can we conduct our political affairs in the right spirit.#

James Skillen, “Reformed… And Always Reforming?” (2009)

• Most Christians today … are Anabaptists in the sense that they contend for free churches in open societies with governments that give equal treatment to all citizens regardless of their faith.#

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)

• Predestination made it fundamentally impossible for the State really to promote religion by intolerance. It could not thereby save a single soul. Only the idea of the glory of God gave the Church occasion to claim its help in the suppression of heresy. Now the greater the emphasis on the membership of the preacher, and all those that partook of the communion, in the elect, the more intolerable became the interference of the State in the appointment of the clergy.#
• Ethical principles for the reform of the world could not be found in Luther’s realm of ideas.#

Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (1850)

• Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.#
• Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.#
• Since law necessarily requires the support of force, its lawful domain is only in the areas where the use of force is necessary. This is justice.#

Peter Boettke, Chris Coyne, Peter Leeson, & Frederic Sautet, “The New Comparative Political Economy” (2005)

• Privatization without price liberalization, or price liberalization without tight monetary policy, or deregulation without fiscal restraint, would all result in outcomes even less desirable than the current system.#
• The visible manifestation of underdevelopment is poverty and its immediate cause is lack of saved capital. The underlying cause, however, is the lack of credible institutions in the realms of politics, law, economics, finance, and society. This lack of credible institutions manifests itself in the inability to ward off predation by either private or public actors. Perhaps one of the most important empirical lessons we have learned from the transition from socialism and the problem of development assistance more generally is that efforts to supply the saved capital in terms of loans are counter productive except in areas where credible institutions which constrain predation are already in place.#

Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767)

• If, in reasoning on the increase of mankind in general, we overlook their freedom and their happiness, our aids to population become weak and ineffectual. They only lead us to work on the surface, or to pursue a shadow, while we neglect the substantial concern; and in a decaying state, make us tamper with palliatives, while the roots of evil are suffered to remain.#
• When fear is suggested as the only motive for duty, every heart becomes rapacious or base.#
• Our very praise of unanimity, therefore, is to be considered as a danger to liberty.#
• He whose office it is to govern a supine or an abject people, cannot, for a moment, cease to extend his powers. Every execution of law, every movement of the state, every civil and military operation, in which his power is exerted, must serve to confirm his authority, and present him to the view of the public as the sole object of consideration, fear, and respect. Those very establishments which were devised, in one age, to limit or to direct the exercise of an executive power, will serve, in another, to remove obstructions, and to smooth its way; they will point out the channels in which it may run, without giving offence, or without exciting alarms, and the very councils which were instituted to check its incroachments, will, in a time of corruption, furnish an aid to its usurpations.#
• Liberty is never in greater danger than it is when we measure national felicity by the blessings which a prince may bestow.#

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962)

• There are thus two sets of values that a liberal will emphasize—the values that are relevant to relations among people, which is the context in which he assigns first priority to freedom; and the values that are relevant to the individual in the exercise of his freedom, which is the realm of individual ethics and philosophy.#
• That majority rule is an expedient rather than itself a basic principle is clearly shown by the fact that our willingness to resort to majority rule, and the size of the majority we require, themselves depend on the seriousness of the issue involved.#
• If one were to seek deliberately to devise a system of recruiting and paying teachers calculated to repel the imaginative and daring and self-confident and to attract the dull and mediocre and uninspiring, he could hardly do better than imitate the system of requiring teaching certificates and enforcing standard salary structures that has developed in the larger city and state-wide systems.#
• Any minority that counts on specific majority action to defend its interests is short-sighted in the extreme.#

John Hasnas, “The Myth of the Rule of Law” (1995)

• Once they believe that they are being commanded by an impersonal law rather than other human beings, they view their obedience to political authority as a public-spirited acceptance of the requirements of social life rather than mere acquiescence to superior power.#
• People who would ordinarily consider it a great evil to deprive individuals of their rights or oppress politically powerless minority groups will respond with patriotic fervor when these same actions are described as upholding the rule of law.#
• The myth of impersonal government is simply the most effective means of social control available to the state.#

F.A. Hayek, Liberalism (1973)

• The endeavours to prolong the prosperity and to secure full employment by means of the expansion of money and credit, in the end created a worldwide inflationary development to which employment so adjusted itself that inflation could not be discontinued without producing extensive unemployment.#
• The liberal demand for freedom is thus a demand for the removal of all manmade obstacles to individual efforts, not a claim that the community or the state should supply particular goods.#
• The decline of liberal doctrine, beginning in the 1870s, is closely connected with a reinterpretation of freedom as the command over, and usually the provision by the state of, the means of achieving a great variety of particular ends.#

F.A. Hayek, “The Moral Imperative of the Market” (1986)

• If it is true that prices are signals which enable us to adapt our activities to unknown events and demands, it is evidently nonsense to believe that we can control prices. You cannot improve a signal if you do not know what it signals.#

