Confessions of a Hired Gun

Place no trust in princes:

I ignored—or forgot—one of the most important lessons my professors tried to teach me in college: politics and law are the products of culture. You will never repair or rebuild the latter by focusing your efforts on the former two.

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And it really is a machine. However gifted a man may be in the “art of politics,” generally he won’t move above inconsequential offices without the backing of a machine.

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The machine moves money, public opinion, votes, and jobs where they need to go in order to win elections and advance legislative agendas.

It does these things through a complicated network of candidates, donors, fundraisers, lawyers, savvy financiers, political and public relations consultants, political action committees, private companies, public office holders, non-profits, think tanks, party organizations, and more. The legal lines preventing some of these groups from coordinating are crossed regularly or bypassed in such a way that violates the spirit of the law.

P.J. O’Rourke nailed it when he said that lawyers writing laws is like pharmaceutical companies inventing diseases.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.