GBRK
5mo ago
Where was it said that the balance of power was intended to be at heavily ideologically progressive skew of the pre-Trump level?
Congress said it, right now, by not passing a law to do it themselves. I wouldn't exactly be happy about congress passing a law to reduce the independence of independent agencies, but it would at least be government operating in its proper course. Alternatively, the president filing suit to get the legal framework of independent agencies before the supreme court would still be respecting constitutional norms in a way that at the very least can't be symmetrically copied by a later democratic president (since republicans are likely to control the supreme court for the rest of my life, barring court-packing.)
Doing this with an executive order is a naked grab for power from both the courts and congress, with no recourse for either.
Why should anyone care after all the abuses of the executive from FDR to Obama?
Two wrongs doesn't make a right, buddy. Especially when this latest wrong enables dramatically more impactful wrongs in later presidents.
GBRK
5mo ago
Just pragmatically, I don't think agencies like the FCC, FTC and SEC have ever really done anything for conservatives, so why would conservatives want to protect a bastion of their enemies?
Even if you accept that they have never done anything for conservatives, can't you see that they could be doing a lot more to conservatives? Their independence cuts both ways. It harder to get them to stop doing something harmful, but also a lot harder to get them to start.
And while I'm not sure if administrative law judges are "constitutional" I'm pretty sure that having no judges at all isn't going to do anything to preserve my constitutional rights.
GBRK
5mo ago
These agencies listened to congress and the courts. This isn't re-attaching the steering wheel, it's yanking out congress' steering wheel and giving it to the president.
Probably I'm biased by the fact that I want to keep the neoliberal machine going... but do conservatives really not see the danger in giving leftists a chance to transform it into a vanguard-communist machine instead? The obama/biden wing of the party died with harris' loss. It's all berniecrats from here on out.
GBRK
5mo ago
Trump passing this order is contigent on a very specific set of political circumstances-- including supreme court justices he personally appointed and a congress that's been influenced toward his ideology for eight years. Having a four-year gap in between his terms is proving to be a massive advantage in centralizing power. It's likely that if a democratic president (or any other republican president) had tried the same thing, they would have been impeached, or resisted by the courts. But now that pandora's box is opened, every subsequent president gets to benefit from this order.
GBRK
5mo ago
Unless you want all bureaucrats selected by sortition or direct election this is just a gish-gallop. Nobody cares if there are more bureacrats than elected politicians-- we care about the relative distribution of power between them, and between the branches of the government. It would be reasonable to complain about bureacrats having to much power relative to politicians... except for the fact that the politicians have held all the power the entire time, except distributed in such a way that they refused to use it. Trump's executive order therefore does nothing to decrease the power of the bureaucracy, it just takes power away from the legislature and gives it to the president. And sure, that's not hugely far from the "norm" (insofar as one exists), but I'm baffled by the fact that conservatives think that it's a norm violation that long-term benefits them. Yes, they're structurally advantaged in the electoral college-- but not nearly as much as they are in the senate.
GBRK
5mo ago
Congress set up the federal bureacracy with an intended balance of power. This is important because, fundamentally, congress is just 435 dudes. They have no magical power to oppose the president-- only the practical power of what they can threaten him with if he won't comply with their demands. Removing the independence of independent agencies removes one of the things they can threaten the president with, making it permanently easier for the president to flout the law. It doesn't matter how precisely a law is defined, or what congress does in their subcommittees. If the president has the actual raw power to do whatever they want, it's trivial for them to say, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”
Regarding the latest executive order re: independent agencies, I'm struggling to understand why conservatives might think this is a good idea long term. Is the plan to just never lose/hold an election again? It seems like trump is massively expanding the scope of executive power versus judicial/legislative power to the point where any president with more than 41 votes in the senate can do essentially whatever they want, with the sole exception of raising non-tariff taxes. Given that its easier to create than to destroy [edit: this was a type, I meant "easier to destroy than to create"], that's of course a benefit for anti-welfare conservatives... but direct presidential command over regulation combined with the stance that the president is beholden to nothing but the supreme court seems like a perfect recipe for vindictive actions against corporations and industries that the president doesn't like. And considering the next democratic president is probably going to look much more like the bernie wing of the party than the obama/biden wing of the party, that's a recipe for economic disaster.
Necessary disclaimer: I'm a trump-hating neoliberal.
GBRK
5mo ago
Oh, and halve the size of soccer fields. They seem way too big for the sport.
Just watch futsal bro. Soccer is good the way it is. Yes, FIFA could change the rules to make it a little more entertaining to any given segment of players-- but not to make it any more entertaining in general. There's nothing soccer could gain without giving up something else in return. For example, a shorter field might make for more intense moment-to-moment action, but it would also make the positional jockeying for space less important in favor of random outcomes and kicking the ball downrange.
