Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, quoted in New York magazine “Intelligencer”:
If you have been in an Uber car and gotten pulled over and had the car seized out from under the driver when you were like in the middle of a trip that you were otherwise having a good time on, you might be a little bit radicalized. You might all of a sudden think, Wait a minute, what just happened, and why did it happen? And then you might discover what the taxi companies did over the last 50 years to wire up city governments and all the corruption that’s taken place. And you might say, “Wait a minute.” There’s this myth that government regulation is well intentioned and benign, and implemented properly. That’s the myth. And then when people actually run into this in the real world, they’re, “Oh […] I didn’t realize.”
One of my favorite things of all time is George McGovern, who ran for president in ’72 as a hyperliberal. Of course Nixon [beat him badly]. And in 1992 he wrote a column for The Wall Street Journal which told the story of his life after he left politics, when he bought an inn in Connecticut. And he said, “Oh my God, I didn’t realize.” And the “Oh my God, I didn’t realize” was: I did not realize what a layered impact 50 or 100 years of regulations and laws applied on small-business owners actually meant.
One Comment
I remember George McGovern’s article about his motel fiasco. Was he becoming a “neo-liberal”? My impression, however, was that he drifted back to the Left in his later years.