Quote of the day—Ted Cruz

Statists invariably have talented people drawn to politics because they believe in power. And they’re very effective at defending government control of the economy in our lives.

Ted Cruz
(Then candidate for) U.S. Senator
October 17, 2011 Issue of National Review
[H/T to Kevin for the video from which I was alerted to this quote.

This is very similar to a message in The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek. Power abusing people are drawn to powerful government positions. These people work to increase that power.

This can also be related to the line, “Because that’s where the money is” falsely attributed to Willie Sutton when asked why he robbed banks.

Banks vaults are built strong because they are subject to repeated and determined attacks. The U.S. Constitution was intended to be analogous to a vault for liberty. By limiting government to specific enumerated power people who would abuse government power would be prohibited from doing so because government was not given power to abuse on a wide scale.

But unlike a bank vault those that attack and/or defeat the Constitutional “vault” through illegitimate means are almost never caught and punished for their crimes. I believe this to be the greatest failing of our form of government and I believe it will result in the collapse of our government.—Joe]

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13 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Ted Cruz

    • I don’t think they want the collapse of government. They just want the collapse of the LIMITATIONS on government, a de-facto rewrite of our constitution, with THEM conveniently in power to control things.

  1. “Government control of the economy” — isn’t this something the government is supposed to do? It seems the Constitution effectively established “government control of the economy” by giving the government the power to tax, create money, regulate commerce, etc.

    • NO. Most emphatically NOT. It was to make regular and understandable, predictable, and have a structure for settling legal disputes in private commerce. It was NOT designed for minute regulation of details. It was to establish standards for weights and measures, and regulate the value of money, so contracts would mean the same thing for everyone. It could control some sorts of things in very general terms, such as taxing imports cotton (ALL imports) because that was crossing the national border; it was NOT to regulate all details of interstate trade, however. There were some who thought it could / should, but they lost the argument.

      • So you’re saying individuals should control the economy? If government doesn’t control the economy, who is supposed to control it?

        • No government, no group of people, can control the economy, no matter how hard the try. They can seriously hinder it, they can hobble it a hundred different ways, but they can’t CONTROL it. That fallacy, that arrogance, is why China lost millions of people to starvation during the Great Leap Forward. Or why the USSR eventually collapsed. Or why Europe is on the brink of financial collapse. It’s why our economy has been absolute crap for the past six years, and why Japan has been in a slump for well over a decade.

          To control the economy is to try and decide what is bests for millions, or billions of different people who may have vastly different wants and needs. This simply isn’t possible; there are far too many variables to account for, many of which we have an incomplete understanding of, and many that simply aren’t known. Our understanding of how the economy works is in its infancy, at best. Modern economists are like medieval physicians whose attempts to heal are more likely to do harm than good.

          The economy is an organic, chaotic system that will take care of itself transaction by transaction, trade by trade, if we let it. That’s not to say that there won’t be losses, or that it will always produced a desired outcome; absolutely nothing can do that. But leaving it alone will result in the greatest amount of good.

          • “…that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men…”

            Not to control, but to secure human rights, to secure our liberty. That was the purpose of the Founding. Control is the opposite of liberty.

            That’s our history, but then Michelle O did tell us they were going to change our history.

            Some people will never admit to understanding the very simple concept of liberty. They’ll try to tell us, like ubu is doing, that if we’re not enslaved by one gang, we’ll certainly be enslaved by some other.

            The suggestion of having no gangster hierarchy at all is shocking and upsetting to such people. It shatters their whole world view. It sends them into fits. It takes away their motivation for living.

          • If the founding fathers didn’t want government to control commerce and taxation, why didn’t they keep the Articles of Confederation? Also, “government” is an awfully broad term. Is Cruz talking state, local, national? He doesn’t say.

        • Individuals, precisely.

          “The Economy” isn’t like a big horse you can ride. It’s 7 trillion horses (and more realistically, 7 trillion cats) that no one person or organization can possibly anticipate the direction and desires of.

          That’s the whole point fo the free market, is that it’s simply not possible to be smart enough to “control the economy” as though it were some huge unitary thing.

          “The economy” is itself the big program, running on a distributed 7 trillion processor computer, calculating what needs to be made and how to allocate resources to meet the demands of the consumers.

        • There is a HUGE, fundamental, basic flaw in your thinking. Not just philosophical, but practical.
          Bill Whittle lays it out pretty good.
          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0MESB6VZM4
          They didn’t want control of the economy (and even if they DID, it CAN’T and DOESN’T work). But after experiencing the problems of the Articles of Confederation (the EXACT same problems now being seen in Europe, where the EU’s Maastricht Treaty, which has the same flaws) they did need some changes for financial and national defense reasons, not control per se.

  2. I’ve said for years that the apparent sole function of Government these days is to tell people what to do – it does not tend to attract people who mind their own business.

    Go figure somebody said it too.

  3. Libertarians are the opposite of statists, which leads to the problem of getting people in power who don’t want power.

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