Politics & Power Quote by Austin O'Malley

A clean little cruelty sits inside O'Malley's farmyard metaphor: both the statesman and the politician treat the public like livestock, but only one pretends the animal survives the transaction. To shear a sheep is to take something renewable - wool - with at least a nominal duty of care. To skin it is to cash out the whole body in one brutal, final harvest. The line works because it refuses the comforting civics-class distinction between governance and power-grabbing; it replaces it with an economic relationship: extraction.

O'Malley, writing in an era when mass politics was consolidating around machines, patronage, and sensational press, aims at a particular Gilded Age cynicism. "Politician" here isn't a neutral job title; it's a type: the operator who sees the crowd as a resource to be worked until depleted. "Statesman" is no saint either. The shears still cut. The public is still shorn. The difference is time horizon: stewardship versus liquidation, policy as maintenance versus politics as smash-and-grab.

The subtext is as pointed as it is bleak: voters often tolerate shearing because it's packaged as necessary (taxes, compromise, incrementalism), while skinning arrives dressed up as populism, emergency, or efficiency. O'Malley's own scientific background sharpens the aphorism's logic. It's an almost clinical model of incentives and outcomes: when leaders stop thinking in cycles and start thinking in hauls, civic life becomes a carcass economy.