Government Regulation Quotes

The trouble with government regulation of the market is that it prohibits capitalistic acts between consenting adults. ~ Robert Nozick

We have lost that which has made us great over the generations, and that is the sense of individual and personal responsibility that we can come up, we can pursue our dreams and our aspirations and we won't be blocked by government regulation, by the inability to get a loan as a small business to make our dreams come true. ~ Jon Huntsman, Jr.

The right to "liberty" and "pursuit" of happiness is incompatible with a government that makes choices for you. ~ A.E. Samaan

I am not interested in having freedom from burdens.
I don't need any authority to free me from responsibility.
I am not interested in having freedoms within an authoritarian's parameters.
I am only interested in self-determination.
I have only respect for liberty as I am a libertarian. ~ A.E. Samaan

Current government regulation interferes with honest voluntary exchanges by imposing arbitrary terms and requiring tons of paperwork disclosing information no one wants anyway. ~ John Stossel

Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) is a major problem from poorly tested products and it should be dealt with sooner rather than later by government regulators. ~ Steven Magee

Liberals conceptualize government regulation as the protection of those who cannot protect themselves - protection of citizens, workers, honest businessmen, and the environment against possible harm by unscrupulous or negligent businesses and individuals. Government regulation of business is there to be sure that businesses don't hurt or cheat anyone. ~ George Lakoff

Socialism is socialism. Government run enterprises are just as inept under democratic governments as they are under autocratic governments. ~ Thomas J. DiLorenzo

The people who tried government regulation have lives which are miserable. ~ John Stossel

There is a dangerous willful ignorance in governments to the adverse health effects of the various forms of electromagnetic radiation. ~ Steven Magee

In the system of conservative moral categories, government regulation falls under interference with the pursuit of self-interest by people trying to make a living, people using their self-discipline to become self-reliant (and, if possible, rich). These are the good people in our society. We want to encourage people like them and it is wrong to put roadblocks in their way. The ~ George Lakoff

Wall Street billionaires are predicting that Roosevelt-style railroad rate regulation will sooner or later bring about financial catastrophe. [ca. 1906] ~ Edmund Morris

Legislating morality grows big government immensely, and helps fashion the noose the government will use to ultimately hang you by. ~ A.E. Samaan

We are in the energy dictatorship that calls itself the United States of America. ~ Steven Magee

Tyrants are obvious, and easy to identify. It is the well entrenched and corrupt establishment that is truly insidious. ~ A.E. Samaan

People should be free, people should be unencumbered by regulation as much as possible, that big government always goes corrupt and the truth shall always set you free. ~ Glenn Beck

I justified my decision to take the bus by the fact that hippies had never spent much time in Malaysia either. To put it bluntly, they weren't welcome. An official government regulation at the time banned hippies from staying in the country. It read: If you are dressed in shabby, dirty, or indecent clothes, living in temporary or makeshift shelters you will be deemed a hippie. On being deemed a hippie, your visit pass will be cancelled and you will be ordered to leave Malaysia within 24 hours, failing which you will be prosecuted under immigration laws. Furthermore, you will not be permitted to enter Malaysian again. ~ Peter Moore

A government is a territorial monopolist of compulsion-an agency which may engage in continual, institutionalized property rights violations and the expropriation, taxation and regulation-of private property owners. ~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe

, I believe in some type of free market system. I just don't think you'll find an example of one completely free from government intervention. ~ Kenneth Eade

Democratic Socialism devolves into totalitarian Socialism and eventually into full on Communism as people resist statism. ~ A.E. Samaan

Conservatives ... are so opposed to government regulations that they are skeptical of anyone who identifies a problem that requires regulatory solutions - and they are inherently accepting of those who downplay such problems. ~ Joseph J. Romm

Allow? Shouldn't women decide what they'll allow for their own bodies, not a government acting out an antiquated, unnecessary law? ~ Tracy Banghart

A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy. Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a
totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the true name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive rerouting of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation. ~ Peter Ludlow

You either limit the government, or you limit the scope of your life. Why is the government that precious to you in the first place? ~ A.E. Samaan

It's all very well to run around saying regulation is bad, get the government off our backs, etc. Of course our lives are regulated. When you come to a stop sign, you stop; if you want to go fishing, you get a license; if you want to shoot ducks, you can shoot only three ducks. The alternative is dead bodies at the intersection, no fish, and no ducks. OK?
(Getting Control of the Frontier, Gainsville Sun, March 22, 1995) ~ Molly Ivins