GBRK
5mo ago
My food is imported from across the world, and I definitely don't want to pay a 25% tarriff on Columbian coffee because some Hawaiian producers wanted to rent-seek.
As for services-- if I concede that immigration depresses wages in the long run (and so far, I don't) then for that exact reason I want my services to be more global. I don't want a tyrranical government forcing me to pay more for american services.
Housing is the closest you get to a winning argument, but only in the short run. Cheap labor leads to more construction in the long run. And in particular, it leads to denser construction, and as someone that likes living in a city I view that as intrinsically desirable. Kowloon walled city WAS real neoliberalism and it was a GOOD THING.
I can understand all the americans making a cynical, oppressive power-grab by forcing me to buy their goods and services. That doesn't mean I have to like it-- and it definitely doesn't mean I have to shut up and take it like a good little paypig. I WILL use cryptocurrency to dodge tariffs. I WILL fly to latin america to buy over-the-counter drugs and get elective medical procedures done. I WILL hire illegal immigrants to get construction work done. (In minecraft.) And no lazy, blood-sucking protectionists are going to stop me.
GBRK
5mo ago
Like, the ancient Greeks made commentary after commentary about the Homeric epics and engaged with those stories on a deep level for centuries
Copyright law is at fault for this. Letting individuals monopolize cultural icons neuters our ability to use them as shared myths... And that destroys our society's ability to self-reflect. "Superman" for example is a potent shorthand for a vision of what it means to be american, but only warner bros is formally allowed to use that shorthand to make money which in practice serves as a massive disincentive for artists to portray the same values in the same package and discuss them in a salient way.
And in the end, the only people that benefit are middlemen, not artists. Fanfiction artists getting patreon money is proof that in a world without copyright artists could still make a living, but we only stick doggedly to it because copyright is the means by which corporations rent-seek.
(All the same logic applies to patents, by the way, and in general all ip law except trademarks. Trademarks can stay because impersonating other people or groups is identity theft.)
How does this extend to non-humans? Primates show evidence of possession-based behaviour, as do young infants and of course many species will defend their land, den or recent kills.
I don't understand this question. I think nonhumans also have no natural rights? My whole point is that possession-based behavior is not intrinsically good even if it's often a utilitarian good at the individual (or genetic, or societal) level.
They're struggling because of anticonstruction nimbies. Their wages are anemic because they're unproductive lazy canadians. (\s a little bit but not really. I know the full explanation for the low wage growth is complex, but also canadian productivity growth is really not very high)
I can't rule out that immigration has an effect on high-skilled labor in general but I'm speaking for me, personally, as a software engineer. I personally am not threatened by immigration because my job is already perfectly globalized. If you actually want me to have an interest in supporting anti-immigration policies you're going to have to add "ban the use of foreign software" as a policy plank because otherwise its just a conspiracy to force me to pay more for lazy american carpenters while you all enjoy using cheap or free linux distros built partially by government-subsidized europeans.
GBRK
5mo ago
I don't think I can convince Zephr (or the median trump voter) that immigration isn't against their interests. Frankly, I agree with them that it probably is. It's just that by the same token, there's no way that they can convince me (or the median Harris voter) that immigration is against our interests. That's why I'm speaking in terms of the median american here-- or rather, of the compromise position that we get when we calculate a weighted average of every american's preferences via democracy. Some of the immigrants some of the time makes everyone unhappy, but it's worth recognizing that neither extreme is ever going to be a viable option (though of course us radicals will keep pulling on our end of the overton window.)
GBRK
5mo ago
but that's also true (as you point out) of giving states back the instruments of economic belligerence.
I think either I misspoke, or you misinterpreted what I wrote. If the government gave the states back their commerce power that would permanently increase federalization because it would dramatically change the incentives available to the states and their citizens. But short of that, not much would change. I think across the multiverse that most versions of america would convergently evolve something like the department of education, even if it had a slightly different role or function in response to the initial conditions of its creation.
Now, there is a caveat to all this. Though many aspects of the federal bureacracy serve a real purpose, that doesn't mean that they're destined to grow indefinitely. For that reason, I suspect that trump will manage to-- in the medium term-- cut the DOE back. In fact, I think the very existence of trump is proof that there's a sort of logistic growth curve for federal agencies. Agencies start small, grow rapidly as they become popular for solving the lowest-hanging problems, then exceed their carrying capacity and become bloated and therefore unpopular and subject to cuts. And we're obviously in an "exceeded the carrying capacity" era, vis-a-vis deficit spending.
But in the longest term, I think the DOE is more-or-less guaranteed to bounce back. The state apparatus is something darwinistically selected for the ability to increase its own carrying capacity. If we were at the knife-point of optimization where no additional changes could be made to the government to increase its absolute ability to generate revenue then it would be permanently doomed, but we're far from fully-optimized in terms for taxation. Even ignoring the possibility for technological economic growth, we're quite far from the bureaucratic state-of-the-art. Switching to the land value taxe, for example, would permanently move the laffer curve to the right-- governments could extract a higher total share of taxes for any given level of free-market economic performance.
