Shrike
5mo ago
Maybe the average American now thinks not only "Europe should contribute more to solve their own defence problems", but furthermore, "Europe should get its nose out of international affairs and attempt to help only when it's spoken to. We, Russia and China are in charge now."
I think the average American has thought the former for years, but does not think that Russia or China are in charge. Your average American does not like Russia or the Chinese Communist Party but they likely think Europeans are weak and pretentious. (Of course Americans often have a pet European nation they like).
Personally I think that the Europeans have been living under the umbrella of American protection for years and they have used that position to take actions that are repugnant to Americans (such as increasingly draconian punishments for "hate speech") as well as advantageous to our rivals (such as building a massive oil pipeline directly to Russia).
The Biden administration successfully put Europe back in its place by convincing it to demilitarize itself in Ukraine's defense and cutting it off from Russian economic succor, which moved American leverage against Europe from "decent" to "strong." Europe would be forced to rely on America for military power and energy. Now Trump is ironically considering torching the military power and leaving Europe on its own. If he actually does this (and it's not a negotiating tactic, which...with Trump, what isn't) it will arguably be throwing away all of Biden's gains on the "keeping the Germans down" front. On the other hand, pulling out of Europe means that the Europeans will have to arm themselves further, which might actually prove fairly lucrative to the United States.
(I know I have said this before, but essential context for understanding American relations with Europe: Russia is by and large not a conventional threat to the United States. The only two powers likely to threaten the United States are China and...a united Europe.)
All I can say is you should have met your military spending guidelines. You can't play the freeloaders in a military alliance. If you are the freeloaders in a military alliance, annoying your biggest partner by continually meddling with how they run their businesses and suggesting they are uncivilized retards is a terrible idea.
The United States put Europe on notice that they needed to increase military spending and that they were pivoting to Asia under Obama. This is not a new idea. I think that Obama made withdrawing from Europe harder on every successive administration with his Ukraine policy, and I am happy to blame the US of A for worsening things on that front. Likewise, I grant some inconsistency in actions due to switching administrations. But Europe has been on notice that we were refocusing on Asia for a decade. They've been on notice that they needed to increase their defense spending for a decade. They have been on notice (if they were paying attention) that the old US two-war doctrine was gone for a decade. None of this should be a shock in any way.
Shrike
6mo ago
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.
Or people wouldn't like it and would return the commerce power to the feds, just like they did last time – that's what I meant.
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.
This is also true of education! Which, to sort of play in to your point – it is possible that the path that worked in the past, or that we took in the past, was not guaranteed to be the best path forward, or the best path now. Even if, as your suggest, certain outcomes in the past were predetermined, that does not necessarily imply the same thing in the future. If Team Trump transforms the Department of Education into a block grant funding machine, it's possible that will work considerably better than the prior department and nobody will want to change it back.
Removing direct election of Senators would plausibly alter the power calculus, but trimming the DOE is either structurally predetermined or guaranteed to fail.
I am not convinced history is quite this inflexible.
Shrike
6mo ago
I guess at least in theory states could mandate the tracking and taxing of out-of-staters at all times
I mean - it's not really practical to bar out-of-staters from enjoying your parks and highways, I agree. If you want out of staters not to access your schools or disability benefits you can simply require a state-issued ID or other proof of residency. I think this is probably typical, actually, although I haven't tried to access anything along those lines for a while and therefore can't speak to it.
Maybe the supreme court could have interpreted specific clauses differently
I mean I do think they could have decided what constituted interstate commerce in a...more restrained fashion, yes.
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.
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.
Now, you might object that these changes can be rolled back - and fair - but that's also true (as you point out) of giving states back the instruments of economic belligerence. I'm not sure that making America less unitary is by itself a laudable goal, though - but what I do think is laudable is ensuring that the states can function as "laboratories of democracy." This requires the federal government to do some things (protect them from invasion), permits the federal government to do others (highways I guess) and I think should discourage the federal government from doing others (e.g. writing a federal housing code).
Shrike
6mo ago
These programs weren't secret, all the info was on the web!
