“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”

—  Barry Goldwater

Gerald Ford in a Presidential address to a joint session of Congress (12 August 1974)
Ford has also been quoted as having made a similar statement many years earlier, as a representative to the US Congress: "If the government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away everything you have."
"If Elected, I Promise…" : Stories and Gems of Wisdom by and About Politicians (1960) p. 193
Unsourced variants attributed to Goldwater include:
A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.
Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have.
However, Karl Hess, a speechwriter for Goldwater, quoted Goldwater as having "repeatedly" said during the 1964 campaign that "the government strong enough to give you what you want is strong enough to take it all away." See The Death of Politics http://fare.tunes.org/books/Hess/dop.html, a Playboy article from 1969.
Misattributed

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Barry Goldwater photo
Barry Goldwater 32
American politician 1909–1998

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“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”

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Presidential address to a joint session of Congress (12 August 1974)
Ford has also been quoted as having made a similar statement many years earlier, as a representative to the US Congress: "If the government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away everything you have."
"If Elected, I Promise…" : Stories and Gems of Wisdom by and About Politicians (1960) p. 193
Similar assertions have often been attributed to Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Some of the inspiration for such expressions may lie in "The Criminality of the State" by Albert Jay Nock in American Mercury (March 1939) where he stated: "You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you."
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