MathWizard
formerly hh26
No bio...
User ID: 164
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Unusually expensive land is created by externalities of labor and capital. If a bunch of people build businesses and and apartments and stuff in a certain place, it will cause the land value of surrounding areas to rise. People working jobs and engaging in productive behaviors capture some of the value themselves, give some of the value to their customers, and have some of it diffuse into nearby land as rents. Except in the rare case where one person owns all of the land in an area, this added rent value is captured by a different person than those who rightfully created it.
Therefore, the workers wages are already being stolen. Well, not exactly stolen, it's not as if surrounding land owners are deliberately taking it from them. It's automatically taken by the nature of economics, that's how externalities work. Taxing it and then giving it back to the surrounding community actually gives the workers more of their own value.
At the very least, even if you're some radical libertarian who believes literally all taxes are theft, you should at least recognize land value taxes as the least bad tax for economic reasons of land values being inelastic, and thus a potential compromise given that you're never going to convince the majority of the population to shut down the entire government.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I personally have no interest in banning contraceptives because, again, who cares.
I want literally the opposite, largely because I am pro-life. I am tentatively in favor of forcing unmarried people to use contraceptives, except that there's no reasonable to enforce it without authoritarian government control that I'm not in favor of. At the very least, we should bring back all of the shame and stigma that used to be attached to unmarried sex a couple centuries ago, but only apply it to people who don't use birth control. Also make it free to incentivize people to use it.
First and foremost, this will reduce abortions. The argument against outlawing it is that people will just do it anyway but in unsafe ways. If so, the only way to truly prevent abortions is to prevent unwanted pregnancies, so we should be pushing legal and social pressures towards doing so.
Second, I believe it is immoral to bring an unwanted child into existence. They will not have the love and support from their parents that a child deserves. Again, pro-choice people use this as an argument in favor of abortions, but I think having an unwanted child is less evil than killing them (otherwise we could replace orphanages with euthanasia clinics). But it's still evil, and more birth control would also reduce this.
Thirdly, I believe it is immoral to deliberately have a child as a single parent, even if you want one. I feel less strongly about this, and I'm not sure I would go so far to call it "evil", just misguided and irresponsible. All of the science shows that children with two parents have significantly better life outcomes, I don't think one parent alone can fulfill all of the responsibilities of both paying for and actually educating and caring for a child, and doesn't have the full breadth of wisdom and life experiences to impart, since they only have their own perspective.
Unmarried people should not be conceiving children, because it inevitably leads to one of these scenarios (unless you have a shotgun wedding, which is still likely to lead to suboptimal results if your partner wasn't someone you were previously planning to marry). Therefore, unmarried heterosexual people should not engage in unprotected sex, at least in any form with a nonnegligble chance of conception. I'm not convinced it is the responsibility of the government to prevent this, I don't think it's within the range of powers they ought to have. But at the very least anyone who does this is a bad person and we need social pressure that disincentivizes people from doing it. Slut shaming is a lost cause, but I hope that unprotected-slut-shaming (Of both sexes. Men are equally culpable for their actions.) can make a comeback.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
8mo ago
The pro-life maneuver with the highest expected value, as measured by abortion reduction multiplied by probability of actually getting passed in the legislature, is to promote free birth control. Most people on the left already want this, so it shouldn't be hard to get bipartisan support. Then way more people will use it, way fewer accidental pregnancies occur, and actual abortion rates plummet regardless of whether it's legal or illegal.
This might have the bonus affect of making it much easier to pass restrictions on abortion afterwards. If fewer people have needed one or known someone who has needed one, and the only people who ever get abortions are morons who forgot to take their free birth control, people in general will be less sympathetic. Lazy people just using abortion as birth control will have cheaper alternatives and so care less. People worried about being forced to give birth to an unwanted child in some hypothetical future will be less worried because they can just use their free state-provided birth control. And the messaging that pro-life people just want to enslave women as breeders forced to give birth against their will just dissolves away because we're actively trying to prevent them from getting pregnant.