Certainly, the job of a U.S. senator is to create a climate conducive to creating jobs, which is lower taxes and less government regulation. What Harry Reid has been doing is putting forward those policies that actually put more regulation on business. ~ Sharron Angle

Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations. ~ Milton Friedman

Some kinds of government regulation of private consensual homosexual behavior may face substantial constitutional challenge. ~ Anthony Kennedy

Any time people create a "black market" to avoid government regulation, they are engaged in, and promoting, free market economics. ~ Dave Champion

Teachers have power. We may cripple them by petty economics; by Government regulations, by the foolish criticism of an uninformed press; but their power exists for good or evil ... ~ Winifred Holtby

It is America, I don't want the government trying to control more of my life. I want less government control, and I think there are too many government regulations, laws and taxes on the books. ~ Trent Lott

Liberals say they are for civil liberties and personal freedom, but they continue to advocate government regulation of business, redistribution of wealth, and various forms of social engineering to manipulate human relationships and attitudes. ~ Richard Ebeling

Vigilant and effective antitrust enforcement today is preferable to the heavy hand of government regulation of the Internet tomorrow. ~ Orrin Hatch

If it were not for government regulation of big corporations, executives at companies like Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, they could have cheated investors out of millions. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

The result, as the journalist Elizabeth Drew noted in the Atlantic Monthly, was "an unabashed act to protect private industry from government regulation." Politicians were far more protective of the narrow interests of tobacco than of the broad interest of public health. Tobacco makers need not have bothered inventing protective filters, Drew wrote drily: Congress had turned out to be "the best filter yet. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

The free enterprise concept inherent in the economic model of capitalism should mean common people, or lower and middle class wage-earners, have greater potential to rise up and gain financial independence. In reality, however, free enterprise all too often leads to an almost total lack of government regulation that in turn allows the global elite to run amuck in Gordon Gecko-style financial coups. ~ James Morcan

The door of the Free Exercise Clause stands tightly closed against any government regulation of religious beliefs as such. Government may neither compel affirmation of a repugnant belief, nor penalize or discriminate against individuals or groups because they hold views abhorrent to the authorities. ~ William J. Brennan

The term "racist" comes from the word "racialist": Someone that sees the world from a racial prism. ~ A.E. Samaan

I paid every effort to seek deregulation throughout FEDEX's start-up and expansion periods, because the biggest impediment to our growth was the government regulations that restricted new entry into the air cargo market. ~ Frederick W. Smith

Liquor, guns, motorcycle helmets (legislation had gone back and forth on that) - mainly white masculine pursuits - are fairly unregulated. But for women and black men, regulation is greater. Within given parameters, federal law gives women the right to decide whether or not to abort a fetus. But the state of Louisiana has imposed restrictions on clinics offering the procedure, which, if upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court, would prevent all but one clinic, in New Orleans, from offering women access to it. Any adult in the state can also be jailed for transporting a teenager out of state for the purposes of an abortion if the teen has not informed her parents. Young black males are regulated too. Jefferson Davis Parish passed a bill banning the wearing of pants in public that revealed "skin beneath their waists or their underwear" and newspaper accounts featured images, taken from the back, of two black teenage boys exposing large portions of their undershorts. The parish imposed a $50 fine for a first offense and $100 for a second. ~ Arlie Russell Hochschild

Funny, I don't particularly care for either "laws" or "order". Liberty is messy. Freedom yields imperfect results. ~ A.E. Samaan

As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness. Habit is a powerful force, and we no longer feel as intensely as we once would have [the] constriction of our liberties that would have been utterly intolerable a mere half century ago. ~ Robert Bork

My evanescent anarchistic tendencies are purely classical. I use the word anarchist in the sense in which it was understood by the ancient Greeks. They, of course, accepted the anarchist as a fairly respectable--if somewhat vehement--opponent of government encroachment on the individual's rights to think and act freely. It is in this sense that I glimpse myself as an anarchist--regretting the growth of government and the ever-increasing trend toward regulation and, worst of all, standardization of human activity. ~ J. Paul Getty

The power of the big fish in general to regroup is hardly restricted to banking. When Standard Oil was broken up in 1911, the immediate effect was to replace a national monopoly with a number of regional monopolies controlled by many of the same Wall Street interests. Ultimately, the regional monopolies regrouped: In 1999 Exxon (formerly Standard Oil Company of New Jersey) and Mobil (formerly Standard Oil Company of New York) reconvened in one of the largest mergers in US history. In 1961 Kyso (formerly Standard Oil of Kentucky) was purchased by Chevron (formerly Standard Oil of California); and in the 1960s and 1970s Sohio (formerly Standard Oil of Ohio) was bought by British Petroleum (BP), which then, in 1998, merged with Amoco (formerly Standard Oil of Indiana).

