MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5hr ago
I learned about the idea from Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9hr ago
the claim that capital controls are ok for dealing with imbalances but tariffs are bad seems questionable. if they both end up making changes in trade to change the imbalance then it would seem both would have the same deadweight losses associated them. i can understand that maybe capital controls have some large side benefit that tariffs do not which would offset the deadweight loss from the change in trade. for example God could come down from heaven and because he supports capital controls he could dump container loads of semi-conductor chips into the US like mana from heaven. this would be a massive benefit that would not normally appear if you implemented tariffs. but i strongly suspect there are no special large benefits from capital controls that would offset the same deadweight loss tariffs also suffer from.
I endorse Steve Waldman's argument on these points (split across multiple blog posts dated April 2025), which is broadly the same as Krugman's. The tl;dr is that tariffs discourage balanced trade as well as imbalanced trade - in a world where everyone agrees that the rules of the game are the deficit countries increase tariffs and surplus countries reduce them to restore balance, there are a bunch of tariffs and therefore less trade than there would be otherwise, making the world poorer for the usual Ricardian reasons*. Whereas achieving balance with capital controls allows balanced trade while discouraging balanced investment. And balanced foreign investment** is not obviously good in the way that balanced trade is - there is a reason why "absentee landlord" is a slur.
*Countries may be able to better than free trade with enforced balance if they adopt targetted tariffs as part of an effective industrial policy - this is an argument against broad-based tariffs as a macroeconomic policy.
** I disagree with Waldman on the desirability of foreign direct investment - I think a world where BMW opens car factories in America and Intel opens chip fabs in Germany is better for it because of the resulting knowledge-sharing. I am more sympathetic to the argument that it would be better if there was less foreign portfolio investment - if I buy Tesla stock from the UK and you buy
AstraZeneca stock from the US it arguably weakens both countries' asabbiyah for a trivial benefit to our portfolios' diversification.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12hr ago
Being as right-wing as Farage publicly will destroy your life
Farage has, fairly obviously, not had his life destroyed. He makes more money in his Saturday job as a TV talking head than the average professional makes in a 50-hour week.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12hr ago
Mars' gravity well is shallow enough that you can build a space elevator with present-day materials technology, which means that to a civilisation capable of colonising Mars getting out of the gravity well is cheap.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12hr ago
One of the nice things about hard sciences like math and physics (and, if I had to guess, one of the reasons the Soviets performed so well in it - aside, of course, from having a good pool of genuine talent) is that you can run standardized objective tests for it pretty easily...and you can maintain oversight of it pretty easily, I would guess, relative to softer sciences.
Biology is somewhat softer than physics, but not enough that the totalitarian system that did Lysenkoism or lied about the death of Laika couldn't have done Arische Physik if it wanted to. The CPSU leadership made a deliberate decision to give physicists in general, and nuclear physicists in particular, a level of intellectual freedom it denied to everyone else.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12hr ago
but was prevented from cutting the welfare-warfare state
Nice use of the passive voice here. Reagan explicitly supported expanding the warfare state, and his big idea on the welfare state side was that free market policies would allow the economy to outgrow the cost of an aging population. Reagan's White House economic team were believers in starving the beast and the two-Santa theory - not in cutting spending themselves.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12hr ago
Thatcher and Reagan in the 80s are some of the more recent examples of this phenomenon.
I don't know enough about Reagan but Thatcher was very cautious and targetted in her attacks on institutions. In her first term she identified a specific enemy (unions, particularly blue-collar unions in state-owned companies) and spent several years planning and executing the attack on them before she went after anything else. She went after other institutions in the same methodical way later, but there was never a purge of the civil service and the purge of middle management in the newly-privatised industries took place over about a decade post-privatisation.
MAGA lump all the PMC-led institutions together, declare war on the whole blob, and demand rapid shock-and-awe attacks on all fronts simultaneously. (Trump responds, but mostly with kayfabe - you don't actually bring the Deep State to heel by cutting USAID's Politico Pro subscriptions). We will see how effective this is, but I wouldn't bet on it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
15hr ago
Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for the New Economic Geography, which includes an agglomeration model where industrial policy can have a long-term benefit even if markets are efficient. And that industrial policy could use targeted tariffs as a tool. But Krugman the political commentator has consistently said (ever since he became a Famous Economist whose political views are taken seriously - not just since Trump started supporting tariffs) that he doesn't think that countries at the technological frontier can make industrial policy work in practice. He supported NAFTA and the WTO when those were live political issues.