But even if nothing else changes legislatively, even if the silly pollitical warmakers would consider this a loss because the pro-choice get everything they want, this would be a massive win for pro-life and effective altruism. I don't think people trying to have tons of promiscuous sex "deserve" to have their degenerate lifestyles subsidized by my tax dollars, but I'm going to offer it anyway because "deserves" matter less than saving lives.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
You always have to be careful about controlling for confounders, but there's enough evidence in the same direction that I generally buy it. HBD is probably true, but my argument is that its effect is significantly smaller than the effect from culture, so it's not an important priority for addressing or using to explain gaps. It's not as simple as reasoning "Median househould income is $77k for white people and $46k for black people, but white people are smarter so everything is fine". If HBD is false then with equal cultures, and absent racism, the median income for black people would also be $77k. If HBD is true, then with equal cultures the median income with equal cultures might be $72k or something, something between $46k and $77k and closer to the latter than the former. The gap is caused by multiple factors, and there is significant progress that can be made, and most but not all of the gap could theoretically be closed. If HBD is true, then it will eventually be important to acknowledge as true so that someday if we reach the equilibrium we don't keep endlessly looking for racists and/or cultural issues, because the gap can't ever be closed completely. But at the moment there's so much other stuff going on that it's only a small piece of the pie.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
And ideally you would tax that too. A sophisticated version of Georgism would include pigouvian taxes on behaviors with negative externalities, or natural monopolies, intellectual property, and other economic niches with fixed supply that one person snatching up deprives others of being able to do.
It's just that land is the easiest to assess and the most high value, and the most reasonably confident that most of its value is not created by the owner. Even if say, 5% of land value is created by real estate developers on their own property, that would mean 95% is not, either inherent to the land itself or created by other people nearby. So even if land value taxes are not entirely costless (although the more zealous Georgists pretend that they are), they're still one of the least bad taxes possible (only being beaten out by pigouvian taxes which disincentivize negative behaviors like pollution)
MathWizard
formerly hh26
29d ago
I don't see why that would always be true. I would expect red-leaning judges to be biased towards the red states, while blue-leaning judges would be biased towards the blue states.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I don't want to pretend that you don't have a point. This is in fact a point I've argued on the other side of against more radical Georgists who pretend LVT has no flaws whatsoever. It exists, it is a potential issue. And a nuanced, sophisticated version of Georgism would try to figure out a way to calculate this and either reduce the tax rate of someone based on how much of their land value was created by their own improvements, or use land tax revenue to give back directly to the people who are responsible for it (though this may be vulnerable to inaccuracies and corruption). Maybe you let large developers apply for a permit which exempts them from taxes caused by their own buildings, but you still tax them for the unearned rent on their land that is caused by other people's actions. Or maybe you make land assessment prices sticky that can't increase faster than a certain rate, so that rapid changes in land value from building things will increase its economic value immediately, without the tax price changing, which allows people to temporarily extract rent from them. But the tax rate slowly goes up towards the current value such that all of the long term value of the land caused by emergent social phenomena that no individual is responsible gets taxed and redistributed to everyone in society.
So ultimately, I think this is a niche problem which has potential solutions within the Georgist framework. Most people will still build the same as what they build now. Some people will actually build more if you remove nonland property taxes and force landlords to build to profit instead of squatting on valuable land. Only large developers relying on their own land value synergies will be disincentivized, and only if the land value tax makes no exceptions for them. It will cause some economic inefficiencies, but so do income taxes. Income taxes create tons and tons of inefficiency which are not niche. So if we're comparing system to a Georgist system, especially a nuanced Georgism which acknowledges the costs and attempts to mitigate them by having exceptions and setting tax rates below 100%, I still think it's the least bad tax.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
8mo ago
Are you talking about like the morning after pill? Because those are bad, but I'm referring to the ones that prevent women from ovulating during pregnancy so they don't just keep conceiving babies month after month while already pregnant. I know they make IUDs that do that, but there might be pills for it to.
