In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government Quotes

“I begin from the assumption that in a good society, everyone may pursue happiness, not just the smart or the rich or the gifted. But the pyramid of options for achieving happiness narrows rapidly as gifts narrow, and the people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are often not only the poorest people and the least educated, but [print edition page 249] also those with the fewest options for achieving happiness. Whence the upside-down pyramid.* This logic admits of an ideological objection. We may decide that there is no such thing as the individual without special gifts; all that is required is a social system that liberates them. A revolution succeeded in Russia on just such expectations—in the best of all possible Soviet worlds “the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx,”8 as Leon Trotsky told us. Against that, I propose this formulation: Yes, there are hidden resources in just about everyone, resources that can make just about everyone a self-determining, self-respecting, competent human being. But the medians in the many assets which humans possess are going to remain about where they are now. And now and forever more, half of the human race will at any moment be below the median on any given measure. Only a comparatively few will ever have any one asset that is so far above average that they can compete for the peaks in any field, whether the peak is defined as Nobel Laureate or California’s top Chevrolet salesman. A system founded on the assumption that the only successful lives are the visibly brilliant ones is bound to define the bulk of the population as unsuccessful. Or to remain within the vocabulary of the pursuit of happiness, very large proportions of the population are not going to be achieving happiness by “the exercise of their realized capacities” in the sense that they excel in some specific vocational (or avocational) skill.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“Is Anything Broken That Needs Fixing? Even with the question put in those terms, one could ask, So what? Let us imagine an antagonist who has read faithfully to this point, and says: “It is still not clear to me that we need any major reforms. I, for one, have a career that I enjoy. It both challenges me and interests me—it gives me a chance to ‘exercise my realized capacities’ just as the Aristotelian Principle prescribes. [Or: I do not have such a career, but nothing in social policy is preventing me from trying to find one.] I am deeply engaged in trying to be a good husband and father. [Or: I don’t have a good marriage, or I have no marriage, but again, that’s not the fault of social policy.] All the enabling conditions have been met for me—material resources, safety, self-respect, [print edition page 247] intrinsic rewards, friendships and intimate relationships with a few selected people. “For me, there is nothing broken that needs fixing. I am, at this moment, under this system, living in very nearly the best of all possible worlds. Whatever the ‘stopping point’ for government must be, the government has so far not infringed upon it. On the contrary, I am quite busy enough already, and I prefer not to have to worry about all the things that contemporary social policy so conveniently takes care of for me. I want the poor and disadvantaged to be looked after and I am glad to pay taxes so that someone else will see that such things get done. It is precisely to escape from the demands of the old-fashioned community that I have moved to a housing division zoned in two-acre lots. “The choice of a ‘stopping point’ is not such a difficult thing. It is to be solved pragmatically on the basis of costs and effectiveness. We are a rich enough country that we can make everybody comfortable and then let them pursue happiness as they see fit. If providing benefits to the less fortunate reaches a point that the work disincentives impair the nation’s economy, then we should retrench. And costs must be kept within bounds. But these are practical economic calculations. As of now, I’m doing fine, the poor and disadvantaged don’t seem to be complaining that they’ve got too many benefits, so what’s the problem?”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“For those who are curious how much more money would be donated today if the trend of the 1950s had continued: If the relationship between real personal income and percentage given away had persisted, we would in 1985 have been donating 5.1 percent of personal income, or $88.2 billion more than we actually donated. To get an idea of the comparative size of such numbers, the cost of the entire federal “public aid” effort in 1985—comprising AFDC, Medicaid, social services, Supplemental Security Income, training programs, low-income energy assistance, surplus food for the needy, work-experience programs, refugee assistance, and a miscellany of other programs—came to $60 billion. The point is not a specific prediction, but a general statement: There is a whole lot of money that private individuals can, do, and would donate to public uses, depending on what the reality test tells them about who else will do what if they watch TV instead.