Krugman the economics populariser put a lot of effort into debunking the macroeconomic case for broad-based tariffs. About a third of his Slate columns were attacking the idea that imports destroy jobs. And he said things about current and capital account imbalances (the two are opposite sides of the same accounting identity) are broadly that bilateral imbalances are harmless, and that overall imbalances can be good or bad, are always dangerous, and that the right tool to control them is capital controls and not tariffs.
It is hard to distinguish between "the Trump tariffs are implementing a bad policy" and "the Trump tariffs implementing a questionable policy incompetently" because Trump is deliberately opaque about what the policy the tariffs are implementing actually is. (For the umpteenth time, tariffs are a tool, not a policy). My personal guess is that there isn't a policy at all, just vibes. But the arguments Navarro is making for the tariffs are macroeconomic, and the details of the tariffs we got are consistent with the goal being macroeconomic rather than industrial policy. So Krugman opposing these tariffs is entirely consistent with what he has been saying since the 1990's.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
16hr ago
Scott has been a de facto Democratic partisan ever since Trump walked down the escalator - he thinks that the badness of the Orange Man is comfortably the most important issue out there right now. You don't need to be a leftie to think that - you just need to think that there is a character-based filter for high public office, and that Trump fails to meet it. He doesn't have TDS - he is able to distinguish between true and false negative statements about Trump (see You are Still Crying Wolf).
See my most-updooted post about Boris Johnson for a worked example of how character can derail an administration and harm the country in a way which doesn't depend on conventional partisan political views.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
I'm quibbling now given that you are right on the Barbary war and opening of Japan, but the Union blockade of the Confederacy was not a blue-water operation and it isn't clear if the Civil War era ironclads were blue-water capable.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
If you mean the German National-Socialist party, calling them "the right" was a propaganda trick in 1930s and will remain so in 2030s.
The German right (in particular the DNVP, the Stahlhelm, Papen's right-wing faction of Zentrum and the clique of conservative aristocrats around Hindenburg) were broadly supportive of the NSDAP and actively enabled Hitler's rise to power. The German left (in particular the SDP) opposed it. I'm happy to admit that the relationship between the NSDAP and the KPD was more complex. But I think "the Nazis were right-wing" had a clear meaning in the context of 1930's Germany and that meaning is obviously correct given who was on which side. If you think you understand the politics of the NSDAP better than the German politicians of its time, then you need a better argument than "there is an S in NSDAP."
Mentioning them in the broader political context as the valid definition of the whole term
My position is that the CDU (and CSU in Bavaria) is "the right" in 21st century Germany. You disagree, and argue that "the right" should correctly refer to some other political tradition which rejects the CDU from a further-right perspective. The reason why no such political tradition has existed in Germany since 1945 is that "the right" in your sense discredited itself by being either proud supporters of or useful idiots for Hitler, and thus contributing to the utter ruination of Germany. It wasn't just Nazism that discredited itself in this way - it was the broader illiberal right including the DNVP, the Chamberlain-Halifax wing of the British Conservative party, throne-and-altar conservatives in Catholic Europe, and the militaristic conservatism of Quisling and Petain.
it certainly sounds like you're calling me a Nazi
I'm not calling you a Nazi - just as I wouldn't call Papen and Hugenberg Nazis, because they weren't. But they both did jail time after WW2 for collaborating with Nazis. I think that you are defining "the right" in a way which means anyone who is a reliable ally against Nazis doesn't qualify. I note that you explicitly endorsed the AfD, a group that was kicked out of the right-populist ID group in the European Parliament after its lead candidate defended the role of the SS in WW2, as an example of what you consider "the right". I think the AfD is lousy with Nazis (it isn't a Nazi party per se), and I think that someone who supports the AfD is sufficiently comfortable working with Nazis that they fall into the broad category of "right-wingers whose approach to politics should have been discredited by events leading up to 1945."
I never mentioned Farage (for the simple reason that his political power right now is microscopic, 4 seats out of 650?)