F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

• Though the concept of national freedom is analogous to that of individual freedom, it is not the same; and the striving for the first has not always enhanced the second.#
• Once this identification of freedom with power is admitted, there is no limit to the sophisms by which the attractions of the word “liberty” can be used to support measures which destroy individual liberty.#
• Where all are made to serve the same ideals and where dissenters are not allowed to follow different ones, the rules can be proved inexpedient only by the decline of the whole nation guided by them.#
• If in the Western world universal adult suffrage seems the best arrangement, this does not prove that it is required by some basic principle.#
• We certainly do not regard it as right that the citizens of a large country should dominate those of a small adjoining country merely because they are more numerous. There is as little reason why the majority of the people who have joined for some purposes, be it as a nation or some supranational organization, should be regarded as entitled to extend the scope of their power as far as they please. The current theory of democracy suffers from the fact that it is usually developed with some ideal homogenous community in view and then applied to the very imperfect and often arbitrary units which the existing states constitute.#
• Once it is generally accepted that majority decisions can merely indicate ends and that the pursuit of them is to be left to the discretion of the administrators, it will soon be believed also that almost any means to achieve those ends are legitimate. The individual has little reason to fear any general laws which the majority may pass, but he has much reason to fear the rulers it may put over him to implement its directions.#
• One may share to the full the distaste for the ostentation, the bad taste, and the wastefulness of many of the new rich and yet recognize that, if we were to prevent all that we disliked, the unforeseen things that might be thus prevented would probably outweigh the bad.#
• A constitutional system does not involve an absolute limitation of the will of the people but merely a subordination of immediate objectives to long-term ones. . . . It means that the agreement to submit to the will of the temporary majority on particular issues is based on the general understanding that this majority will abide by more general principles laid down beforehand by a more comprehensive body.#
• The main lesson of the period of Confederation was that the mere writing-down on paper of a constitution changed little unless explicit machinery was provided to enforce it.#
• The reason why a division of powers between different authorities always reduces the power that anybody can exercise . . . is not merely that the separate authorities will, through mutual jealousy, prevent one another from exceeding their authority. More important is the fact that certain kinds of coercion require the joint and coordinated use of different powers or the employment of several means, and, if these means are in separate hands, nobody can exercise those kinds of coercion.#
• The decisive factor which made the efforts of the [French] Revolution toward the enhancement of individual liberty so abortive was that it created the belief that, since at last all power had been placed in the hands of the people, all safeguards against the abuse of this power had become unnecessary.#
• A free society demands not only that the government have the monopoly of coercion but that it have the monopoly only of coercion.#
• There are strong reasons why action by local authorities generally offers the next-best solution where private initiative cannot be relied upon to provide certain services and where some sort of collective action is therefore needed; for it has many of the advantages of private enterprise and fewer of the dangers of the coercive action of government. Competition between local authorities or between larger units within an area where there is freedom of movement provides in a large measure that opportunity for experimentation with alternative methods which will secure most of the advantages of free growth.#
• Because unions are most powerful where capital investments are heaviest, they tend to become a deterrent to investment – at present probably second only to taxation.#
• The dominant “full-employment” doctrines explicitly relieve the unions of the responsibility for any unemployment and place the duty of preserving full employment on the monetary and fiscal authorities.#
• To the impatient reformer, who will be satisfied with nothing short of the immediate abolition of all avoidable evils, the creation of a single apparatus with full powers to do what can be done now appears therefore as the only appropriate method. In the long run, however . . . we may well prevent the evolution of other organizations whose eventual contribution to welfare might have been greater.#
• Though all insurance involves a pooling of risks, private competitive insurance can never effect a deliberate transfer of income from one previously designated group of people to another.#
• The fundamental absurdity of a majority taxing itself in order to maintain a propaganda organization aimed at persuading the same majority to go further than it is yet willing should be obvious.#
• While the task of combating the serious diseases which befall and disable some in manhood is a relatively limited one, the task of slowing down the chronic processes which must bring about the ultimate decay of all of us is unlimited. The latter presents a problem which can, under no conceivable condition, be solved by an unlimited provision of medical facilities and which, therefore, must continue to present a painful choice between competing aims.#
• It may be better even that some children should go without formal education than that they should be killed in fighting over who is to control that education.#
• One of the strongest arguments against [the establishment of welfare programs] is that their introduction is the kind of politically irrevocable measure that will have to be continued, whether it proves a mistake or not.#

Ludwig Lachmann, Capital, Expectations, and the Market Process (1940)

• In a market economy a process of redistribution of wealth is taking place all the time before which those outwardly similar processes that modern politicians are in the habit of instituting, pale into comparative insignificance, if for no other reason than that the market gives wealth to those who can hold it, while politicians give it to their constituents who, as a rule, cannot.#

James Madison, “Federalist XLVII” (1788)

• A mere demarcation on parchment of the constitutional limits of the several departments is not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands.#Quoted in F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)
• The invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.#Quoted in F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

Charles Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws (1748)

• As in democracies the people seem to act almost as they please, this sort of government has been deemed the most free, and the power of the people has been confounded with their liberty.#Quoted in F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

Walter Lippmann, An inquiry into the principles of the Good Society (1937)

• In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.#Quoted in F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

Daniel Klein, “A Plea to Economists who Favor Liberty” (2001)

• Kirzner’s pupil Sanford Ikeda has usefully distinguished two interpretations of bad policy: the deception theses, in which posturing politicians and rent-seekers laugh all the way to the bank, and the error thesis, in which decent and good-willed human beings blunder inexpertly through the complex realms of political economy and trap themselves in a cul-de-sac.#

Thomas Szasz, Heresies (1976)

• The more politicians protect people from harming themselves, the more they fail to protect them from being harmed by others.#Quoted in Daniel Klein, “A Plea to Economists who Favor Liberty” (2001)

Bruno Leoni, Freedom and the Law (1961)

• The more numerous the people are whom one tries to ‘represent’ through the legislative process and the more numerous the matters in which one tries to represent them, the less the word ‘representation’ has a meaning referable to the actual will of actual people other than that of the persons named as their ‘representatives.’#
• The increasing significance of legislation in almost all the legal systems of the world is probably the most striking feature of our era, besides technological and scientific progress.#
• The development of science and technology at the beginning of our modern era was made possible precisely because procedures had been adopted that were in full contrast to those that usually result in legislation.#
• That the legislators, at least in the West, still refrain from interfering in such fields of individual activity as speaking or choosing one’s marriage partner or wearing a particular style of clothing or traveling usually conceals the raw fact that they actually do have the power to interfere in every one of these fields.#
• Just as language and fashion are the products of the convergence of spontaneous actions and decisions on the part of a vast number of individuals, so the law too can, in theory, just as well be a product of a similar convergence in other fields.#
• While legislation is almost always certain, that is, precise and recognizable, as long as it is “in force”, people can never be certain that the legislation in force today will be in force tomorrow or even tomorrow morning. The legal system centered on legislation, while involving the possibility that other people (the legislators) may interfere with our actions every day, also involves the possibility that they may change their way of interfering every day.#
• Everybody today pays lip service to the Romans no less than to the English for their legal wisdom. Very few realize, however, what this wisdom consisted in, that is, how independent of legislation those systems were in so far as the ordinary life of the people was concerned, and consequently how great the sphere of individual freedom was both in Rome and in England during the very centuries when their respective legal systems were most flourishing and successful.#
• The succumbing minorities [to a vote], in their turn, adjust themselves to defeat only because they hope to become sooner or later a winning majority and be in the position of treating in a similar way the people belonging to the contingent majority of today.#
• No historism and no relativism could prevent us from recognizing that in any society feelings and convictions relating to actions that should not be done are much more homogenous and easily identifiable than any other kind of feelings and convictions.#
• The very possibility of nullifying agreements and conventions through supervening legislation tends in the long run to induce people to fail to rely on any existing conventions or to keep any accepted agreements.#
• No legislator would be able to establish by himself, without some kind of continuous collaboration on the part of all people concerned, the rules governing the actual behavior of everybody in the endless relationships that each has with everybody else. No public opinion polls, no referenda, no consultations would really put the legislators in a position to determine these rules, any more than a similar procedure could put the directors of a planned economy in a position to discover the total demand and supply of all commodities and services.#
• In order to restore to the word “representation” its original reasonable meaning, there should be a drastic reduction either in the number of those “represented” or in the number of matters in regard to which they are allegedly represented, or both.#
• What we are often confronted with today is nothing less than a potential legal war of all against all, carried on by way of legislation and representation.#
• If we contrast the position of judges and lawyers with the position of legislators in contemporary society, we can easily realize how much more power the latter have over the citizens and how much less accurate, impartial, and reliable is their attempt, if any, to “interpret” the people’s will.#
• One of the paradoxes of our era is the continual retreat of traditional religious faith before the advance of science and technology, under the implied exigency of a cool and matter-of-fact attitude and dispassionate reasoning, accompanied by a no less continual retreat from the same attitude and reasoning in regard to legal and political questions. The mythology of our age is not religious, but political, and its chief myths seem to be “representation” of the people, on the one hand, and the charismatic pretension of political leaders to be in possession of the truth and to act accordingly, on the other. #
• The hegemonic bond of the state is not only something to be curbed, but also – and I would say first of all – something we make use of to curb other people’s actions.#
• It is not easy to establish what renders one law general in comparison with another. There are many “genera” under which “general” laws may be contrived, and many “species” which it is possible to take into consideration with the same “genus”.#
• If the predictability of the consequences is one of the unavoidable premises of human decisions, it is necessary to conclude that the more general rules render predictable . . . the consequences of individual actions, the more these actions can be called “free” from interference on the part of other people, including the authorities.#
• If we leave out of the picture the ambiguities of the text, we are always “certain” as far as the literal content of each rule is concerned at any given moment, but we are never certain that tomorrow we shall still have the rules we have today.#
• If we admit that individual freedom in business – that is, the free market – is one of the essential features of political freedom conceived as the absence of constraint exercised by other people, including the authorities, we must also conclude that legislation in matters of private law is fundamentally incompatible with individual freedom.#
• It seems to be a great misfortune of this principle [of the extension of representation to as many individuals as possible] that, the more one tries to extend it, the more one defeats its purpose.#
• Everyone probably has more to gain from a system in which his decisions would not be interfered with by the decisions of other people than he has to lose by the fact that he could not interfere in turn with other people’s decisions.#

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

• The “self-government” spoken of is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest.#
• Those who first broke the yoke of what called itself the Universal Church, were in general as little willing to permit difference of religious opinion as that church itself. But when the heat of the conflict was over, without giving a complete victory to any party, and each church or sect was reduced to limit its hopes to retaining possession of the ground it already occupied; minorities, seeing that they had no chance of becoming majorities, were under the necessity of pleading to those whom they could not convert, for permission to differ. It is accordingly on this battle field, almost solely, that the rights of the individual against society have been asserted on broad grounds of principle, and the claim of society to exercise authority over dissentients openly controverted. #
• There is the same need of an infallible judge of opinions to decide an opinion to be noxious, as to decide it to be false, unless the opinion condemned has full opportunity of defending itself.#
• It is not the feeling sure of a doctrine (be it what it may) which I call an assumption of infallibility. It is the undertaking to decide that question for others.#
• What little recognition the idea of obligation to the public [by a ruler] obtains in modern morality is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christian.#
• It remains to be proved that society or any of its officers holds a commission from on high to avenge any supposed offence to Omnipotence, which is not also a wrong to our fellow creatures. The notion that it is one man’s duty that another should be religious, was the foundation of all the religious persecutions ever perpetrated, and, if admitted, would fully justify them. Though the feeling which breaks out in the repeated attempts to stop railway travelling on Sunday, in the resistance to the opening of Museums, and the like, has not the cruelty of the old persecutors, the state of mind indicated by it is fundamentally the same. It is a determination not to tolerate others in doing what is permitted by their religion, because it is not permitted by the persecutor’s religion. It is a belief that God not only abominates the act of the misbeliever, but will not hold us guiltless if we leave him unmolested.#

Ludwig Von Mises, Bureaucracy (1944)

• What many people nowadays consider an evil is not bureaucracy as such, but the expansion of the sphere in which bureaucratic management is applied.#
• No progress and no reforms can be expected in a state of affairs where the first step is to obtain the consent of the old men.#
• Representative democracy cannot subsist if a great part of the voters are on the government pay roll. If the members of parliament no longer consider themselves mandatories of the taxpayers but deputies of those receiving salaries, wages, subsidies, doles, and other benefits from the treasury, democracy is done for.#

Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action (1949)

• Economics does not say that isolated government interference with the prices of only one commodity or a few commodities is unfair, bad, or unfeasible. It says that such interference produces results contrary to its purpose, that it makes conditions worse, not better, from the viewpoint of the government and those backing its interference.#
• In endorsing the principle of equality as a political postulate nobody wants to share his own income with those who have less. When the American wage earner refers to equality, he means that the dividends of the stockholders should be given to him. He does hot suggest a curtailment of his own income for the benefit of those 95 percent of the earth’s population whose income is lower than his.#Quoted in Ludwig Lachmann, Capital, Expectations, and the Market Process (1940)
• Liberals . . . believe that a man’s ability to rule proves itself better by convincing his fellow-citizens than by using force upon them. There is, of course, no guarantee that the voters will entrust office to the most competent candidate. But no other system could offer such a guarantee. If the majority of the nation is committed to unsound principles and prefers unworthy office-seekers, there is no remedy other than to try to change their mind by expounding more reasonable principles and recommending better men.#
• Whatever freedom individuals can enjoy within the framework of social cooperation is conditional upon the concord of private gain and public weal.#
• This state of affairs [consumer sovereignty] has been described by calling the market a democracy in which every penny gives a right to cast a ballot. It would be more correct to say that a democratic constitution is a scheme to assign to the citizens in the conduct of government the same supremacy the market economy gives them in their capacity as consumers.#
• The appeal to justice in a debate concerning the drafting of new laws is an instance of circular reasoning. . . . It makes sense only when approving or disapproving concrete conduct from the point of view of the valid laws of the country. In considering changes in the nation’s legal system, in rewriting or repealing existing laws and writing new laws, the issue is not justice, but social expediency and social welfare. There is no such thing as an absolute notion of justice not referring to a definite system of social organization. It is, on the contrary, the social system which determines what should be deemed right and what wrong.#

Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (1980)

• One of the peculiarities of the American Revolution was that its leaders pinned their hopes on the organization of decision-making units, the structuring of their incentives, and the counterbalancing of the units against one another, rather than on the more usual (and more exciting) principle of substituting “the good guys” for “the bad guys” – i.e. substituting “the people” for “the oppressors,” the faithful for the heathens, the Jews for the gentiles, the gentiles for the Jews, and other such substitutions based on differences of history, physiognomy, or mannerisms.#
• No expert can say from 100 miles away, and signet unseen, what this year’s grape crop is good, or even that last week’s good grapes are still good this week. By contrast, an expert on the manufacture of steel can specify the exact quality of steel that will be produced by given combinations of iron ore and coal at given temperatures. For these reasons, steel production has been successfully centrally planned and controlled in various countries, whereas agricultural production has had such chronic problems and periodic disasters in centrally planned economic systems that even the most centralized communist governments have had to make major exceptions in agriculture, allowing decentralized decision-making of various sorts.#
• The most basic of all decisions is who shall decide. This is easily lost sight of in discussions that proceed directly to the merits of particular issues, as if they could be judged from a unitary, or God’s eye, viewpoint.#
• The advantages of market institutions over government institutions are not so much in their particular characteristics as institutions but in the fact that people can usually make a better choice out of numerous options than by following a single prescribed process.#
• The logic of transcendent values drives even the humane toward the use of force.#

Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957)

• Parties formulate policy in order to win elections, rather than win elections in order to formulate policy.#Quoted in Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (1980)

Elizabeth Anderson, “What is the point of equality?” (1999)

• People lay claim to the resources of egalitarian redistribution in virtue of their inferiority to others, not in virtue of their equality to others.#

Gordon Tullock, “The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies, and Theft” (1967)

• As a successful theft will stimulate other thieves to greater industry and require greater investment in protective measures, so each successful establishment of a monopoly or creation of a tariff will stimulate greater diversion of resources in attempts to organize further transfers of income.#
• The problem with income transfers is not that they directly inflict welfare losses, but that they lead people to employ resources in attempting to obtain or prevent such transfers.#

Ronald Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost” (1960)

• The kind of situation which economists are prone to consider as requiring corrective government action is, in fact, often the result of government action.#
• Nothing could be more “anti-social” than to oppose any action which causes any harm to anyone.#

Paul Johnson, Modern Times (1991)

• Lenin’s Bolsheviks of 1917, Mao’s CCP cadres of 1949 and the Congressmen of India came to power by different routes. But they had this in common. All three new ruling groups were men who had never engaged in any other occupation except politics and had devoted their lives to the exploitation of a flexible concept called ‘democracy’.#

Ludwig Lachmann, The Legacy of Max Weber (1971)

• Institutions are very important, but their modus operandi must be examined from a firmly founded praxeological basis rather than taken for granted on the strength of some dubious biological analogy.#
• May not the struggle for power among political leaders, even irrespective of their personal qualities, gradually lead to an erosion of those fundamental institutions which circumscribe and limit the exercise of political power? Will not the leaders in the course of the political struggle have to make promises to the electorate which cannot be redeemed without whittling away some of the very institutions on which the democratic process rests?#

John McKenzie, Authority in the Church (1966)

• Certainly the story [of Jesus’ temptation] means that secular power is not to be acquired at the price of worship of Satan; but do we grasp the import of the story fully if we think the only thing wrong with the offer is that it came from Satan . . . ? The offer is not rejected because Satan is unable to deliver what he promises; it is rejected because secular power is altogether inept for the mission of Jesus, indeed because the use of secular power is hostile to his mission.#Quoted in John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (1974)

Edmund Opitz, “The Churches and the United Nations” (1999)

• Political power is strengthened if the state has only one spiritual authority to deal with. Conversely, for a church that wants to gain the whole world there is a clear advantage in gaining access to the levers by which that world appears to be moved.#

Roderick Long, “Corporations Versus the Market, or, Whip Conflation Now” (2008)

• Competition to establish a legal monopoly is no more genuine market competition than voting – one last time – to establish a dictator is genuine democracy#

John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (1974)

• After the invitation to wives we saw that the Haustafeln addressed a similar and immensely more novel call to husbands to love their wives; after calling slaves to be subject, the early Christian moralists called upon the masters to be equally respectful; after calling children to remain subordinate to parents, the admonition was turned about and addressed to parents as well. When, however, the call to subordination is addressed to the Christian in his status as political subject, then in these texts exhortation is not reversed. There is no invitation to the king to conceive of himself as a public servant.#
• That God orders and uses the powers does not reveal anything new about what government should be or how we should respond to government.#

Ludwig Von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962)

• All men are liable to error and . . . it could happen that the majority, deluded by faulty doctrines propagated by irresponsible demagogues, could embark on policies that would result in disaster, even in the entire destruction of civilization. But . . . no thinkable method of government could prevent such a catastrophe.#
• Not the state is an evil, but the shortcomings of the human mind and character that imperatively require the operation of a police power. Government and state can never be perfect because they owe their raison d’être to the imperfection of man and can attain their end, the elimination of man’s innate impulse to violence, only by recourse to violence, the very thing they are called upon to prevent.#
• The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical.#
• No system of social cooperation can remove the dilemma between a man’s or a group’s interests in the short run and those in the long run.#
• No reform can render perfectly satisfactory the operation of an institution the essential activity of which consists in inflicting pain.#
• What the individual forgoes in order to cooperate with other individuals is not his personal interests opposed to that of the phantom society. He forsakes an immediate boon in order to reap at a later date a greater boon.#

Michael Horton, Introducing Covenant Theology (2006)

• By identifying the kingdom of God with the advance of Christianity in the world here and now, it was easy to take the further step of identifying the fortunes of Christianity with those of the empire. Christendom is the result of this unholy alliance.#
• If Calvinists are not expected to endure tyranny, they are also not given liberty to take justice into their own hands or to exercise the judgement reserved for the King of Kings on the last day. Nor are they to seek to impose their distinctively Christian convictions on society through the kingdom of power, as both Rome and the radical Anabaptists tried to do. Rather, they are to pursue their dual citizenship according to the distinct policies proper to each kingdom. The Bible functions as the constitution for the covenant people, not for the secular state.#
• Those who confuse civil righteousness with righteousness before God will be likely to confuse moral reform in society with the kingdom of God.#