The tale of AT&T is similar. As the result of an antitrust settlement with the government, on January 1, 1984, AT&T spun off its local operations so as to create seven so-called Baby Bells. But the Baby Bells quickly began to merge and regroup. By 2006 four of the Baby Bells were reunited with their parent company AT&T, and two others (Bell Atlantic and NYNEX) merged to form Verizon.

So the hope that you can make a banking breakup stick (even if it were to be achieved) flies in the face of some pretty daunting experience. Also, note carefully a major political fact: The time when traditional reformers had enough power to make tough banking regulation really work was the time when ~ Gar Alperovitz

Government intervention in the economy - through taxes, regulation and, most importantly, currency inflation - causes distortions and misallocations of capital that must eventually be unwound. The distortions degrade the general standard of living, and the economy goes into a recession (call that an incomplete cleansing). Or it goes into a depression - wherein the entire sickly structure comes unglued. ~ Doug Casey

Those who advocate more and more government regulation have been experimenting for 40 years, trying to create an economic system in which everyone can somehow be made more prosperous by the toil of someone else. ~ Ronald Reagan

What constitutes wise policy . . . will depend on whether the immediate objective of policy is the promotion of political ends, the protection of vested interests, or the satisfaction of consumer needs. ~ George W. Stocking

Anyone believing the TPP is good for Americans take note: The foreign subsidiaries of U.S.-based corporations could just as easily challenge any U.S. government regulation they claim unfairly diminishes their profits - say, a regulation protecting American consumers from unsafe products or unhealthy foods, investors from fraudulent securities or predatory lending, workers from unsafe working conditions, taxpayers from another bailout of Wall Street, or the environment from toxic emissions. ~ Robert Reich

Further global progress is now possible only through a quest for universal consensus in the movement towards a new world order. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government; it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early. ~ George Will

That depends on how Washington reacts. Every state joined the Union voluntarily; they should have the right to leave it again if the Federal government no longer represents their best interests. ~ Lynn Austin

There is no company - no corporation on earth that engages in accounting fraud to the extent the Imperial Federal Government of the United Sates does. Not many congressmen are willing to come forward with the details. ~ Neal Boortz

Increased congestion was highlighted by the 2009 collision between a Russian government Cosmos satellite and a U.S. commercial Iridium satellite. The collision created approximately 1,500 new pieces of trackable space debris, adding to the more than 3,000 pieces of debris created by the 2007 Chinese ASAT test. ~ Anonymous

We preferred our own way of living. We were no expense to the government. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone. ~ Crazy Horse

The sole motivating factor behind the death penalty is vengeance, not justice, and I firmly believe that a government that forbids killing among its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself. ~ Larry Flynt

This website is the dream of people who want to change the culture of state government. ~ Steve Rauschenberger

A democratic government that respects no limits on its power is a ticking time bomb, waiting to destroy the rights it was created to protect. ~ James Bovard

The mistake the apartheid government made was they gave the black people nothing, so they had nothing to lose. But now a lot of the former freedom-fighters are big-time capitalists. They've been given directorships in every major company. They're billionaires! ~ Wilbur Smith

The checks and balances is a way to prevent government from either devolving into an autocratic tyranny or an autocratic mob mentality. ~ Beau Willimon

With respect to the northeastern boundary of the United States, no official correspondence between this Government and that of Great Britain has passed since that communicated to Congress toward the close of their last session. ~ Martin Van Buren

We would be a much healthier culture if the government had never told us how to eat. ~ Joel Salatin

Today the Iraqi and Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom. The governments that are rising will pose no threat to others. Instead of harboring terrorists, they're fighting terrorist groups. And this progress is good for the long-term security of all of us. ~ George W. Bush

In matters of religion, I have considered that its free exercise is placed by the Constitution independent of the powers of the general government. I have therefore undertaken on no occasion to prescribe the religious exercises suited to it; but have left them as the Constitution found them, under the direction and discipline of State or Church authorities acknowledged by the several religious societies. ~ Thomas Jefferson