I actually am not super familiar with the habits of promiscuous people and their typical birth control preferences, so "most" might not be the right phrase to use here. But if it turns out that most forms of birth control are abortive, but some aren't, that just increases the potential benefit of a pro-life promotion and subsidization of the ethical ones. If someone can pay $10/month for abortion pills vs $20 for non-conceiving hormones, and they don't think fetuses are people, they're likely to take the abortion pills. If someone can pay $10/month for abortion pills vs $0 for non-conceiving hormones because the government and/or pro-life charities pay the $20, then no child gets conceived in the first place, and thus none die. Assuming that the goal is actually to prevent the conception and subsequent deaths of fetuses because they die, and not just to increase the number of childbirths, this seems like a massive win to me.
Now maybe it would be healthier for society and relationships for people to just not have promiscuous sex in the first place, but that ship has sailed, pragmatically there's nothing we can do to fix that, and it seems much less of a priority to me than the millions of deaths at stake that free non-abortive birth control could prevent.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
(This is probably a conversation for the culture war thread, not SQS, but whatever)
I sincerely doubt cynical men who are willing to disfigure their bodies and live a life of deception outnumber those who are sincerely dissatisfied with their lives as men and think living as women will make them happier.
I don't think that the latter category is necessarily excluded from "white males trying to become a marginalized group". That is, cynical exploitation of the system is sufficient but not necessary for this to be a factor. Some men are sincerely dissatisfied with their lives, and have been convinced that men are privileged oppressive patriarchs who oppress everyone else, and viscerally reject that identity because they don't feel privileged or oppressive and don't want to be. Instead, they are bullied and socially outcast and don't fit in with more masculine men, and thus feel that they must be part of an oppressed group. They are being oppressed by other white men (the bullies/normies), so they must be something other than a white man, hence trans.
Or something like that. I am not a clinical psychologist, I don't purport to know exactly what goes through the mind of someone in this situation (I was a weird social outcast, sort of, but very much not woke so I coped in completely different ways). And each individual is different so will have different responses to this situation. But it seems very plausible to me that social outcasts will look for reasons and excuses as to why they are different from everyone else, and why the people who pick on them are inherently evil in a morally objective way that makes them truly the bad guys. Taking on an oppressed identity makes your bullies into bigots and allows you to unite allies against them, even if they were previously bullying you for reasons unrelated to your identity. And, importantly, you don't need to be a cynical opportunist or a sleaze trying to sexually assault women, just be hurt and confused and subject to the same mental biases that everyone has that let us justify beliefs that are beneficial to ourselves.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
There are strong deontological and libertarian arguments that if somebody earns money, or creates something which is valued via money, via legitimate means, then they can do whatever they want with their own money no matter how wasteful you deem it, even if starving people elsewhere could use that money, because it's the owner's choice to do what they will with their own property.
I'm going to put those arguments aside, and argue from a utilitarian perspective. After all, what are they doing with their money if not spending it on themselves? If it sits in a bank vault as cash forever then it might as well not exist as far as the economy goes and thus helps counter inflation, at least until they die and a lot of it goes into death taxes and heirs. If they donate it to charity then hey, it's doing exactly what you want. If they're investing it to earn even more money, then it is being invested, not sitting around being useless. Again, if we're restricting our view to ethical billionaires who earn money by creating wealth, then they invest by giving money to ethical companies which create wealth, and then they extract some of that wealth as dividends while the rest disperses into the economy in the form of cheaper goods, more valuable goods, wages, and more buying/selling in interactions between their company and others.
So there are a number of reasons, from a utilitarian perspective, why billionaires might sometimes be good:
1: Charity
Scott makes a strong post arguing that billionaire charity is good because it can pick up blind spots that government charity misses: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billionaire-philanthropy/ Bill Gates in particular has devastated malaria, which was previously being underfunded relative to its value, because governments have systematic biases in what they do and do not fund. Such cases are not one person hoarding wealth that they can't possibly use on themselves, it's individuals choosing where to donate their own money that they created instead of the government appropriating it and then deciding for them. And they earn this right be creating the wealth in the first place.
