Politics & Power Quote by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Buckley’s line is engineered like a double-barreled sneer: it starts with the familiar conservative jab that liberals are free spenders because they’re spending yours, then swivels to something harsher and more morally freighted. The twist is the point. By moving from “money” to “freedom and security,” he reframes budget debates as existential stakes, implying that liberal compassion is not merely naive but dangerous - a luxury belief purchased with someone else’s risk.

The phrase “it has been said” is classic Buckley: a patrician shrug that pretends to cite common wisdom while laundering the attack as observation rather than accusation. It also gives the insult plausible deniability, as if he’s only reporting a verdict already reached by sensible people. The repeated “other people’s” is the rhetorical hammer. It paints liberalism as a form of moral outsourcing: generous in public, costless in private, and ultimately indifferent to who pays in dollars, sovereignty, or lives.

Context matters. Buckley built National Review and helped define postwar American conservatism in the Cold War era, when arguments about defense spending, anti-communism, and national resolve weren’t abstract policy seminars but identity tests. His subtext is that liberalism, when faced with threats, chooses negotiation, restraint, or civil-liberties concerns over decisive force - and that this preference amounts to gambling with the public’s safety.

It works because it collapses complicated tradeoffs into a character judgment: not just “wrong,” but unserious, indulgent, and faintly treacherous. That’s polemic as social sorting, delivered with Buckley’s trademark icy wit.