Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good.
If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.
Perhaps the soundest advice for parents is: Lighten up. People have been raising children for approximately as long as there have been people.
Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election.
Democrats believe, plausibly, that middle-class entitlements are instantly addictive and, because there is no known detoxification, that class, when facing future choices between trimming entitlements or increasing taxes, will choose the latter.
Corporations do not pay taxes, they collect them, passing the burden to consumers as a cost of production. And corporate taxation is a feast of rent-seeking – a cornucopia of credits, exemptions and other subsidies conferred by the political class on favored, and grateful, corporations.
Big government inevitably drives an upward distribution of wealth to those whose wealth, confidence and sophistication enable them to manipulate government.
Voters cannot hold officials responsible if they do not know what government is doing, or which parts of government are doing what.
The strongest continuous thread in America’s political tradition is skepticism about government.
Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.
Politics in a democracy is transactional: Politicians seek votes by promising to do things for voters, who seek promises in exchange for their votes.
World War II was the last government program that really worked.
I grew up in central Illinois midway between Chicago and St. Louis and I made an historic blunder. All my friends became Cardinals fans and grew up happy and liberal and I became a Cubs fan and grew up embittered and conservative.
In democracy, as quaintly understood, voters pick their representatives. American democracy increasingly reverses that. Legislative districts are drawn to protect incumbents who, effectively, pick their voters.
Liberalism is wrong because it doesn’t work. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.
All politicians are to some extent salesmen.
Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called self-interestedness. This was not a.
Ronald Reagan has held the two most demeaning jobs in the country; President of the United States and radio broadcaster for the Chicago Cubs.
Modern man’s capacity for destruction is quixotic evidence of humanity’s capacity for reconstruction. The powerful technological agents we have unleashed against the environment include many of the agents we require for its reconstruction.
Geology has joined biology in lowering mankind’s self-esteem. Geology suggests how mankind’s existence is contingent upon the geological consent of the planet.