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Quote by Antony Davies

“Government is a powerful tool, but not a magic one. And once people realize that unintended outcomes are the rule rather than the exception, they can begin to temper their expectations as to what government can actually achieve. Because while government cannot accomplish all things, the belief and expectation that it can are probably the most dangerous beliefs and expectations that we have as members of a political body. Every sentence that begins with, “the government should…” implies the use of coercion. And the coercion that follows is not always worth what it costs, in terms of money, time, emotional distress, or human dignity. The trick is in knowing under what circumstances the reality of what coercion can achieve is more desirable than the reality of what cooperation can achieve.”

Quote by Antony Davies

Book:Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics
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Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics

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Antony Davies

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“In the end, when voters are criticized they are criticized on only two grounds: they are ignorant, or they are unconcerned. What voters are is rationally ignorant. There are any number of things that they do not know, and given the various sorts of voting and information costs they face, it is perfectly reasonable that they remain ignorant of these things. After all, they have more important things to do, things like mowing the lawn, picking up their children from soccer practice, making dinner, and worrying about paying bills. The problem is that, in our idealized way of looking at the political process, we generally assume that voters are something that they are not: concerned with all things in equal measure, and ready, willing, and able to act on that concern.”

GovernmentPoliticsSocietyEconomics
Book:Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics
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“As a result of creating a victimless crime, the United States has become, in some ways (and especially in some places and directed toward some people), a police state. Since 2003, more than 10,000 police officers nationwide have been assigned full time to various drug task forces. This is, coincidentally, the size of a military division, and it is approximately the same number of soldiers that the United States had stationed in Afghanistan in 2017.”

GovernmentPoliticsSocietyEconomics
Author:Davies
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“In addition to the nation’s twelve wars, both declared like World War II and undeclared like the Korean conflict, the United States has fought three others beginning in the 20th century. They have all been declared, in a way, but they ultimately share more in common with the Vietnam War than with any other. Enemies are ill defined, victory is indescribable (or indeed, impossible), strategies and tactics seem to change with the political winds, and resolve, on the part of both those who fight and those who endure, has been replaced with a form of tired resignation. For all of these reasons, these wars, the wars on poverty, drugs, and terror, are unwinnable. And because they are unwinnable, they will also tend to be perpetual.”

GovernmentPoliticsSocietyEconomics
Book:Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics
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“Compare Socrates then, one of the smartest men who ever lived, to just about every member of the political class today. Political orientation scarcely matters. Nearly everyone, Republican, Democrat, or Independent, who aspires to any sort of political office from small town mayor to President of the United States, begins his political journey with the belief that he knows best how other people should live. And it is the goal of every politician to inflict his knowledge on the rest of us. And why wouldn’t it be? If they really know how people should live, why wouldn’t they try to impose their ideas on the rest of us?”

GovernmentPoliticsSocietyEconomics
Book:Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics
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“When politicians talk about raising the minimum wage, they talk about the single working mother who is holding down two jobs to support her family. The reality is that the average minimum wage worker is part time and lives in a household with a family income of more than $53,000, which is about the United States median household income.”

GovernmentPoliticsSocietyEconomics
Book:Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics
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“In both the public and the private sectors, one can find people who are altruistic, selfish, smart, stupid, capable, incompetent, and just about every other description. They are all drawn from the same mass of people in roughly the same proportions. What is true of all of these people is that they pursue what they believe will make them happy, and they respond to the incentives that surround them. When those incentives are tied directly to their job performance, people’s quest for happiness encourages them to behave in ways that satisfy the people for whom they perform their jobs. But when people’s incentives are tied to something else, like voters avoiding the cost of becoming informed, or politicians attracting more voters, or bureaucrats making their jobs less difficult, the outcomes that emerge can be very different from the outcomes people had in mind when they empowered government to pursue those outcomes in the first place. Consider the typical experiences with the Post Office versus FedEx, Amtrak versus Southwest, applying for a driver’s license versus applying for a credit card, or applying for federal financial aid versus applying for a bank loan.”

GovernmentPoliticsSocietyEconomics
Book:Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics
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“Yet only the economic in the narrow sense will allow us to get beyond the economic. By redeploying the resources capitalism has so considerately stored up for us, socialism can allow the economic to take more of a backseat. It will not evaporate, but it will become less obtrusive. To enjoy a sufficiency of goods means not to have to think about money all the time. It frees us for less tedious pursuits. Far from being obsessed with economic matters, Marx saw them as a travesty of true human potential. He wanted society where the economic no longer monopolised so much time and energy. That our ancestors should have been so preoccupied with material matters is understandable. When you can produce only a slim economic surplus, or scarcely any surplus at all, you will perish without ceaseless hard labour. Capitalism, however, generates the sort of surplus that really could be used to increase leisure on a sizeable scale. The irony is that it creates this wealth in a way that demands constant accumulation and expansion, and thus constant labour. It also creates it in ways that generate poverty and hardship. It is a self-thwarting system. As a result, modern men and women, surrounded by an affluence unimaginable to hunter-gatherers, ancient slaves or feudal serfs, end up working as long and hard as these predecessors ever did. Marx's work is all about human enjoyment. The good life for him is not one of labour but of leisure.”

PoliticsSocietySocialismLabourMarxismLeftistHuman Fulfilment
Book:Why Marx Was Right
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“But fairness is not the only, or even the most important, consideration in law: the law is not always fair. Contracts are not fair, not always. But sometimes they are necessary, these unfairnesses, because they are necessary for the proper functioning of society. In this class you will learn the difference between what is fair and what is just, and, as important, between what is fair and what is necessary. You will learn about the obligations we have to one another as members of society, and how far society should go in enforcing those obligations. You will learn to see your life—all of our lives—as a series of agreements, and it will make you rethink not only the law but this country itself, and your place in it. pp.116-7”

LawSocietyContracts
Book:A Little Life
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