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1939)

• Rapid technological changes, taking place in a mass-producing economy and among a population predominantly propertyless, have always tended to produce economic and social confusion. To deal with confusion, power has been centralized and government control increased.#
• Without economic security, the love of servitude cannot possibly come into existence.#
• As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase.#

Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (1867)

• [The] whole political machinery presupposes a people so fundamentally at one that they can safely afford to bicker; and so sure of their own moderation that they are not dangerously disturbed by the never-ending din of political conflict.#Quoted in Carl Schmitt, Legalität und Legitimität (1932)

Carl Schmitt, “Political Theology” (1922)

• The political is the total, and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision, irrespective of who decides and what reasons are advanced.#
• The metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization.#

Steven Horwitz, “From The Sensory Order to the Liberal Order: Hayek’s Non-rationalist Liberalism” (2000)

• Human actors require constitutional constraints because we are epistemologically unable to generate social order in any other way.#

Max Stackhouse, Public Theology and Political Economy (1987)

• A wide range of political and economic questions has always been technical or prudential in nature, and it is doubtful that Christian theology has, or should claim, any special competence to address such questions.#

Matthew Hale, “Reflections by the Lord Chief Justice Hale on Mister Hobbes, His Dialogue of the Law“ (1924)

• They that please themselves with a persuasion that they can with as much evidence and congruitie make out an unerring system of laws and politiques equally applicable to all states as Euclide demonstrates his conclusions, deceive themselves with notions which prove ineffectual when they come to particular application.#Quoted in Bruno Leoni, Freedom and the Law (1961)

Bruno Leoni, The Law and Politics (1964)

• Law-making is much more a theoretical process than an act of will, and as a theoretical process it cannot be the result of decisions issued by power groups at the expense of dissenting minorities.#
• While the processes conducive to lawyers’-law and judge-made-law appear as conditioned ways of producing law, the legislative process appears, or tends to appear, to be unconditioned and a pure matter of will.#
• Only voters ranking in winning majorities . . . are comparable to people who operate on the market. Those people ranking in losing minorities are not comparable with even the weakest operators on the market, who at least under the divisibility of goods . . . can always find something to choose and get, provided that they pay its price.#
• Voting appears to be not so much a reproduction of the market operation as a symbolization of a battle in the field.#
• While in the market supply and demand are not only compatible but also complementary, in the political field – in which legislation belongs – the choice of winners on the one hand and losers on the other are neither complementary nor even compatible.#

Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy In America (1840)

• To manage those minor affairs in which good sense is all that is wanted – the people are held to be unequal to the task, but when the government of the country is at stake, the people are invested with immense powers; they are alternately made the playthings of their ruler, and his masters – more than kings, and less than men.#

Ludwig Von Mises, Omnipotent Government (1944)

• There can be protectionism in a country with domestic free trade, but where there is no domestic free trade protectionism is indispensable. . . . Where there is free trade, foreign competition would even in the short run frustrate the aims sought by the various measures of government intervention with domestic business. . . . The further a nation goes on the road toward public regulation and regimentation, the more it is pushed toward economic isolation.#
• In this age of trade walls and migration barriers, of foreign exchange control and of expropriation of foreign capital, there are ample incentives for war and conquest. Nearly every citizen has a material interest in the nullification of measures by which foreign governments may injure him. Nearly every citizen is therefore eager to see his own country mighty and powerful, because he expects personal advantage from its military might.#
• The total complex of the rules according to which those at the helm [of the state] employ compulsion and coercion is called law. Yet the characteristic feature of the state is not these rules, as such, but the application or threat of violence.#
• It is illogical to say, as many etatists do, that liberalism is hostile to or hates the state, because it is opposed to the transfer of the ownership of railroads or cotton mills to the state. If a man says that sulphuric acid does not make a good hand lotion, he is not expressing hostility to sulphuric acid as such; he is simply giving his opinion concerning the limitations of its use.#
• Democracy is therefore not a revolutionary institution. On the contrary, it is the very means of preventing revolutions. Democracy is a system providing for the peaceful adjustment of government to the will of the majority. #
• If our community does not beget men who have the power to make sound social principles generally acceptable, civilization is lost, whatever the system of government may be.#
• The demands for liberty and self-determination on the part of the Asiatic peoples are a result of their Westernization. The natives are fighting the Europeans with ideologies borrowed from them.#
• The further a nation goes on the road toward public control of business, the more it is forced to withdraw from the international division of labor.#

F.A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (1949)

• Though the declining influence of religion is undoubtedly one major cause of our present lack of intellectual and moral orientation, its revival would not much lessen the need for a generally accepted principle of social order. We still should require a political philosophy which goes beyond the fundamental but general precepts which religion or morals provide.#
• Smith’s chief concern was not so much with what man might occasionally achieve when he was at his best but that he should have as little opportunity as possible to do harm when he was at his worst.#
• In a democratic society, at any rate, once the principle is admitted that the government undertakes responsibility for the status and position of particular groups, it is inevitable that this control will be extended to satisfy the aspirations and prejudices of the great masses.#
• Economic frontiers create communities of interest on a regional basis and of a most intimate character: they bring it about that all conflicts of interests tend to become conflicts between the same groups of people, instead of conflicts between groups of constantly varying composition, and that there will in consequence be perpetual conflicts between the inhabitants of a state as such instead of between the various individuals finding themselves arrayed, sometimes with one group of people against another, and at other times on another issue with the second group against the first.#
• It is only because, in consequence of [economic frontiers], the standard of life of all the people in a country will tend to move in the same direction that concepts such as the standard of living or the price level of a country cease to be mere statistical abstractions and become very concrete realities.#
• That there will always be communities of interest which will be similarly affected by a particular event or a particular measure is unavoidable. But it is clearly in the interest of unity of the larger whole that these groupings should not be permanent and, more particularly, that the various communities of interest should overlap territorially and never become lastingly identified with the inhabitants of a particular region.#
• If goods, men, and money can move freely over the interstate frontiers, it becomes clearly impossible to affect the prices of the different products through action by the individual state.#
• Government by agreement is only possible provided that we do not require the government to act in fields other than those in which we can obtain true agreement.#
• Coercion can probably only be kept to a minimum in a society where conventions and tradition have made the behaviour of man to a large extent predictable.#
• Only because men are in fact unequal can we treat them equally. If all men were completely equal in their gifts and inclinations, we should have to treat them differently in order to achieve any sort of social organisation. Fortunately, they are not equal; and it is only owing to this that the differentiation of functions need not be determined by the arbitrary decision of some organizing will but that, after creating formal equality of the rules applying in the same manner to all, we can leave each individual to find his own level.#

