Politics & Power Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken’s “of course” is the knife twist. He’s not arguing so much as shrugging, daring you to deny what he treats as obvious: the state’s job description is constraint. Government doesn’t merely stumble into curtailing liberty; it exists to regulate, tax, police, conscript, surveil, license, and punish. Liberty, in Mencken’s frame, isn’t a warm civic ideal but the raw space of being left alone. The line works because it strips away the sentimental gloss that democracies love to paint over their coercive machinery.

The subtext is classic Mencken: contempt for moralizing reformers and the earnest priesthood of “public good.” He’s puncturing the progressive-era fantasy (very alive in his lifetime) that smarter bureaucracies could engineer virtue without cost. Every crusade, he implies, needs an enforcer; every “solution” quietly manufactures a new permission slip you must carry. His cynicism isn’t neutral, either. It flatters the reader’s self-image as the only adult in the room, the one who sees that lofty rhetoric often masks appetite - for control, status, or a cleaner, more obedient populace.

Context matters: Mencken wrote through Prohibition, Red Scares, expanding federal power, and the rise of mass politics. He distrusted majorities as much as bosses. So “all government” isn’t a libertarian slogan about small vs. big state; it’s a broader indictment of collective authority itself, whether it wears the suit of technocracy or the flag pin of populism. The punchline is grim: liberty has no natural constituency because order is always easier to sell.