Doug Bandow Quotes

The history of the welfare state is the history of public enterprise pushing out private organization. The impact was largely unintentional, but natural and inevitable. Higher taxes left individuals with less money to give; government's assumption of responsibility for providing welfare shriveled the perceived duty of individuals to respond to their neighbors' needs; and the availability of public programs gave recipients an alternative to private assistance, one which did not challenge recipients to reform their destructive behavior.

Gun control has proved to be a grievous failure, a means of disarming honest citizens without limiting firepower available to those who prey on the law-abiding. Attempting to use the legal system to punish the weapon rather than the person misusing the weapon is similarly doomed to fail.

The Constitution's framers intended to restrict central authority to the few areas that could not be handled by states. The drafters would be horrified at how the present court misapplies what they designed.

Collectivism takes on many guises and seldom uses its own real name. Words like 'community' and 'social' soothe us into thinking that collectivist decision-making is somehow higher and nobler than individual or 'selfish' decision-making. But the cold fact is that communities do not make decisions. Individuals who claim to speak for the community impose their decisions on us all.

[E]conomic liberty and creative entrepreneurship are the basis of any solution to today's social and economic difficulties. Blaming business, setting wages, and attempting to run the economy by decree from Washington only exacerbates the problems. Consider the minimum wage. It seems so simple: Tell business to pay its workers more. But a hike in the minimum wage is essentially a tax, punishing precisely those companies that hire workers with the least skills.

The U.S. should stop garrisoning the globe, subsidizing rich friends, and reconstructing poor enemies. Instead, it's about time Washington focused on defending America and its people.

Legislators consistently put the political imperative before the national interest.