 As somebody with unconventional political views, I sometimes get criticized by people who say, Steve, your political theory is naive. It's an interesting criticism, because I do see naivete all over the political spectrum, especially from those who are on the traditional left-right spectrum. So let me tell you what I consider to be genuinely naive political beliefs that I'm still in the process of sloughing off myself. One, people care about the truth. This is, I think, a very naive idea. Politicians don't care about the truth. The general public doesn't care about the truth. The media doesn't care about the truth. Politics has a very weak connection with truth whatsoever. What people care about in politics is power, and it's specifically group power. So if your guy is in office, the truth probably doesn't matter, especially if he's done some crappy things. If your guy is not in office and the opposite party is in office, well, by George, then the truth becomes superficially important because you can use it as a bludgeon to knock the other person down and try to get your own group member in power. So to the extent truth matters, it's only until you get in power, and then truth doesn't matter. Similarly, another naive view that I used to hold up and tell fairly recently is that principles matter in politics and in political discussion, that when you listen to the Republican debates or the Democratic debates or the talking heads on TV, they always come back to these lofty principles, principles. Then once you've been watching the political system for long enough, you realize, oh, that's kind of a farce. They only say those things because they sound good so that they can't get elected. People, let's say the voting electorate only talks about principles for the most part because they think it makes them look better than the opposite party who is spy and listen without principles. If you need any empirical evidence of this, just take, for example, the story of the last 16 years from starting with George Bush. So George Bush got elected on this idea of having a being a conservative, having a humble foreign policy, and very shortly into his first term, he started some wars overseas. Conservatives went from supporting a humble foreign policy and not supporting nation-building to, yeah, man, if you're a patriot, we gotta be involved overseas and we gotta be involved in the Middle East to try to set up a democracy there. Very short period of time, we had people who were supposed to be small government turned into big government. At the same time, you also had a great number of people who were self-described liberals and Democrats. Be out in the streets marching against the Iraq war and against foreign interventions that war is not the answer. I can't believe the savage that George Bush is. We gotta stop this guy because he's immoral and killing people. And tell Barack Obama gets elected and also engages in a bunch of overseas meddling, namely invading Libya, bombing Yemen, getting involved in both sides of a civil war in Syria. Immediately, once the opposition power takes office, everybody goes numb. Somehow those anti-war protests disappear and we don't care about the plight of the innocent civilians who've been killed by drone strikes in places in the Middle East because our guy's in power. And then enter this current political election with Mr. Donald J. Trump, who by any actual analysis of his ideas is anything but a conservative. The man's something like a centrist Democrat and yet now conservatives, supposed conservatives, are supporting the man's executive orders, the idea that he's gonna rule by fiat, which they were upset about Barack Obama doing. This is what Donald Trump is doing and yet they're not putting up a fight because truth doesn't matter, principles don't matter. What matters is power. Now this is, I think, a much more mature way of viewing politics and you take this lens, you apply it historically, it's even got explanatory power. Then it doesn't really matter what era you're talking about, it's only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of any group of people that actually care about consistent application of principles, even when your person's in power and who care about the truth. Take another humorous example, Russia phobia from people on the left with Donald Trump. Only a few years ago, when Mitt Romney was running for president, he was lambasted by the establishment and by leftists for suggesting that Russia was a threat to the United States. They were mercilessly mocking him, of course, because he was running for the presidency. Fast forward a few years later and now we're in McCarthyism again where if you support Donald Trump in any way, you of course are being employed by the Russians and Russia hacked the elections and there's this coup that's happening and everybody's got Russia fever. Came out of totally out of left field, however, people have jumped on it because it's not about truth, not about principle, ain't about consistency, that's for sure, it's about power and whatever you can, if you disagree with Donald Trump, whatever you can sink your teeth into, you sink your teeth into and criticize the man. I even see this with my own libertarian community that for a while, there was a lot of people who were big on the Constitution. They were Ron Paul supporters. Ron Paul seems to be the only exception to what I'm talking about, of people not caring about truth or principle. The man actually did, but he's the one exception to the gang of 435, as he's known. But I see this from libertarians who now that Trump is in power, they view him as being able to smash the establishment, even if he does so by trampling over individual rights. And suddenly libertarians who used to be anti-government, anti-establishment, anti-central power, are now saying, well, if the ends justify the means, maybe we can smash our opposition party a little bit and not criticize them so much. So I think that the truly naive are those who have hope and trust in the political system that take these politicians and the media at their word, that when these debates are going on and politicians just quacking about empty platitude that make no difference in the world that they're not gonna act on, act on, it's a sham. It's a charade. It's the suckers who believe them. The suckers who actually think that they're telling the truth are gonna enact some lofty idealistic policy. I don't think that's the existing system of government. I think it's far more corrupt and hopeless than that. I think that the more skepticism and cynicism you have towards government, the more mature your political philosophy likely is.