Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Ellison very much for those very thoughtful and insightful comments. I want to pick up the discussion about the police power and expand the discussion to include not just power over persons, but power over property in America. Our Constitution's Framers were deeply informed by the social contract theorists of the 17th and 18th centuries, and those theorists believed that we enter into a social contract out of a state of nature, because we are all made better off by virtue of being part of a society. So the first incarnation of it came from Thomas Hobbes in his work on the ``Leviathan.'' Hobbes argued that the state of nature was, in his famous words, ``nasty, brutish, and short,'' because anybody could kill anybody. And so we enter into society together, and we give our power to the leviathan, the government. Now, the problem with his view, of course, was that the leviathan, the government, had whatever powers it wanted, unlimited, infinite powers. And at that point, as the Framers of our Constitution would see, you have got a real problem, because you might be saved from criminals and bandits and thieves, but now you have got to deal with an all-powerful government and police who can trample your rights just as much as the thieves and the bandits could. So the Hobbesian theory was inadequate. John Locke, in his famous work on the social contract, improved upon the proposition. The state of nature for him was not quite so frightful a place.…”