Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, and Jean-Claude Trichet are in the duck blind and a bird flies overhead.
Bernanke looks at it and says, "Looks like a duck, flies like a duck... it's probably a duck," shoots at it but misses and the bird flies away.
The next bird flies overhead, and Monsieur Trichet looks at it, then looks through the pages of a bird manual, and says, "Hmmmm...green wings, yellow bill, quacking sound...might be a duck." He raises his gun to shoot it, but the bird is long gone.
A third bird flies over. Greenspan raises his gun and shoots suddenly, brings it down, and turns and says, "Can someone go see if that was a duck?"
"The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. Power will achieve its murderous potential. It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, to justify the beginning of murder en masse."
R. J. Rummel, Mass Murder and Genocide, 1994