ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
why wouldn't similar reasoning prevent them from considering the Price Force to be like an army or navy?
Because you're not letting it! I want to be able to have (good) reasoning that does this! (Not terrible reasoning like "I'm imagining hypothetical people, and my imagination is telling me that they think things.") But you're telling me that it's absolutely Constitutionally allowed, because of the spending clause.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
No, it's an argument "people don't think that".
Facts not in evidence. Especially facts from our hypothetical universe. You can't build a Constitutional test that is just your imagination of what some hypothetical people might think. I want to know what the Constitution says. I happen to think that something like textualism + original public meaning is approximately right. I think a school of Constitutional interpretation that is "I imagined in my head what I think some people I imagined might think in a hypothetical" is part of how we've gotten into this mess, because it's much easier to change people's imaginations than it is to change the Constitution.
The government can spend money
This is precisely the point of why I started this all the way back here. People have gotten this stupid idea in their brain that the spending clause authorizes literally any spending that the government chooses to do. This is just simply not true. There are, indeed, precedents to this effect already. My point is that people need to be real about this.
Moreover, this undercuts literally everything else you've argued. The Price Force must also be Constitutional, literally the opposite of the thing you've just been arguing, because "that's just the government spending money". You are literally now embodying the worst position that must be eliminated.
Consider that the government actually has things like the Voice of America, subsidies to NPR, etc.
Precisely. The point of this whole entire chain of comments, from the very beginning, was to get people back on track to realize that all sorts of stuff like that are not acceptable. As I wrote:
You start here [with the Air Force] specifically because it is one of the most absurd places, where technically-proper formalism has not been followed, but everyone [like you] gives in and shrugs their shoulders because they prefer power instead. Nobody will have any real argument against formalizing the Constitutionality of the Air Force, either, so it'll probably get done. And that sends a message, giving you political cover. "Now that everyone has agreed that it's important to strictly follow the Constitution and formally authorize any deviations from its very limited grant of power, I'm going to start shutting everything down that isn't properly authorized unless you can get sufficient supermajorities to save it."
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
Pretty much nobody could sincerely claim that the Price Force counts.
Why not? Frankly, I just don't believe this whatsoever. This is nothing but an argument from personal incredulity. I guess this is what you're left with after your prior tests didn't work out. There's simply not a single shred of reasoning here.
Creating the Price Press is something the government can do using its ordinary powers.
No.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
A Price Force is not sufficiently like either the army or navy to count, so it isn't authorized. Yes, the government could lie and say that it is.
An Air Force is not sufficiently like either the army or navy to count, so it isn't authorized. Yes, the government could lie and say that it is.
That's pretty easy to just state ipse dixit. But there's something missing that I would call "reasoning". So far, when we've tested your reasoning, it has led to many more questions that you've consistently refused to answer.
once the Price Press exists
That's not how Constitutional grants of authority work. At all. Honestly, if this is your understanding of the Constitution, there's probably not much more value in me continuing this discussion.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
If the history of the Price Force is unrelated to the army and navy
Ok, then I'll just repeat what I wrote in the original comment proposing it:
Say, the Army probably has some folks who work on the economics of a place. Like, say you're occupying Iraq; they want to understand the economic situation and implement policies for various reasons. Let's just grow that. Maybe stand it up as its own Force. Maybe call it the Price Force, with the mission to control prices globally. Of course, this may have some incidental domestic component to the mission, as these things are all linked. Is the Price Force an "Army" and a "land Force"? Is it properly authorized by the Constitution, since it grew up inside of the Army historically? What if we instead happened to grow the Price Force out of a group of economists at the Navy, since it seemed like those guys were actually better at it than the Army guys at whatever point in time? Is the Price Force then a "Navy" and a "naval Force"?
Perhaps it does not matter which one its history grew up in, and all this establishes is that the Price Force is an ArmyOrNavy. Do we then move on to asking about its supercomputers to try to figure out which one it is?
That example was once we've decided it's an army or navy, we need to figure out which one it's more like. You don't do this from scratch.
? Once we decide that it's some quantum superposition? Are you referring to the "ArmyOrNavy Clause"? Where is that in the Constitution?
