Power: The Perfect Drug
Power: The Perfect Drug
A conversation with Barry Green on Western Tourist Radio
“Power is intoxicating — and the more it’s centralised, the harder it is for those who hold it to let go.”
I recently joined Barry Green on Western Tourist Radio (87.6FM) for a wide-ranging conversation about government, markets, censorship, and the quiet cultural drift reshaping Western democracies.
While the discussion touched on familiar policy terrain, what made it valuable was where it ultimately landed: not on laws or programs, but on power itself — how it accumulates, how it corrupts judgment, and why societies repeatedly underestimate its effects.
This wasn’t a conversation about left versus right.
It was a conversation about limits.
What we explored
Power doesn’t correct failure — it compounds it
A recurring assumption in public debate is that when markets fail, the State must step in to “fix” the problem.
But this framing quietly ignores a more uncomfortable reality:
markets do not fail in isolation from power — they are distorted by it.
When governments regulate, subsidise, license, mandate, or protect incumbents, they are not observing market failure from the outside — they are participants shaping outcomes. Once the State places its thumb on the scale, it becomes impossible to distinguish genuine market failure from policy-induced distortion.
The result is a self-reinforcing loop:
State intervention creates dysfunction, which is then used to justify more intervention.
Centralised authority erodes judgment
One of the most dangerous effects of concentrated power is not corruption in the dramatic sense — but moral outsourcing.
As authority moves upward, individuals and families are trained to defer judgment rather than exercise it. Responsibility is transferred from people to systems, from parents to policies, from conscience to compliance.
Over time, societies lose something essential:
the expectation that ordinary people must make difficult decisions themselves.
Censorship isn’t about safety — it’s about control
We also touched on censorship, not as a technical issue, but as a cultural signal.
Censorship always arrives wrapped in concern — safety, harm prevention, misinformation — yet its structural effect is the same across history: it narrows the range of acceptable thought while expanding the authority of those who decide what may be said.
The danger isn’t merely that some speech is restricted.
It’s that power becomes the arbiter of truth, rather than something truth must continually challenge.
The family as the last brake on power
Where institutions centralise, families decentralise.
Families are one of the few remaining places where responsibility is learned organically — through consequence, care, failure, and repair — rather than imposed procedurally.
When the State displaces families as the primary site of judgment, something irreplaceable is lost: not efficiency, but formation.
A society can survive bad policies.
It cannot survive the erosion of the people capable of resisting them.
Why this conversation matters
What struck me most in this interview wasn’t disagreement — it was how often modern debates talk around power rather than about it.
We argue endlessly over programs and policies, while ignoring the deeper question:
What kind of people must exist for freedom to survive at all?
Without restraint, power always expands.
Without culture, law becomes brittle.
Without families, responsibility has nowhere to land.
Watch the full conversation
The full interview is embedded below for those who want to listen in full.
If you’re interested in how power operates beneath politics — and why freedom ultimately depends on limits rather than intentions — this conversation is worth your time.
If you’d like personalised help applying the ideas in my work — for your family, your work, or your online presence — I offer a small number of private advisory sessions. No jargon, no overwhelm. Just clear thinking suited to your situation.
