Your Code of Ethics – Page 2 – Honest Government

Historic Views on Government – Bastiat

Honest opinion about government from Frederic Bastiat:

Whenever a portion of wealth is transferred from the person who owns it–without his consent and without compensation, and whether by force or by fraud–to anyone who does not own it, then I say that property is violated; that an act of plunder is committed.
I say that this act is exactly what the law is supposed to suppress, always and everywhere. When the law itself commits this act that it is supposed to suppress, I say that plunder is still committed, and I add that from the point of view of society and welfare, this aggression against rights is even worse.

Try to imagine a regulation of labor imposed by force that is not a violation of liberty; a transfer of wealth imposed by force that is not a violation of property. If you cannot reconcile these contradictions, then you must conclude that the law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing injustice.
The Law, 1850

A French economist, statesman, and author, Frederic Bastiat was a firm believer in free enterprise and an opponent of socialism. Near the end of his life, he criticized the socialistic direction in which France was headed. A believer in private charity but not in the forced redistribution of wealth, Bastiat held that socialism violates property rights and leads to conflict and economic stagnation as the ratio of producers to consumers narrows.

Quotation and short bio from The Quotable Conservative: The Giants of Conservatism on Liberty, Freedom, Individual Responsibility, and Traditional Values. Rod L. Evans and Irwin M. Berent, editors. Holbrook, Mass.: Adams Publishing, 1996.

Historic Views on Government – Banfield

Honest opinion about government from Edward Christie Banfield:

So long as the city contains a sizable lower class, nothing basic can be done about its most serious problems. Good jobs may be offered to all, but some will remain chronically unemployed. Slums may be demolished, but if the housing that replaces them is occupied by the lower class it will shortly be turned into new slums. Welfare payments may be doubled or tripled and a negative income tax instituted, but some persons will continue to live in squalor and misery.

The lower-class forms of all problems are at bottom a single problem: the existence of an outlook and style of life which is radically present-oriented and which attaches no value to work, sacrifice, self-improvement, or service to family, friends, or community.
The Unheavenly City, 1968

New schools may be built, new curricula devised, and the teacher-pupil ratio cut in half, but if the children who attend these schools come from lower-class homes, the schools will be turned into blackboard jungles, and those who graduate or drop out from them will, in most cases, be functionally illiterate. The streets may be filled with armies of policemen, but violent crime and civil disorder will decrease very little. If, however, the lower class were to disappear–if, say, its members were overnight to acquire the attitudes, motivations, and habits of the working class–the most serious and intractable problems of the city would all disappear with it.
The Unheavenly City Revisited, 1974

Edward Banfield's best known and perhaps most influential work is The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Enterprise (1968). He is also the author of such works as Government Project (1951); (with Martin Meyerson) Politics, Planning and the Public Interest: The Case for Public Housing in Chicago (1955); (with Laura Banfield) The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958) and Political Influence (1961); (with James Q. Wilson) City Politics (1963); The Unheavenly City Revisited (1974), and Here the People Rule (1985).

Historic Views on Government – Clarence Thomas

Honest opinion about government from Clarence Thomas:

Without…a notion of natural law, the entire American political tradition, from Washington to Lincoln, from Jefferson to Martin Luther King, would be unintelligible. According to our higher law tradition, men must acknowledge each other's freedom, and govern only by the consent of others. All our political institutions presuppose this truth. Natural law of this form is indispensable to decent politics. It is the barrier against the "abolition of man" that C.S. Lewis warned about in his short modern classic.
This approach allows us to reassert the primacy of the individual, and establishes our inherent equality as a God-given right.
The Heritage Foundation, June 18, 1987

A U.S. Supreme Court associate justice (since 1991), Clarence Thomas received his J.D. from Yale University (1974) and went on to serve as an assistant to the Attorney General of Missouri (1974-1977), legislative assistant to Senator John C. Danforth (1979-1981), Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education (1981-1982), chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (1982-1990), and a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals (1990-1991).