Lord Acton, “Nationality” (1862)

• Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety or the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute.#Quoted in F.A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (1949)

Harold Demsetz, “The Exchange and Enforcement of Property Rights” (1964)

• A proper definition of a right of action include the degree to which the owner or the community is allowed to enforce the right.#
• It is, of course, necessary to economize on police cost, so that we will not always want to guarantee full control to the purchaser.#

Gary Becker, “Competition and Democracy” (1958)

• An electorate with a limited amount of political information finds it easier to place one person in charge of many activities than to choose one person for each activity.#
• It may be preferable not to regulate economic monopolies and to suffer their bad effects, rather than to regulate them and suffer the effects of political imprfections.#

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

• Because adherence to standard operating procedures is difficult to second-guess, decision makers who expect to have their decisions scrutinized with hindsight are driven to bureaucratic solutions – and to an extreme reluctance to take risks.#

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776)

• When the judicial is united to the executive power, it is scarce possible that justice should not frequently be sacrificed to what is vulgarly called politics.#

Peter Bauer, From Subsistence To Exchange (2000)

• Extensive politicization of life enhances the prizes of political power and thus the stakes in the fight for them. This in turn exacerbates political tension . . . And because peoples’ economic fortunes come to depend so largely on political and administrative decisions, the attention, energies, and resources of forward-looking, perceptive, and ambitious people are diverted from economic activity to political machination. These consequences are manifest in many societies, especially in multiracial communities. Politicization of life, often pursued in the name of equality, has in many countries brought about a situation in which the question of who controls the government has become a matter of overriding importance, even a matter of life and death to millions.#
• Hong Kong should remind us that in the modern world a nonelective government can be more limited than an elected one and that, for most ordinary people, it is arguably more important whether government is limited or unlimited than whether it is elective or nonelective.#
• Until well into the nineteenth century Catholics, Jews, and Nonconformists [in Britain] could not enter politics or, for that matter, Oxford or Cambridge. . . . Their economic success shows how misleading it is to think that exclusion from political activity necessarily inhibits the economic prospects of a person or group.#

Sanford Ikeda, The Dynamics of Interventionism (2005)

• When Mises claims that “measures that are taken for the purpose of preserving the private-property order are not interventions”, he is implicitly assuming that capitalism under a minimal state is immune from his criticism of interventionism – that it is coherent and stable in a way that an interventionist mixed economy is not. . . . However, in the presence of a government wielding political means, even one that conforms to the minimal or “night-watchman” state, it is arbitrary where one draws the line demarcating interventionism from non-interventionism. The taxes, subsidies, and regulations required to maintain the minimal state, minimal though they may be, interfere with the entrepreneurial competitive process in the same way, though certainly to a lesser degree, as the taxes, subsidies, and regulations of the welfare state or the regulatory state. Defining interventionism as the use of political means in areas beyond those strictly required by the minimal state does not in any way alter the effect that political means will have on the market process within the bounds of the minimal state.#
• Interventionism is an unworkable and incoherent system because in the strict sense of the word it is not a system at all.#

Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1943)

• The picture of the prettiest girl that ever lived will in the long run prove powerless to maintain the sales of a bad cigarette. There is no equally effective safeguard in the case of political decisions. Many decisions of fateful importance are of a nature that makes it impossible for the public to experiment with them at its leisure and at moderate cost. Even if that is possible, judgment is as a rule not so easy to arrive at as in the case of a cigarette, because effects are less easy to interpret.#
• The will of the people is the product and not the motive power of the political process.#

Daniel Klein, “Mere Libertarianism: Blending Hayek and Rothbard” (2004)

• [A] continuum . . . inheres between private, voluntary agreement and coercive local government. When the members of a condominium association elect fellow residents to a rule-making board, we call any rules that restrict the use of private property “contractual”. But when the residents of Imperial, Nebraska (population 2,007) elect fellow residents to a rule-making body, libertarians are wont to call any such rules “coercive”. . . . Decentralized government, as in Switzerland, begins to merge with voluntary governance. . . . If the variable by which we distinguish between night and day is the extent of sunlight, what is the variable by which we distinguish between coercive local government and voluntary agreement?#

Peter Blau, On The Nature of Organizations (1968)

• The distinctive characteristic of legitimate authority is that a superior’s commands are obeyed, not because of his sanctioning power, but because of the normative pressure exercised among the subordinates themselves.#

David Granick, The Red Executive: A Study of the Organization Man in Russian Industry (1960)

• When a huge organization is highly centralized, two possibilities exist. The organization may founder in its own bureaucracy, or it may ignore its own rules.#Quoted in Peter Boettke, Calculation and Coordination (2000)

Richard Wagner, Mind, Society, and Human Action (2010)

• It is just as metaphorical to assert that the state does something as it is to assert that the market does something. What we denote as state activity, just as market activity, emerges out of complex patterns of interaction.#

James Buchanan, Cost and Choice (1969)

• If idealized market interaction process—pure or perfect competition—is used as the standard for deriving conditions which are then to be employed as norms for interference with actual market process, the question of objective measurement must be squarely faced. If prices ‘‘should’’ be brought into equality with costs of production, as a policy norm, costs must be presumed objective, in the sense that they can be measured by others than the direct decision-maker.#
• To locate the genuine cost of public goods, a cost which influences fiscal choice, we must look at the fiscal alternatives. What is avoided if debt is not issued and the public goods not provided? If public debt is not created, if bonds are not marketed, the decision- maker, along with others in the collectivity, avoids the necessity of servicing and amortizing the debt in future periods.#
• To the extent that the consideration of prospective harm to others, or, in fact, any moral restraint upon the decision, varies with the location and incidence of the offense contemplated, the opportunity cost of the offense varies. Hence, we should expect that crimes committed within the local community of the perpetrator against persons with whom he has close contacts would normally involve a higher cost barrier due to the moral restraint upon the actor in such a situation. From this it follows that fines or penalties required to achieve any given level of deterrence can be somewhat lower for these cases than for others. That is, crimes committed locally should bear lower fines than those imposed for identical crimes committed outside the community and on ‘‘foreigners.’’#
• If the ‘‘true costs’’ of employing resources could be measured (let us say by an omniscient observer who can read all preference functions) along with the ‘‘true benefits,’’ allocative efficiency in nonmarket resource usage could be ensured only if the effective decision-maker acted in accordance with artificial criteria for choice. That is to say, allocative efficiency will emerge only if the effective choice-maker acts, not as a behaving person, but as a rule-following automaton.#

