“There is a price to pay for being wrong in politics, but the effects are widely dispersed and time-delayed. And the pain of being wrong in politics is likely to fall on somebody other than the politician. Partly this insulation is by design: You may be confident that you will never meet a U.S. senator who lives in a federal housing project, earns the federal minimum wage, or relies upon Social Security for his retirement income. What holds true at the national level holds true at the local level: About 40 percent of the public school teachers in Chicago send their own children to private schools, insulating their families from the effects of political policies for which the teachers themselves are in no small part responsible through the political actions of their union. Police officers tend to keep guns at home for self-defense rather than rely upon the officers of any particular shift to protect them and their families. Timothy Geithner, who as Treasury secretary had final authority over the Internal Revenue Service, famously didn’t pay his taxes. Politicians are always building utopias, but the curious thing is that none of them wants to live there.”

Excerpt From: Kevin D. Williamson. “The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome.” HarperCollins, 2013-05-01. iBooks.

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