Garet Garrett Men Quotations

The spectacle of a great, solvent government paying a fictitious price for gold it did not want and did not need and doing it on purpose to debase the value of its own paper currency was one to astonish the world.

The New Deals enmity for that system of free and competitive private enterprise which we call capitalism was fundamental.

Formerly government was the responsibility of people; now people were the responsibility of government.

There is a long history of monetary experience. It tells us that government is at heart a counterfeiter and therefore cannot be trusted to control money, and that this is true of both autocratic and popular government.

If people cannot limit government they will not for long be free.

No government can provide social security. It is not in the nature of government to be able to provide anything. Government itself is not self-supporting. It lives by taxation. Therefore, since it cannot provide for itself but by taking toll of what the people produce, how can it provide social security for the people?

Never was it [Capitalism] imposed on life as a system, or at all. It grew out of life, not all at once but gradually, and is therefore one of the great natural designs. When it was found and identified by such men as Adam Smith, who wrote its bible, and Karl Marx, who wrote its obituary too soon, it was already working.

Between government in the republican meaning, that is, Constitutional, representative, limited government, on the one hand, and Empire on the other hand, there is mortal enmity. Either one must forbid the other or one will destroy the other. That we know. Yet never has the choice been put to a vote of the people.

There is in government a living impulse to extend itself indefinitely; and there is in freedom a necessity to resist that impulse.

Government is the natural enemy of freedom.

If the great Government of the United States were a private corporation no bank would take its name on a piece of paper, because it has cynically repudiated the words engraved upon its bonds.