Indeed, an irascible curmudgeon, Henry Louis (H.L.) Mencken was, in the waning years of the 19th century and for the first half of the 20th century, a voice of sardonic and, concomitantly, wry reason.
But he would be the first to remind that dyspepticism in defense of liberty is a virtue, not a vice.
And in our modern day and age in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, where the latter continues to do the wrong things – refuse to conduct regular property reassessments while onerously raising property taxes – and the former believes it can command the economy – intervene our way to prosperity and subsidize the rich in the name of the common good – it’s time for a few timeless thoughts from ol’ H.L.:
“Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently — one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified and more agreeable undertakings.” …
“Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.” …
“All government is, in its essence, organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man.” …
“Every election is a sort of advance auction of stolen goods.” …
“The storm center of lawlessness in every American state is the state Capitol. It is there that the worst crimes are committed; it is there that lawbreaking attains to the estate and dignity of a learned profession; it is there that contempt for the laws is engendered, fostered and spread broadcast.” …
“Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.” …
“A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office, he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.” …
“The theory behind representative government is that superior men — or at least men not inferior to the average in ability and integrity –are chosen to manage the public business, and that they carry on this work with reasonable intelligence and honesty. There is little support for that theory in known facts.” …
“The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.” …
“The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.” …
“[Government’s] great contribution to human wisdom … is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.” …
“It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law … that the average citizen is half-witted and, hence, not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.” …
“It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume … that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions.” …
“The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.” …
“Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, criminal, grasping and unintelligent.” …
“The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse –that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.”
Ah, yes, we hold these Menckenian truths to be self-evident. To thinking people, that is.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
