When I was a graduate student the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
Our Founding Fathers crafted a constitutional Republic for the first time in the history of the world because they were shaping a form of government that would not have the failures of a democracy in it but had the representation of democracy in it.
History tells us that America does best when the private sector is energetic and entrepreneurial and the government is attentive and engaged. Who among us really would looking back wish to edit out either sphere at the entire expense of the other?
The fact is that America has been at her most prosperous when government and the private sector have been not at war but in a wary if often underplayed alliance. History is unmistakable on this point.
History proves that all dictatorships all authoritarian forms of government are transient. Only democratic systems are not transient. Whatever the shortcomings mankind has not devised anything superior.
And I can tell you that history will back up what I'm about to say and that is that there is no government run by conservatives Republicans put whoever you want there if you give government the opportunity to spend more money than it has it will do it. It will do it every time.
I didn't do improv in college I never performed I didn't do theater either. I was in student government I was a history major.
The new rage is to say that the government is the cause of all our problems and if only we had no government we'd have no problems. I can tell you that contradicts evidence history and common sense.
As I speak to you today government censors somewhere are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history. But history itself has already condemned these tactics.
Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power not the increase of it.
Just in general any government throughout history hasn't really wanted its people to be educated because then they couldn't control them as easily.
History in general only informs us of what bad government is.
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases while the citizens may act only by permission which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history the stage of rule by brute force.
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.
So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear. That there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.
The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.