“The federal budget suggests that just over 20 percent of what the national government does involves the provision of public goods, and the rest involves taking from A and giving to B because politicians want it that way. This isn’t

Political projects by definition exist to mandate outcomes that are different than those that people would choose for themselves if left to their own devices. It was for this reason that the economist Murray Rothbard famously argued that political action

“The charade that is fundamental to the political game—pretending that politicians have wealth that they can give away to favored constituencies rather than wealth that they can expropriate from one group of people for the enjoyment of others—does not work

“That is because the cost of government is not the annual toll in taxes and debt, but the forgone benefits that we would have derived from using all of that capital in innovative and productive ways. The $1 trillion that

“Because we cannot irrefutably establish the superiority of our first principles to the satisfaction of the general public—because there is no real consensus—political entrepreneurs have been obliged to come up with arguments for forcing others to consent to their principles