2: Capital Allocation
I read a good argument (I forget where, maybe Paul Graham?) comparing investors to a natural selection process for determining what projects should be invested in. That is, people who are systematically good at telling the difference between promising companies and doomed failures can repeatedly invest in good companies that others underestimate, earn a profit, and have even more money. And then they repeat the process but more and bigger because they have more money to utilize. People who are bad at doing this will end up with less money and eventually be forced to do something else with their time. Therefore, smart investors will end up with more money, which they have demonstrated their ability to use wisely. And again, if they are investing in ethical companies then the more money they earn is a fraction of the wealth generated by the companies they finance, the rest going to grow the economy. Importantly, this process is brutal and unbiased. A bureaucrat trying to decide where to allocate public funding is going to have personal biases, conflicts of interest, and legibility concerns that they have to justify to others. A wealthy investor can chase hunches, whims, make their own plans based on their own industry knowledge, or just be unreasonably biased in favor of some industry that happens to be a good idea but nobody knows why yet. Evolution doesn't need to understand why the things it does works, it just has to kill the things that don't work and let the ones that do multiply, and eventually you have good things that work.
This second point demonstrates that how a billionaire spends their money is not necessarily decoupled from how they earned it. If they're spending it on making more money, and if they're investing in an ethical way (a big if) then they are creating even more wealth. And any limits or disincentives, soft or hard, will disincentivize this behavior and make some of them not try so hard. What genius business creator is going to super hard for a 10% chance of turning their 10 million dollar company into a billion dollar company, if you're going to cap them at 20 million dollars and they can just sell it now for a guaranteed 10 million? What $999 million dollar banker is going to risk $10 million dollars in a startup with a 2% chance of earning them another billion if you've capped them at $1 billion?
Poor people matter, it would probably help them in the short term if you snatched all of their billionaires wealth and just gave it to poor people, but you don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. There's a teach a man to fish versus feed a man a fish sort of thing going on here. Capitalism is a strange alien beast which, when carefully tuned, can/is/will lift billions of poor people out of poverty. And billionaires are mostly a side effect of that process, but in some cases a direct contributor.
There's a large extent to which all of this is just a rephrasing of trickle down economics, which is 90% bullshit. But it's 10% not, and I would argue that to the reason it mostly doesn't work is largely because a significant fraction of wealth people and companies aren't actually behaving ethically. There is a lot of rentseeking and exploitation and imbalance in bargaining power between labor and capital, which means that many companies create wealth and then keep 90%+ of it as profit for themselves rather than a more fair ~50%, and some companies actually destroy wealth via externalities but manage to extract profits that they didn't legitimately create.
But also, from a brutal utilitarian perspective, maybe 10% is good enough. Like, if a group of rich people have $1 trillion dollars, we could snatch that and give it to the poor, and then the rich people and all the economic potential they represent is gone, the goose is dead. Or maybe we take 10% today, so the poor people only have $100 billion and a bunch suffer in poverty (though not literally starving). And then the remaining 900 billion the rich people invest grows to 1.8 trillion, and then we take another 10% giving $180 billion to the poor. And then the remainder doubles again and then we take another 10%. And wealth inequality continues to grow as the rich get richer and richer and richer, and yet pretty soon the amount we've extracted for the poor has exceeded what even existed in the first place, and they're not so poor. Maybe in a hundred years we'll have billions of "poor" people living in luxury apartments with all of what we would today consider modern luxuries, while the uber rich fly to pluto for vacation in gigantic space castles that the poor could never hope to afford. And if the alternative is to snatch the trillion now and hope that it feeds enough people for long enough before the money runs out and they go back to how they were before, then maybe it's better to let them stay poor until the economy grows enough to lift them out organically via wealth creation.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I think so. It's been a while since I learned about this so I don't remember all the details or studies off the top of my head. But I'm pretty sure there were many such studies and probably at least some controlled correctly. I'm not completely certain though.
However I don't think it would even be appropriate to control for money/wealth/family-income directly, because part of the value of a two-parent household is the increased income. And even if you look at income per parent that's not necessarily appropriate because being a single parent forces them to juggle career and child rearing which would lead to less opportunities to take on high paying but demanding jobs. You'd have to control for socio-economic status of the families the parents came from (ie the grandchildren of the kids) or something complicated like that which controls for potential earning power rather than actual earnings.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Oh hey, I didn't even think of using flair for that. That's pretty convenient, I'll probably do that for a couple months.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
9mo ago
I agree, but I think the rape affect is appropriate, at least with regard to trans issues. Medical transitions are a form of genital mutilation which cause massive harm similar in kind but greater in magnitude to rape. I would rather a child be groomed into sex with a pedo than groomed into undergoing medical transition, because the former would leave fewer long term irreversible trauma and could hopefully eventually be healed and recovered from.