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“In defining a proper stopping point for government services and benefits, trusting to the vote-by-vote behavior of the members of the United States Congress is a mistake. They will never define a stopping point on their own. So the problem is set. Somehow the mix of somethings with which we fill up our time must give us happiness. And happiness depends crucially on taking trouble over things that matter. There must be a stopping point, some rule by which governments limit what they do for people—not just because of budget constraints, not just because of infringements on freedom (though either of these might be a sufficient reason in itself), but because happiness is impossible unless people are left alone to take trouble over important things. [print edition page 238] Furthermore, the stopping point must leave untouched certain possibilities of failures, of losses, of pains. Recall Csikszentmihalyi’s formulation: Enjoyment follows from the balance of challenge and skills. The word “challenge” has embedded in its meaning the element of “possibility of failure”; take away that possibility, and the possibility of enjoyment goes with it. Take away the possibility of failure, and the concept of “measuring up” that underpins self-respect is meaningless.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“One of the plentiful examples: the ability of a small number of American sugarcane and sugar beet growers to get the government to require 250 million [print edition page 295] Americans to pay far more for sugar than the rest of the world does. I am touching very lightly on the topic of collective decision-making. Two titles that are especially relevant to these points are James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1962); and Mancur Olsen, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965).”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“The psychological reasons why people seem endlessly willing to accept such measures is no more complicated than the reason why any of us, given a choice, will often take the easy way out even when we know that we will derive more satisfaction from the more troublesome [print edition page 237] choice. It is the all-too-familiar problem of knowing that one “will have enjoyed” doing something (reading a fine novel) but lacking the will to get started on it (therefore picking up a magazine instead). This is not reprehensible, but it does raise two important points. The first is that the process cannot ultimately be a healthy one. Taking the trouble out of things must eventually go too far. Somehow the mixture of things with which we fill up our time must give us long-term satisfaction with life as a whole. And satisfaction depends crucially on being left important things over which we take trouble. The second observation is that we cannot expect legislatures to define a stopping point. If the decisions about what government may not do on our behalf are left to a majority vote of elected representatives, logrolling and shifting coalitions will mean a perpetually expanding domain of benefits.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“A problem with such reforms, quite apart from anything having to do with their immediate effects, is that in every instance in which “taking the trouble out of things” works, there is a corresponding diminution in the potential satisfaction that might be obtained from the activity that has been affected. To be employed is not quite as satisfying if being unemployed doesn’t cause hardship. To be a businessman who scrupulously pays his bills is not quite as satisfying if not-paying-bills is made less painful.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“Let me now begin to put these considerations alongside the problem of making good social policy. I am no longer trying to formulate effective policies to deal with discrete social problems, but trying to characterize more broadly the shape that good social policy will take. The proposition is that the importance of affiliation—of rich affiliations, imbued with responsibility and effort, used as a way of living according to one’s beliefs—transcends any of these discrete social goods. Much of what we observe as rootlessness, emptiness, and plain unhappiness in contemporary life may ultimately be traced to the many ways, occasionally blatant, more often indirect and subtle, in which social policy has excised the option of taking responsibility, the need to make an effort, or both—the ways in which social policy has, in a phrase, taken the trouble out of things.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“People affiliate with other people because of something about other people—in this case, the qualities of being friendly, helpful, and amusing. It may seem a distinction too obvious to mention. Of course one is attracted to “something about” someone else, since there is no such thing as being attracted to someone as an abstract entity. But however obvious, the distinction is essential to understanding why little platoons are rewarding or unrewarding, why they sustain themselves or fall apart: Affiliation is a means whereby people of common values are enabled to live by those values. “Values” in this case means your views about how the world works or ought to work, ranging from religion to childrearing to politics to table manners to standards of public civility. The reason why affiliation is so intimately linked to values is that, to have much use—or, in fact, to be truly held—values must be acted on. Furthermore, they are typically expressed not in a one-shot action but as patterned behaviors over a period of time. Still further, values can seldom be acted upon in isolation; to live by them requires that your standards be shared by a consensus of your neighbors. Unless most of your neighbors believe in calling the police when something suspicious is happening to a neighbor’s house, you are not going to be able to practice community crime control. Unless most of your neighbors believe that stealing is wrong and that sex for fourteen-year-olds is