Meanwhile, the "federal housing code" thing you mention would be, I think, destined to fail for essentially the same reason the current "federal drug code" is failing. That being, that housing-- and drugs-- are locally and culturally specific in a way that doesn't benefit from the federal government trying to enforce nationwide uniformity.
Putting that all together:
I think there are other, less forceful ways to do it! America is permanently(?) less unitary because the Obama administration decided not to enforce federal drug law, and by the way that the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs, for instance. You could likely continue to make America less unitary by removing direct election of Senators, by (to take your example, and something that plausibly may happen soon) trimming the Department of Education into a machine for distributing block-grant funding and administering student loans, by shredding federal firearms regulations, etc.
Removing direct election of Senators would plausibly alter the power calculus, but trimming the DOE is either structurally predetermined or guaranteed to fail.
GBRK
5mo ago
I assume you consider these "the collective coercion of justice" too, along with the very idea of property rights?
Yes.
Because it's their space
It's only their space because we, as a society, have agreed that it is useful to enforce a concept of exclusionary control over particular patches of land that can be delegated to other people. Now I'm not saying we shouldn't do that. I think private property, and justice, and taxes are useful concepts to have. But they're only instrumentally good. There's nothing intrinsically wrong about limiting the extent to which we enforce private property rights.
GBRK
5mo ago
I'm not gonna lie, that sounds like a skill issue on the part of the canadian culture and government. I mean, it definitely confirms my priors to hear about canadians failing at things because I'm convinced that you're a fake country, to the point where it's the one thing I agree with donald trump on. (That and the need to annex greenland and panama). But anglophones have been successfully exploiting immigrant labor for literally a thousand years. Fix your shit, canada, or we'll come in and fix it for you.
I'm being a little facetious here. Not entirely facetious, but I can see how america is vulnerable to similar attacks. That being said, the very article you linked is an example of a culture successfully punishing someone who's violated a social norm. I know you're making a point along the lines of, "this is the one we caught-- just think about all the other fish out there!" But my response is still going to be, "then make a better net instead of nuking the pond."
GBRK
5mo ago
I would have been so much happier without any contact with other races and ethnicities and the other sex.
Wait are you an actual honest-to-god homofascist?
GBRK
5mo ago
I don't understand the thrust of this comment. And anyways, groups divide fractally so I disagree that it's even possible to create a society without cultural-linguistic-historical divisions.
GBRK
5mo ago
I mean, even just a year or two ago when Monkeypox was spreading, the humble suggestion that gays stop having giant unprotected orgies with multiple strangers was viewed as a demand that "gays stop having sex".
I think that's a framing issue, not something intrinsic to communicating with the gay community. I think there are ways the same advice could have been conveyed and been well received. But-- I admit that that's never going to happen in practice, because the only way to alter a group's community norms without pushback is to credibly present yourself as part of the group and working in your own best interests. Key word: credibly. For minority groups that see themselves as marginalized, the only way to avoid "uncle ruckus" accusations would be to simultaneously display high-cost signals of group affiliation. And politicians are notoriously averse to sending high-cost signals*. Jared Polis could have given effective monkeypox advice, but only if he'd done it in the middle of a livestream while blowing his husband's back out.
* Trump is notable for being an exception to this. His base is rabid precisely because of how many high-cost signals he sends them. As an equal and opposite reactions, his enemies (including myself) hate him for the exact contents of those signals.
GBRK
5mo ago
Even the so-called "fairtax" is still using the implicit threat of violence to coerce people into giving up money (i.e., the abstract potential for goods and services).
Just bite the philosophical bullet and concede that the only reason any act of collective coercion can ever be "just" is because justice itself is only another act of collective coercion.
GBRK
5mo ago
and counteracts the will of the native population in favour of "GDP line go up"
I know the will of the population isn't "open borders." But still-- the will of at least ~half the citizen (i.e., native) voting population is that "lots of people" should come in. There are some quibbles about the exact rates, and which immigrants are acceptable, but I don't think the median position is, "everyone except O-1A visas can fuck right off."
The example you give me about the Indians is illustrative. You mean to tell me that there's an entire population of hard workers who don't demand much in the way of resources and you want to keep them out? In the old days we used to have to round these people up with wooden ships! I can see how certain low-skilled segments of the populations are threatened by immigrant labor, but I'm not part of those segments. I'm sympathetic to appeals about helping the cultural ingroup-- but I'm catholic, and an urbanite, so rural southern heretics aren't really any culturally more similar to me than rural latin catholics or urban indian hindus. There's the issue of language barrier, but I find it non-salient. Our modern media environment is more effective at acculturating immigrants than at any prior point in history.