With regards to LGB, grooming is only an appropriate accusation if the ideologues are trying to convince the children to be more sexually explicit, promiscuous, and/or think sex with adults is okay (things which would be a prelude to pedophilia). Almost nobody is accusing normal LGB people of being "groomers", and I disavow the ones who do. The efficacy of "groomer" comes from the rape affect, and in order to preserve that as a useful tool we need to use the word only in cases where that implication is accurate.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
9mo ago
Yeah. I wouldn't mind some high effort white nationalist posts so their points can be addressed and discussed and possibly rebutted in an intelligent way.
And to some extent, forcing high quality posts from people with misguided views may force them to educate themselves and accidentally de-radicalize in the process.
I think you're missing distinction between base land value and capital improvements. You don't tax the buildings themselves, or the entire property value, you set the tax rate according to the underlying value of the land itself (which can be assessed separately from the building's value, and real estate agents do this all the time). Which is entirely externalities from other nearby stuff. Whatever value a property has from invested capital improvements contained within itself is exempt from the land value tax. If done properly, the incentive to build is the same as the incentive to invest money in any other form of capital (and the same the vast majority of people have when they build in the current system): you can either extract money from it over time, (which is not taxed in a full Georgist system), or sell it for a profit, which people are willing to buy because they can then extract money from it over time. In fact, people are more incentivized to build with land value taxes, because it's becomes the only way for a landlord to earn profit. You can't just buy a piece of land and sit on it as it appreciates in value, or extract rents based on its favorable location that everyone wants to be in. You have to build and upkeep structures that create value such that people are willing to pay to live there, or useful buildings that earn profit, above and beyond the taxed land rent value.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Why does it have to be aliens?
visiting A-bombs, nuclear subs, carriers and missiles
First possibility that pops into my head is Russia or China. Second is the U.S. military itself pretending not to know what its own craft are to keep them secret from the public. Third is CIA or other shady U.S. government agency that keeps secrets from other parts of the U.S. government. Aliens are fourth. UFO stands for "unidentified flying object": if it flies and you haven't identified it, it's a UFO. They can easily exist without requiring them to be extraterrestrial. We already know of a species right here on Earth that has access to advanced technology, can create flying craft, and keeps inventing new stuff that nobody has ever seen before.
Underwater stealth drones or lasers that scramble people's brains are just outside the publicly known levels of technology, it's not too crazy to imagine that one of the governments is experimenting with something like that and people don't know about it yet. Certainly less crazy than secret aliens. So, conditional on these reports being true, that's the most likely scenario.
Right, but people maximize their individual utility, not the average of everyone else, so the equilibrium point may not be the globally optimum point. That's how public goods dilemmas work.
Ie, if we take the above instance, where the speed of each car is (0.99)^x, where x is the number of cars, then total throughput is x(0.99)^x, which is maximized at x = 100. If each person's utility when they drive is u = (personal speed) - 0.1 (and 0 if they don't drive), then the equilibrium (when an additional driver would have a utility of 0) happens at about 230 cars. And by definition at this point everyone gets a utility of 0, the wasted time and cost of driving is so bad that it just barely cancels whatever benefit would be gained from driving. Meanwhile the maximum for total utility among all drivers happens at x = 77, which is actually lower than the max throughput of 100 because those 77 drivers have better speed and thus gain more utility.
