“Everyone should look in the mirror, before pointing a finger. Maybe you are the person everyone is complaining about, but you don't see it. Women know the wrong things they do, and man also know the wrong things they do. Even if everyone denies it and trying to be innocent in public. We point fingers at others and hoping that they don’t find out , about our bad traits, character and behavior. Hoping we are not exposed one day on the wrong things we are hiding. Everyone needs to work on themselves and fix the wrongs they do. That is how we will fix the country.”
“What do you do?"
"I am in search of God."
A culture where this answer is considered 'abnormal' is doomed.”
“If we really believed that any law is justified if it saves just one life, we would require all Americans to pass a mental-health evaluation on a regular basis or be institutionalized (over 38,000 Americans commit suicide annually). We would outlaw all motor vehicles (almost 35,000 Americans die in vehicle accidents annually). We would require all houses to be single-story structures (over 26,000 die in falls annually). We would ban alcohol (almost 17,000 die annually from alcohol-related liver disease). We would require people to be certified as swimmers before allowing them into any large body of water (over 3,500 die from drowning annually). We would prohibit women from getting pregnant unless they had no family history of birth complications (over 900 American women die in childbirth annually).
Of course none of these things will ever happen, nor should they. Life is full of dangers that cannot be legislated away.”
Source: Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics
“At some point enough voters decided that government was less a thing to be frightened of than it was a tool with which they could accomplish all manner of good. In short, people decided that they wanted a good deal more in terms of positive rights than the minimal version they had previously experienced. In exchange, the negative rights they had possessed to that point had to give way to some degree in favor of the positive rights they sought. This necessarily meant that some of the potential for cooperation among them had to give way to a greater level of coercion.”
Source: Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics
“At some point in our history we decided that the coercive power of government should be used as a force for attaining good rather than merely a force for preventing bad. This point of view replaced the previous view, which held that government is a necessary though dangerous thing. In short, we traded in Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson for FDR.”
Source: Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics
“The minimum wage is an example of coercion. Many people believe that it is an acceptable application of coercion because the minimum wage protects workers. It guarantees an hourly income, and many people have benefitted over the years from this federal wage floor. Many people have earned higher wages than they would have without minimum wage legislation. The dirty secret of the minimum wage, though, is that it doesn’t help everyone. Any number of people are hurt, and many of them are the same workers the minimum wage was intended to benefit.”
Source: Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics
“It turns out that it is easier for an employer to prove that it did not hire a disabled worker for a reason unrelated to the worker’s disability than it is to prove that it fired the worker for such a reason. Consequently, the Americans with Disabilities Act actually led to a decrease in employment rates for the disabled. The law had exactly the opposite effect that lawmakers intended.”
Source: Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics
“The first steps toward gun control in the United States, though, were doubtlessly rooted in racism. The first gun control measures in this country were designed to keep firearms out of the hands of newly freed slaves upon conclusion of the Civil War.”
Source: Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics
“For what blessing may a man hope for but
An immortality in
The loving vigilance of death.”
“Politicians seek to win elections not by offering sound public policy that will yield good results, but by appealing to 50 percent plus one of the voters. The way they appeal to that many voters is by appealing to the median voter. But the median voter often wants something very different than do people with strong opinions on either side of an issue. Removing the rose-colored glasses that have us romanticizing what politics is is the first step to understanding politicians. Politicians seek first to maximize their own happiness, because that’s what all humans do. Understanding this sweeps away the 1950s civics class vision of the political process in favor of a vision that is a lot more realistic.”
Source: Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics