Historic Views on Government – Tyrrell

Honest opinion about government from R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.:

The socialist theory is a fable. The socialist reality is a very uncomfortable place to live: political tyrants having replaced the bosses of yore; coercion having vanquished liberty; shortages and want having replaced economic growth and self-reliance. Greed remains, but long ago it was surpassed in popularity and maliciousness by envy. Where there once was optimism there is now pessimism. The citizen who once hoped to be an entrepreneur now queues up like everyone else for a new pair of socks or a feast of moldy state-issued potatoes.

Wherever socialism has slithered into power there is either unspeakable cruelty or slow economic decomposition. Russia, the Socialist Motherland, offers its citizens both. The decrepitude of Britain, upon whose wealth the sun could not set four decades ago, is evidence of socialism's knack for despoiling an economy. More recently we have witnessed the amazing impoverishment of Germany under the Social Democrats and the almost instantaneous economic collapse of France's theretofore robust economy under Francois Mitterand's Socialists.

The intelligent quest is for the free society with equality of opportunity. The quest for equality of result is the path to the widest inequality of all: despotism.
   The Liberal Crack-Up, 1984

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is the founder and editor-in-chief of American Spectator. Known for his witty, sardonic style, he is the author of The Liberal Crack-Up (1984) and The Conservative Crack-Up (1992).

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 – Kilpatrick

Honest opinion about government from James J. Kilpatrick, Jr.:

The one great, precious factor that distinguishes a free society from a totalitarian society is the absence of unwarranted governmental restraint upon the free man. Within the broadest possible limits the free man may work as he pleases, come and go as he pleases, think, read, write, vote, and worship as he pleases. His liberties, of course, are not absolute…but…extend to the point at which Citizen A causes some serious loss, risk, or inconvenience to Citizen B.
   The Smut Peddlars, 1960

I had supposed it to be a fundamental principle of conservatism to challenge every doubtful intrusion of the state upon the freedom of the individual. The more serious the intrusion, the more it must be resisted. Only the most compelling interests of society can justify a major invasion by the government of a person's rights to be left alone…. If these are not fundamental principles of conservatism, I have wasted thirty years in the contemplation of that philosophy.
   National Review, 1967

A prolific columnist and author, James J. Kilpatrick began his long writing career as a newspaper reporter, then became an editorial writer, and later a syndicated columnist (currently syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate). He has been a television commentator, won numerous awards (including the Medal of Honor for Distinguished Service in Journalism from the University of Missouri), and written several books, including The Sovereign State (1957), The Smut Peddlars (1960), and The Writer's Art (1984).

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 – Boaz

Honest opinion about government from David Boaz:

In the private sector, firms must attract voluntary customers or they fail; and if they fail, investors lose their money, and managers and employees lose their jobs. The possibility of failure, therefore, is a powerful incentive to find out what customers want and to deliver it efficiently. But in the government sector, failures are not punished, they are rewarded. If a government agency is set up to deal with a problem and the problem gets worse, the agency is rewarded with more money and more staff–because, after all, its task is now bigger. An agency that fails year after year, that does not simply fail to solve the problem but actually makes it worse, will be rewarded with an ever-increasing budget.

A key point to keep in mind is that nongovernment schools, which have to offer a better product to stay in business, do a better job of educating children. Defenders of the education establishment have tried to dismiss that success by claiming that the private schools start with a better grade of students–once again, blaming the customers for the enterprise's failure. But that excuse has been exposed time and again. Urban Catholic schools serve a clientele not terribly different from that of the government schools. Marva Collins's school in Chicago received national publicity for its success with poor black children, many of them declared "learning disabled" by the neighborhood government schools. Joan Davis Rateray of the Institute for Independent Education describes…the success of many minority-run independent schools. Any remaining doubts should have been eliminated in 1982 when James S. Coleman and his colleagues, after a comprehensive investigation of the results of public versus private schools, concluded that "when family backgrounds that predict achievement are controlled, students in…private schools are shown to achieve at a higher level than students in public schools.
   Liberating Schools, 1991

Executive vice-president of the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C. libertarian think-tank devoted to a belief in minimal government, David Boaz has written many articles and edited a number of works, including Liberating Schools: Education in the Inner City (1991) and Market Liberalism: A Paradigm of the 21st Century (with Edward H. Crane, 1993).

