Tuesday, February 09, 2016

"Eles assustam-me"

They Scare Me, por Bryan Caplan:

Occasionally, though, I wonder: What would happen if Mormons were a solid majority of the U.S. population?  Maybe they'd be as wonderful as ever, but I readily picture a sinister metamorphosis.  Given enough power, even Mormons might embrace a brutal fundamentalism.  Despite my lovely experiences with Mormons, they scare me.

To be fair, they're hardly alone.  You know who else scares me?  Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, and atheists.  Sunnis, Shiites, Catholics, and Protestants.  Whites, blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and American Indians.  Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, Marxists, and reactionaries.  Even libertarians scare me a bit.  Why?  Because given enough power, there's a serious chance they'll do terrible things.  Different terrible things, no doubt.  But terrible nonetheless.

If you're afraid of every group, though, shouldn't you support whatever group has the minimum chance of doing terrible things once it's firmly in charge?   Not at all.  There's another path: Try to prevent any group from being firmly in charge.  In the long-run, the best way to do this is to make every group a small minority - to split society into such small pieces that everyone abandons hope of running society

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