Thursday, 24 February 2022

Politics... "making your friends happy by making their enemies suffer."


Image by Scott McCloud

"Cruelty is the main emotion that politicians pander to. And cruelty is what every politician strives to deliver. They don’t want to make everyone happy. They want to make their friends happy by making their enemies suffer."
          ~ Bryan Caplan, from his post 'Politics is Cruelty'


1 comment:

MarkT said...

Yes. There's also a contingent who say they believe in freedom, but it's not primarily because freedom allows them to make themselves happy, but because they want a weapon to make politicians they don't like suffer.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Sometimes making yourselves happy requires politicians to suffer. But you know there's something's wrong when the suffering of the politicians becomes more important than their own happiness.