Sublime

Why a democratic people is less capable of sustained effort than another.

We are used to understanding the battle lines of American politics as cleaving liberals who believe in a strong, active government from conservatives who doubt it. The truth is far more complicated. Liberals speak as if they believe in government and then pass policy after policy hamstringing what it can actually do.

The city’s government did little to help its people. The will to help was not the force that drove that government. That force was greed. During the fifteen years in which Red Mike Hylan and then Beau James Walker had been Chief Magistrate of America’s greatest city, the Tammany leaders who served under them had seemed motivated primarily by the

The problem is rather that the dramatically increasing level of federal involvement in society has outstripped its institutional capabilities.

Certainly, experts are indispensable. They cannot govern, however, because their perspective is limited by their expertise. But as a class they have come to rule the federal government’s relation to the United States.

cold-blooded need for control.

La démocratie est prise sous un feu croisé : par le haut avec la possible apparition d’un despote ; par le bas en raison de la tyrannie de l’opinion publique et du développement de l’individualisme au détriment du bien commun.

According to Rothbard, complete gridlock is the best one can hope for in Washington. A paralyzed government was fairly close to his anarchist ideal. In this vein, political insanity is not a bug; it’s a feature,