Top 15 Howard Jarvis Quotes

I never smoked a cigarette or had a drink or saw a pregnant girl either in grade school, or high school, or college. Never. When I was in high school, the coach would write on a piece of paper. ‘These are the rules,’ and hang it on the wall. And believe me, those were the rules. You had to go to bed at 9:00. You couldn’t eat ice cream or pie. You had to report for practice at 3:35 every afternoon, for all sports. And of course we could not drink coffee or tea or Coca Cola or soda pop. It never occurred to us to disobey the rules.

There’s no question about it: My father was the most important influence on my life. He was a very stern, righteous, but fair guy who had a set of principles by which he lived. Those principles were: you never lied to anybody, you never took anybody’s money unless you had earned it, and education is essential. He would tell us that education was just like the cans on the market shelf: all you have to do is go take it off. But if you don’t take it off, you’re not going to get it. Nobody’s going to hand it to you.

The best way to convince the state legislature to give people the legal right to petition to change the law is by circulating petitions and collecting the name of as many voters as possible. That’s what keeps the politicians honest, or at least more honest than they would otherwise be: the knowledge that the people are interested in their government and that if they don’t do the job, the people will reclaim their rights. That’s why the initiative and referendum are important.

Elected officials have a responsibility to represent their constituents to the best of their ability. But there is hardly a better example of a conflict of interest than the difference between the best interest of the politician and the best interest of the people he has the duty to represent. The more taxes, the more money government has to spend, the more public employees the politician can put on the public payroll, the more power the politician has.

Tax shelters are a coffin for money.

Also, I want to reduce the capital gains tax from its current level of up to 40% to a flat 15%. This would free investment capital and result in increased productivity and a decline in unemployment… Japan and Germany, for instance, have virtually no capital gains tax at all, and they have two of the strongest economies in the Western world.

My heart doesn’t bleed any more for public workers who get fired than it does for employees of private business who lose their jobs; much less, in fact. I’m not saying all public workers are bad, but I think there are too many of them who never do anything. A lot of them are cynical and arrogant and give lousy service. They have no investment in their jobs, no responsibility, and for many of them their sole objective is to avoid doing anything until they become eligible for a pension.

One of the worst scare tactics used against us during the campaign was the dire prediction—based on the phony UCLA study that Governor Brown and other politicians cited—that hordes of public employees, perhaps as many as 451,000, would be laid off if 13 passed. Well, 13 did pass. And what happened?... There have been no massive layoffs of public employees or drastic cutbacks in governmental services in California… only 19,000 employees of local governments and school districts had lost their jobs because of 13. That’s less than 2% of the 1.1 million people who work for local governments and school districts in the state.

My taxes don’t worry me. I’m worried about the guy who can’t pay his taxes. That was one of the big advantages I had over anybody in politics. I had no axes to grind. I went up before an audience of 200 or 50 or 2,500 and I told ‘em just what I felt. If they didn’t like it, the hell with ‘em. I wasn’t running for a damn thing… What all these people were doing—if they did what I asked them to—was helping themselves. Whatever they did, they didn’t do it for me, because I’m not going to get a penny out of it. All I was doing was showing them how to help themselves. But politicians are afraid to tell the truth, because they’re afraid they’ll lose votes. I don’t care whether I lose 4 votes or 4 million. If the people were not smart enough to save their own necks after I told them how, what else could I do?

I guess nobody chose me to lead the parade. I guess I chose myself. If I hadn't done it, I don't think anybody else in California would have done it. Nobody.

I think the wealthy, the middle class, and the poor voted for 13 because I think people from every class resented the fact that government was stealing too much of their money. I think the general idea in California and all over the country, with rich and poor alike, is that the government is too invasive; it has too much control; it passes too many laws; it curbs too many freedoms.

After all, a government is supposed to be run by the people. We’ve developed in this country an apathetic philosophy that says: ‘I’m only one person. I can’t do anything—why should I take my time?’ The lack of interest means the people have lost faith in their elected officials. They have lost faith in their capacity to be part of government. They have lost sight of the fact that if this system continues as it has, it’s going to change American citizens into subjects.

I was out there and I knew how the people felt. During the campaign, I debated a school superintendent in Southern California. He said, ‘Why if you pass 13, we’ll have to shut the schools down.’ And everybody stood up and clapped. They wanted the damn schools shut down. Even Richard Reeves wrote in that Esquire article of his that Paul Priolo, the Republican leader in the Assembly, said ‘Whenever I tell an audience that Jarvis will bring local government to a halt, all I see is smiling faces.’

Most of the politicians and the press were wrong about 13, so it’s no surprise that most of the pollsters were, too. The first time a California poll was conducted on 13 by the ‘impartial,’ ‘scientific’ Field organization in February 1978 the result was 20% in favor of 13 and 10% opposed. The opposition had no trouble rationalizing that poll by pointing out that 70% of the voters were undecided, and that it was only natural for the people who had signed the petitions to be strongly in favor of 13, which they said distorted the poll… I do think a lot of polls are fixed.

I tell off reporters when I think they’re asking me a stupid question or an irrelevant one. I compare their business to everyone else’s. I say they’re not a privileged class. They have no right to ask me what color toilet paper I use any more than I have a right to ask them how many times they had sex last week. And when they suggest that the apartment business should be under rent control, I say, ‘How would you like it if you were under censorship?’ That always stops them.