These seem like platitudes to me. After all, if you believe in people, you can use that to note that it is through democratic government, as well as the market, that people can empower themselves.
And, really this claiming of no tradeoffs seems in practice to be used to justify policies that conveniently and unambiguously benefit the wealthy but not the poor and middle class. Of course, there are tradeoffs and winners and losers in any policy choices, at least at the margin! Hell, James Madison talked about the conflict of competing interests in some of the Federalist Papers that I read in college.
On this we agree. But, in practice, unfortunately, there is a lot of opposition to this. At work a few years ago, I was talking to a colleague about a talk I had gone to where the main point was this problem of majority poverty neighborhoods and majority poverty schools and the speaker’s conclusion was the necessity of spreading lower-income housing throughout higher income communities. This colleague, who a few minutes earlier had told me that he thought any kid who was motivated enough could get a good education no matter what the surroundings, then proceeded to deride this plan because it would mean his kids would be exposed to a few of these lower income kids at their wealthy suburban school. I was dumbfounded…I said (or at least thought), "So you mean to tell me that you think a kid growing up in a majority-poverty environment can do just fine and dandy but your own kids are so fragile that they are going to be adversely and detrimentally effected by having just a few of those kids around in their environment!?! " It was very frustrating. But, alas, people are very protective as far as their own kids are concerned.