bad, you are going to have a tough time making your norms stick with your own children. If you conduct your business on the assumption that one’s word is one’s bond, you are going to go broke unless the other businessmen you deal with operate by the same principle. In other words, to live according to many of your most important beliefs, it is essential that you be free to affiliate with fellow believers and that, together, you enjoy some control over that environment. To [print edition page 232] the extent that you are satisfied that you are “living according to your beliefs”—that anciently honored right of Americans—it is because of affiliations. So far, presumably, no surprises: All I have done is impose some nomenclature on a familiar process. But it also remains true that in the everyday world some affiliations work much better than others. Some marriages are much richer affiliations than others, some neighborhoods are much more closely knit than others, and so on. Even a commonality of beliefs is obviously not enough—some local churches are much more vital than others. The question therefore becomes not only how affiliation occurs, but how it becomes infused with satisfying content.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“When in part 2 I began to explore enabling conditions for the pursuit of happiness via Abraham Maslow’s needs hierarchy, I observed that the third of the needs, for intimacy and belongingness, was also a resource; in effect, it is the master resource whereby human beings in society go about seeing that the other needs are met. The label I will give to this mechanism is “affiliation.” Here, too, Burke has distilled the essence of what I mean: “Men are not tied to one another by papers and seals. They are led to associate by resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies.”2”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“Human beings have needs as individuals (never mind the “moral sense” or lack of it) that cannot be met except by cooperation with other human beings. To this degree, the often-lamented conflict between “individualism” and “community” is misleading. The pursuit of individual happiness cannot be an atomistic process; it will naturally and always occur in the context of communities. The state’s role in enabling the pursuit of happiness depends ultimately on nurturing not individuals, but the associations they form. The text for this discussion is one of Burke’s best-known passages: “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.”1 I will be using the image of the “little platoon” to represent the essential relationship of social organization to the pursuit of happiness and, by extension, the relationship of the state’s social policy to the pursuit of happiness. We each belong to a few “little platoons.” The great joys and sorrows, satisfactions and preoccupations, of our daily life are defined in terms of them. This observation, I will assert, applies to everyone, wherever his little platoons fall within the larger social framework.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN OF PARENTS WHO DON’T CARE? But not all people are like the virtuous working-class parents I have just described. Along with the low-income parents who are deeply involved in their children’s education are many others who do not socialize their children into values that will stand them in good stead as students. Their children skip school a lot, don’t pay much attention to the teacher, don’t study, and, as children will, encourage other children to do the same. Some of them “act out,” as the jargon has it, meaning that they create disturbances in the classrooms and halls. A few are downright dangerous. Among low-income populations there exists a subclass of children who exhibit these behaviors, which in turn may often be traced to home environments in which parents do a very poor job of training their children to behave otherwise.* What will happen to these children?”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“For those who question whether government should be involved in education at all, I share the view that education in a democracy is a classic public good. Milton Friedman has said it as well as anyone: “A stable and democratic society is impossible without a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge on the part of most citizens and without widespread acceptance of some common set of values. Education can contribute to both. In consequence, the gain from the education of a child accrues not only to the child or to his parents but also to other members of the society. . . . It is not feasible to identify the particular individuals (or families) benefited and so to charge for the services rendered.”5 Or less formally but more passionately, Thomas Jefferson, writing to George Wythe: “Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils, and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”6”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“The specific driving force is the relationship of parents to their children. To recapitulate: Parents want good things for their children. [print edition page 215] In a society where education means opportunity for getting ahead, one of those good things is education. This is not just one of many goods, but a central one. Therefore, one of the things that parents in a free society want most intensely for their children is an education. This generally holds true across parents of widely varying backgrounds, incomes, and abilities. To that, I add the critical belief from the discussion of the idea of man that human beings are resourceful, and that this latent resourcefulness is not limited to just a few especially able human beings but is a general characteristic including everyone but the most mentally or emotionally disabled. To put it less formally: Give parents control over the education of their children, as I gave it to the hundred parents, and you will unleash enormous energy and imagination, all tending toward the excellent end of educated children. Why wouldn’t these observations apply to poor people? Several answers come to mind. Thinking about them argues for what I believe to be the general truth that the more natural the dynamics that produce good results, the more robust they will be under difficult circumstances.