While Christian nationalists very much want to see the Ten Commandments play a larger role in the United States, they - and the majority of Americans (60 percent) - cannot name even five of the Ten Commandments. Surprisingly, research revealed that only 60 percent of American adults could even identify "thou shalt not kill" as a commandment. Given this, it should not be surprising that most people do not realize the number of commandments that would create an exclusively Judeo-Christian orientation for the government, and that they constitute almost half of God's decrees from the Mount, making the wish for a biblical justice system less than promising for religious freedom in the United States. The goal of Christian nationalism is not religious freedom, however: It is Christian supremacy[....] ~ Elicka Peterson Sparks

If an injustice requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the government machine. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Every Indian outbreak that I have ever known has resulted from broken promises and broken treaties by the government. ~ Buffalo Bill

I say we cut our government in half, with a chainsaw along their waists. ~ Jarod Kintz

Agribusiness - with its wicked powerful lobby and its infiltration of top bureaucratic posts - essentially runs roughshod over the government agencies that are supposed to monitor it. It's the rich fox guarding the filthy, overcrowded henhouse. ~ Jane Velez-Mitchell

What I'd do is not have USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy working with U.S. taxpayers' money to knock off an elected government in Ukraine, which is what they did. I wouldn't try to force the people of Ukraine into a deal with NATO against their interest or into a deal with the European Union, which is against their economic interest. ~ Dennis Kucinich

I go by the great republican principle, that the people will have the virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom [to the offices of government]. ~ James Madison

Government technology processes are mind-boggling long and complicated. A procurement process alone is typically two years, and that doesn't account for the time required to actually build the product. ~ Jennifer Pahlka

We need to get the government out of the way. Inflation hits the middle class and the poor the most. Those are the people who are losing it. We don't have enough competition. There's a doctor monopoly out there. We need alternative health care freely available to the people. They ought to be able to make their own choices and not controlled by the FDA preventing them to use some of the medications. ~ Ron Paul

What I tried to make clear in Good Calories, Bad Calories was that nutrition and obesity research lost its way after the Second World War with the evaporation of the European community of scientists and physicians that did pioneering work in those disciplines. It has since resisted all attempts to correct it. As a result, the individuals involved in this research have not only wasted decades of time, and effort, and money but have done incalculable damage along the way. Their beliefs have remained imperious to an ever-growing body of evidence that refutes them while being embraced by public-health authorities and translated into precisely the wrong advice about what to eat and, more important, what not to eat if we want to maintain a healthy weight and live a long and healthy life. ~ Gary Taubes

Every day you feel like you can't control the forces affecting your fate-your job,the government,your addiction,your depression,your money. So you stage micro-revolts. You customise your ringtone,you paint your room,you collect stamps. You choose.
Choices,even small ones,can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness,but you can't stop there. You must fight back your behavoir and learn to fail with pride. Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life. Besides death your destiny is not inescapable.
You are not so smart,but you are smarter than dogs and rats.
Don't give in yet. ~ David McRaney

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy. ~ Milton Friedman

Because secrecy can become an addiction. That's been a problem as long as people have tried to covet power for themselves. Sure, governments need to keep some secrets, but too often the people inside the government create for themselves the illusion that because they know things nobody else does, it makes them more powerful. That kind of thinking creates a kind of contempt for anyone on the outside. It's born from a belief that their own power will diminish in direct proportion to the transparency of their actions. So secrets become the currency that buys them membership into a club so exclusive that their agendas are never shared, and the value of what the hold is measured only from a first-person perspective. ~ Jonathan Maberry

I think there is a lot of fat in the government. ~ Luis Fortuno

Because the rich are generally few in number, while the poor are many, they appear to be antagonistic, and as the one or the other prevails they form the government. Hence arises the common opinion that there are two kinds of government - democracy and oligarchy. ~ Aristotle.

