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Kindle Notes & Highlights
What this country needs is fewer people who know what this country needs. We’d be better off, in my opinion, without so many opinions.
Transformations in health care have turned the historically cheapest part of being alive—dying—into something so expensive that many people can’t afford to do it.
Free speech should not only be protected, it should be compulsory. Everyone with a strong political opinion should be required to wear a sign proclaiming it.
People do not emigrate because things are going well at home.
Civil liberties. Free speech. Property rights. Rule of law. Representative democracy. Free enterprise. Free trade. These are the ideas of Classical Liberalism. Since 1776 the fortunate among us have been living in places where those ideas were embraced.
But politics is not about creating more goods, services, and benefits to society. Politics is about dividing them up. Politics is about promising things to people. “The auction of goods about to be stolen,” as H. L. Mencken put it.
politics is a zero-sum game the way freedom and free markets are not. Zero-sum games are not played for kicks and giggles. Zero-sum games are blood sports.
in politics only one side can win. What’s at stake in politics isn’t goods and services, it’s power. Power is always zero-sum. When I sell you goods and services I gain something in return. When I sell you power over myself—and that’s the political exchange—I stand to lose everything.
In politics only one side can win. Which is bad. But what’s worse is this means there have to be sides. Faction—angry partisan faction—isn’t a by-product of politics, it is politics.