Price Press
There is no Constitutional grant of any such authority anywhere. We have specific Constitutional grants of authority. There is no freewheeling grant of authority to establish a Price Press; there is no freewheeling grant of authority to establish a Price Force1; there is no freewheeling grant of authority to establish an Air Force; there is no freewheeling grant of authority to establish a quantum superposition ArmyOrNavy. There is a specific Constitutional grant of authority concerning Armies, specifically and individually. There is a specific Constitutional grant of authority concerning a Navy, specifically and individually.
1 - At least AFAICT. I believe I still remain ignorant as to whether you think the establishment of a Price Force is authorized by your reasoning. I still remain ignorant as to what we do, on your view, about its supercomputers or lack thereof. I still remain ignorant as to what we do, on your view, as to the current Army's supercomputers/other equipment that must be maintained. I guess our first step was to determine that the US Army is an ArmyOrNavy quantum superposition. And then step two is to look at its supercomputers/other equipment that must be maintained and conclude that it's a Constitutional Navy?
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
we don't need to decide
We do need to decide. The Constitution authorizes Armies and Navies. I don't see any Constitutional provision that authorizes entities that are in some quantum superposition, such that we only see some probabilistic sense of what it is each time we poke at some little aspect of it. I'm kind of liking the hypothetical I just came up with over here. There, I focused on the bureaucratic history, because that's what the other commenter thought it was. Here, I'll focus on the quantum superposition nature.
Let's say they just stand up a Price Force; no bureaucratic history needed; it's from whole cloth. One might ask whether it's authorized by the Constitution. "Wait! Is that an Army, which is Constitutionally authorized... or a Navy, which is constitutionally authorized... or something else, which might not be Constitutionally authorized?" I would probably not buy claims that it doesn't matter, that you don't need to decide, that it's some magical quantum superposition just because we say so. That we can obviously fund it, that it's obviously authorized, and that the President obviously counts as the Commander in Chief of the Price Force, since those all apply to both the Army and the Navy. That perhaps the only consideration is whether or not the Price Force has equipment that needs to be maintained. So, uh, I guess if the Price Force decides they need big supercomputers that need maintained, then they're a "Navy" and a "naval Force" and don't have a 2 year funding limit (and otherwise have to abide by the various Navy clauses instead of the Army clauses)... but if they don't (or we decide to not talk about them), then they're an "Army" and a "land Force"?
But wait! Doesn't the Army have big supercomputers!? Don't they, uh, have equipment that needs to be maintained? Has the Army been a "Navy" and a "naval Force" all along? Did we just not notice? We just didn't poke the quantum superposition right or at the right time or something? Or is it that if we just don't talk about the equipment that the Army needs to maintain hard enough, it can stay an "Army" and a "land Force"?
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
I'm just asking about how you think Constitutional terms work. AFAICT, your position is that the way the Constitutional terms work is that one simply looks at the history of bureaucratic organization. This seems somewhat foreign to the way we normally interpret Constitutional terms.
For example, suppose there was some bureaucratic convenience reason for just reducing the Navy down to a single frigate. Then, they began expanding the Army's fleet of ships, subs, etc. and their set of maritime missions. Eventually, the expanded set looks kiiiiiiiinda like what the Navy used to do.1 Is it all "Army and land Forces"? Vice-versa, and we get all "Navy and naval Forces"? If they decide the Air Force should really start controlling carriers, because they're more important to the planes these days, and then, meh, let's just give 'em the rest of the boats, too... is the Air Force still an "Army and land Force"? After all, that's what it was originally called. Maybe we just have the Army and Navy just completely swap everything about them except their organizational history; they're the same entities, but they're now doing everything that the other one used to do.
Essentially, can the government sort of trivially change what Constitutional labels/authorizations/rules apply by merely bureaucratically renaming things/growing them out of some historical organization? This would make all sorts of Constitutional provisions (constraints) much easier to deal with, from a gov-maxxing perspective.
Say, the Army probably has some folks who work on the economics of a place. Like, say you're occupying Iraq; they want to understand the economic situation and implement policies for various reasons. Let's just grow that. Maybe stand it up as its own Force. Maybe call it the Price Force, with the mission to control prices globally. Of course, this may have some incidental domestic component to the mission, as these things are all linked. Is the Price Force an "Army" and a "land Force"? Is it properly authorized by the Constitution, since it grew up inside of the Army historically? What if we instead happened to grow the Price Force out of a group of economists at the Navy, since it seemed like those guys were actually better at it than the Army guys at whatever point in time? Is the Price Force then a "Navy" and a "naval Force"?