These are oversimplified dynamics and numbers, but hopefully they illustrate the concept. People frequently reach inefficient equilibria because they're optimizing selfish individual utility functions that don't consider externalities. And it's precisely those cases where the government can serve a legitimately useful purpose by nudging the equilibrium closer to the globally optimal value while still maintaining the feedback loops. Preferably by making people internalize their externalities in some way so that their personal incentives better line up with the global incentives so that they can still optimize but less selfishly. Hard quotas, limits, and bans tend to lead to worse results and/or have unintended consequences because they're not subject to appropriate feedback loops that reflect genuine preferences.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Unless you run into public goods dilemmas. I am not an expert on traffic patterns, but it seems at least theoretically plausible that at a certain level of crowding, adding a marginal car to the existing traffic might decrease total throughput. Ie, if each car within a certain area reduces the speed of all other cars on the road by 1% (multiplicatively), then once you have more than 100 cars in that area, each new car will reduce the total throughput (speed x cars) by more than it adds, and it would be optimal to have only 100 cars at a time.
It sure seems like this is the case in a lot of crowded cities, where cars are stuck in traffic jams and barely moving a lot of the time, such that half as many cars could go way more than twice as fast.
I will note that this does not necessarily justify this approach. It is icky and orwellian and an abuse of power. But if it would work it'll be important to recognize that and oppose it on other grounds.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
the Russians are inherently authoritarian/imperialistic/belligerent/orcish, and therefore must be destroyed.
You could say the same about Americans. And Americans literally do say the same about other Americans, they're just divided into two groups who are each accusing each other of being authoritarian/imperialistic/belligerent/orcish while they themselves are the only sane and rational people in the world. And you could say the same about pretty much any population ever if they happen to be stirred up into a frenzy at the moment. Look at how blindly most people (on all sides of the political spectrum) believe whatever their thought leaders tell them to. Look how violent people become when they declare a group to be their enemy. You are literally advocating the genocide of 143 million people because you believe them to be evil, not because you've met all 143 million of them, or probably even a dozen, but because of the government and military of their country is doing bad things and there is some amount of support among their populace. Do 90% of Russians support their military? Do 50%? Do 10%? Maybe it's only a tiny but vocal minority who don't face opposition because the 90% of sane Russians know better than to stick their necks out in an authoritarian country that's oppressing them. Or maybe it legitimately is 90%, but you have no idea and you advocate genocide anyway, because you decided that they are the enemy and thus deserve no mercy.
That sounds pretty authoritarian/imperialistic/belligerent/orcish to me. If Ukraine had done something you don't like to incite this war, or if you had been born in Russia and had feelings of nationalist loyalty to them, or if the U.S. government had been allied with Russia and fed anti Ukraine propaganda (have you heard that they're literal Nazis?), I expect you'd be advocating their genocide instead. Because you're not any better than the Russian citizens. And you're not any worse. People have a tendency to get carried away, especially when fed propaganda, and it's important to understand them so you can deconvert them, demoralize them, and end wars without genociding the enemy whenever possible, because at the end of the day they're still human beings and they still matter even when they do bad things.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I don't think that indigenous people are inherently special, I don't think their culture or rights are any more or less deserving of consideration or privilege than those of any other human being, and I don't think they should be legally treated as meaningfully distinct from any other group of people. They're regular people, just like you or me, and they deserve the same dignity and respect for their rights that you and I deserve.
Personally, I think if they made a stronger effort to integrate and adapt to modern society they would probably end up with better economic and life outcomes, but I feel that way about most minority and/or immigrant communities. The ones that value education, technology, respect for the rule of law, tolerance of others, and stuff like that, end up doing just as well as white people, while subcultures that obsess over their race and origins, and refuse to adapt end up poor and angry. Maybe I'm mixing up culture with class, but there's not always a meaningful distinction there, a lot of subcultures feel like variations of "lower class behavior", but I think there's something extra damaging about going off into a separate physical and legal area and preventing the natural spread of ideas and behaviors that the rest of the first world uses to great success.
Which, they're free to do. And in some cases it works out fine, I think the Amish are pretty happy. But if they end up unhappy, which they often do, then I can only shrug and point out that they could at any time be regular citizens like everyone else, and instead choose to be special.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
In my opinion, shadowbans are an appropriate measure in only two circumstances:
-
the target is a bot, not a real human
-
the target is an alt who is attempting to evade regular public bans
Precisely because these are cases where a real ban is ineffective because the target will just try again with new accounts repeatedly, and the shadowness helps prevent them from knowing it's necessary. Shadowbanning a real human for regular rule breaking is sinister and evil, the only purpose it serves is to reduce transparency for mod decisions.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
2mo ago
Yeah, we definitely need to move in a more libertarian direction than we are now. It's just that an awful lot of Libertarians claim things like "we need to remove literally all regulations", and I'm like "no, the anti-monopoly, anti-cartel ones are pretty good and we should keep those while we strip out the bad ones."
