Joel Miller Quotes

#1. Bureaucracies typically move slowly, clumsily, and without much regard for the wants and needs of the people they supposedly serve.

Joel Miller

#2. Far from a simple attempt to rid the nation of crime and drugs,
our policy against narcotics
like any public policy
comes with strings attached. And increasingly these strings
are constricting around the necks of Americans' lives and liberties.

Joel Miller

#3. Advocacy groups, politicians, and bureaucrats use the government to advance their private good instead of the common good.

Joel Miller

#4. I took another draught and my mouth was awash again in a riptide of bitter, bubbly, CO2 eruptions and the fruity splash of malted barley. What a sensation! I wasn't sure if I liked it at first, but by bottle's end I was a dedicated fan.

Joel Miller

#5. The only way to effectively secure the common good is for the government to remain small.

Joel Miller

#6. Every day Big Government heaps demands and restrictions upon businesses that sink some enterprises, cause others to direct resources away from serving customers and instead toward jumping through hoops of lawyers and regulators, and prevent other operations from ever getting off the ground.

Joel Miller

#7. As government increases in quantity, our lives decrease in quality.

Joel Miller

#8. To best serve the public happiness, government shouldn't do things it cannot do well - anymore than Wal-Mart should provide goods and services that people don't like.

Joel Miller

#9. Today, the law is a crazy quilt of provisions and clauses that very often have little to do with securing general happiness but instead are designed to secure the particular happiness of various advocacy groups, politicians and bureaucrats.

Joel Miller

#10. Political changes and reforms do not usually favor the general populace. They benefit those who are positioned to best organize and advocate for their policies.

Joel Miller

#11. Markets help people pursue their happiness more efficiently and effectively. Because they are so effective, markets provide benefits right here and right now, even while government is busy batching the protection of happiness.

Joel Miller

#12. Instead of doing more badly, government should focus on doing less well.

Joel Miller

#13. Markets are nimble and efficient, gathering the collective but disbursed intelligence of the economy's players and communicating up-to-the-minute realities of prices, product availability, etc. Government is typically cumbersome, plodding, and slow.

Joel Miller

#14. Like some great swelling river, the powers of the federal government have today breached their constitutional levees and spilled into countless areas of life never anticipated by the founders.

Joel Miller

#15. The more government does, the greater chance that its efforts will be tilted toward a particular group's good, instead of the common good.

Joel Miller

#16. Money spent in complying with a regulation cannot be spent again on marketing or product research.

Joel Miller

#17. Laws do not curb the lawless. After all, that's why we call them 'lawless.'

Joel Miller

#18. With its brutal excesses and reliance on snitches and finks as informants, I don't think it's far off-kilter to describe the modern-day drug war as oddly similar to the Salem witch trials.

Joel Miller

#19. The government doesn't create wealth of its own; it can only take it from some and distribute it to others or dictate particular public uses of private resources.

Joel Miller

#20. Markets respond not to political pressures channeled through various committees, subcommittees, lobbies, and special interests but to the immediacies and exigencies of the economy - in other words, what's happening now.

Joel Miller