1 - Not quite PLA/PLAN, but hilarious.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
you did by arguing that the air force isn't an army because it uses aircraft
Point of fact, I didn't ever actually do that.
My determination was that because it was originally part of the Army it is therefore just another army separate from the Army for bureaucratic reasons.
...and then I asked about the clauses referring to "land and naval Forces". This was only like three comments ago; surely you haven't already forgotten how things went down.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
Good questions! You're the one who tried to make this the way we make the determination, so I'll be interested to hear your answers.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
Do ports and shipyards make it so that the US Navy is a land Force, since it probably doesn't matter whether some of its units are temporarily waterborne, in the same way that a US Army soldier swimming across a river wouldn't make it a naval Force?
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
Do you think it also satisfies the clauses that describe "land and naval Forces"? Is it a land Force or a naval Force?
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
You're not giving me an answer. Is it an Army or a Navy? Saying "we decide" isn't an answer. What is your hypothetical decision? What are the reasons?
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
If the government can fund an army and a navy, then when the Air Force is invented, we decide whether it's more like an army or navy for the purposes of being able to fund it. Fortunately, the government is permitted to fund both, so this is easy: the government can fund one.
It is not a question of "being able to fund it". It's a question of whether it's authorized in the first place. So, is it an Army or a Navy?
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
Saying something about the military implicitly distingushes between military things and non-military things.
But what are the actual clauses with actual words that go on to make further distinctions between things? Without that, your hypothetical isn't analogous.
I don't know. You could make arguments for either one.
Then at least try. Because right now, you're not even trying, and it's becoming ever clearer that it's because you can't. Because the Air Force just isn't authorized. It doesn't fit.
Don't worry, though. There's an easy fix. It's why we have Article V. Literally everybody really wants to have a legal Air Force. You want it so bad that you're tying yourself in knots trying to imagine that you already have it, when you clearly can't even come up with a half-hearted argument for it. Nobody is going to get in the way of passing an amendment to finally make it constitutional.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
Exactly what distinction did they make?
For example, the Constitution says:
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy;
There are no such additional distinctions for terms in 1A.
the problem is that if you mean "after the Constitution was written" you have no choice but to be arbitrary. If the Constitution just said "the military" you could claim that the Air Force only became part of the military after the Constitution was written
Where would be the part of your hypothetical Constitution where they distinguished between two separate things? This example just isn't analogous in any way.
You ask yourself "in what ways is the Air Force similar to an army and in what ways is it similar to a navy. Do what is appropriate based on the similarity."
So, uh... which category does the Air Force fall into, given the distinction above? I keep asking this question, and you keep not answering it. Is it an Army or a Navy?
"After the fact" is a vague term and can mean two things here
I don't think your two meanings make a difference.
And as far as that's saying anything at all it sounds like "the Bill of Rights shouldn't be interpreted that way but the reference to armies and navies should".
This is literally true, though. Both from a philosophical/historical standpoint and a textual standpoint. We can just look at the text and see how they made significant additional distinctions for one and not the other. Ergo, we can pretty quickly realize that there may be different interpretive considerations.
You're still refusing to answer the actual question that is posed by this significant difference in the text, itself. We have specific rules (that are different) for Armies and Navies. Which set of rules applies to the Air Force? This is within the Constitution, itself. It is not some possible external difference, such that we're considering whether or not it is relevant for the text of the Constitution (as may be the case for 1A). It's a baseline, threshold consideration that one must address before one even gets to any sort of consideration that could plausibly be analogous to that of interpreting 1A.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
You figure it out, by deciding which one it's more similar to based on the Founders' intentions.
I kinda did (it's not authorized, and we should specifically authorize it and determine what rules to use). But you don't like the conclusion.
you can't just say "it doesn't mention the air force so we can't have one at all"
Good news! You'll notice that I am not just saying that. I've said more things.
By this reasoning if by some quirk of English we had actually called the Air Force the Flying Navy and not just made it up, the Constitution would allow an air force after all.