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 – Bloom

Honest opinion about government from Allan Bloom:

Affirmative action now institutionalizes the worst aspects of separatism. The fact is…that the university degree of a black student is…tainted, and employers look on it with suspicion, or become guilty accomplices in the toleration of incompetence. The worst part of all this is that the black students, most of whom avidly support this system, hate its consequences. A disposition composed of equal parts of shame and resentment has settled on many black students who are beneficiaries of preferential treatment. They do not like the notion that whites are in the position to do them favors. They believe that everyone doubts their merit, their capacity for equal achievement. Their successes become questionable in their own eyes. Those who are good students fear that they are equated with those who are not, that their hard-won credentials are not credible. They are the victims of a stereotype, but one that has been chosen by black leadership. Those who are not good students, but have the same advantages as those who are, want to protect their position but are haunted by the sense of not deserving it….
   The Closing of the American Mind, 1987

Allan Bloom was co-director of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy at the University of Chicago, where he was also a professor on the Committee of Social Thought. He taught at Yale, Cornell, the University of Toronto, and other universities and translated and edited Plato's Republic and Rousseau's Emile. Although he wrote numerous articles as well as Shakespeare's Politics (1964) and Confronting the Constitution (1990), he is best known for The Closing of the American Mind (1987), a sweeping analysis and critique of contemporary thought.

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 – vos Savant

Honest opinion about government from Marilyn vos Savant:

In addition to buying votes, what's wrong with government doing the spending instead of our doing the spending ourselves? Consider this: When you spend your own money on yourself (such as buying yourself a tie or a handbag), you do an excellent job of keeping the cost down and getting exactly what you want. But when you spend your own money on someone else (such as buying a gift tie and handbag for your parents), you still keep the cost down, but you don't get them what they'd choose themselves. (Think about all the gifts you've ever received: What percentage of them would you have chosen yourself?)
Even worse, when you spend a third party's money on someone else, you not only don't get the recipient what he or she would choose, there's also no pressure to keep the cost under control. (Imagine being allowed to charge that gift tie and handbag to the "taxpayers" instead of to your own account: Would you worry about the cost?) This is what the government does, and in a massive way, every single day.
   "Ask Marilyn," Parade, Oct. 9, 1994

Marilyn vos Savant is listed in the Guinness Hall of Fame for having the highest officially measured IQ – 228. Her column, "Ask Marilyn," is featured weekly in Parade. She has written a number of books, including Ask Marilyn (1992), The World's Most Famous Math Problem (1993), and I've Forgotten Everything I Learned in School! (1994).

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 – Kirk

Honest opinion about government from Russell Kirk:

Conservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogma, and conservatives inherit from Burke a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the time. As a working premise, nevertheless, one can observe here that the essence of social conservatism is preservation of the ancient moral traditions of humanity. Conservatives respect the wisdom of their ancestors (this phrase was Strafford's, and Hooker's, before Burke illuminated it); they are dubious of wholesale alteration. They think society is a spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate constitution: it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a machine. "What is conservatism?" Abraham Lincoln inquired once. "Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?" It is that, but it is more. Professor Hearnshaw, in his Conservatism in England, lists a dozen principles of conservatives, but possibly these may be comprehended in a briefer catalogue. I think that there are six canons of conservative thought�
   (1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality, what Coleridge called the Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs. "Every Tory is a realist," says Keith Feiling: "he knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man's philosophy cannot plumb or fathom." True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls.
   (2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems; conservatives resist what Robert Graves calls "Logicalism" in society. This prejudice has been called "the conservatism of enjoyment"�a sense that life is worth living, according to Walter Bagehot "the proper source of an animated Conservatism."
   (3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a "classless society." With reason, conservatives often have been called "the party of order." If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum. Ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and equality before courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom.
   (4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Economic levelling, they maintain, is not economic progress.
   (5) Faith in prescription and distrust of "sophisters, calculators, and economists" who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. Tradition, sound prejudice, and old prescription are checks both upon man's anarchic impulse and upon the innovator's lust for power.
   (6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman's chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.
   Various deviations from this system of ideas have occurred, and there are numerous appendages to it; but in general conservatives have adhered to these articles of belief with a consistency rare in political history.
   The Conservative Mind, 1953

One of the most influential conservatives of the twentieth century, Russell Kirk earned a D.Litt. at St. Andrews University in Scotland and has received numerous awards, including the Ingersoll prize for scholarly writing (1984), the Presidential Citizen's Medal (1989), and the Salvatori prize for historical writing (1991). A distinguished fellow of the Heritage Foundation, Kirk has written and edited numerous books, including The Conservative Mind (1953), A Program for Conservatives (1954), Academic Freedom (1955), Confessions of a Bohemian Tory (1963), Edmund Burke (1967), Decadence and Renewal in Higher Learning (1978), Portable Conservative Reader (1982), The Conservative Constitution (1990), The Politics of Prudence (1993), and America's British Culture (1993).