Historic Views on Government – Samuel Johnson

Honest opinion about government from Samuel Johnson:

Most of the misery which the defamation of blameless actions or the obstruction of honest endeavors brings upon the world is inflicted by men that propose no advantage to themselves but the satisfaction of poisoning the banquet which they cannot taste, and blasting the harvest which they have no right to reap.
The Rambler, 1751

English author, poet, and lexicographer, Samuel Johnson is perhaps most famous for his pioneering Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which established the practice of clarifying definitions by quotations from leading authors. He wrote many other works, including The Rambler essays (1750-1752), the satirical Rasselas (1759)–a fictional assault on metaphysical optimism–and Lives of the English Poets (1779-1781). His political views were very much like those of Edmund Burke: conservative, traditional, and distrustful of popular upheavals. Johnson was immortalized by his biographer James Boswell, who wrote Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).

Historic Views on Government – Brigitte Berger

Honest opinion about government from Brigitte Berger:

No amount of legislation and court decisions can produce in the individual such basic moral ideas as the inviolability of human rights, the willing assent to legal norms, or the notion that contractual agreements must be respected.

[N]either the state nor the judiciary can be moral authorities in and of themselves. When they try to do this, they either are ineffective (the usual case in democracies) or they start out on a path at the end of which lies totalitarianism, in which the political order tries to absorb into itself all values and all institutions in the society (in which case democracy must come to an end).

For understandable reasons, public policy in the modern welfare state has been aimed toward those who are weak and in need of help. Commonly, the people who fulfill these criteria are rather few…, and certainly are a minority of the population. This very limited definition of the scope of public policy clashes with the expansionary tendency of the bureaucratic and professional empires spawned by the welfare state. Quite logically, the latter tended to inflate the definitions both of weakness and of need. Ever more families were added to the category of those too weak to cope by themselves, and new needs were invented. Thus, in America, the definition of the family was changed to "families," all of these were supposed to be in "crisis," and at the same time the real needs of certain types of families were magnified and distorted.
The War Over the Family, 1983

Professor of sociology at Wellesley College, Brigitte Berger has written The War Over the Family (with Peter Berger, 1983) and edited Child Care and Mediating Structures (with Sidney Callahan, 1979).

Historic Views on Government – Bell

Honest opinion about government from Daniel Bell:

The presumed failure of the idea of equality of opportunity has shifted the definition of that value to equality of result, and by fiat if necessary. The increasing thrust by disadvantaged groups, or their ideological mentors, has been for direct redistributive policies in order to equalize incomes, living conditions, and the like, and on a group basis. In the shorthand of game theory, equality of opportunity is a non-zero-sum game in which individuals can win in differential ways. But equality of result, or redistributive policies, essentially is a zero-sum game, in which there are distinct losers and winners. And inevitably these conditions lead to more open political competition and conflict.

If one moves to Western society, generally, we find a subtle but pervasive change, namely, that the revolution of rising expectations, which has been even more tangible in the advanced industrial societies than in the underdeveloped countries, has become a sustained demand for entitlement. To be a "citizen" has usually meant to share fully in the life of the society. In the earliest years, this meant the claim to liberty and the full protection of the law. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this was defined as political rights, principally the full right to vote or hold office by all adult citizens, a status which was achieved only fifty years ago in most Western societies. But the major claim in recent decades has been for social rights: the right to a job, insurance against unemployment and old age indigence, adequate health care, and a minimum, decent standard of living. And these are now demanded from the community as entitlement.
The Winding Passage, 1980

A prominent sociologist, Daniel Bell has written a number of books, including The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), The Winding Passage: Essays and Sociological Journeys (1980), and The Budget Deficits (with Lester Thurow, 1986).

Historic Views on Government – de Tocqueville

Honest opinion about government from Alexis de Tocqueville:

Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.

The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal; but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or to wretchedness.

Within these limits the power vested in the American courts of justice of pronouncing a statute to be unconstitutional forms one of the most powerful barriers that have ever been devised against the tyranny of political assemblies.

In order to enjoy the inestimable benefits that the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils that it creates.
Democracy in America, 1835

French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville is admired for his concern for personal freedom, fear of majoritarian tyrrany, and desire for limited government. He wrote the classic, Democracy in America (2 volumes, 1835, 1840).

