Politics & Power Quote by Harry Browne

Browne’s line works because it refuses to grant either side the moral high ground. It’s a neat piece of libertarian jujitsu: take the two great bipartisan alibis for state expansion - compassion and protection - and expose them as interchangeable costumes for the same power grab. The phrasing is calibrated to sting. “In the name of” repeats like a drumbeat, suggesting ritual rather than reason: policies aren’t debated on outcomes, they’re sanctified by invoking children, poverty, family, drugs. You’re not meant to argue with saints and victims.

The subtext is that modern politics runs on emotional hostage-taking. If you oppose a program marketed as “for children,” you’re cast as cruel; if you resist “family values,” you’re decadent; if you question the drug war, you’re soft on crime. Browne implies the real product isn’t safety or justice, but legitimacy for surveillance, policing, taxation, and bureaucracy. “Either way” is the pivot: the ideological fight is theater, the institutional result is cumulative.

Context matters: Browne came out of the post-1960s American cycle where Great Society welfare expansion met the rising conservative state - Nixon’s drug war, Reagan-era moral politics, and the growth of the security apparatus. He’s writing into a moment when “small government” rhetoric coexisted with ever-larger enforcement budgets. The final clause, “you become less free,” is deliberately personal; it drags abstraction down to the level of the individual citizen, framing politics as a ratchet where each crisis narrative locks in new powers and rarely releases them.