"You know, I used to live in Russia where you had officers in the military opening up the warehouses at night and taking weapons out and putting them into a truck and selling them to foreign powers. That type of stuff doesn't happen in the United States. We still have a very functioning and relatively civil society."

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Here's the positive scenario: that something has been going wrong in American society. You see it in wage growth, opioid abuse, many other social indicators, as you know. Sometimes it's better to get the bad reaction to that over with quickly while your civil society still is strong and you can react and respond and protest, and you know, four or eight years from now, make another decision, and maybe it's better to have that happen in 2017 than 20 years later when some of our problems are worse and our national mood is worse.

— Tyler Cowen