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“I am suggesting that if policy planners—diagnosticians?—are to be successful, they must think in terms of solutions that permit a naturally robust organism to return to health. Does the nation suffer from schools that don’t teach? The task is not to figure [print edition page 202] out better teaching techniques; we’ve known how to teach children for millennia. The task is to figure out what is keeping us from doing what we already know how to do. Does the nation suffer from too many children being born into fatherless families? The task is not to devise a public relations campaign to discourage single teenage girls from having babies, but to neutralize whatever is impeding the age-old impulse of human beings to form families. Does the nation suffer for lack of low-income housing? The task is to understand why an economic system that pours out a profusion of cheap-but-decent shoes, food, clothes, and every other basic of life is prevented from pouring out a profusion of cheap-but-decent apartments for rent. And so on through the list of problems that customarily preoccupy planners of social policy. In proposing a metaphor of healing, I am proposing as well two quite specific and important characteristics of solutions that work. The first is that such solutions are quite fragile, in this sense: They do not comprise modules that can be connected or disconnected or grouped in combinations. They don’t work because of gimmicks; they don’t work by twiddling one bit of a mechanism without affecting anything else. Instead, they work because they tap natural and deeply embedded responses. Such solutions tend to be of a piece, and they tend to be simple. The second characteristic (which seems at first to be paradoxical) is that the solutions if implemented as a unitary piece will themselves be robust. In sharp contrast to social engineering solutions (which tend to be disrupted by almost anything), solutions that tap dynamics which “will naturally occur if you let them” will tend to work even in the tough situations and to spin off positive unintended outcomes—they are serendipitous. In this chapter I take up each of these characteristics in turn, once again using the education problem for illustrative purposes.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“We’ve raised teachers’ salaries for years without getting better teachers. Figure 11 shows the history (in constant dollars) from 1930 to 1986. [print edition page 190] FIGURE 11. Regarding the Assumption That Raising Teachers’ Salaries Helps . . . Source: National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics 1987 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1987), table 53, p. 63. National trend data refer to average annual earnings of full-time employees in all industries. The graphic gives one pause. The only extended period in which teachers’ real incomes rose faster than wages elsewhere in the economy—just a bit more than 28 percent overall, coincidentally—was from 1961 to 1972, a period coinciding with what is generally accepted as a precipitous deterioration in American education. This does not prove that raising teachers’ wages makes things worse, but it is very difficult to see in these data an argument that they help.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“In the rare instances when a test criterion actually has been met and there are no credible technical challenges, the hostility to tests can still mean the downfall of standards. The most notable recent example is the attempt by the city of New York to develop a police sergeant’s exam that was free of racial bias. The city was successful in that no one has been able to advance a plausible explanation of how the test items retain a racial or cultural bias. But the test results have nonetheless been downgraded in promotion decisions simply because they continued to show large racial differentials. Such experiences do not augur well for the Carnegie Corporation, especially since the effects of certification on minority teachers will be so highly sensitive (as the task force’s own report notes).”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“So if the Carnegie [print edition page 182] Corporation does produce a tough test, we must expect fierce criticism of it from within the teaching profession. And since teaching ability is exceptionally difficult to measure, and since a tough test does falsely reject competent teachers, we may be confident that the critics will be able to make their case that the test is invalid (meaning that it is often in error). It is impossible—not just difficult, but impossible—to create tough teacher certification procedures that are not vulnerable to plausible challenge.* What will the Carnegie Corporation do when those challenges are mounted? Stick to its guns? Or revise the “passing” grade downward?”