Quotes on Nanny Statism

John Webb, on LA Forum:

The fact that we have to suffer a nationwide shakedown every time some goon fancies raising his media profile should not distract us from the overriding purpose of these campaigns [speed cameras]: firstly, to foster the idea that man is a will-less drone likely to succumb to irrational forces at any moment and therefore not to be trusted with own welfare, and secondly that politicians and their lackeys are somehow not infected by this general malaise but, on the contrary, are invested with magical powers that enable them to eliminate all social ills by the mere act of passing a few laws.

Screw the Kids:

Every time some syphylitic drip-dick of a politician or public policy wonk wants to pass a stupid new law, they cry "It's for the children."

Sean Gabb:

If you believe that people are not fit to keep arms for their own defence..., it's a bit odd that you believe that people who have the right to vote in a government that... rules all out lives. You either trust people or you run the country like some gigantic open air lunatic asylum which is what the present government is doing.

Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State:

It is not difficult to discern that the practical man in social reform is the same animal as the practical man in every other department of human energy, and may be discovered suffering from the same twin disabilities which stamp the practical man wherever found: these twin disabilities are an inability to define his own first principles and an inability to follow the consequences proceeding from his own action. Both these disabilities proceed from one simple and deplorable form of impotence, the inability to think.

Yours Truly:

And on the subject of the Million Mom March, I have this lovely vision of a million burnt-out, twisted wrecks of SUVs, and in each of them an incinerated busybody with several melted soccer balls and a cell phone fused into her charred skeleton.