Words Worth Keeping

Good ideas have a way of getting lost. The core principles of limited government — that power must be justified, that liberty is the default, that the individual precedes the state — are not complicated. But they need repeating, because the argument against them never stops. Governments expand. Bureaucracies grow. The language of compassion and crisis is used, generation after generation, to explain why this expansion is different, why this emergency requires the exception.

The men and women quoted here understood that argument and answered it. Some were statesmen. Some were economists. Some were philosophers writing before the word "economist" existed. What they share is clarity: they said what they meant, meant what they said, and were right about the things that matter most.

This post is a companion to our ranking of U.S. presidents on the classical-liberal spectrum, which examines how these ideas hold up — or don't — in the actual practice of governing. The words below are the standard against which the practice gets measured.

A note on sourcing: a quotes post lives or dies on attribution. Every line below has been verified against its primary or well-documented secondary source. Several beloved quotes were excluded because they couldn't be traced to the person they're attributed to — a list of what we left out, and why, appears at the end.

I. The Foundation: What Government Is For

Before you can limit government, you have to know what it's there to do. The Founders were clear about this: government exists to secure rights that precede it, not to grant them.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. — Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. — George Mason, Virginia Declaration of Rights, Section 1, June 12, 1776

Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it. — John Adams, Thoughts on Government, April 1776

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. — James Madison, Federalist No. 51, February 6, 1788

Madison's answer to the angel problem — since neither governed nor governors are angels — was the constitutional structure: separated powers, checks and balances, enumerated authority. The framework was designed from the assumption that power corrupts, not from the hope that it wouldn't.

II. Enumerated, Not Unlimited: The Case for Constitutional Limits

The federal government holds only the authority the Constitution explicitly grants. That is not a minority interpretation; it is the plain text of the Tenth Amendment and the stated intention of the men who wrote the document.

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite. — James Madison, Federalist No. 45, January 26, 1788

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground. — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Edward Carrington, May 27, 1788

Jefferson wasn't describing an acceptable equilibrium. He was naming the tendency that the Constitution was built to resist. Entropy, in politics, runs in one direction: toward expansion. Resisting it requires deliberate structural constraint — and consistent, stubborn people willing to enforce those constraints against the pressure of the moment.

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. — Lord Acton, letter to Mandell Creighton, April 5, 1887

III. The Law and Its Perversions

Frédéric Bastiat, a French economist writing in 1850, identified the central problem of the modern state with a clarity that no subsequent writer has improved upon: the law was made to protect rights, and it gets corrupted into a mechanism for violating them.

The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose! — Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (La Loi), 1850

It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder. — Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (La Loi), 1850

Bastiat's term for using law to take from some and give to others was legal plunder. He was not squeamish about the word. When the law is used to compel redistribution — not to protect property and person, but to transfer them — it has been converted from its proper function into its opposite. The fact that it is done by majority vote, by people with good intentions, under the name of public welfare, does not change what it is.

The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. — John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Chapter I, 1859

Mill's harm principle, stated here in its full original form, is the clearest single-sentence statement of the classical-liberal limit on coercion. Note what it excludes: "His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant." Paternalism — government action to protect people from themselves — fails the test. The person has to be the judge of their own interest, or self-governance has no meaning.

IV. The Knowledge Problem and the Case for Markets

The 20th-century case against central planning is not primarily a moral case, though the moral case is real. It is an epistemological case: the knowledge required to plan an economy does not exist in any form that can be accessed by a planner. It exists only dispersed across millions of individuals making decisions about their own circumstances.

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. — F.A. Hayek, "The Use of Knowledge in Society," American Economic Review, September 1945

Historical evidence speaks with a single voice on the relation between political freedom and a free market. I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity. — Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, University of Chicago Press, 1962

A society that puts equality — in the sense of equality of outcome — ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests. — Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, 1980

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics. — Thomas Sowell, "Student Loans," Is Reality Optional? And Other Essays, Hoover Institution Press, 1993

Sowell's formulation is one of the cleanest explanations of why political promises consistently overpromise and underdeliver: they are not constrained by the reality that economics imposes on everyone else. The politician can always find another source, another tax, another debt instrument — right up until they can't.

V. Self-Governance, Local Life, and the Virtue of Association

Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831 and spent two volumes trying to explain why American democracy worked — not despite its decentralization but because of it. His answer centered on what he called the "spirit of municipal institutions": the habit of self-governance practiced at the local level, where the stakes are immediate and the accountability is real.