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“Sociologist Peter Rossi, who led the early evaluation efforts for the War on Poverty and since then has remained a leading scholar and practitioner of program evaluation, has expressed his frustration in what he calls Rossi’s Iron Law of Evaluation: The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero, and the Stainless Steel Law, The better designed the impact assessment of a social program, the more likely is the resulting estimate of net impact to be zero.6 Taking the evaluation literature as a whole, Rossi’s laws seem no more than a statement of fact. Small-scale demonstration programs sometimes succeed, especially if the program has been implemented by its designer. But large-scale programs do not. Or, as Rossi writes: It is possible to formulate a number of additional laws of evaluation. . . . [T]hey would all carry the same message: The laws would claim that a review of the history of the last two decades of efforts to evaluate major social programs in the United States sustains the proposition that over this period the American establishment of policy makers, agency officials, professionals and social scientists did not know how to design and implement social programs that were minimally effective, let alone spectacularly so.7 Rossi remains committed to the attempt to do better. Milton Friedman suggests that the attempt is futile. He uses a label invented by Congressman Richard Armey for the “somethings” that always seem to [print edition page 178] prevent success: The Invisible Foot, a twist on Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that guides social progress in a laissez-faire economy.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“To begin asking of social programs how they affect the pursuit of happiness of individuals, with emphasis on “individual,” is in this sense to begin to think about the welfare of others as you think about the welfare of yourself and of those you care for.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“My first general point thus has nothing to do with the pursuit-of-happiness theme per se. Rather: The abbreviations with which we express operational goals have over the years displaced the constructs that should be motivating them. In conducting the evaluations of social programs, assessing the results, and deciding how these should be translated into policy, policy analysts have gotten lazy. They have stopped specifying at any point in the process the construct that lies behind the operational measure. I have further been proposing that this laziness has tangible results: It truncates the analysis. If analysts go to the trouble of spelling out what it is that we are really trying to accomplish with a given program, that process will of itself improve policy. In some cases it will clarify what needs to be done to make good on the real objectives; in other cases it will reveal how foolish the underlying rationale for a program has been, giving people a better chance to say “Wait a minute, that’s not what we’re really after.” Turning to the pursuit-of-happiness framework, my point is as simple as can be: The evaluation of policy should use the individual as the unit of aggregation. The question that evaluations must first address is, How does the impact of program X look from the point of view of the individual who is directly affected by it? I am not saying that the application of such a criterion of success will lead to any particular set [print edition page 170] of programs or laws; rather, I am saying that applying it will lead to better debate, more reasoned decisions, and ultimately lead us closer to the state of affairs that we are really trying to accomplish.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“occur.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“And that is the kernel of the debate over policy choices. Most of what we know as contemporary social policy is based on the tacit assumption that the Founders were wrong. It is believed, apparently by a large majority of people, that humans can act collectively with far more latitude than the Founders believed they could. If the Founders were wrong, we may conduct social policy on the assumption that if humans seek a more even distribution of resources, for example, they may achieve it. If humans want an end to racial inequality or sexual inequality, it is within their grasp to have it; all they have to do is pass the right laws. The world can be made constantly fairer if human beings use the instruments of government to reduce unfairness. If the Founders were wrong, we may continue to be optimistic in the face of failures, and assume that when one attempt at a solution doesn’t produce the desired results, the proper response is to try again with another and better political solution. Most importantly: If the Founders were wrong, then we may assume that this expansive [print edition page 150] use of a centralized government can continue over the long run, because men have it in them after all to act collaboratively in their public capacity. Suppose, however, that the Founders were right. If one accepts their optimistic view of private man, then centralized governmental solutions are not attractive. What allows man to fulfill his own nature in the Founders’ vision is the process of individual response to challenge, risk, and reward. Each of those words—“individual,” “challenge,” “risk,” “reward”—grates against the rationale for centralized solutions. Centralized solutions from the left urge that the collective society has a moral claim on the individual; they seek to dampen risks and increase predictability, and use as primary measures of success the achievement of security and equality. Centralized solutions from the right urge that the state has the right to impose beliefs on individuals; they seek to restrain by law individual variations in social behavior, and use as primary measures of success the degree of conformity to the righteous way. If man has the autonomy and equality that the Founders saw in him, these goals are not “bad” but wrong-headed. They do not liberate humans to fulfill their potential. They do not nourish the human soul.