How Evil Are Politicians? - by Bryan Caplan
ISBN: 9798804049608Date read: 2025-06-27
How strongly I recommend it: 7/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
my notes
Ordinary people have no obligation to devote their lives to the study of moral philosophy and social science.
But anyone who wields political power over thousands of human beings – much less millions – absolutely does.
Anyone in a position of power has a greatly elevated moral obligation to act with extreme moral trepidation at all times.
Political systems reward politicians for seeming good by conventional standards.
What economics teaches is not that greed is good, but that good incentives transform this questionable motive into awesome results.
Greed plus property rights plus competition plus rationality plus reputation is good.
Greed alone is film noir.
Demagogue: political leader who tries to get support by making false claims and promises and using arguments based on emotion rather than reason.
Demagogue: political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument.
Demagogue: political orator or leader who gains favor by pandering to or exciting the passions and prejudices of the audience rather than by using rational argument.
When the truth sounds bad, people bend the truth.
When all straightforward answers sound bad, similarly, people refuse to answer.
And since politics revolves around sounding good rather than doing good, politicians habitually dodge hard questions.
During World War I, who was worse – the Germans or the Russians? The two sides were moral approximates.
The very fact that people have strong emotions about recent and ongoing conflicts is a strong reason to discount their judgment.
When a conflict is recent or ongoing, we usually lack a great deal of not-yet-released relevant information.
Democrats and Republicans will angrily protest being lumped together because in their eyes, the differences between their parties are “huge.”
In 200 years, how big will these “huge differences” look to historians?
During the Wars of Religion, Catholics and Protestants mutually called each other servants of the Antichrist. Now can plainly see that both sides were unhinged.
Governments that vocally proclaim their compassion for the meek commit a grossly disproportionate share of mass murder.
Bleeding-heart rhetoric is disguised hate speech.
People often resent first, then rationalize said resentment later.
While extreme power-lusters are a small fraction of humanity, they are a large fraction of successful politicians.
We are awful at the detection of extreme power-lusters.
When we hear flowery words, our impulse is to take them at face value, instead of remembering, “That’s just what a power-luster would say – and politics is packed with power-lusters.”
Most people don’t know enough social science to begin to weigh policies’ overall consequences.
So they mentally substitute easier questions like, “Would I be happy if employers gave low-skilled workers a raise?”
Moral reasoning is hard, so most people do little moral reasoning.
Instead they perform a mental substitution.
Rather than wonder, “What’s morally right?,” they ask, “What’s socially acceptable?”
This seems fairly harmless, but how do you know whether your society is evil?
Evil test: Would it be all right if someone did that to you?
Ordinary people in these societies could easily figure out that their societies were deeply evil – and they should at least have covertly strived to avoid complicity.
People routinely break stupid laws.
Those who say they always follow the law don’t actually study the body of laws to ensure they don’t accidentally break one.
Censorship is not to suppress the truth – which has little mass appeal anyway.
Censorship is to monopolize pretty lies.
Only the powers-that-be can freely make absurdly self-aggrandizing claims.
People like to say and think whatever superficially sounds good.
Censorship allows rulers to exploit this mental flaw.
If no one else can make absurd lies, a trite slogan like, “Let’s unite to fight for a fantastic future!” carries great force.
Truthful critics would have to make crowd-displeasing objections like,
“Maybe competition will bring us a brighter future than unity?”
“Who exactly are we fighting?”
“Precisely how fantastic of a future are we talking about?”
Dictators make One Big Political Lie mandatory.
Free speech lets a Thousand Political Lies Bloom.
Proponents of government action are prone to hyperbole because it’s rhetorically effective.
You need wild claims and flowery words to whip up public enthusiasm for government action.
Sober weighing of probability, cost, and benefit damns with faint praise – and fails to overcome public apathy.
How anyone can get a good job:
Happily settle for your first tolerable job offer, but only temporarily.
Once you’re secure in your new position, keep looking for a better opportunity.
Something’s bound to come along eventually – and when it does, you can bargain with confidence.
Virtually any job yields valuable experience and career connections.
As a result, you have more than happenstance on your side.
Month after month, year after year, the odds tilt more and more in your favor – especially if you strive to impress your whole social network with your professionalism.
The tension between socialism and self-help:
The power-hungry don’t want people to think they’re able to fix their own problems.
If individuals can help themselves by doing a good job, learning new skills, making friends, and keeping their eyes peeled, what do they need rulers for?
I blame people very freely.
I blame people for being impulsive, lazy, conformist, stubborn, hot-tempered, hostile, and naive.
I blame people for being too dogmatic.
I blame them for being so open-minded their brains fall out of their heads.
If determinism were true, then moral blame would never be justified.
When I blame people for their problems, Democrats and liberals are prone to object at a fundamental level.
One fundamental objection rests on determinism:
Since everyone is determined to act precisely as he does, it is always false to say, “There were reasonable steps he could have taken to avoid his problem.”
Another fundamental objection rests on utilitarianism:
We should always do whatever maximizes social utility, even if that means taxing the blameless to subsidize the blameworthy.
A successful politician who broke ranks with his party would probably lose his job.
But he could easily find alternative employment that didn’t require him to spurn the poor, scoff at climate science, and makeup stories about WMDs.
Stop heinous activity, keep your upper-middle-class lifestyle.
Quite reasonable.
If you can blame politicians for lying, why can’t you blame alcoholics for lying to their families about their drinking?
If you can blame leaders for supporting bad policies because they don’t feel like searching for another job, why can’t you blame able-bodied people on disability because they don’t feel like searching for another job?
Unless you’re willing to bite the bullet of involuntary organ donation, “good overall consequences” are insufficient to morally justify war.
If your targets perceive your behavior as inappropriate, mean, or downright evil, people who previously bore you no ill will now start looking for a chance to give you a taste of your own medicine.
Preparation for war often causes war by frightening and provoking.
Anyone who says “By any means necessary” is, by implication, saying, “If it takes 80 million deaths for us to win, then so be it.”
But thankfully few have the stomach for it.
If your ideas are bad, hypocrisy makes them less bad.
Michael Huemer is my favorite living philosopher.
A large society is likely to have rationalists.
Free speech allows these truth-seekers to ask thoughtful questions and propose reasonable answers, even if the thoughtful questions are awkward and the reasonable answers are scary.
While the rationalists are likely to remain the minority, free speech preserves their existence.
Free speech lets the best and brightest produce and consume truth, even if most people hold the truth in disdain.
Immigrants work hard to make a better life for themselves and their families.
Immigrants contribute far more to the world than they could possibly have done at home.
All complaints leveled against immigrants also apply to many natives:
Native women who enter the workforce make life harder for native men competing for the same jobs.
Low-income natives with children cost taxpayers money.
Anything immigrants do makes their critics angry.
Critics are angry when immigrants work, and angry when they’re on welfare.
Critics are angry if immigrants are visible, and angry if immigrants keep to themselves.
Critics are angry if immigrants increase housing prices and angry if immigrants reduce housing prices.
Decent folk should be uncomfortable with democracy. Why?
Because most voters are nationalists, and nationalist voters consistently do to foreigners what low-income voters almost never do to the rich:
Strip them en masse of their basic rights to work, reside, and travel. Why?
For the flimsiest of reasons, like trapping millions of foreigners in dire poverty and bloody repression probably makes our safety net somewhat stronger.
Taking offense when a speaker intends no offense is rude.
If someone happens to step on your emotional toes, civility impels you to suppress the urge to take it personally.
Free goods are almost automatically inefficient.
Unless the marginal social cost of the product miraculously happens to be zero, setting a price of zero leads to socially wasteful behavior.