Historic Views on Government – Kemp

Honest opinion about government from Jack Kemp:

Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was built on an invigorating, exciting, but nonetheless erroneous, idea that government sharing can end poverty and urban squalor by taxing away resources from the "haves" and giving them to the "have nots." As is usual, the resources were taxed away from middle-class Americans and, except in the rare instance, never got to the lower-income classes. Giant federal bureaucracies were established to run programs and dispense funds that would lead to this Great Society, and by the time the federal tax dollars got through the bureaucratic "in" and "out" baskets there were left only nickels and dimes. The war on poverty became a war on the middle class–and on the poor.

Where tax dollars were actually spent [in Lyndon Johnson's Great Society], there almost always occurred an increase in bitterness and frustration in the segment of society that was supposed to benefit. All over the nation poor blacks, Hispanics, and whites, were trained by government bureaucrats for jobs that didn't exist in the private sector. Urban renewal meant that low-income housing, designated "substandard" by government bureaucrats, was torn down to make way for gleaming new–and taxable–offices, factories, and shopping malls. In 1979, a dozen years later, the nation is pockmarked with the razed acreage of defunct projects. Those evicted generally had to fend for themselves, and because they usually could only move to housing they could not afford the government had to begin new programs to transfer income to citizens it had displaced. And since only a tiny number of such projects resulted in the expected taxable properties, the unlucky people whose properties surround the pockmarked urban-renewal areas now have to pay off bonds floated to ravage their towns and cities.
An American Renaissance: A Strategy for the 1980's, 1979

Former U.S. Congressman from New York (1971-1989) and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (1989-1992), Jack Kemp was also a special assistant to the governor of California and a special assistant to the chair of the Republican national convention. He has been a strong advocate of free enterprise, as when he has supported programs enabling industrious people in public housing to become self-sustaining and to buy their homes. His appreciation of the entrepreneurial spirit and his manifest enthusiasm and optimism have appealed to millions of people. Kemp is the author of An American Renaissance: A Strategy for the 1980's (1979).

Historic Views on Government – Berns

Honest opinion about government from Walter Berns:

[O]n this foundation [natural law] we built not only a nation of immigrants, but a nation of immigrants from every part of the globe. In the words of the old Book of Common Prayer, we became and remain a haven for "all sorts and conditions of men."
This is not to deny that our laws have sometimes been biased or our citizens prejudiced; it is merely to say, what is surely true, that in no other place is a prejudice against foreigners so inappropriate, so foreign, so difficult to justify. Xenophobia is, to use another term for which there is no analogue elsewhere, un-American. Precisely because America is something other than a place and a tradition, because words constitute the principal bond between us, anyone (in principle) may become an American. He has only to be Americanized, and, as I say, all sorts and conditions of men have been able and willing to do that.
Taking the Constitution Seriously, 1987

Walter Berns has been a Rockefeller Fellow, a Fulbright Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Phi Beta Kappa lecturer, a winner of the Clark Distinguished Teaching Award (Cornell University), and a member of the Council of Scholars in the Library of Congress. His books include The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy (1985), For Capital Punishment: Crime and the Morality of the Death Penalty (1991), and Taking the Constitution Seriously (1987).

Historic Views on Government – Peter Berger

Honest opinion about government from Peter Ludwig Berger:

It is not possible to impose a socialist system without force, since those who are dispossessed in this imposition will not graciously assent to their fate. Hence, as Marx and all the other mainline Marxists argued, there must be a dictatorship. What neither Marx nor most of his epigones understood is that this need for dictatorship increases rather than decreases with the successful establishment of socialism: Central planning of the economy and despotic policies are intrinsically linked phenomena. The degree of power required by "the plan" requires dictatorial powers;…there is a natural tendency for a despotic elite to seek control over the economy on which its power rests. Of course, one can imagine different developments–all those included in the vision of a democratic socialism–and no social scientist can confidently assert that such developments are impossible. Yet enough is now known about the empirical workings of "real existing socialism" to make one highly skeptical of the chances for such a future possibility.
The Capitalist Revolution, 1986

A professor at Boston University, where he has directed the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture, Peter Berger has written many books, such as the classic Invitation to Sociology (1963) as well as American Apostasy (1989), Confession, Conflict, and Community (1986), Facing Up to Modernity (1977), and The War Over the Family (with Brigitte Berger, 1983).