This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 10th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The winner-take-all nature of politics makes us course.

Far from compelling us to cultivate tolerance for our fellows and their choices, we

instead can begin to see some people not as those with whom we share humanity, but as enemies

to be defeated or worse.

And that's not a recipe for living in harmony.

Alexander William Salter is an associate professor of economics at Texas Tech University.

Aaron Ross Powell is the founder of Cato's

Libertarianism.org project. We spoke last month.

Alexander, why don't you, I'm just, I'm gonna take off whatever I'm about to say here but give us the basic idea that in a sense what politics does to us.

Absolutely. I think that when we ask of politics more than it can properly deliver, it makes us cranky,

suspicious, and all around worse citizens.

We get this idea because we're told it through multiple outlets that government is just another word for the things that we do together.

The only problem is it's just not true.

There are multiple avenues for collective action in society, fraternal organizations, churches,

universities, that sort of thing. Government is the only entity that can force people to act

collectively even when they would not want to and because we use

violence to quash dissent through the state we have to be very very careful about

what things we even want to do politically.

Aaron this is a long-standing point of yours and if there's one point I can expect

Aaron Powell to make at any given moment it is that politics makes us worse. What is it about the state that turns us

...