hurt

Politics is hard, and one of the most intractable rules that governs the implementation of any policy is: When trying to help people you want to help, you will inevitably hurt people you don’t want to hurt. The political True Believer denies this rule in one of two ways. The traditional way is to insist that, in fact, no one will be hurt by their preferred policies, that their preferred policies are so awesome because they come with lots of benefits and no costs at all. The more recent alternative is to declare that, actually, we really do want to hurt the people who’ll be hurt by the implementation of our preferred policies. They deserve the pain.