7 Quotes by Jason Brennan

Professors are nerds who like to discuss nerdy things with fellow nerds.

Each of us has our own life to lead. So long as we respect others’ rights, we must be permitted to live as we see fit.

To justify democracy takes more work: we have to explain why some people should have the right to impose bad decisions on others. In particular, as I will show in later chapters, to justify democracy, we’ll need to explain why it’s legitimate to impose incompetently made decisions on innocent people.

Democracy does not empower individuals. It disempowers individuals and instead empowers the majority of the moment. In.

Since individual votes don’t matter and hating other people is fun, voters have every incentive to vote in ways that express their tribal biases.

We should hope for even less participation, not more. Ideally, politics would occupy only a small portion of the average person’s attention. Ideally, most people would fill their days with painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain, or perhaps football, NASCAR, tractor pulls, celebrity gossip, and trips to Applebee’s. Most people, ideally, would not worry about politics at all.3.

In civil society, most of my fellow citizens are my civic friends, part of a great cooperative scheme. One of the repugnant features of democracy is that it transforms these people into threats to my well-being. My fellow citizens exercise power over me in risky and incompetent ways. This makes them my civic enemies.