The Cry Wolf Quote Bank chronicles the false predictions and hyperbole by opponents of these laws and protections. While the issues and specific policies change over time, the rhetoric and themes remained the same. You can search the Quote Bank for what opponents said to prevent these laws from passing. Using the drop down menus on the right their statements by issue, by specific law, by who said it and by the core themes they evoke. Elsewhere on the site, you can find articles, studies, and other material that debunks their claims.
[The proposed ‘comparable’ work standard is] so general and so vague as to give an administrator a grant of power which could destroy the sound wage structure which many industrial companies have worked for years to perfect.
There is little difference between men and women as regards their satisfactory performance in industry. Sound employment and personnel practices are applicable to both men and women are applicable to both men and women and no emphasis should be placed on any distinction between them as workers.
[Medicare will usher in] federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have know it in this country.
[Write to your congressional representative against the health care reform proposal or] we will awake to find that we have socialism.
One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism has been by way of medicine….If you don't do this, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was like in American when men were free.
The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.
All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man's working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it's a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay….He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.
[W]e feel that in a free competitive economy, the task of equal pay to women workers is properly within the province of collective bargaining and not of police action by the government.
There are on an average 1,000 men who lose their lives in the coal mines annually. Ninety percent of the men lose their lives in the ordinary accidents, accidents in which the individual plays an important role usually. The other 10 percent lose their lives as a result of what we call mine disasters. Those disasters are preventable. They are almost in every case not caused by some action of the individual workman.
Now, if there is a real purpose to be accomplished by what you ask here from a safety standpoint, then you have my vote. But if the only purpose is to set up something that you say is going to be another police force, like they had in Germany and Russia, to inspect other policemen…then I say we are wasting our time.