Nope. Please try reading my argument again. This is not what I've claimed. I explicitly agreed above that what we call it after-the-fact seems irrelevant.
And you haven't really addressed freedom of the speech/the press
I wrote:
There is significant interpretive difference between individual rights recognized in the Bill of Rights, due to the background of natural/retained rights tradition, as compared to enumerated, limited powers of government. In fact, much jurisprudence actually roots rights WRT television in the free speech clause. Whether or not that is accurate, and whether there should be more of a revival of the free press clause, is above my pay grade (though I have thoughts). But the entire interpretive framework is significantly different from the first step.
You don't seem to have engaged with it.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
I really want to not strawman this. There are many sources one could go to, but this sort of 'old work that has been thoroughly commented on' is prime domain for LLMs.1 I asked a well-known LLM about it, specifically asking it to separate the content that was in Marx's writings versus later thinkers' take on the topic, so as to hopefully keep them from being muddled together. It indicated that it thought that there were four central aspects to alienation.
Alienation from the product of labor: The worker creates goods not for personal use or fulfillment, but as commodities owned and controlled by the capitalist. The product stands apart, becomes “something alien, as a power independent of the producer”. Workers do not recognize themselves in what they produce.
My interpretation is that this is, right off the bat, the most dangerous form from the standpoint of genuine well-being. My interpretation is that one of the problems is that it seems like we could swap in/out the phrase "owned and controlled by the capitalist" and have two independent intellectual constructs with two different implications. It is not clear to me how this ownership/control is essential to the theory, as my understanding of other aspects of Marxism (particularly commodity fetishism) seem to think this concern still applies without this clause.
My understanding is that there is one independent intellectual construct here that is primarily focused on whether you are producing goods for your own use or (possibly to trade) for the use of others. As such, there is more of a sense of, "I need to make this product in such a way as to satisfy the desires of others." In my mind, this is actually a beautiful part of markets, specialization, and trade. One must think about, and care about, others. What they want. What they care about. It is perhaps a double-edged sword, and I think that's what they're getting at. When you're caring about others, you're not necessarily being primarily self-motivated. It is somewhat incidental to the process, but markets/specialization/trade make it more front and center; you're also self-motivated to produce a good product that others will want, because you can then trade it for things that you want. As the old joke goes (at a country scale, but sort of related), there are two ways for the US to produce cars. They could either build their own cars, or they could grow corn, ship it to Japan, and magically ship back cars. There is a possible kind of mind which simply feels a subjective aversion to producing things for others or not producing some of their own things.
I would submit that we should consider how much we should shape society around those particular kinds of minds. How would we do it? It seems to be already allowed for one to not engage in such things. One can already decide to go be a subsistence farmer, living only on the fruit of their direct labor, not producing anything for the purposes of trading with others. Further, if they want to trade, they can already produce the specific types of goods that they prefer, with exactly the characteristics that they desire. Others might not like those products so much. Then what? Do we subsidize it by buying those items with the public purse? What do we do with those items? Do we force others to buy those items? Moreover, if it's not good enough for people to generally have the option to engage in this behavior, I think perhaps people might think that there is a problem if the rest of society is humming along with markets/specialization/trade; it's just somehow some sort of mental block for the people who would prefer to be self-sufficient. What then can be done about this? I'm not sure what the answer is other than to just ban the rest of society from doing these things. Force them to all be self-sufficient, so those particular types of minds won't feel like they're doing something 'weird' and 'different'. Perhaps this could bring some comfort to those types of minds, but I obviously think it must be weighed against the effects that it has on the folks who have different types of minds.
Up to this point, this is distinct from @orthoxerox's description of small business ownership. In small business ownership, you're still ultimately making goods (or services) to meet the desires of others. You are still trying to figure out what they want in significant part.