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 – Bork

Honest opinion about government from Robert Bork:

In a constitutional democracy the moral content of law must be given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the morality of the judge.
   American Enterprise Institute, 1984

Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man's nature, and it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia, that we must ask that our judges adhere.
   The Tempting of America, 1991

[W]hen a judge goes beyond [his or her proper function], and reads entirely new values into the Constitution, values the framers and ratifiers did not put there, he deprives the people of their liberty. That liberty, which the Constitution clearly envisions, is the liberty of the people to set their own social agenda through the process of democracy.
   1987

Lawyer, former federal judge, and Reagan Supreme Court nominee, Robert Bork is known for his vast scholarship and his judicial philosophy, which is that of strict constructionism, in which judges are to evaluate laws in relation to the original intent of the Constitution. He taught at Yale Law School, was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and wrote The Anti-Trust Paradox (1978) and The Tempting of America (1990), in which he explains, among other things, his judicial philosophy.

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 – Boorstin

Honest opinion about government from Daniel Boorstin:

We must return to the ideal of equality. We must recognize that many of the acts committed in the name of equal opportunity are in fact acts of discrimination. We must reject reactionary programs, though they masquerade under slogans of progress, which would carry us back to Old World prejudices, primitive hatreds, and discriminatory quotas. Our cultural federalism, another name for the fellowship of man in America, must once again emphasize what each can give to us. We must reject the clenched fist for the open hand. We must aim, more than ever before, to become color-blind. We must aim to create conditions of equal opportunity�by improving American schools beginning at the very bottom, and by ruthlessly applying the same standards of achievement to all Americans regardless of race, sex, religion, or national origin�the same standards for admission to institutions of higher learning, for graduation, for the Civil Service, for elected office, and for all other American opportunities. We weaken our nation and show disrespect for all our fellow Americans when we make race or sex or poverty a disqualification�and equally so when we make them a qualification.
   Democracy and Its Discontents, 1971, 1974

Senior historian of the Smithsonian Institution, Daniel Boorstin is an extremely versatile intellectual. Until 1969 he was Preston and Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor of American History at the University of Chicago, where he taught for twenty-five years. He earned degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Yale and practiced law in Massachusetts. He is known for his numerous books, including The Americans (a trilogy), The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1964, 1971), The Genius of American Politics (1953), and The Decline of Radicalism (1969). He also edited the twenty-seven volume Chicago History of American Civilization series.

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 – Washington

Honest opinion about government from George Washington:

The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.
   First Inaugural Address, April 30, 1789

It is a maxim founded on the universal experiences of mankind that no nation is to be trusted farther than is bound by its interest.
   Letter to Henry Laurens, 1778

The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.
   Farewell Address, 1796

Happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
   Letter to the Jewish Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, 1790

First President of the United States, George Washington was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses (1759-1774) and became one of the leaders of the colonial opposition to British policies in America. He was a member of the First and Second Constitutional Congresses (1774-1775) and was elected to command all Continental armies on June 15, 1775. Near the end of 1783, he resigned his commission and retired to Mount Vernon, from which he was called from retirement to preside at the federal convention in Philadelphia (1787). He was unanimously chosen president of the United States under the new constitution and took his official oath on April 30, 1789. He was unanimously re-elected in 1793 and later declined a third term.

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 – Kirkpatrick

Honest opinion about government from Jeane Kirkpatrick:

The fact is that government cannot produce equality, and any serious effort to do so can destroy liberty and other social goods.

[B]ecause regulation uses the coercive power of government to alter outcomes, it diminishes individual liberty: people are persuaded by the threat of sanctions to act differently than they would otherwise prefer.
   Dictatorships and Double Standards, 1982

A former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and syndicated columnist, Jeane Kirkpatrick is the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1985) and the author of such books as Political Woman (1974), Dictatorships and Double Standards (1982), The Reagan Phenomenon (1982), and The Withering Away of the Totalitarian State (1990).

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.