Politics & Power Quote by Steve Forbes

The sentence sells a political diagnosis in the language of personal aspiration, and that’s the trick. Forbes doesn’t lead with budgets or bureaucracies; he leads with loss. “Too large and too powerful” is deliberately elastic, a phrase that feels self-evident while sidestepping specifics about which programs, regulations, or agencies are the problem. It invites the reader to supply their own grievances, from taxes to red tape to cultural frustration, and then funnels them toward a single culprit: Washington.

The key move is the pivot from institutional scale to intimate autonomy. By defining the “real loss” as “the freedom of people to govern their own lives,” Forbes turns government expansion into a moral trespass, not a technocratic dispute. “Govern their own lives” borrows the dignity of civic self-rule and reassigns it to the individual-as-sovereign. That framing flatters the audience: you’re not resisting policy, you’re defending self-determination.

Then comes the soft-focus closer: “participate fully in the American dream.” This phrase works as a cultural solvent, dissolving class conflict and structural inequality into a promise of upward mobility. The subtext is that government, not markets or concentrated private power, is the primary barrier between ordinary people and opportunity. Coming from a businessman and longtime advocate of deregulation and tax cuts, that’s not neutral philosophy; it’s a persuasive rebranding of pro-business policy as populist liberation. The context is modern conservative rhetoric that converts economic freedom into political freedom, making the state the villain and the market the stage where the “dream” supposedly becomes reachable.