Friday, July 13, 2012

The quote of the day...

...is from a piece written in January by Matthew Yglesias. (It was recommended in Ezra Klein's Wonkbook this morning.) The article is about Mitt Romney and outsourcing and is really quite balanced. But the money quote is at the end of the last paragraph (my emphasis): 

On the other hand, politics isn’t business. Helping retired people or badly maimed veterans with their health care needs isn’t “efficient.” If you were a businessperson, you’d do anything to keep those veterans out of your hospital. It’s not the job of a businessman to feel sad about the consequences of cutbacks for your marriage, your employees, your grandma, or your community. But it should be the president’s job. The inherently destructive nature of a dynamic market economy means that lots of people are suffering on any given day thanks to forces beyond their control. Romney’s strength is that he understands those forces better than anyone in the race, but his weakness is that he doesn’t understand the suffering.

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