The “dog days of summer” have ended. And public policy makers prepare to prosecute their too oftentimes putrid trade anew. We commend for their attention a few wise past words from those who knew better to those who should:
“How does it become man to behave towards the American government today?” asked Henry David Thoreau. “I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”
“What I must not do, the government must not do,” quipped a long-ago unidentified author.
Or as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis offered in Olmstead v. U.S. (1928):
“Experience teaches us to be most on guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent.”
As E.W. Howe, a long-forgotten newspaper editor of the late 19th and 20th centuries, reminded:
“The government is mainly an expensive organization to regulate evildoers and tax those who behave: government does little for fairly respectable people except annoy them.”
It was in 1887 that President Grover Cleveland addressed Congress in what today would be considered a blasphemy to “The State”:
“The government is not an almoner of gifts among the people, but an instrumentality by which the people’s affairs should be conducted upon business principles, regulated by the public needs.”
Eighteenth-and 19th-century cleric Charles Caleb Colton pulled no punches when he assessed government actions thusly:
“Governments connive at many things which they ought to correct and correct many things at which they ought to connive.”
“Government can have no more than two legitimate purposes,” reminded William Godwin, an English journalist in 1793: “The suppression of injustice against individuals in the community and the common defense against external invasion.”
Here’s a classic sentiment that should be considered evergreen but is regularly denuded in modern government, from U.S. Rep. Gerrit Smith, before the House of Representatives, in 1854:
“I do not subscribe to the doctrine that the people are the slaves and property of their government. I believe that government is for the use of the people and not the people for the use of the government.”
And last, but not least, from Theodore Roosevelt in 1905:
“I do not believe in government ownership of anything which can with propriety be left in private hands … .”
Some thoughts to chew on in advance of a new seasonal onslaught of government policy proposals that are antithetical to sound public policy.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
