I’m Canadian and have a romantic fondness for the famous motto of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the one about the Mounties always getting their man. But the bigger you make the government, the more you entrust to it, the more powers you give it to nose around the country’s bank accounts, and phone calls, and e-mails, and favourite Internet porn sites, the more you’ll enfeeble it with the siren song of the soft target. The Mounties will no longer get their man, they’ll get you instead. Frankly, it’s a lot easier.
[…]
What should have died on September 11th is the liberal myth that you can regulate the world to your will. The reduction of a free-born citizenry to neutered sheep upon arrival at the airport was the most advanced expression of this delusion. So how’s the FAA reacting to September 11th? With more of the same kind of obtrusive, bullying, useless regulations that give you the comforting illusion that if they’re regulating you they must be regulating all the bad guys as well. We don’t need big government, we need lean government — government that’s stripped of its distractions and forced to concentrate on the essentials. If Hillary and Co want to argue for big government, conservatives could at least make the case for what’s really needed — grown-up government.
Mark Steyn, “Big Shift”, National Review, 2001-11-19.
February 24, 2024
QotD: Big government
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