Assuming you trust what's on the web, which maybe you shouldn't given that USAID has channeled funds ostensibly meant for Pakistan into "making Cuban Twitter" as part of a scheme to somehow undermine the Cuban government.
One potential benefit of these sorts of purges is that it helps consolidate US spending into something that's more legible to the executive branch (and Congress). Now, given that the executive branch has a history of lying, not only to Congress but also to the Executive himself I think it's good that the entire system is flushed from time to time and programs restarted from scratch to ensure that there can be proper oversight and accountability. I mean, think about it - if we just wanted Good Government Programs to run with minimal confusion, we'd get rid of democracy and elections and call it a day.
However, frankly, it is hypothetically possible that every single program is doing something Good And Useful. It does not then follow that no programs should be cut. If the national debt is actually going to be a problem (and probably it is) we should not spend beyond our means. Just as in our personal lives, that means that there will be some good things that we can't have. I won't be particularly sad about INL (which is a shady bunch in my book) being temporarily shut down in Mexico. Possibly the US government would want to shut it down any way as they might be approaching the problem of drug flow from Mexico a little differently, I'm not sure.
Shrike
6mo ago
I'm not exactly pro-abortion but trans-border abortion bounty laws are sort of proof for why that won't work out.
Mmm yes this reminds me of fugitive slave laws in some ways.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Shrike
6mo ago
Yes, I think this is correct. From what I can see, Hispanics often aspire to become American, and that means owning a small business, getting married, sending kids to school, having enough money to have a nice house...all the things that make you a quintessential GOP voter.
Shrike
6mo ago
I think the critics from the right are at least partially correct that Donald Trump wasn't "supposed" to win, that after eight years of Obama and nearly unmitigated cultural Ws many on the left had convinced themselves that the pendulum would not swing back, that they would never have to live through eight years of George W. Bush again, and then...
There's obviously a danger that the pendulum will swing back on the righties, but if Elon keeps going like this for four years it will take more than four years to rebuild the absolutely gutted institutions. And it's quite possible (looking at Trump's favorability ratings, the meh Democratic slate, and the popularity of downsizing measures) that the GOP will get another four years or more.
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.
Shrike
6mo ago
So the best way to do this is by making the UK look dumb and kneecapping American power in the Pacific so that the United States is more likely to lose a war with China, making it more likely to pull back its Middle Eastern commitments, including the missile shield that's been protecting Israel from Iranian ballistic missiles and the foreign aid they've been receiving ever year?
Shrike
6mo ago
That is a good, thought-provoking response.
Thank you.
My primary concept of libertarianism is pursuit of a smaller state which just does less in all domains generally.
Libertarians often but not always coalesce around some form of the Non Aggression Principle, which is that you shouldn't initiate violence. This seems uncontroversial but libertarians try to apply it to the state, which is inevitably and frequently violent to varying degrees.
One of the most important liberties strikes me as not getting dragged away by draft officers, heading off to fight and possibly die in a trench somewhere.
And this, I think, is interesting, because it explicitly was understood in the American conception of liberty that this was part of the bargain – you would pay for your freedom with blood. I think libertarians are divided on this today, but it's not inherently at odds with very libertarian ideas (not that I am claiming early America was libertarian per se, but it is common for libertarians to look up to it, I think).
You obviously want to have state arsenals and dockyards, that expands out into investments in steel and chemicals, support for heavy industry and power plants, technical education in schools... At some point it merges with a nationalist state's military-industrial complex.
Worth considering that the most powerful nation in the world, militarily, outsources the vast majority of its defense needs (perhaps too much for my personal liking) to private contractors (including "direct action" work). I don't think libertarianism is necessarily opposed to a state military-industrial complex, but I also suspect there are probably strange and radical uh "free market solutions" to defense that have not been tried, or not been tried for some time, for a variety of reasons. Maybe we'll get to see how letters of marque work soon...
Was the Anglo-Scottish border really that bad? It was bad by British standards. Most of Britain was pretty peaceful. There was long-term low intensity violence.