Richard Wagner, “Boom and Bust: The Political Economy of Economic Disorder” (1980)

• So long as the interests of politicians are promoted more effectively through actions and policies that are negative-sum than through actions that are positive-sum, we should expect such negative-sum action and policies to dominate the political process.#

Doug North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change (2005)

• A polity (in which the players operate on the basis of rational self-interest) that is strong enough to specify and enforce economic rules of the game is strong enough to allow factions (to use Madison’s felicitous term) to use the polity to pursue their own narrow self-interest at the expense of the general welfare. The elusive key to improved political ordering is the creation of credible commitment on the part of the players. While Madison’s checks and balances take us part way to resolving the problem it requires, in addition, informal constraints that will redirect behavior to more felicitous outcomes.#

Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)

• There is an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups.#Quoted in F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1945)

Anthony De Jasay, The State (1985)

• Max Weber . . . defined the state as the organization which “successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” . . . a definition which might resist counter-examples rather better would lay down that the state is the organization in society which can inflict sanctions without risk of disavowal and can disavow sanctions by others. #
• As kings from medieval times sought to lessen their dependence on the nobility by soliciting the support of town burghers, so did the state in more modern times emancipate itself from the bourgeoisie by enfranchising and buying the votes of successively broader masses of people.#
• It would seem that the more governments came to rely on popular support (in England in the last third of the nineteenth century), the more willing they became to arouse demands for change instead of letting sleeping dogs lie.#
• It may, in fact, be a misnomer to call either [the contractarian or the Marxist theory] a theory of the state, though they are both theories of the individual (or class) subject’s interest in the state#

James Buchanan, The Logical Foundations of Constitutional Liberty (1998)

• Majority decision must be viewed primarily as a device for breaking a stalemate and for allowing some collective action to be taken.#
• One of the most important limitations placed upon the exercise of majority rule lies in the temporary or accidental nature of the majorities. . . . Majority rule is acceptable in a free society precisely because it allows a sort of jockeying back and forth among alternatives, upon none of which relative unanimity can be obtained. . . . In this way, majority decision-making itself becomes a means through which the whole group ultimately attains consensus. that is, makes a genuine social choice. It serves to insure that competing alternatives may be experimentally and provisionally adopted, tested, and replaced by new compromise alternatives approved by a majority group of ever-changing composition.#
• The reason that majority rule proves tolerably acceptable and individual authoritarian dictatorship does not lies not in the many versus the one. It is because ordinary majority decision is subject to reversal and change, while individual decision cannot readily be made so. With identical majority orderings, the majority would, of course, always choose the same leaders, and this advantage of majority rule would be lost.#
• The definition of democracy as “government by discussion” implies that individual values can and do change in the process of decision-making. . . . If individual values in the Arrow sense of orderings of all social alternatives are unchanging, discussion becomes meaningless.#
• Rent-seeking activity is directly related to the scope and range of governmental activity in the economy, to the relative size of the public sector.#
• The equity norm for the distribution of tax burdens can be viewed as a constitutional standard designed to prevent the exploitation of minorities through the fiscal process.#
• As it operates and as we observe it to operate, ordinary politics may remain conflictual . . . while participation in the inclusive political game that defines the rules for ordinary politics may embody positively valued prospects for all members of the polity. In other words, constitutional politics does lend itself to examination in a cooperative analytical framework, while ordinary politics continues to lend itself to analysis that employs conflict models of interaction.#
• Progressive taxation has been justified because it leads to a more equal distribution of income among individuals. Standing alone, the statement that progressive taxation does redistribute real income is not true. It can be true only on the basis of certain assumptions about the other half of the fiscal system [i.e. expenditures]. . . . The statement that progressive taxation will redistribute incomes but that proportional taxation will not implies that benefits are returned to individuals in proportion to incomes and wealth.#

James Buchanan, Economics: Between Predictive Science and Moral Philosophy (1987)

• In a real sense, Western societies have attained universal suffrage only after popular democracy has disappeared. The electorate, the ultimate sovereign, must, to an extent not dreamed of by democracy’s philosophers, be content to choose its leaders.#
• If there is, in fact, no relationship between income and wealth levels and the evaluations that individuals place on public goods, almost all of the institutions on general taxation must produce serious distortion in the allocation of economic resources.#

Gordon Tullock, The Politics of Bureaucracy (1965)

• It is not from the benevolence of the bureaucrat that we expect our research grant or our welfare check, but out of his regard to his own, not the public interest.#Quoted in James Buchanan, Economics: Between Predictive Science and Moral Philosophy (1987)

Robert Barro, “United States Inflation and the Choice of Monetary Standard” (1982)

• Telling the Federal Reserve to select substantially different values – usually lower values – for monetary growth seems similar to urging firms and households to choose different numbers for prices, unemployment, production, and so on. As in the private sector, it is reasonable to view the Fed’s monetary decisions as emerging from a given structure of constraints and rewards.#Quoted in Lawrence White, Competition and Currency (1989)

James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (1962)

• There is nothing in the operation of majority rule to insure that public investment is more “productive” than alternative employments of resources, that is, nothing insures that the games be positive-sum.#
• In an opportunity cost sense, the failure to take cooperative action when such is actually more “efficient” is precisely equivalent to the taking of positive private action that is detrimental to overall “efficiency”.#

Vincent Ostrom, The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration (1973)

• Any form of organization capable of establishing and enforcing ordered social relationships among a large community of persons will necessarily depend on a radical inequality in the assignment of decision-making capabilities to those who exercise the prerogative for allocating and controlling the decision-making capabilities exercised by others.#

Doug North, John Wallis, & Barry Weingast, Violence and Social Orders (2009)