The second central aspect identified by the LLM is:
Alienation from the process of labor: The act of working is not freely chosen or self-directed. Workers follow someone else’s schedule and perform repetitive, monotonous tasks in conditions set by the employer. Marx writes: “in his work he does not affirm himself but denies himself … does not freely develop his physical and mental energy”
This lines up more closely with orthoxerox's description of entrepreneurship. In fact, the first thing that came to my mind is how closely it lines up with, of all things, the IRS's definition of the distinction between "employee" and "independent contractor". As an independent contractor, you're supposed to be able to substantially manage your own schedule and the process for how the work is to be completed. Note, however, that it is definitely distinct from the first aspect. In either entrepreneurship/independent contracting, one must still be thinking about how to make the product something that the customer desires rather than immediately being a thing that one desires oneself. An independent contractor still needs to come to some agreement with the customer as to the general parameters of the finished product. These can be more or less specific, depending on the customer's disposition. Some entrepreneurs joke that they no longer have one boss, they have a thousand bosses (their customers).
I can see the appeal of both of these aspects. There is something nice about doing things in the way that you want to do them, for your own use. Yet again, we must consider whether or not we can influence these balances and what the consequences are. Perhaps we do add challenges to being an entrepreneur/independent contractor that could be reduced. I'd be open to suggestions. I think we try to subsidize at least entrepreneurship to some extent, but not as much independent contracting.
I also think that there was something to Marx's concern, at the time he had that concern, that is a bit less concerning now. It was the rise of the industrial age, and actual factories were suddenly economically dominant. They're not anymore (much to the President's chagrin), and I think the balance is already significantly shifted, naturally. Should we just make it harder for companies to hire 'employees' in some way, possibly encouraging/requiring that they make most of their deals be with 'independent contractors'? Obvious tradeoffs are obvious, and doing things like mandating some sense of, "X% of your 'employment' headcount/budget must be independent contractors" seems like it would be pretty damaging to productivity (but I don't know this for sure), and I'm not entirely sure how much mental benefit it would bring to individual minds.
It would probably render a fair number of business models nonviable, and I guess we'd have to figure out whether the loss of entire domains of goods/services is worth the benefit of some more people becoming independent contractors, as well as what is likely a significant reduction of standard of living that will come from all those former employees having to figure out what else to do and trying to find other gigs. Knock on considerations that are at least worth a sentence include the difference between having to market yourself to a company/companies for an employee-type role versus having to otherwise market your contracting service to whatever sorts of customers you'll want to take on. Some may substantially contract with one company, in a way that is kinda sorta like an employee, whereas others may diversify more. Without getting more into details, I'd say this is kind of a wash, but I could be convinced otherwise.
The third aspect identified by the LLM is:
Alienation from species-being (human essence): Marx argues that what distinguishes humans is conscious, creative, purposeful activity. Under capitalism, labor is reduced to a means to survive, not an end in itself, thus depriving humans of their essential life activity and reducing them to animal existence
This one is pretty mind-boggling to me. In what system is labor not at least "required" as a means to survive? I guess UBI? Whether or not labor is "reduced" to a means to survive seems to be entirely a matter of subjective disposition... especially in an era where we're so rich. The vast majority of our labor is not really just for managing to survive; it's to increase our standard of living, to have nicer things in life that we like.
That does still leave a fair amount of it being not an end in itself. But I'm honestly not sure how much of labor can almost ever be an end in itself. One almost always has some other end in mind. E.g., I grow some herbs of my own. I control how I do it (aspect two) and it's for my own consumption, so I'm doing it in a way that produces only what I desire (aspect one), but the end of the labor involved is not the labor, itself. The end is that I want tasty herbs on tasty food, the labor of watering the plants is still a means to that end.
If I had to try to rescue at least part of this, I'd say that it's more related to the second aspect, in the desire for some amount of autonomy, being able to use one's own conscious, creative, and purposeful powers. Modern studies of motivation do, indeed, confirm that many people desire autonomy, alongside things like competence.
One conclusion could be to just reiterate the above discussion of independent contracting, but another would be to observe that our current capitalist system sort of already has a weighing of this factor built-in. Employees prefer jobs with these sorts of things; the research has shown it. It's also shown that this causes them to choose such jobs over others, all else being equal, or even with things like pay being less. Some folks even root sentiments of things like "kids these days don't want to work" with examples being things like picking strawberries or whatever, in the fact that it's harder to recruit employees into lower-autonomy positions when they have options to take higher-autonomy positions. It could have been a historical contingency that low-autonomy work became ever and ever more economically-dominating, but, uh, it didn't? It really seems like, by increasing productivity through specialization/trade/markets, we've opened up new opportunities for people to choose more autonomy.2 I'm really not sure that if we tried engineering society to start with, we could have gotten to this historically-contingent end point.
