Frederic Bastiat (1850 and 1848): “See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong.  See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.  Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil in itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals.  If such a law – which may be an isolated case – is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.”
AND
“The question of legal plunder must be settled once and for all, and there are only three ways to settle it: (1) The few plunder the many. (2) Everybody plunders everybody. (3) Nobody plunders anybody. We must make our choice among limited plunder, universal plunder, and no plunder. The law can follow only one of these three.”
AND
Bastiat’s one line definition of government (1848): “the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”

U.S. Representative James Monroe Miller (R.-Kan.), arguing for the 16th Amendment (which was ratified in 1913):  “I stand here as a representative of the Republican Party of the central West to pledge you my word that the great western states will be found voting with you for an income tax.  Why?  Because they will not pay it!”

N.J. Governor Woodrow Wilson (campaigning for the Presidency in 1912):  "We used to say that the ideal of government was for every man to be left alone and not interfered with.  That was the idea in Jefferson's time.  But we are coming now to realize that life is so complicated that we are not dealing with old conditions, and that law has to step in and create new conditions under which we may live."

President Calvin Coolidge (1924):  "Realizing that the power to tax is the power to destroy and that the power to take a certain amount of property or of income is only another way of saying that for a certain proportion of his time a citizen must work for the Government, the authority to impose a tax on the people has been most carefully guarded. Our own Constitution requires that revenue bills should originate in the House, because that body is supposed to be more representative of the people. These precautions have been taken because of the full realization that any oppression laid upon the people by excessive taxation, any disregard of their right to hold and enjoy the property which they have rightfully acquired, would be fatal to freedom. A government which lays taxes on the people not required by urgent public necessity and sound public policy is not a protector of liberty, but an instrument of tyranny. It condemns the citizen to servitude."

U.S. Senator Huey P. Long (D.-La.):  “There is no rule so sure as that one that the same mill that grinds out fortunes above a certain size at the top, grinds out paupers at the bottom.”
AND
“God invited us all to come and eat and drink all we wanted.  He smiled on our land and we grew crops of plenty to eat and wear.  He showed us in the earth the iron and other things to make everything we wanted.  He unfolded to us the secrets of science so that our work might be easy.  God called: ‘Come to my feast.’”  But what had happened?  “Rockefeller, Morgan, and their crowd stepped up and took enough for 120,000,000 people and left only enough for 5,000,000 for all the other 125,000,000 to eat.  And so many millions must go hungry and without these good things God gave us unless we call on them to put some of it back.”  (the Robin Hood version of the welfare state)

President Franklin Roosevelt, 1936, stating his public policy objectives:  “To do what any honest Government of any country would do; try to increase the security and the happiness of a larger number of people in all occupations of life and in all parts of the country; to give them more of the good things in life, to give them a greater distribution not only of wealth in the narrow terms, but of wealth in the wider terms; to give them places to go in the summer time – recreation; to give them assurance that they are not going to starve in their old age; to give honest business a chance to go ahead and make a reasonable profit, and to give everyone a chance to earn a living.”  (the Santa Claus state)

Professor James Landis (1938):  "In terms of political theory, the administrative process springs from the inadequacy of a simple tripartite form of government to deal with modern problems.  It represents a striving to adapt modern governmental technique, that still divides under three rubrics [that is, the executive, legislative, and judicial], to modern needs . . . .  The insistence upon the compartmentalization of power along triadic lines gave way in the nineteenth century to the exigencies of governance.  Without too much political theory but with a keen sense of the practicalities of the situation, agencies were created whose functions embraced the three aspects of government. . . . [Congress] vests the necessary powers with the administrative authority it creates, not too greatly concerned with the extent to which such action does violence to the traditional tripartite theory of governmental organization."  (the Repairman state)

Professor Lawrence Friedman, 1965 and 1985:  “The most dramatic changes touching the significance of contract law in modern life . . . came about, not through internal developments in contract law, but through developments in public policy which systematically robbed contract of its subject-matter . . . [such as] labor law, anti-trust law, insurance law, business regulation, and social welfare legislation.  The growth of these specialized bodies of public policy removed from ‘contract’ (in the sense of abstract relationships) transactions and situations formerly governed by it . . . .”
AND
“[T]here has developed in this country a general expectation of justice . . . and a general expectation of recompense for injuries and loss.”

Justice William Brennan, 1985:  “The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it may have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and present needs.”

Bastiat, first two quotes from The Law; the third quote from Government.
Miller, quoted in David Brinkley: A Memoir (1995), pp. 260-261.
Wilson, quoted in Jack Beatty, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900 (2007), p. 364 fn.
Coolidge, Address at the Meeting of the Business Organization of the Government
Long, first quote taken from Richard D. White, Jr., Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long (2006), p. 144; second quote taken from Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (1983), pp. 71-72.
Roosevelt, quoted in Cass R. Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever (2004), p. 191 (emphasis added).
Landis, The Administrative Process, pp. 1-2, 10-12. <check this>
Friedman, first quote: Contract Law in America, pp. 20-24 (quoted in Grant Gilmore, The Death of Contract); second quote, Total Justice, p. ___.
Brennan, quoted on www.brennancenter.org/about_us/aboutus.html
 

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