Finally, as per the question of resources: America has no shortage of land. We do have a shortage of buildings (houses), and services (healthcare, childcare)... but just take a guess at what I think the best way to remedy that is.
GBRK
5mo ago
Arguably this is a feature. But states can tax nonresidents. For instance, if you aren't a resident of a state, but you keep a car there, you are supposed to register the car in that state.
Let's be real here: the vast majority of these laws are toothless. I guess at least in theory states could mandate the tracking and taxing of out-of-staters at all times, but that doesn't remove the concern of sick people demanding residency so they can access services... unless, I guess, we make state residency requirements as onerous as federal nationalization requirements. I can kind of see how that system would work-- after all, I'm in favor of open national borders so people can come to live and work here without restriction, but see the utility behind withholding, e.g. SS, medicare, medicaid, etc. until after the ~10 year naturalization process. (Birthright citizenship should stay, but that's because babies are power. If you have your kid in on american soil they belong to uncle sam now.)
Well part of the point of the OG Constitution was specifically to prevent this by gently removing commerce from the hands of the states, while letting them retain power over most local regulatory and criminal law. Nowadays the federal government has a lot of say about that!
You have to remember that the "OG" wasn't the constitution, it was the articles of confederation. The constitution was a reaction to the articles being too weak. To the extent that the federal government is too strong, the constitution is to blame, because it was developed with the specific purpose of forcing the states to cooperate. Maybe the supreme court could have interpreted specific clauses differently, but in the end, it wouldn't have mattered-- the constitution can be amended, or worked around. Neither of those things are trivial, but they're bound to happen when the structural incentives are strong enough. Just look at the department of education, for example. Countries that require and encourage a high level of trans-regional political-economic-cultural unity are inevitably bound to develop some sort of centralized control apparatus for education. The fact that "regulating education" isn't one of the enumerated powers doesn't matter, because it's not strictly illegal for congress to fund educational institutions, and large carrots are isomorphic to sticks.
The only way to make america permanently less unitary would be to give states back the instruments of economic belligerence-- border controls, tarriffs, their own coinage, etcetera. Not that I think that's a good idea, of course. (Ref: constant EU dysfunction.)
GBRK
5mo ago
Which is why I think people on the left and the right should be careful about memeing "Brazilification" into being. Maybe instead lefties should take this opportunity to consider the many benefits of federalism that righties have been screaming about for literal centuries and maybe righties should let them beat a graceful retreat back to California instead of fighting to the death over the scepter of federal power that was never meant to be.
I'm not exactly pro-abortion but trans-border abortion bounty laws are sort of proof for why that won't work out. That, and the fact that states can't tax nonresidents to prevent people from taking advantage of their services but living in a lower-tax jurisdiction. (America as a whole can tax nonresidents, and that's a good thing-- citizenship has privileges and duties.)
That being said, as a thought experiment, I do actually wonder how a truly federalized america would actually work out. I imagine the federal government would tax states by their land value to fund nationally-relevant institutions like the military, NASA, and NOAA, but leave control of welfare and commerce to the states. Probably there would be pretty complicated internal politics as states take competition-over-industry to the next level, with the larger states involved in dirigiste intervention to make sure the businesses providing services are headquartered within them. California could tariff texan companies as a retaliation for Ted Cruz existing, for example, while floridian anti-trust law could force google to operate a local subsidiary with partial state ownership and knowledge transfer.
GBRK
5mo ago
Probably the closest actual analog for democratic backsliding in the US is ancient Republican Rome, but they intentionally don’t want to think about that one because it would require meditating on uncomfortable truths. Yes, Caesar killed the Republic in the end, but he was only able to do that because the Optimate oligarchs had been slowly strangling it for the last 150 years, and had been turfing out the native labor force in favor of foreigners that had fewer legal rights and therefore cost less to work.
The truth really isn't that uncomfortable. If the problem is underpaid foreigners who have no rights... why not just grant them rights so they can't be paid less?
Open the borders! Stop having them be closed!
...I admit that I'm biased as a software engineer though. I'm not afraid of globalization because my field is already near-perfectly globalized. Anyone who wants software cheaper can already buy labor from the third world (aside from national-security sensitive domains, but natsec-relevant software engineering is only a tiny fraction of the market.) I don't see why I should be forced to pay for american carpenters if they're not going to be forced to pay for american software.
(Not that I want carpenters being forced to pay for american software. IP law is bullshit and knowledge should be free, etcetera etcetera.)
Yes, this is exactly my point. This executive order shifts power from the conservative to the-- as you call it-- "dynamic" aspect of the government. And conservatives are happy about this? What?
And your solution to this is to put all that rulemaking power in the hands of the president?
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