I'm really not sure how it stacked up to its peers. But let's just accept for the sake of argument that England was "fairly peaceful" albeit with long-term low intensity violence – we'll stipulate that the many campaigns in France, Scotland, Ireland, etc. count as closer to this than existential industrialized warfare. But I think that long term violence is better for creating martial peoples than short-term high intensity violence. I suspect it has some failure modes, but while I don't have a good grasp of Asian history I get the impression that in places like China and maybe at times India it tended more (especially on a per capita basis) towards short term high intensity violence with periods of stability in between, and the result was that smaller states with a history of constant, lower intensity warfare rode roughshod over them – not merely the Europeans, but also the Japanese and, as you mention, the Mongols. My understanding is that to this day in China and, e.g., Korea, the military is a low-status profession (whereas here in the United States it is extremely high status in some communities and high enough status generally that speaking of it as low status is to risk cancelation, although doubtless it is considered low status in some quarters).
However again I will cop to not having a good idea of Chinese history, so maybe I am wrong! But England's long-term low intensity violence certainly did not do it a disservice when it came to conflict; first Britain and then her culturally similar and (even more so) geographically privileged American offspring absolutely dominated the world, and this was not merely due to superior industry and firepower but also due, I think, to superior martial prowess.
The Native Americans could not produce 80,000 troops seemingly out of nowhere and ride up to besiege Boston like the average steppe horde circa 500 AD.
The Comanche, as you say, were too low in numbers to seriously threaten the United States or the "Mexican nation" as a whole but they were a serious enough threat that they pushed back the border during the Civil War and used northern Mexico as a sort of loot farm for decades – and all of that with extremely low numbers. Probably fewer than 1,000 Comanche were part of the Great Raid of 1840 and they overran and burned two white settlements; Linnville was never rebuilt. The problem with the Comanche was simply that they didn't have the numbers, and they also seemed to suffer from what I think is a fairly common problem of premodern conflict, which is that they would bail on skirmishes that weren't inevitably going there way instead of risking taking casualties. Which meant, incidentally, that smaller groups of settlers could and did hold off larger groups of Comanche. I think that this plays into my general suggestion that libertarian "tendencies" arise among individualistic peoples, which often arise in relatively low-population-density high-conflict regions, although I suspect that's not all of the picture. Libertarianism itself as an ideology I think arises in part as a reaction to the atrocities perpetrated by high state capacity actors – it's not an inevitable outgrowth of libertarian tendencies, I don't think. But I'd suggest it's precisely the sort of people who have to fight a group of bandits coming over the hill that develop the individualized tendencies that can easily manifest as libertarianism or similar ideological leanings.
Small kin groups and decentralized defence works against a small tribe of natives but will not hold back the Mongols, Goths or Manchu.
Didn't the Mongolians take over China and then peter out when facing the comparatively less populous and decentralized Eastern Europeans? I realize that wasn't the only factor there, but I'm not really sure that necessarily cuts in favor of large hierarchical states instead of numerous decentralized ones. If, as I suspect, long-term violence breeds killing machines, it would make sense that the Mongols (a people known for long-term low-intensity conflict) would run roughshod over the Chinese (who as I understand alternated between high-intensity warfare and periods of peace) but met their match against the fragmented Eastern European monarchies. However, I suspect that's at best a huge oversimplification of what actually happened.
But our wars are nearly always fought overseas and/or against much weaker opponents. In WW2 we lost 0.5% for Australia and 0.3% for the US. Not 17% like Poland or 13% like the Soviet Union. That is a totally different kind of warfare.
Casualties in the American Civil War were very large. Sure, not einsatzgruppen-levels of ethnic cleansing kill-counts, but World War One levels of per capita casualties, especially for the South. (Incidentally, the South was the much more "libertarian" of the two polities if you don't count owning human beings and it caused them more than a little grief at managing the industrial war. However, they outperformed their larger counterpart as a fighting force, coming out of the war with a superior "k/d ratio" despite being the smaller force and losing the war).
To your point, the United States emerged from the conflict a much more centralized and less "libertarian" regime, which served it fairly well in cleaning up the frontier (what we might now refer to as "ethnic cleansing") and getting in conflicts overseas.
