Politics & Power Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line lands like a tossed-off proverb, then reveals itself as a booby trap for democratic self-congratulation. It’s built on a nursery-simple fable - Peter, Paul, robbery, repayment - that smuggles in a brutal point: political legitimacy can be manufactured by redistribution that creates grateful beneficiaries, even when the mechanism is coercive. The wit is in the calm “can always depend,” as if we’re discussing weather, not ethics. Shaw’s cynicism isn’t aimed only at the state; it’s aimed at the human talent for rationalizing self-interest as justice.

The subtext is less “taxation is theft” (a reading later libertarians love) than “votes follow incentives.” Shaw, a Fabian socialist with a flair for provocation, understood that modern government runs on coalitions and that coalitions often form around who gets to be Paul. The line needles the comforting idea that popular support equals moral rightness; a government can be “supported” precisely because it has learned how to distribute other people’s burdens with rhetorical cleanliness.

Context matters: Shaw wrote in an era when welfare-state arguments, labor politics, and expanding suffrage were reshaping Britain. His work routinely punctured pieties on all sides, including his own. By framing redistribution as “robs,” he forces a moral accounting that reformers sometimes dodge; by making Paul’s support inevitable, he points to a structural temptation, not a single scandal. It’s a short sentence with a long shadow: democracy’s sweetest promise - helping people - and its oldest vulnerability - buying allegiance - share the same toolkit.