The final aspect identified by the LLM is:
Alienation from other people: Workers relate to one another as competitors or as mere cogs within a larger machinery, rather than as collaborators in collective, self-realizing activity. Social relations become transactional and estranged
Again, I find myself thinking that this is quite subjective as a mental disposition, and it's quite contingent depending on the specific community in which you choose to collaborate (one of the ways of choosing could be which employer you work for). Do you see yourself as thinking, "I'm collaborating in (maybe something sounding mundane like) the manufacturing of coffee pots, and together we bring joy to millions of folks who just adore the smell of their fresh coffee every morning"? Or do you think, "I'm just a cog here, and I'm only here to get a paycheck"? Maybe, "I'm collaborating in making sure that this industrial part is up to spec and safe for operation, protecting the lives of others who are using this to, I don't know, run a tractor to grow food, putting dinner on people's plates with their family every night"? I've known people with both dispositions. I've probably had both dispositions at different times with the same job.
I'm likely to be happier at the times when I have the positive disposition. My own sense is that the negative disposition mostly comes up when there's some other thing happening that is pulling me toward a generally negative frame of mind. I think it's unlikely that entrepreneurs/independent contractors are completely free from this sort of disposition ever popping up. I'm really not sure what type of labor could ever be immune. But perhaps that's due to the particularities of my own subjective mental dispositions, and I'm just genuinely missing how other minds experience this.
I don't know that I have the time right now, or the interest, in getting into the LLM's description of later thinkers' gloss on this. I find them sort of less interesting, anyway. In summary, I'd say that there are genuine correlates to human psychology captured by the general picture. I think some components are just wrong, but others are at least relatively close to something not absurd. Again, I think it was a possible historical counterfactual that these aspects could have just continued to get worse and worse, but they, uh, kinda didn't? I'm really not sure how any of them are really inherent to capitalism, per se, rather than being some human psychological factors that are part of the human condition and which interact with a whole set of legal, political, and economic factors that shape any given time/place. They're good to keep in mind when you're thinking, for example, of whether you can shape a job offering in a way that offers more autonomy, because the market has shown that it does, indeed value that. I think the most extreme versions, where we're just like, banning trade or forcing everyone to be subsistence farmers or something, are extreme and extremely harmful. And I'm not really sure how this leads to any serious, concrete proposals that have much of a hope of making things better, given the tradeoffs. I think that the general policy of allowing markets/specialization/trade still leads to significant increases in productivity, standards of living, and the ability of individuals to find the best tradeoffs for where they are on the spectrum of subjective, mental dispositions.
1 - TheMotte's rules on use of LLMs are not currently codified in the sidebar, AFAICT. There may be some explainers buried in the comments somewhere, but I have not saved them. My vague recollection is that basically just raw posting LLM output is poor form, but I think that the type of thing I'll be doing here might be acceptable. My use is for brief summary to try to make sure I'm at least in a reasonable ballpark, as a jumping off point for my own commentary. I also anticipate the LLM-generated content to not be the bulk of the content of my comment.
2 - Or less? I know actual people who say that one thing they really like about their job is how it's repetitive and they don't have to think about it. I sometimes like such things in small doses, but I believe them when they tell me they actually like it all the time. Also coming to mind is Einstein's working at the patent office, saying that it sort of kept him going with relatively repetitive stuff, giving approximately the right amount of 'spare brain time' to be useful. I guess too much, and he might have just procrastinated and found other useless things to soak up the void, but too little, and he wouldn't have had the mental space to think about what he wanted to think about?
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
The average man on the street
...is wrong about Constitutional stuff all the time.
it's basically like a navy or an army
...uh, which one? The Constitution gives different rules for them, so which set of rules apply?
Corporations develop them but states manage them. States don't like human cloning, it's banned. States want to keep nuclear technology secret, it's secret. The EU decides that we need to click through pop-ups about cookies, millions of man-hours are wasted... The US allocates GPU access around the world, there are tiers of who can and who cannot have them.
This doesn't sound like "management". It sounds like States ban stuff.
I think this is confusing what it means to be a Classical Liberal.
If there are problems with implementing and sustaining an ideology (and there are problems with all ideologies), surely that's relevant in discussing its merits?