Doing what the US did in WW1/2 and switching from huge civilian industry to wartime industry when war arrives is a privilege of geography and size. In 1941 the US Army was smaller than the Portuguese army, that just wouldn't work in Eurasia. The most important thing for winning a huge struggle like WW2 is being big, industrialized and resource-rich, military efficiency and ideology is secondary. If the US had to cope with having negligible oil production like Germany, a population 50% lower, shortages of iron, nickel, chromium and just about everything except coal... German victory in Europe would be hard to avoid.
Yes, I agree with this, more or less. But Germany would have been better served by embracing libertarianism than fascism in the 1930s, so perhaps it's not as maladaptive in Central Europe as you think!
Germany is also the home of Prussian enlightened absolutism and militarism, von Schleicher's Military State, Marxism and national socialism itself, I don't think it can necessarily be claimed as a bastion of libertarianism. It's certainly not a very libertarian state today and wasn't historically, aside from the Holy Roman Empire period.
I certainly wouldn't claim it as a bastion for libertarianism today. But in antiquity my understanding was that it was "more libertarian" than, say, the Romans and I think some of those tendencies carried through to the Anglo-Saxons, then the British (and perhaps the Scots) with their conception of liberty and liberalism, and now with the American liberal, "conservative," or libertarian tendency – which in many ways is ascendent.
'twill be interesting to see what we do with it.
Shrike
6mo ago
Why would Jews want to weaken British power? England generally stacks up in favor of Israel and/or Jews, does it not?
Shrike
6mo ago
Uhhhh Diego Garcia is there, the United States will defend the islands for free I would imagine :p
Shrike
6mo ago
But from what I hear USAID has been making the Global South more sympathetic to the Peking Clique, as you call them, by showing up and demanding to know how the sexual minorities are being treated. Eliminating USAID is not a commitment to forever forsaking the Global South and banning all foreign aid forever, it's shutting down an organization that's served as an arm of US coercive diplomacy.
Shrike
6mo ago
usually only very sheltered peoples that embrace libertarianism
Well, this depends on how you define "libertarianism" and famously each libertarian has 3 - 5 competing definitions. I agree inasmuch as the ideology itself is a product of the modern age and makes modern assumptions, and by historical standards most all modern peoples are very sheltered. However if you look at people groups with libertarian characteristics (low state capacity, egalitarian attitudes, primacy of the individual or family, emphasis placed on individual rights) you tend to find the opposite – libertarian attitudes thrive in places like the Anglo-Scotch border region, the Comanche tribes of North America, I hear perhaps Somalia. These places are places of constant conflict, not sheltered places.
The British avoided the need for a large standing army because of their geography.
What time period do you have in mind here? The British were fairly consistently menaced by outside invasions (from Scotland, from France, from Spain, from various Viking invasions, etc.) and they raised huge armies (and ran up massive expenses) to deal with some of these threats.
If you tried libertarianism in central Europe or Asia...
Those regions produced libertarian thinkers like Frédéric Bastiat and of course most (in)famously Ayn Rand (idk are we counting Russia as European or Asian here?)
Germany
Germany is the heartland of the Anglo-Saxons (who, if memory serves, were noted in antiquity for their egalitarian attitudes) and (almost) the geographical home of the Austrian school of economics!
China - massive crises and disasters with tens of millions dead whenever the state shows weakness.
This also describes China whenever the state shows strength, does it not?
Decisive, central leadership has its virtues.
I agree with you that low state capacity (particularly after the Industrial revolution) is potentially a critical weakness in a society, but I would suggest you don't understand how this interfaces with the libertarian impulse. The libertarian impulse arises from a condition where self-reliant individualism is an adaptive capacity, not places where it is maladaptive, and I think historically it is often adaptive in frontier regions that are high in violence and low on population and trust.
What is the libertarian response to a bunch of bandits coming over the hill?
Probably to airstrike them? In my experience libertarians are very often former military personnel and are better equipped both psychologically and otherwise to deal with a bunch of bandits coming over the hill than most people.
(An aside – , I can't speak as much for other places, but in the United States, the "bandits coming over the hill" (Indians) were often better dealt with by locals (for instance, the Meusebach-Comanche Treaty) or state forces (e.g. the Texas Rangers) than the strong arm of the centralized government, in this case the United States.)
