Quotes from From Subsistence To Exchange

By Peter Bauer (2000)

• Extensive politicization of life enhances the prizes of political power and thus the stakes in the fight for them. This in turn exacerbates political tension . . . And because peoples’ economic fortunes come to depend so largely on political and administrative decisions, the attention, energies, and resources of forward-looking, perceptive, and ambitious people are diverted from economic activity to political machination. These consequences are manifest in many societies, especially in multiracial communities. Politicization of life, often pursued in the name of equality, has in many countries brought about a situation in which the question of who controls the government has become a matter of overriding importance, even a matter of life and death to millions.#
  Politics
• Hong Kong should remind us that in the modern world a nonelective government can be more limited than an elected one and that, for most ordinary people, it is arguably more important whether government is limited or unlimited than whether it is elective or nonelective.#
  Politics
• Until well into the nineteenth century Catholics, Jews, and Nonconformists [in Britain] could not enter politics or, for that matter, Oxford or Cambridge. . . . Their economic success shows how misleading it is to think that exclusion from political activity necessarily inhibits the economic prospects of a person or group.#
  Politics