John Hood, writing today at carolinajournal.com about Charlottesville and the larger issue of politics today:
You see, politics is at its root a search for ways to accommodate strongly divergent points of view. If you don’t like a certain business, charity, church, or private group, you can just disassociate yourself from it. Governments are different. They produce coercive policies and collect coercive taxes. If your view of what government should do doesn’t prevail, the only way to disassociate yourself from it is to leave the locality, state, or nation in question.
Because people will never see their views prevail all the time, they have to be willing to live under policies they dislike if they want to continue living in their communities. But when their heads are pumped full of conspiracy theories, bigotries, and revolutionary ideologies, some come to believe that they shouldn’t have to either tolerate difference or exit — that there must be a third alternative.
Read John Hood’s entire piece on Charlottesville here.