MathWizard
formerly hh26
5mo ago
I think there's a difference between being enemies as a result of material circumstance, which can allow for mutual respect, versus fundamental ideological differences, which I don't think do, or at least severely cap the amount.
Like, if I found myself in a family/tribe/guild/nation, and someone else is in another, and we both want the same land/resource, or are fighting for sovereignty or global hegemony, then we could have approximately the same values but still be at odds against one another, because we each want what's best for our own group to the exclusion of what's best for the other group. Similarly, I can respect an opponent who has different factual beliefs (provided they're not absurd and obviously false such that no respectable person would be wrong in the way they are). Maybe we both want what's best for everyone, but disagree on what course of action is best to do that. Or even with slight ideological differences there can be mutual respect. Like, if there's an opportunity to tradeoff freedom points versus security points at a 1:1 ratio, and I value freedom at 6 utils each and security at 4 utils each, while person B values freedom at 4 utils each and security at 6 utils each, then we're going to end up on opposite sides of the issue of the tradeoff despite both valuing freedom and security. Ideally, neither of the latter two scenarios would lead to war, but maybe they would.
But if the other person's ideology is just straight up evil then no, I can't respect that. Or rather, the sum of my respect would be all of the other traits about them that might be respectable, minus the massive loss from them being an evil person. I don't think it's respectable to be evil, even if you're loyal and devoted to your evil ideals. To the extent that Rommel wanted what's best for the German people and genuinely thought that he was helping them, I can respect that. To the extent that Rommel turned a blind eye to genocide in as a sacrifice towards that end, I lose a decent amount of respect. To the extent that Rommel might have genuinely believed in genocide as a means itself, if any (it's not entirely clear) I would lose a ton of respect for him. I would have much much more respect for a counterfactual Rommel who had pulled a coup on Hitler, stopped the genocide, and then tried to conquer the world, because it would have shown more moral fortitude than someone who's blindly loyal.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
8mo ago
Maybe I should clarify my position as someone who is both pro-life and utilitarian. It is about "harm" for me, and a non-negligible proportion of pro-life people I have encountered. Human fetuses are human and alive, human life is good, death is bad. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Of course for a different non-negligible proportion of "pro-life" people it's about punishing people for their sins and forcing people to bear the consequences of their premarital sex.
I just wish my... subfaction? were more influential than the latter so we had more control over the movement and its messaging.
Georgist land value taxes are probably the best possible solution, and it is kind of annoying to constantly see people constantly being oblivious to them and conflating landlords with "the rich" as if capitalists who create products that people can consensually choose whether to buy or ignore are the same thing as landlords who hold not-homelessness hostage from everyone born without a huge amount of money to buy into the Ponzi scheme of land ownership.
A fair start to life is one in which everyone starts from zero, with nothing but the support of their parents and an equal share of the land and the bounty of nature. One in which you can go out into the land and use it to feed yourself and clothe yourself and build more and better things, and trade with others doing the same. In so far as land privitization of land has deprived everyone from the ability to do this, it is only fair and just that they be compensated for the value of the land. Not by giving them some vaguely defined "wealth redistribution" of arbitrary source or amount from "people who we think ought to help them", but by directly taxing the land equal to the value it provides as "rent", and distributing it to people either in the form of UBI and/or cuts to other taxes (or a combination of both). Anyone with less than an average amount of land should be paid by people with an above average amount of land (weighted by the land values). And if that's not enough to feed and clothe them, then they can work to make up the difference. But it will at least establish a baseline that removes the exploitation of landlords while not punishing capitalists who actually create value and inhibiting them from continuing to create value. (Also, reducing income taxes will significantly help employment rates and wages)
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