More fundamentally, though, "bandits coming over the hill" is a quintessential example of a situation where libertarians are quite happy to look to the state. I don't think you understand the way (if I can speak broadly about an ideology or movement as prone to infighting as "libertarianism") that libertarians think about state capacity. Libertarians take a very Hobbesian view of the state (going back to a low view of human nature). For them, the state is fundamentally a killing machine that enjoys the monopoly on violence. Thus, they want the state to have capacity to deal with
- Collective self-protection via the military
- Enforcement of contracts (as a neutral party with a monopoly on violence)
- Crime (albeit with strong due-process norms)
None of this inherently implies any sort of weakness when it comes to military affairs. Libertarianism arguably is inadequate to 19th and 20th century industrialized warfare because internal state capacity translates to military prowess. But this is due to the intersection of culture and technology, and of course in World War Two the more libertarian regimes (the United States of America, the U.K.) were actually superior to regimes with ostensibly stronger state capacity like the USSR and Nazi Germany. There's nothing inherent in libertarian philosophy that requires a low state capacity for dealing with external threats, and I don't think the correlation between internal state capacity and wartime state capacity is quite as strong now as it was in the earlier days of the Industrial Revolution.
Shrike
6mo ago
ChadYes.jpg?
It seems to me that the proper thing to do is distinguish between intentional deaths and deaths via mismanagement. Probably Roosevelt did not intend to give people pellagra, but I think it's fine to blame him for the result, even if we don't consider it the moral equivalent of mass murder.
Shrike
6mo ago
Even the Jews themselves make a point of not requiring non-Jews to believe the part about the covenant.
And interestingly God in the Torah makes a promise to both of Abraham's sons, but the Ishmaelites are definitely not considered Jewish. God, in the Jewish conception, is clearly bigger than merely a God of the Jewish people, even in the earliest parts of Hebrew Scripture.
Shrike
6mo ago
The libertarian sees the state as a bikini that should only provide the bare minimum of protection, provide the maximum freedom of movement. They think that the world and other peoples are fundamentally good, the environment is pleasant and danger is rare. If you're on a tropical island why constrict yourself with clothing?
I don't think this is true. I think libertarians tend to have a fairly negative view of humanity, as they think that people generally cannot be trusted with power, and that power itself almost inevitably leads to crimes and catastrophes. The Ron Swanson "everything before 1776 was a mistake" view of history is one of the most pessimistic views of man one can conceive of.
Shrike
6mo ago
attacked Vietnam multiple times in fear of their expansionism
Man from what I can tell this is one of the most bruh moments in all of history. As I recall, Vietnam had, essentially, overwhelming firepower over the Khmer Rouge (particularly since the Khmer Rouge were systematically eliminating their own manpower base) but the Cambodian regime still insisted on randomly invading and wiping out villages along their borders until Vietnam got fed up with them and overthrew the government.
Then China threw a hissy fit about it and invaded Vietnam in retaliation.
Shrike
6mo ago
Huh. Just from reading the TRO - maybe what the Trump administration did was bad (I suspect that SCOTUS will rule that there's at least some areas regarding funding that judges cannot issue this sort of order about due to the separation of powers but arguably you should wait for them to overrule the lower court before assuming that!) but in and of itself my guess is that "the executive branch imperfectly follows a TRO" is not exactly a rare occurrence. I did a quick Google, for instance, and found that the Obama administration, to my untrained eye, appears to have pulled a similar stunt in the national-security context.
Shrike
6mo ago
I mean the real coup would just be to make the federal government no longer involved in access to government benefits (besides e.g. retirement and healthcare for direct employees).
Shrike
6mo ago
Hahahahahahahahaha
Elon if you're reading this: the Air Force could be dissolved and folded into the Army and Navy and the result would be a net positive (golf courses everywhere hardest hit).
And if you're still listening to me, ask yourself if the Army really needs to be quite so large in a Pacific Pivot model...
This is only a net negative for Finland is Moscow's actions are dictated (at least in part) by perceiving NATO as a threat.
If Moscow is a mad dog attacking the weakest neighbors in its vicinity then a weak military alliance is better than none.
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