Anti-government rhetoric and ideology have created paralysis in which government cannot act effectively even when it is the only actor poised to address a problem.

There is no society on earth without a government; without one you would be invaded and end up paying taxes to someone else's government, so the real question is not whether to have a government but how to build a good one, which takes long sustained effort.

The main source of government abuse is dependence on campaign contributions, which forces legislators to serve donors over constituents; fixing this should be 'job one' for building better government.

The left's argument that employers would force dangerous conditions without regulation fails the 'no cash on the table' test: if a safety device worth $100/week to a worker costs only $50/week, the employer profits by installing it and cutting wages, or a rival employer could cherry-pick workers by offering it—so market forces install all cost-justified safety devices.

The housing bubble unfolded as a positional arms race: relaxed credit terms let people bid more for houses, and because good schools are concentrated in expensive neighborhoods, parents had to borrow imprudently just to hold their relative position in the school-quality hierarchy, not because of greed for granite countertops.

Current high government expenditures as a share of GDP are largely a temporary aberration driven by automatic stabilizers (Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance) triggered by a distressed labor market, not a structural rise in government's share.

U.S. government spending has grown more modestly than international standards, reflecting American anti-government sentiment; whether this is good or bad is contestable, but countries whose citizens trust their governments tend to be the places people would most want to move to.

Demand for government intervention arises chiefly when people 'bump up against each other' and harm one another; America's historical western frontier let people escape such conflicts by moving away, but having run out of frontier, the U.S. must now confront these conflicts directly like Europe.

Competition favors individual actors, and while this sometimes benefits the larger group (mimicking the invisible hand), in many cases it works against the group's interest by driving wasteful arms races.

In polygynous species, competition among males for mates selects for ever-larger body mass (e.g., 6,000-pound bull elephant seals) far beyond what is optimal for males as a group, producing a runaway arms race they would collectively prefer to escape but cannot.

Gazelle speed is a Darwinian trait that mimics the invisible hand: a mutation making an individual gazelle faster benefits both that gazelle and the population as it spreads—analogous to a cost-saving market innovation that diffuses and ultimately benefits consumers as competition drives prices down.

A century from now economists will name Charles Darwin, not Adam Smith, as the intellectual founder of the discipline, because Darwin's vision of the competitive process is more accurate and descriptive than Smith's (as channeled by neoclassical economics).

The financial services industry channels the smartest graduates into zero-sum competition to predict price moves microseconds faster than rivals, which produces private gain but no social product—evidenced by 45% of Princeton's pre-crash graduating class entering finance.

The trillions misallocated into housing demonstrate something deeply wrong with capital allocation in the financial system; this was not a mere mistake but a Darwinian dynamic, while the banking industry's deregulation was bought through high-return political donations.

Workers value extra income not only for absolute consumption but for relative (positional) consumption; since any worker can take a riskier, higher-paying job to bid up in the school-district hierarchy, the equilibrium has everyone selling more safety than they would in isolation, only to bid up house prices—leaving them with less safety and no positional gain, which justifies considering safety regulation.

Safety is inherently a cost-benefit question rather than a binary 'safe/unsafe' state, demonstrated by the fact that no rational person checks their brakes every day; the wise approach reduces risk to a prudent level and spends the savings on other valued things.

The income tax should be scrapped entirely and replaced with a steeply progressive consumption tax (income minus documented savings), which would stop penalizing savings and, by taxing high-end consumption heavily, reduce wasteful positional spending arms races without making people less happy because the social standard shifts accordingly.

Demonstrating that the market equilibrium is suboptimal is not sufficient to justify intervention; one must show the proposed government remedy will actually do better than doing nothing, assuming government is also imperfect and its intervention might be worse.

Adam Smith never claimed markets always produce good results; he was circumspect, noting that actors with market power inevitably conspire to defraud workers and customers, thus requiring government to rein in exploitation—reservations that map onto modern left-wing critiques.

Milton Friedman endorsed an expenditure (consumption) tax as the ideal way to raise revenue when government needs it, having proposed it in a 1943 American Economic Review article as the best way to fund the World War II effort—indicating common ground between left and right on using consumption taxation.