Town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people's reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it. A nation may establish a system of free government, but without the spirit of municipal institutions it cannot have the spirit of liberty. — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I, Ch. V, 1835

Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations… In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made. — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II, Second Book, Ch. V, 1840

Tocqueville's insight about associations is not merely historical nostalgia. It is a functional argument: voluntary cooperation in civil society does things that government cannot do, and doing them trains citizens in the habits of self-governance that democracy requires to survive. When government displaces civil society — when the state substitutes its administration for the neighborhood, the congregation, the mutual-aid society — it doesn't just crowd out institutions. It atrophies the capacities those institutions were developing.

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ, as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind. — Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790

What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice… Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall… Let him alone! — Frederick Douglass, "What the Black Man Wants," Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, January 26, 1865

Douglass was speaking about Reconstruction-era policy, not abstract political theory. His demand was for equal standing under the law and the opportunity to compete on equal terms — not preferential treatment, not managed outcomes, not the paternalism of the well-intentioned reformer who knows better. The argument for equal rights has always been the argument for self-determination. Those two things are the same argument.

VI. The Practice of Restraint: Fiscal Discipline as Principle

Liberty without fiscal restraint is an aspiration that cannot sustain itself. A government that spends beyond its means borrows against the future, devalues the currency, and ultimately compels either explicit taxation or the hidden tax of inflation. The men who governed closest to classical-liberal principles understood this as a matter of principle, not merely accounting.

The collection of any taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny. — Calvin Coolidge, First Inaugural Address (full term), March 4, 1925

I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. — Grover Cleveland, Veto Message on the Texas Seed Bill, February 16, 1887

Cleveland was vetoing a $10,000 appropriation to provide seed grain to drought-stricken Texas farmers. The suffering was real. His point was not that the suffering didn't matter — it was that the federal government did not have the constitutional authority to address it directly, and that substituting federal relief for private charity had corrosive long-term effects on the habits of both citizens and government. He continued: "The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune. This need not concern us here. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character."

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. — Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981

VII. Maxims of Limited Government — Our Own

The words above belong to other people. They were written in other centuries, for other arguments, against other expansions of power. We quote them because they are right, not because the problems they diagnosed have been solved.

But we have our own formulations — shorter, harder-edged, calibrated to the arguments we encounter in the work we do every day. These are original to Bull Moose Strategy. We offer them not as wisdom on the level of Bastiat or Madison, but as working principles for people who govern and people who help others get elected to govern.

• If it isn't enumerated, it must be eliminated.
• A power not granted is a power denied.
• The Constitution is a leash, not a launchpad.
• Liberty is the default; power is the exception that has to justify itself.
• Rules for the ruler, not just the ruled.
• Consent of the governed, not the convenience of the governing.
• Emergencies end; the powers they justify rarely do.
• Power borrowed in a crisis is seldom returned.
• The best thing government can do is less, done well.
• Debt is taxation deferred.
• A subsidy is cronyism with paperwork.
• Sound money is just honest government.
• Every dollar government spends is a choice it took from someone.
• Decide it where you can change it.
• The closer the power, the more accountable the official.
• Collectivism promises the village and delivers the queue.

Most of what we do day-to-day — helping candidates reach voters, build an honest digital presence, run an effective campaign — is not philosophical. It is operational. But the operations serve a purpose, and the purpose is connected to these principles. A candidate who understands that government's legitimate authority is limited, that the public budget is the public's money and not government's to spend freely, that self-governance is a skill that atrophies without practice — that candidate governs differently than one who doesn't. That difference is the whole point.

The quotes above are the library. The maxims below them are the working notes. The candidates we work with are the practitioners. And the voters who elect them are, in the end, the ones who decide whether any of this matters.

On Sourcing: What We Left Out and Why

Several well-known quotes were excluded from this collection because they cannot be verified to the people they're attributed to. We'd rather have a shorter, accurate list than a longer, impressive-sounding one.

"That government is best which governs least" — not Jefferson. This line appears as the epigraph to Thoreau's Civil Disobedience (1849), and may have appeared in an 1837 Democratic Review essay. Jefferson never wrote it. It circulates constantly under his name. We excluded it.

"A government big enough to give you everything you want..." — apocryphal. Attributed variously to Jefferson and to Gerald Ford. Neither attribution has a documented primary source. Excluded.

The Davy Crockett / "Not Yours to Give" story — fabricated. This story about Crockett learning a constitutional lesson from a farmer named Horatio Bunce was invented by Edward S. Ellis, writing under a pseudonym, and published in Harper's Magazine in January 1867 — thirty-one years after Crockett died at the Alamo. "Horatio Bunce" is a fictional character. No congressional record supports the episode. Excluded entirely.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil..." — not Burke. This line, universally attributed to Edmund Burke, does not appear anywhere in Burke's writings. The earliest attribution to Burke dates to 1920. We used Burke's actual 1770 passage instead: "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

If you have a sourced version of any quote we excluded, we're genuinely interested. Attribution matters. The ideas are strong enough to stand on accurate ground.