Politics & Power Quote by Garet Garrett

A clean little sentence that smuggles in a whole worldview: the shift from citizens as agents to citizens as dependents. Garrett isn’t just lamenting bureaucracy; he’s diagnosing a moral inversion. “Formerly” and “now” do heavy lifting, turning political history into a before-and-after parable. The syntax itself performs the reversal: “government” stays put as the subject in both clauses, while “people” slide from doing to being done for. That grammatical swap is the argument.

The intent is polemical but disciplined. Garrett, a journalist steeped in classical liberal suspicion of centralized power, frames the modern state as a parent that can’t stop “helping.” The subtext is that care is never neutral: once government assumes “responsibility” for people, it also claims authority over them. Responsibility becomes a pretext for supervision, taxation, regulation, and the soft coercion of “for your own good.” The line anticipates a familiar critique of the welfare state: benefits are sticky, and so are the controls that fund and administer them.

Context matters. Garrett wrote in the long shadow of the New Deal and the expansion of federal capacity during the Depression and World War II, when government began managing employment, banking, retirement, and risk on a mass scale. To supporters, that was democracy finally taking material hardship seriously. Garrett’s edge is to recast that triumph as a loss of civic adulthood: a public trained to petition rather than participate, and a state incentivized to keep enlarging its mandate. The wit is in the austerity: no statistics, no villains, just a reversal so neat it sounds inevitable, which is precisely the warning.