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In a free society, government has the responsibility of protecting us from others, but not from ourselves.
Walter E. Williams
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Walter E. Williams
Age: 84 †
Born: 1936
Born: March 31
Died: 2020
Died: December 1
Columnist
Economist
Journalist
Radio Personality
University Teacher
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Walter Williams
Walter Edward Williams
Others
Government
Protecting
Economics
Liberty
Economic
Responsibility
Society
Free
More quotes by Walter E. Williams
Economic planning is nothing more than the forcible superseding of other people's plans by the powerful elite backed up by the brute force of government.
Walter E. Williams
Whenever there's a tragedy involving gun use, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, the gun-control lobby and the news media seize it as another opportunity to exploit the emotions of uninformed American people for political gain.
Walter E. Williams
Wealth comes from successful individual efforts to please one's fellow man ... that's what competition is all about: outpleasing your competitors to win over the consumers.
Walter E. Williams
The global warming scare has provided a field day for politicians and others who wish to control our lives. After all, only the imagination limits the kind of laws and restrictions that can be written in the name of saving the planet.
Walter E. Williams
No matter how worthy the cause, it is robbery, theft, and injustice to confiscate the property of one person and give it to another to whom it does not belong.
Walter E. Williams
Multiculturalists argue that different cultural values are morally equivalent. That's nonsense.
Walter E. Williams
Tariff policy beneficiaries are always visible, but its victims are mostly invisible. Politicians love this. The reason is simple: The beneficiaries know for whom to cast their ballots, and the victims don't know whom to blame for their calamity.
Walter E. Williams
Legality alone is no guide for a moral people. There are many things in this world that have been, or are, legal but clearly immoral. Slavery was legal. Did that make it moral? South Africa’s apartheid, Nazi persecution of Jews, and Stalinist and Maoist purges were all legal, but did that make them moral?
Walter E. Williams
Preaching doom and gloom has been beneficial to the political class. They use it to gain more power and control.
Walter E. Williams
If we buy into the notion that somehow property rights are less important, or are in conflict with, human or civil rights, we give the socialists a freer hand to attack our property.
Walter E. Williams
Nothing in our Constitution suggests that government is a grantor of rights. Instead, government is a protector of rights.
Walter E. Williams
Most of our country's serious problems can be laid at the feet of Congress and the White House and not at capitalism.
Walter E. Williams
Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.
Walter E. Williams
Tyrants always condemn and seek to replace the market process with government coercion because tyrants do not trust that people behaving voluntarily will do what the tyrants think they should do.
Walter E. Williams
If the States do not have the right to secede, then they have no rights at all.
Walter E. Williams
Vote for me. I'll use my office to take another American's money and give it to you.
Walter E. Williams
Legislators aren't known for being rocket scientists.
Walter E. Williams
Profit is vital to human well-being. Profit is the payment to entrepreneurs just as wages are payments to labor, interest to capital and rent to land. In order to earn profits in free markets, entrepreneurs must identify and satisfy human wants and do so in a way that economizes on society's scarce resources.
Walter E. Williams
You can bet the rent money that whatever politicians do will end up harming consumers. ... Economic ignorance is to politicians what idle hands are to the devil. Both provide the workshop for the creation of evil.
Walter E. Williams
Most of what Congress does fits the description of forcing one American to serve the purposes of another American. That description differs only in degree, but not in kind, from slavery.
Walter E. Williams
