The Legislature

Judges … should not be dependent upon any man or body of men. To these ends they should hold estates for life in their offices, or, in other words, their commissions should be during good behavior, and their salaries ascertained and established by law. —John Adams....

There already exist some excellent constitutional checks and balances that slow legislatures down. These include the executive veto, limited sitting days, multiple readings and bicameral legislatures. However, as the career of former California governor Gray Davis...

The relationship between self-discipline and success Is it not obvious that this relationship between discipline and success holds good nationally? Are not nations made of men; and are not men subject to the same laws of modification in their adult years as in their...

People will always be laid off or have their businesses go bankrupt or lose their investments. These unpleasant experiences are necessary to motivate people to exert themselves, to direct investments to profitable undertakings and to re-deploy resources away from...

With every grant of complete security to one group the insecurity of the rest necessarily increases. If you guarantee to some a fixed part of a variable cake, the share left to the rest is bound to fluctuate proportionally more than the size of the whole. —Friedrich...

Perpetually, governments have thwarted and deranged the growth, but have in no way furthered it; save by partially discharging their proper function and maintaining social order. —Herbert Spencer. The Sins of the Legislature, 1850. The incredible advances in medical...

Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom. —Friedrich Hayek. Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. I, 1973. Every restriction,...

You put a duty on paper, and by-and-by find that … you have inadvertently taxed figured silk, sometimes to the extent of several shillings per piece. On removing the impost from bricks, you discover that its existence had increased the dangers of mining, by preventing...

When railways, toilets, telephones, television, air travel and automobiles were all first invented, only the very wealthy could afford them. A politician back then could have seen this as an evil and decided that with one great concerted coerced effort these bounties...

The parents of a child spend every waking hour watching, caring, considering, and adjusting to the child’s needs. Were the government to employ a million experts to tell them the optimum time for children to go to bed and then decree that all children must go to bed...

But when I remember how many of my private schemes have miscarried; how speculations have failed, agents proved dishonest, marriage been a disappointment; how I did but pauperize the relative I sought to help; how my carefully-governed son has turned out worse than...

As the alchemist attributed his successive disappointments to some disproportion in the ingredients, some impurity, or some too great temperature, and never to the futility of his process or the impossibility of his aim; so, every failure of State-regulations the...

We have been ruled by men who live by illusions: the illusion that you can spend money you haven’t earned without eventually going bankrupt or falling into the hands of your creditors; the illusion that real jobs can be conjured into existence by Government decree,...

Today in Britain there are millions living in squalor, poverty, and ignorance on drug and crime-infested council estates. These vast, barren, weed and rubbish strewn concrete monstrosities are an abomination, the worst and most depressing places imaginable to live. Of...

As the sum of all human knowledge grows, so does each individual’s relative ignorance The more men know, the smaller the share of all that knowledge becomes that any one mind can absorb. The more civilized we become, the more relatively ignorant must each individual...

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...

All government meddling beyond its proper sphere is injustice When the government subsidizes the steel industry, the wool industry and the arts, or builds space telescopes or particle accelerators, or pays for food critics to fly in from overseas and puts them up at...

No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his...

Our legislators are not sufficiently apprised of the rightful limits of their power: that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties and to take none of them from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal...

Truth has ever originated from the conflict of mind with mind; it is the bright spark that emanates from the collision of opposing ideas. —Herbert Spencer. The Proper Sphere of Government, 1842–1843. When people are required to articulate their thinking, it forces...

I argued the case for the ideological clash of opposing political parties as essential to the effective functioning of democracy. The pursuit of consensus, therefore, was fundamentally subversive of popular choice. It was wrong to talk of taking the big issues ‘out of...

Parties encourage their members to abandon principle in favor of faction. For example, in America the Republican Party is supposed to be the party of low taxes, respect for property and fiscal restraint, yet during the period 2003–2005, when they controlled both the...

By parliaments therefore liberty is preserved; and whoever has the honour to sit in those assemblies, accepts of a most sacred and important trust; to the discharge of which all his vigilance, all his application, all his virtue, and all his faculties, are necessary;...