The proposition we were arguing about is "the right is over". Farage doesn't have power right now, but nobody paying attention to British politics thinks that Reform UK is "over". If you say that "the right is over" in the UK, you are implying that Reform UK isn't right-wing enough for you.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
My argument is that grazing rights are typically not exclusive, whereas the previous poster had given grazing rights as an example where exclusivity was practically necessary. I wasn't making a policy argument for or against "ownership" - I was declining to do so on the basis that real-world arrangements are often more complex (and in the case of land, almost always more complex) than the Jurisprudence for Dummies idea of "ownership".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
You can define "the right" to exclude mainstream conservative parties like the German CDU, and then say it is all over for the right. But then you are using non-standard definitions of words to do the work, not facts about the world.
The point @Tree is making is that functional political parties adjust their positioning in order to chase votes. Big-tent right-wing parties are torn between their desire to win elections and their desire to push right-wing policies, and end up positioning themselves slightly to the right of the median voter. @Tree is right that no matter how left-wing a country is, there will usually be a right-wing party doing directionally right-wing things, and consisting of recognisably right-wing people. Even in Denmark, which is so left-wing that the main right-wing party is called "Left" and the centrist liberal party is called "Radical Left", you have a right-wing party full of obviously right-wing people (they stick out like a sore thumb at Liberal International conferences) and with obviously right-wing policies like tax cuts and reduced immigration.
@JarJarJedi is of course correct that it is all over for a specific policy agenda if that political agenda becomes sufficiently unpopular. If you define "right" sufficiently strictly, then it was all over for the right in 1945 (and good riddance). And if @JarJarJedi thinks that Meloni and Farage are insufficiently right-wing to count, then for him it probably was.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Although in practice the vast majority of what gets caught by IHT is middle-class housing wealth that was not, in fact, taxed the first time.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Either my cattle can graze the land or your cattle can.
This is not how land title works in traditional livestock-grazing societies. Multiple cow-owners' cattle can graze the same land as long as the total number of cattle does not exceed the capacity of the land. And the smallest efficient land holding for grazing cattle is much larger than the amount of land actually needed for one family's cattle. So you end up with various forms of communal ownership of rough grazing land. The most primitive is collective ownership and customary management by the whole tribe/village, but England and Wales developed two more formal systems - under levency and couchancy the right to graze livestock on the common land associated with a village in summer is tied to stabling the livestock in the village and feeding them locally grown hay in the winter, and under stinting the right to graze a certain number of livestock on the common land becomes a property right (initially tied to owning a specific plot of land in the village, later separately tradeable). In the US, most of the rough grazing in the west is government land.
tl;dr - There are sound practical reasons why rough grazing land is not privately owned. The resulting OG tragedy of the commons has been understood, and institutions have existed for solving it, since time immemorial.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
This is an opinion, not a fact. The United States government received most of its revenue from tariffs until the Civil War,
When they didn't have a federal welfare state for the old, or a blue-water navy. The main reason why Trump beats the GOPe at the ballot box is that voters worry that the GOPe is going to aggressively cut the welfare state for the old. Maintaining Social Security and Medicare in something resembling their current form is fundamental to the political viability of Trumpism, and isn't compatible with funding the government with tariffs.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Ask the Afghans (very much including the women) who would rather live under the Taliban than under Pashtunwali. But my understanding is that Pashtunwali is a goatfucker culture honour code similar to the Albanian Law of Lek and is bad because it institutionalises all the pathologies of goatfucker cultures, including blood feuds, bridal kidnapping, goatfucking etc.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
The problem, of course, is that the optics of (mostly) young black men being publicly whipped would be intolerable to a plurality of white Americans.
Countries without American racial politics also eschew judicial corporal punishment of adults. Although a number of backward former British colonies still have caning on the books, Singapore appears to be the only non-Islamic country that actually does it on a regular basis. For whatever reason, the taboo against judicial corporal punishment is stronger than the taboo against the death penalty.
If I had to guess, it would be some combination of:
- Over time, it has become common sense that the criminal justice system works by incapacitation more than deterrence or rehabilitation, meaning that caning adults is ineffective.
- People are more worried than they used to be that the guy swinging the cane might be getting off on it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
To the extent that more expensive lawyers are actually better at winning cases, it reduces the role of raw monetary advantage in deciding who wins.
