Thomas Sowell on equality

A society that puts equality - in the sense of equality of outcome - ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality or freedom.  The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.

~ Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell on good intentions

Nothing is easier than to have good intentions but, without an understanding of how an economy works, good intentions can lead to disastrous consequences for a whole nation.

~ Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics

William Ryan on evil

To persuade a good and moral man to do evil...it is not necessary first to persuade him to become evil.  It is only necessary to teach him that he is doing good.

~ William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (1971)

Daniel Webster on the Law of Good Intentions

Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority.  It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions.  There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern.  They promise to be good masters, but mean to be masters.

~ Daniel Webster

Daniel Webster
1932

Ed Bugos on the delusion of democracy

So many good people believe that good can be achieved through the political means, using the blunt end of collective force.  This is the great delusion and the myth of democracy that we live under today.  All through history the State has been a bad actor.  The exploiter.  The conqueror.  Nothing much good has been written about any state, at least not before the USSA was invented.  By restricting government, if only for a few years, the market system was able to create a theretofore unprecedented amount of wealth.  Indeed, so much wealth that it will still take decades of socialism to destroy - this is despite the fact that progressivism and interventionism have marched on for a century weaving the fabric of democracy, i.e., that ideological cloak where we are supposed to think we control government because we get a vote.  This is delusion folks, total delusion.  The apparatus itself was designed for exploitation (see Oppenheimer).  And so democracy truly is the god that failed, from the outset.  You just don't know it yet.

~ Ed Bugos, August 19, 2019

Louis Brandeis on threats to liberty

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent...  The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal -- well-meaning but without understanding.

~ Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1928

C.S. Lewis on the tyranny of good intentions

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

~ C.S. Lewis

Ayn Rand on do-gooders

Do not consider Collectivists as "sincere but deluded idealists". The proposal to enslave some men for the sake of others is not an ideal; brutality is not "idealistic," no matter what its purpose. Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

~ Ayn Rand