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“Madison stated the theme most powerfully in the famous passage from Federalist No. 51: It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices [as the separation of powers] should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? 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. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power; where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other; that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme power of the state.43 [print edition page 149] There is no better statement of the pessimism with which one must view man acting as a political creature.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“Therefore, Brutus did not need to know exactly what the rationalization for expanded federal authority would be—he didn’t need to know about modern communications or complex economies or any of the other ex post facto justifications. He knew that, one way or another, it would happen: The disposition to expand power “is implanted in human nature” and will inevitably “operate in the federal legislature to lessen and ultimately to subvert the state authority.”40 Having made that prediction about the federal legislature, Brutus made this confident forecast about the Supreme Court: [T]he judges under this constitution will control the legislature, for the supreme court are authorized in the last resort to determine what is the extent of the powers of the Congress; they are to give the constitution an explanation, and there is no power above them to set aside their judgement. . . . There is no authority that can remove them, and they cannot be controlled by the laws of the legislature. In short, they are independent of the people, or the legislature, and of every power under heaven. Men placed in this situation will generally soon feel themselves independent of heaven itself.41”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“To some of the influential Americans of the period, there was no way at all to provide such relief in the context of a strong federal government. These men, known as the Anti-Federalists, read the same accounts of past republics that Madison and Hamilton read and came to the conclusion that men acting in a public capacity were so intrinsically bound to form factions and expand their power that the only relief lay in decentralization.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“FACTION, AND ITS ORIGIN IN HUMAN NATURE Republics don’t last. Democracies don’t last. This was the stark empirical truth that faced the Founders. It is a fine thing to say that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, but it is exceedingly difficult to translate this aspiration into policy. The reason why it is so difficult, Publius concludes, is that men, given a chance, will destroy their freedoms under a representative [print edition page 145] government. The bludgeon with which they do so is called faction, defined by Madison in No. 10 as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”32 Faction is something with which the political system must live, because eliminating the phenomenon is out of the question. To endure, the system would either have to suppress faction—which requires a totalitarian state—or else convince everyone to share the same opinions and interests, which is impossible even in a totalitarian state.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“All of this contrives to make The Federalist almost inaccessible to us today. It is a classic as Mark Twain defined one, a book that people praise and don’t read. Nor is it an easy read, written as it is in the cadences and with the vocabulary of the eighteenth century. But it remains a critically important document for contemporary policy-making. The Federalist is not about the eighteenth century. It is about how humans function when given access to public power.*”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“The construction of the American polity was grounded in the understanding that men acting as political animals are dangerous, and that what men might do innocuously as individuals is far different from what men might do innocuously as groups. Man’s potentialities are grand; his human nature constantly threatens to prevent him from realizing those potentialities.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“Bernard Bailyn as he concluded The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution: [print edition page 143] The details of this new world were not as yet clearly depicted; but faith ran high that a better world than any that had ever been known could be built where authority was distrusted and held in constant scrutiny; where the status of men flowed from their achievements and from their personal qualities, not from distinctions ascribed to them at birth; and where the use of power over the lives of men was jealously guarded and severely restricted. It was only where there was this defiance, this refusal to truckle, this distrust of all authority, political or social, that institutions could express human aspirations, not crush them.30 Such was the vaulting optimism about what free men might accomplish, what free men might be.”
― Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government