If an economy in the doldrums could drift indefinitely, the price of government inaction might be graver by far than the consequences of bold unorthodoxy. ~ Robert Heilbroner

What kind of country has this one become? What kind of world? What evil infests the land which allows innocents to be corrupted in the cradle? What evil seeks children to torture? What civilization abandons its children, gives them drugs, shocks them, hypnotizes them and harbors sexual assault upon them by their family, their clergy and representatives of their government? ~ Walter H Bowart

Here is your government at work. A congressman from Colorado said he wants to draft a rule that would make it unethical to have a sexual relationship with an intern. Only Congress would need a rule to tell them cheating on their wives is not ethical. Don't we have that rule? I believe it's called the Sixth Commandment. ~ Jay Leno

The goal to strive for is a poor government but a rich people. ~ Andrew Johnson

Palo's three older brothers had died in the Paraguayan War, conscripted by the Argentinian government, taken off by force along with all the black men of their generation, because, Palo told young Santiago, they needed a way to not only win their war but also rid this country of us in the process, two birds with one stone. Buenos Aires was too black for them, one third of the population, that's enough blackness to swallow you up! to get strong on you! and so they sent our fathers off to war and opened floodgates to European steamships so that white men would pour into the city to replace us, and their plan worked, the bastarda, look at our city now. ~ Carolina De Robertis

Moammar Gaddafi, who has called himself the 'Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,' should go down in history with the Emperor Bokassa and Idi Amin as a grotesque reminder of why people have the right to change their government. ~ Elliott Abrams

It is important that we should never lose sight of this distinction. We must not confuse the peoples with their governments ... ~ Thomas Paine

We certainly see opportunities in Vietnam for talented people to have jobs in the IT sector, including the improvement of the efficiency of the economy and the government. ~ Bill Gates

In no way have we contemplated the intervention of the army in tasks that belong to police at the different levels of government. What is contemplated .. is support from the army in these tasks but not in direct actions that correspond to municipal, state and federal police. ~ Ruben Aguilar

I would not have shied away from an assignment to sail a canoe around Cape Horn or to take charge of the government of Afghanistan. ~ Jan Valtin

We have made money our god and called it the good life. We have trained our children to go for jobs hat bring the quickest corporate advancements at the highest financial levels. We have taught them careerism but not ministry and wonder why ministers are going out of fashion. We fear coddling the poor with food stamps while we call tax breaks for the rich business incentives. We make human community the responsibility of government institutions while homelessness, hunger, and drugs seep from the centers of our cities like poison from open sores for which we do not seek either the cause or the cure. We have created a bare and sterile world of strangers where exploitation is a necessary virtue. We have reduced life to the lowest of values so that the people who have much will not face the prospect of having less.
Underlying all of it, we have made women the litter bearers of a society where disadvantage clings to the bottom of the institutional ladder and men funnel to the top, where men are privileged and women are conscripted for the comfort of the human race. We define women as essential to the development of the home but unnecessary to the development of society. We make them poor and render them powerless and shuttle them from man to man. We sell their bodies and question the value of their souls. We call them unique and say they have special natures, which we then ignore in their specialness. We decide that what is true of men is true of women and then say that women ~ Joan D. Chittister

Never was a government that was not composed of liars, malefactors and thieves. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

What rendered it all acceptable was that government won the war, in astonishingly short order. Had the war dragged on or ended badly, the trust reposed in government might have been withdrawn. But the greatest conflict in human history was brought to a victorious conclusion for the United States only three and a half years after American entry. America's unprecedentedly large government defeated fascism; America's big government placed the United States at the pinnacle of world power. In the process, big government restored the nation's economic vitality and self-confidence. By 1945 most Americans found big government thoroughly acceptable, even necessary, and they had ample reason for feeling the way they did. ~ H.W. Brands

But you see, "libertarian" has a special meaning in the United States. The United Statesis off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect: what's called "libertarianism" here is unbridled capitalism. Now, that's always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every anarchist has been a socialist - because the point is, if you have unbridled capitalism, you have all kinds of authority: you have extreme authority. If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, "they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract" - but that's a joke. If your choice is, "do what I tell you or starve," that's not a choice - it's in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.
The American version of "libertarianism" is an aberration, though - nobody really takes it seriously. I mean, everybody knows that a society that worked by American libertarian principles would self-destruct in three seconds. The only reason people pretend to take it seriously is because you can use it as a weapon. Like, when somebody comes out in favor of a tax, you can say: "No, I'm a libertarian, I'm against that tax" - but of course, I'm still in favor of the government building roads, and having schools, and killing Libyans, and all that sort of stuff.
Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard [Am ~ Noam Chomsky

Very important thing to keep in mind, that when justice comes and when injustices are remedied, they're not remedied by the initiative of the national government or the politicians. They only respond to the power of social movements. ~ Howard Zinn