Loser pays doesn't prevent lawyers representing poor clients with strong cases working on contingency - in fact loser pays is complementary with contingency fees (called "conditional fees" in England) because the contingency only needs to cover the "uplift" over a regular fee to compensate the lawyer for the risk of not getting paid, whereas US-style contingency fees need to cover (in expectation) both the basic fee and the uplift.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
And this is the point of the "First Island Chain" logic.
If the anti-China coalition controls Taiwan, then they can maintain an effective blockade of China using mostly land-based aircraft operating out of bases in Japan (and its islands), Taiwan, the Philippines, and Malaysian Borneo. If China controls Taiwan, then maintaining the blockade means either bringing US carriers within range of Chinese land-based aircraft operating out of Taiwan, or engaging Chinese short-range fighters with American long-range fighters. Both of these are generally believed to be insta-lose conditions against a peer competitor.
China appears to be building a blue-water navy. This only makes strategic sense if they can break out into the Pacific beyond the First Island Chain, which either means they plan to take Taiwan, or that they know something we don't and think they can run a blockade.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
(state governments as proxies for)
general principle of self-governance
This matters - in no Confederate state did the pro-secession majority of whites represent a majority of the whole population. The Confederate states were (in most cases explicitly) seceding in order to prevent self-governance by numerical majorities of their multiracial populations.
You can argue that secession was legal based on respect for actual existing sovereignty, but that gets you into the obscure historico-legal argument about the de jure division of sovereignty between the Feds and the States and whether the 1789 Constitution was intended to be irrevocable.
To justify Southern slavery at all, you need to start with a position of "No Good, only Law" which means you are arguing about what rights the South did have under the Constitution, not what rights they should have had. The only rights the southern slavers should have had under the general principles we believe in in 2025 were the right to a fair trial and the right to execution by long-drop hanging or some other civilised method.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
The interaction between historical preservation and disabled accessibility is particularly problematic. There are a lot of buildings where the options boil down to "stay in the lane that allows you to be grandfathered out of disabled accessibility" and "abandon the building and the lot it stands on because it is too historical to refit or demolish".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
I wouldn't say the US forced him to abdicate - he was couped in the 1970's by his Prime Minister. But if the question is "why did the US not put Zahir Shah on the throne as part of their policy of building not-the-Taliban?" then per Wikipedia the answer is that Pakistan vetoed it. That the US deep state still (wrongly) considered Pakistan an ally who might have a better sense of Afghan politics than they did was obvious if you were paying attention in the noughties.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
Is it? The US spent two trillion dollars trying to spread liberalism to Afghanistan.
That is how they justified it to themselves. But what the US was actually doing in Afghanistan was spending two trillion dollars to (unsuccessfully) spread not-the-Taliban, in order to punish the Taliban for harbouring Osama Bin Laden pre-9/11. The not-the-Taliban the US spread included a bit of liberalism, but rather more drug dealing, bacha bazi, Pashtunwali, and stealing of US aid money. This was not a problem, except for the Afghans, who quite sensibly brought back the Taliban at the first reasonable opportunity.
I remember the pre-9/11 days when the treatment of Afghan women under the Taliban was a big deal (a fake petition against it was the first big viral fake e-mail) among Blue Tribers who wrongly considered themselves to be elites (undergraduates at top universities and suchlike), while the actual Blue Tribe elites of the US Deep State was turning a blind eye because friends of friends of the Taliban were on our side against Iran. Counterfactual (but obviously true) premise: The US would not have bombed Afghanistan without a 9/11-scale Al-Qaeda outrage. Conclusion: The US did not bomb Afghanistan for feminism.
The US power elite remains entirely comfortable with the treatment of women, gays, and journalists in Saudi Arabia for crissake. Because the al-Saud keep the oil flowing and hand out the DC largesse on a grand scale.
I don't actually know if it is true that right-populism naturally throws up politicians of base character, or whether Trump and Johnson are just highly salient bad examples. Farage seems marginally more honest than the average politician (a low bar, but one Trump and Johnson profoundly fail to clear). Marine le Pen clears the even lower bar of being more honest than the average French politician. Meloni clears the lower still bar of being more honest than the average Italian politician.
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