• Systematic rent-creation through limited access in a natural state is not simply a method of lining the pockets of the dominant coalition; it is the essential means of controlling violence.#
• The cessation of violence (peace) is not achieved when violence specialists put down their arms, but rather peace occurs when the violent devise arrangements (explicit or implicit) that reduce the level of violence.#
• All personal relationships are, in some way, unique while large classes of impersonal relationships are the same. . . . As long as social personas are unique across individuals, impersonal relationships are impossible. Impersonality arises as social personas become standardized.#
• The social identity of non-elites [in a natural state] is closely tied to the identity of the patronage network in which they are located.#
• Societies capable of supporting complicated private organizations have complicated and sophisticated public organizations. Societies incapable of governing themselves are also incapable of supporting strong private organizations.#
• Widening the set of commonly held beliefs among elites broadens the range of credible commitments that the dominant coalition can sustain.#
• The natural state cannot support creative destruction because the creation of new economic organizations directly threatens existing economic organizations and their patterns of rents.#
• Effective political competition requires credible guarantees that losers will not be expropriated and that losing political organizations continue to enjoy access to future competition#
• As long as landownership serves both a political and an economic purpose, it will serve its economic purpose less well than if ownership responds more closely to economic incentives.#
• When elites institutionalize their own impersonal intra-elite relationships, they lower the costs of expanding the size of the coalition covered by these institutions.#
• A modern political party contains a legislative arm coordinating the behavior of legislators, and an elective arm identifying party voters and getting out the vote.#
• Charters created rents even when charters did not confer monopolies because the ability to access the corporate form in itself was a substantial advantage to any economic organization.#
• The birth of the nation-state did not occur with the apotheosis of the ruler, but by subsuming the personal identity of all rulers in a durable and perpetual corporate organization of the state.#
• It is not that natural states are incapable of progress; it is that they are as likely to move back toward personal arrangements and more limited access as they are toward impersonal arrangements.#
• Beliefs that impersonal identities can be sustained lie at the heart of beliefs in equality. Equality depends on impersonal identity; for citizens to be equal before the law, for example, the law must treat citizens impersonally.#

Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1907)

• The fixed residences of princes, which require centralization, are possible only with the emergence of money taxes, for taxes paid in kind cannot be transported and they are appropriate only to a wandering court which consumes them as it goes. It is in the same spirit that modern tax policy tends to leave taxes on real property to local authorities, and to reserve income tax for the state. By focusing the tax demands of the central power upon the money income of the individual, it grasps precisely the kind of property with which it has the closest relation. #
• Very crass social differences and the insurmountable distance between classes usually go hand in hand with social harmony. The call for egalitarian reforms or for revolutions is usually raised only after the rigidity of class barriers has been alleviated and a livelier movement within society has brought about certain intermediate transitional phenomena and a degree of contact between the social orders which allows mutual comparison. As soon as this happens, however, the lower classes become aware of their subjugation and the upper classes of their moral responsibility as well as their interest in defending their position, and social harmony is disrupted.#
• It is not the bond as such, but being bound to a particular individual master that represents the real antipode of freedom.#
• The shrewd despot will always choose a form for his demands that grants to his subjects the greatest possible freedom in their purely individual relationships. The terrible tyrannies of the Italian Renaissance are, at the same time, the ideal breeding ground for the most unrestricted growth of the individual with his ideal and private interests; and at all times—from the Roman Empire to Napoleon III—political despotism has been found to be accompanied by a licentious private libertinism. For its own benefit, despotism will restrict its demands to what is essential for it and will make its measure and kind endurable by granting the greatest possible freedom for everything else.#
• Wherever equality impinges upon the formal foundations of human relationships, it serves to express individual inequalities most pointedly and far-reachingly.#
• The principle that the minority has to conform to the majority indicates that the absolute or qualitative value of the individual voice is reduced to an entity of purely quantitative significance.#

James Buchanan, Economic Inquiry and its Logic (2000)

• Many, indeed the overwhelming majority, of the technologically feasible positions cannot be behaviourally realized, under any regime.#

Yuval Harari, Sapiens (2014)

• A real ‘clash of civilisations’ is like the proverbial dialogue of the deaf. Nobody can grasp what the other is saying. Today when Iran and the United States rattle swords at one another, they both speak the language of nation states, capitalist economies, international rights and nuclear physics.#
• The liberal belief in the free and sacred nature of each individual is a direct legacy of the traditional Christian belief in free and eternal individual souls. Without recourse to eternal souls and a Creator God, it becomes embarrassingly difficult for liberals to explain what is so special about individual Sapiens.#

Ludwig Von Mises, Liberalism in the Classical Tradition (1962)

• Everything that serves to preserve the social order is moral; everything that is detrimental to it is immoral. Accordingly, when we reach the conclusion that an institution is beneficial to society, one can no longer object that it is immoral. There may possibly be a difference of opinion about whether a particular institution is socially beneficial or harmful. But once it has been judged beneficial, one can no longer contend that, for some inexplicable reason, it must be condemned as immoral. #

Ludwig Von Mises, Planning for Freedom (1952)

• If one rejects laissez faire on account of man’s fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reasons also reject every kind of government action.#

Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence (1763)

• Till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor.#
• Hereditary nobility is the great security of the people’s liberty.#

Barry Weingast, “The Political Foundations of Democracy and the Rule of Law” (1997)

• When a [mass] consensus over [political] values exists, elites face different incentives than when none exists.#
• Maintaining limits on the state requires that citizens oppose a violation even if they potentially benefit from it. . . . [C]itizens in stable democracies not only must value democracy but also must be willing to take costly action to defend democratic institutions against potential violations.#

Gabriel Almond, The Civic Culture (1963)

• A good deal of citizen influence over governmental elites may entail no activity or even conscious intent of citizens. On the contrary, elites may anticipate possible demands and activities and act in response to what they anticipate. They act responsively, not because citizens are actively making demands, but in order to keep them from becoming active.#Quoted in Barry Weingast, “The Political Foundations of Democracy and the Rule of Law” (1997)

Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market (1991)

• Constitutions that are observed and last for a long time are those that reduce the stakes of political battles.#Quoted in Barry Weingast, “The Political Foundations of Democracy and the Rule of Law” (1997)
• Successful democracies are those in which the institutions make it difficult to fortify a temporary advantage. Unless the increasing returns to power are institutionally mitigated, losers must fight the first time they lose, for waiting makes it less likely that they will ever succeed.#Quoted in Barry Weingast, “The Political Foundations of Democracy and the Rule of Law” (1997)

Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition” (1994)

• What has come about with the modern age is not the need for recognition but the conditions in which the attempt to be recognized can fail. This is why the need is now acknowledged for the first time. In premodern times, people didn’t speak of “identity” and “recognition”—not because people didn’t have (what we call) identities, or because these didn’t depend on recognition, but rather because these were then too unproblematic to be thematized as such.#