Throughout history governments have been chronically short of revenue. The reason should be clear: unlike you and me, governments do not produce useful goods and services that they can sell on the market; governments, rather than producing and selling services, live parasitically off the market and off society.
The greatest fears that governments have are freedom of speech and exposing the corruptness, the ineptitude, and the double dealing going on that they don’t want the public knowing about.
It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war.
The divine right of kings may have been a plea for feeble tyrants, but the divine right of government is the keystone of human progress, and without it governments sink into police, and a nation is degraded into a mob.
If we could get proportional representation and open up roles for smaller parties in coalition governments, we could start intentionally breaking down the cult of personality that is one of the most distorting things about our electoral system in Canada. We had a constellation of social actors behind the Leap Manifesto. And we created something bigger than ourselves.
When distrust exists between governments, when there is a danger of war, they will not be willing to disarm even when logic indicates that disarmament would not affect military security at all.
People are increasingly frustrated that decisions taken further and further away from them mean their living standards are slashed through enforced austerity or their taxes are used to bail out governments on the other side of the continent.
I do miss the excitement of seeing history up close, of having intimate knowledge, through direct experience, of what happens when people and governments clash, but I do not miss the danger or the constant displacement.
Its sad that governments are chiefed by the double tongues.
It is a very bad idea for governments to create arbitrary and unfair outcomes, or outcomes resulting from the passions and whims of the government rather than from the law, just because they have the power to do so.
The world's central banks and the International Monetary Fund still have vaults full of bullion, even though currencies are no longer backed by gold. Governments hold on to it as a kind of magic symbol, a way of reassuring people that their money is real.
And the men who loan money to governments, so called, for the purpose of enabling the latter to rob, enslave, and murder their people, are among the greatest villains that the world has ever seen. And they as much deserve to be hunted and killed (if they cannot otherwise be got rid of) as any slave traders, robbers, or pirates that ever lived.
It would have been very alarming - morally, and in other ways too - if an attack of that nature, the 11 September attacks, had not aroused in us and in our governments and societies the spirit of self-defence. If that had not been one of the responses it seems to me there would have been very grave cause for concern.
When governments and other vested interests attack me personally I usually regard it as a vindication, otherwise they would use facts. That's why I believe in the wonderful Claud Cockburn dictum, 'Never believe anything until it is officially denied. ' It has certainly been my experience.
There are men running governments who shouldn't be allowed to play with matches.
It's not a weapon, [governments] don't kill, they don't conduct massacres, although massacres have been committed and many people were killed, but they stifle religion, they're afraid probably.
Human beings will generally exercise power when they can get it, and they will exercise it most undoubtedly in popular governments under pretense of public safety.
Governments can be useful to the governed only so long as inherent tendencies toward tyranny are restrained.
The reason societies with democratic governments are better places to live in than their alternatives isn't because of some goodness intrinsic to democracy, but because its hopeless inefficiency helps blunt the basic potential for evil.
The only ends for which governments are constituted, and obedience rendered to them, are the obtaining of and protection; and they who cannot provide for both give the people a right of taking such ways as best please themselves, in order to their own safety.