Walkaway: A Novel

That’s why you never hear politicians talking about ‘citizens,’ it’s all ‘taxpayers,’ as though the salient fact of your relationship to the state is how much you pay. Like the state was a business and citizenship was a loyalty program that rewarded you for your custom with roads and health care.

His whole identity rests on the idea that the system is legit and that he earned

Which was very forward of her and a good walkaway kind of question, in that it violated every norm of default.

That’s what walkaway is—not walking out on ‘society,’ but acknowledging that in zottaworld, we’re problems to be solved, not citizens. That’s why you never hear politicians talking about ‘citizens,’ it’s all ‘taxpayers,’ as though the salient fact of your relationship to the state is how much you pay. Like the state was a business and citizenship w

his position into it fair and square and everyone else is a whiner.”

The opportunity cost of not having the right salad fork when she wanted a salad was lower than the opportunity cost of not being able to go where she wanted to go without hauling mountains of pain-in-the-back stuff.

that justifies their rewards from Government Inc.

Making other people feel like assholes was a terrible way to get them to stop acting like assholes.

He recognized this belief was driven by a theory of humanity that most people were good, but also by a horrible, oppressive loneliness and nonspecific horniness.