Stephen Kotkin

Bread and circuses fools them.

They have this false consciousness, but I know better, and I can be in charge, and I can get us to a better place.

Even along the way,

Bad things are going to happen.

Some people who are innocent are going to die or be arrested.

But this is the march of history.

This march of history is to peace and justice.

And who is going to stand in the way of that, especially when it empowers you personally so that you could never do this in the private sector.

Nobody could afford you this kind of power in the private sector.

and in a decentralized political system, in a federalized political system where nobody accumulates that much power.

Social engineering is always coercive, always coercive.

The issue is how much of the coercion is necessary

that we accept in the trade-off to right some of the things that are obviously wrong.

And they're arrested and executed, all of them.

Very few of those kind of people are going to survive.

The ones who publicly decry the failures of the system and its perverse and unintended consequences, the ones who decry the dictatorship as opposed to the freedom that Marx predicted would happen, right?

There are some people like that.

They're extremely courageous.

They're known to us.

I'm not the only one, but I feature some of them in my book.