Quotes on Welfare
They [Democrats] are the same people who rediscover poverty every election and promise to cure it. They've cured it so often that they've now made a profession of it. They thrive on failures, on righting wrongs, on aiding victims, and so forth. It must be understood that success in those tasks would put them out of business. No matter how many programs are set up and operating, their proponents never claim success for them. To do so would be to say the problems have been solved, meaning the programs are no longer needed. And the programs, not the problems, are their very reason for being.
Ronald Wilson Reagan
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This is the context.
For three decades now we have sought to solve the problems of unemployment through government planning, and the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan...Well, now if government and welfare had the answer - and they've had almost thirty years of it - shouldn't we expect government to read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn't they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? And the reduction in the need for public housing? But the reverse is true.
Ronald Wilson Reagan
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There are many well-meaning people today who work at placing an economic floor beneath all of us so that no one shall exist below a certain level or standard of living, and certainly we don't quarrel with this. But look more closely and you may find that all too often these well-meaning people are building a ceiling above which no one shall be permitted to climb. Between the two, they are pressing us all into conformity, into a world of standardized mediocrity.
Ronald Wilson Reagan
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It has been pointed out that the days of democracy are numbered once the belly takes command of the head. When the less affluent feel the urge to break a commandment and begin to covet that which their more affluent neighbors possess, they are tempted to use their votes to obtain instant satisfaction. Then equal opportunity at the starting line becomes an extended guarantee of at least a tie at the finish of the race. Under the euphamism "the greatest good for the greatest number," we destroy a system which has accomplished just that and move toward the managed economy which strangles freedom and mortgages generations yet to come.
Ronald Wilson Reagan
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Free enterprise has done more to reduce poverty than all the government programs dreamed up by Democrats.
Ronald Wilson Reagan
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My friends, some years ago the federal government declared war on poverty - and poverty won.
Ronald Wilson Reagan
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Nations crumble from within when the citizenry asks of government those things which the citizenry might better provide for itself.
Ronald Wilson Reagan
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A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
George Bernard Shaw
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If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
Mark Twain
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We pay too little attention to the reserve power of the people to take care of themselves. We are too solicitous for government intervention, on the theory, first, that the people themselves are helpless, and second, that the government has superior capacity for action. Often times both of these conclusions are wrong.
Calvin Coolidge
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Three-fifths to two-thirds of the federal budget consists of taking property from one American and giving it to another. Were a private person to do the same thing, we'd call it theft. When government does it, we euphemistically call it income redistribution, but that's exactly what thieves do -- redistribute income. Income redistribution not only betrays the founders' vision, it's a sin in the eyes of God.
Walter E. Williams
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I hold that if the Almighty had ever made a set of men that should do all the eating and none of the work, He would have made them with mouths only and no hands; and if He had ever made another class that He intended should do all the work and no eating, He would have made them with hands and no mouths.
Abraham Lincoln
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There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.
Booker Washington
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No human should be coerced by the state to bear the medical expense, or any other expense, for his fellow man. In other words, the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another is morally offensive.
Walter E. Williams
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I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.
James Madison
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Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.
Thomas Jefferson
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The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.
Plutarch
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Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
Frederic Bastiat
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The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.
Alan Greenspan
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Programs that are labeled as being for the poor, for the needy, almost always have effects exactly the opposite of those which their well intentioned sponsors intend them to have.
Milton Friedman
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There's been one underlying basic fallacy in this whole set of social security and welfare measures, and that is the fallacy - this is at the bottom of it - the fallacy that it is feasible and possible to do good with other people's money. That view has two flaws. If I want to do good with other people's money, I first have to take it away from them. That means that the welfare state philosphy of doing good with other people's money, at it's very bottom, is a philosophy of violence and coercion. It's against freedom, because I have to use force to get the money. In the second place, very few people spend other people's money as carefully as they spend their own.
Milton Friedman
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The argument for collectivism, for government doing something, is simple. Anybody can understand it. 'If there's something wrong, pass a law. If somebody is in trouble, get Mr. X to help them out.' The argument for voluntary cooperation, for a free market, is not nearly so simple. It says, 'You know, if you allow people to cooperate voluntarily and don't interfere with them, indirectly, through the operation of the market, they will improve matters more than you can improve it directly by appointing somebody.' That's a subtle argument, and it's hard for people to understand. Moreover, people think that when you argue that way you're arguing for selfishness, for greed. That's utter nonsense.
Milton Friedman
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People don’t have rights to jobs and they don’t have rights to medical care or rights to education. What you have is a right to your life. That’s what you have. We’re told that’s not compassionate. But if you look at all of history you’ll find out that the most uncompassionate system of all is socialism and welfarism.
Ron Paul
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The lessons of paternalism ought to be unlearned and the better lesson taught that while the people should patriotically and cheerfully support their government, its functions do not include the support of the people.
Grover Cleveland
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The impersonal hand of government can never replace the helping hand of a neighbor.
Herbert Hoover
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Wouldn’t it be better for the human spirit and for the soul of this nation to encourage people to accept more responsibility to care for one another, rather than leaving those tasks to paid bureaucrats?
Ronald Wilson Reagan
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When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves.
George Pataki
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You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
Adrian Rogers
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When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation.
Adrian Rogers
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Can the real Constitution be restored? Probably not. Too many Americans depend on government money under programs the Constitution doesn't authorize, and money talks with an eloquence Shakespeare could only envy. Ignorant people don't understand The Federalist Papers, but they understand government checks with their names on them.
Joseph Sobran
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The [American] government's War on Poverty has transformed poverty from a short-term misfortune into a career choice.
Harry Brown
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A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
Gordon Liddy
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In all the years I took my daughter to the playground, I never once heard another parent tell a child that if some kids have more toys than you do, that makes it okay to take some of them away. Nor did I ever hear a parent tell a child that if some kids have more toys than others, that makes it okay to form a government and vote to take some of those toys away. Of course we encourage sharing, and we try to make our children feel remorse when they are very selfish. But at the same time, we tell them that if other children are being selfish, you must cope with that in some way short of a forcible expropriation. You can cajole, bargain, or ostracize, but you cannot simply steal. Nor is there any such thing as a legitimate government with the authority to do your stealing for you.
Steven Landsburg
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It's amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.
Penn Jillette
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People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered, and if we're compassionate we'll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint.
Penn Jillette
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There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good with his own money - if a gun is held to his head.
P. J. O'Rourke
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The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.
Thomas Sowell
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