Greg Mankiw's Blog: Ford sums up Hayek
リンク: Greg Mankiw's Blog: Ford sums up Hayek.
I don't know if Gerald Ford ever read economist Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom (or if he speechwriters did), but this Ford quotation strikes me as a good one-sentence summary of the book:
A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
10 Comments:
I think Hayek got his Nobel Prize in 1974.
If anything could inspire a Hayek revival among the overeducated wunderkinder who might make up a White House speech writing team, it would be a high profile victory like that one.
Chalk up one (tentative) data point to the hypothesis that "ideas matter."
Also, a priori history is my methodology of choice. Deal.
Isn't that a Barry Goldwater quote?
Hayek,Hayek,Hayek....hell with Hayek...all apostles of imperialism...down with imperialism...hell to imperialist forces.
Well, heres someone who certainly read Hayek. This is a wonderful description - from Hayeks Wikipedia slot- of someones memoir of an incident with Margaret Thatcher:
"she reached into her briefcase and took out a book. It was Friedrich von Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. Interrupting [the speaker], she held the book up for all of us to see. ‘This’, she said sternly, ‘is what we believe’, and banged Hayek down on the table."
I think the full quote is even more interesting:
"What is it, in a very few words, that all Republicans really believe in? We believe, along with millions of Democrats and Independents, that a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have."
The two things to note here are that he equates this belief with Republicanism, which seems contrary to the expansion of government of the last few years, and it also relinquishes a Republican monopoly on this viewpoint. An interesting blend of irony and non-partisanship.
Why do you invoke Hayek and not Madison?
http://thefilter.blogs.com/thefilter/2006/12/mankiws_muddled.html
Um, because he's an economist. Not a political scientist.
Guess what, Hayek and Madison weren't the only people who said something to this effect.
"A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have."
If we apply logic rather than emotion to this quote, it becomes rather stale.
A government could be much smaller than one big enough to give you everything you want and still take everything you have.
For example, Saddam Hussein's government was not big enough to give the Iraqi people everything they wanted, but still was able to take everything away from countless people.
In general, government is and has always been able to kill and murder people (take away everything they have) regardless of whether it was right-wing or left-wing, large or small.
Ford's quote has emotional appeal, but not logical appeal.
ragerz: I think that the basic intent of the quote (which I believe was originally from Goldwater) is to make people realize that there are tradeoffs involved with government intervention, and that this is something that people should be wary of. The idea is to make people realize that power is a two way street, and on that point I think it succeeds admirably.
To answer your question ragerz:
The word "government" in the quote is referring to a democratly elected government. A democratically elected government that is too big beyond necessary is undesirable. I believe that is the meaning behind the statement.