Sure... but I think you've just mistaken what it is in starting this analysis.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
There is significant interpretive difference between individual rights recognized in the Bill of Rights, due to the background of natural/retained rights tradition, as compared to enumerated, limited powers of government. In fact, much jurisprudence actually roots rights WRT television in the free speech clause. Whether or not that is accurate, and whether there should be more of a revival of the free press clause, is above my pay grade (though I have thoughts). But the entire interpretive framework is significantly different from the first step.
Now please answer the actual question? We have specific rules (that are different) for Armies and Navies. Which set of rules applies to the Air Force?
A proposed amendment could even use more generic language
How would that work? Remember, your idea doesn't go by wording
Hold up. The words you choose for your Constitution do matter.
if the air force were called a Flying Navy that wouldn't make a difference.
This is an after-the-fact naming convention, trying to shoehorn something into the Constitution that isn't there. You can just use different, possibly more general, wording in your Constitution. How general you actually choose to be is a difficult question, but you can obviously do it.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
I like how you fail to quote the remainder of that paragraph. The criticism of such a position. But I would go further. The clauses which distinguish between Armies and Navies aren't really providing separate "powers"; that bit was mostly done already. There's some notion of "powers" here, but it's more that they're outlining substantially different modes of operation within the government, speaking even of constraints.
If you aren't sure which one it comes under, that's different from not thinking it counts at all.
I mean, you're the one saying that it counts under one of them. Which one? Why? Do you think it's both somehow? How?
It seems unlikely that the founders would think the Constitution doesn't allow for an air force at all just because you're not sure exactly which thing it's most similar to.
Not "just because". Primarily, it doesn't allow for it, because it's just not in there! It's nowhere to be found! Instead, you're trying to say, "Well... I think it's kinda like these other things... but I can figure out which one or how, what rules will apply, etc., because, well, it's not in there anywhere." The straining gets more obvious every time you try to patch the hole without actually amending the Constitution and patching the hole. Wouldn't it be vastly mentally easier to just amend the Constitution and patch the hole rather than try to continue juggling such epicycles in your head? A proposed amendment could even use more generic language that actually enables future military forces of
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
There is significant interpretive difference between individual rights recognized in the Bill of Rights, due to the background of natural/retained rights tradition, as compared to enumerated, limited powers of government. In fact, much jurisprudence actually roots rights WRT television in the free speech clause. Whether or not that is accurate, and whether there should be more of a revival of the free press clause, is above my pay grade (though I have thoughts). But the entire interpretive framework is significantly different from the first step.
The founders did seem to think that there was a meaningful difference between Armies and Navies, naming them separately rather than some unified term and including entirely separate clauses addressing particulars of each. I also agree that if we called the Navy the Floating Army, it probably wouldn't turn the Navy into an Army for purposes of the Constitution. So, I guess my first question is... is the Air Force a Flying Army or a Flying Navy? Because I'm not sure which Constitutional clauses apply to it.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States
It's perfectly legal to have an air force.
There are significant concerns with such a flippant reading. The Constitution goes on to explicitly grant particular ways that such a thing can be done. One must read those clauses out of the Constitution in order to take such a broad reading here. A couple examples just to give you a sense of some of the gymnastics that are required. It's pretty clearly motivated reasoning, saying, "I really think we should have an Air Force; how do I torture the Constitution (and my own interpretive system) in order to get the result I want?"
The real problem is that there are structural reasons why states get bigger, I think it's mostly due to technology.
I thought that was actually the crony capitalism business. Crony capitalists want growth of the administrative state and presidential power... so long as they feel they have a decent handle on their ability to steer it to their benefit.
As technology develops, there are more capital-intensive technologies that only states can manage efficiently.
This seems counter to the actual world in which non-states are efficiently managing extremely capital-intensive technologies.
Liberalism has a weak immune system because it is naturally liberal and open to new ideas
I think this is confusing what it means to be a Classical Liberal.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
I would say that the reason that people don't choose that path probably only has a little to do with alienation.
I don't think I caught any reasoning for this sentence, and yeah, I don't follow. I'm pretty sure I do feel alienation from the work of a subsistence farmer.
I would like to humbly submit a request for you to share a recipe at some point.
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