SophisticatedHillbilly
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User ID: 1964
SophisticatedHillbilly
23d ago
No, but most legal issues where there’s a huge split between states desire to do something and SCOTUS go on for quite some time. If the courts weren’t continuing to take up gun cases I’d be worried, but Roberts is enough of an institutionalist that it seems like he’s going to keep striking down state laws until the line of “this is the absolute constitutional maximum you can regulate firearms” gets found and all the liberal states stick to that line. Going from “no personal right to firearm ownership” to litigating the specific types of weapons that can’t be banned or the circumstances one can be carried on the person is a lot of progress in 18 years frankly.
People point to progressive wins like Roe and Obergefell as these inevitable conservative losses when those issues were fought for way longer than to get to the SCOTUS case. And Roe got overturned after only 50 years, after over 70 years of activists agitating to legalize it!
As an aside, abortion was less of a blatantly progressive win when Roe came around, supported most strongly by Southern Evangelicals along with California and New York. It was primarily a Southern Democrat stance and seen as a liberty issue more than what it is now.
SophisticatedHillbilly
24d ago
Hardly seems true given that the last few years have been constant 2A wins at SCOTUS. For an area of law that basically didn’t exist prior to 2008, it’s going extremely well. Have there been any major SCOTUS 2A losses ever? I guess the about sbs in the 30s? The interstate commerce ones that allow regulating them I suppose, but given that everything is interstate commerce I think that barely counts.
Lots of cases on felons and firearms and sentencing, but few people are really committed to letting felons have guns, and it’s pretty unlikely that it was intended by the founders anyway.
SophisticatedHillbilly
24d ago
Yeah the Cthulhu swims left idea only seems true to online rightists because their particular hobby-horses are usually the ones with the least support among the right wing broadly. I think it’s mostly a conservative blue-triber issue.
SophisticatedHillbilly
24d ago
NFIB v. Sebelius would have gone quite differently under the current court I think. A court where Robert’s is the 4th most conservative justice is very different than where he’s the 6th
SophisticatedHillbilly
25d ago
I see. I didn’t realize Georgists are generally setting the rate at 100% of the value. This makes me understand the opposition to LVT much more, when before it just seemed plainly superior to normal property taxes
SophisticatedHillbilly
25d ago
This isn’t making any sense to me. My understanding is that normal property tax taxes market value (or at least an assessed opinion of market value) as built, which necessarily includes the value of the land plus the value of the improvements. LVT taxes just market value (or assessed opinion thereof) of the land excluding improvements. LVT could be set at such a higher rate that it eclipses the differences between the two but that’s just a question of rates, not an actual LVT vs. property value tax question. It’s just not possible that appreciation of land value would result in a greater tax increase than appreciation of land value PLUS the tax on the improvements directly.
SophisticatedHillbilly
25d ago
Yeah no doubt people will object to that, I just think the market will override their objections barring infinite cheap foreign labor. People will pay out before they’ll go without running water.
SophisticatedHillbilly
25d ago
Increasing efficiency is the best way for sure. That’s unlikely to occur when extremely cheap labor is available. Besides, the increase in production would still result in the problem you pointed out: super efficient home building results in lower appreciation for existing homeowners. They lose in your scenario.
The numbers are fictional but the price on any given product would increase by less than the % gain in pay, as pay would not be increasing for the entire buyer-side, but only a portion, benefiting those being paid more at the expense of buyers who did not receive a pay increase. Sellers would win out, as in the made up numbers, but so would the now-better-paid workers.
Regardless yes markets are two sided, but the point here was addressing the “young and the poor.” Both of those groups could afford houses if they were being paid much more. The best houses in the best places? No, but most people don’t live in the 5 trendy metro hubs, and they still wouldn’t.
SophisticatedHillbilly
25d ago
Ordinary property tax that we already have would be even worse in that case, because the developer would be paying higher tax from the land appreciation plus the tax from their improvements. LVT just removed the improvement tax.
SophisticatedHillbilly
25d ago
I agree it’s not a trivial question, but I do think the answer is a clear yes. There’s a pretty large portion of the population that isn’t built for knowledge work and loves money. It does have to beat out the living-on-benefits life which is pretty good.
The snobbery is one part, but I suppose there is a degree of understandable anxiety around what a world might look like where the salaries of sanitation workers and knowledge workers get reversed or even reach parity. It is deeply contrary to blue-tribe values I think.
SophisticatedHillbilly
26d ago
The catch here is that the “our youth and our poor” here would also largely be the people working these construction jobs, and all other jobs that now have the depressed wages. Easier to afford a $300,000 house on 40$/hour than a $200,000 house on $20/hour Not to mention that land is generally the largest price factor in housing, so the labor cost increase wouldn’t do that much anyway.
SophisticatedHillbilly
26d ago
That doesn’t really make sense though. There is always a wage people will take to do dirty jobs (I would do them instead of my profession if the dirty jobs paid better) so leaving that aside is the economy argument. Your argument is basically an argument against paying any job a high wage. Trucking simply must be done. The economy must bear whatever labor (or automation when that becomes fully viable) cost is required to make the trucks move. If that is $100/hour for entry level truckers, then goods will become more expensive and that cost will be distributed across the economy accordingly. This will make all other people in the economy poorer, and it will make truckers or whatever other dirty-job-doers richer. It would also increase the quality of talent in those positions, resulting in efficiency gains (but probably somewhat lower gains than the cost increase). I think the reality is people just don’t want to see meatpackers and truckers making significantly more than they make with an email job and a degree .
That’s how any high paid job works. Doctor is a difficult-to-fill position, and so is paid highly, which makes all other people in the economy marginally poorer by increasing their expenses. If doctors were willing to work for 20$/hour, everyone else would be better off. They don’t do that, but maybe they would if we imported 1,000,000 foreign doctors and put them to work.
What is infeasible is any one company paying high wages for dirty jobs when there is a pool of cheap labor available due to competition.
SophisticatedHillbilly
26d ago
Yeah it would work as you say, but that’s kind of the point, as it forces an even higher amount of development to justify the tax burden, thus pushing such valuable property to ever higher heights. Again whether or not this is crippling is a matter of the tax rate rather than the tax system I think
SophisticatedHillbilly
27d ago
Isn’t a big part of this discussion the actual percent value of the LVT? Like the point of it is, I gather, cheaper property tax on heavily improved property in hot markets (because improvements aren’t taxed) but higher tax rate on unimproved property in hot markets. This makes sense to me, but it’s unclear to me whether Georgists are anticipating a base-rate LVT that is higher or lower than your typical county property tax rate, and what would be done with agricultural land.
If higher, then it seems both pointlessly punitive on “cold” markets where there is unlikely to be development regardless, where if it’s lower then it may not actually impact much at all.
Also seems important how assessment works, given that currently assessment mostly just doesn’t, at least where I’m at (properties often sell for several multiples of assessed value).
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
And how many angels do fit on the head of a pin anyway?
You’re asking for incredibly detailed objective answers to questions that largely don’t have answers yet at too fine grained a level of detail. Race for instance is difficult to define, but very clearly exists. Class is very different than money, and your average joe can tell a low-class lottery winner from an old-money upper class fellow at a glance. There are many more joints in between.
I get your point about gender divisions. Yes, you can sort of gerrymander groups here, but because power is zero-sum it doesn’t make the 10 people more powerful. It does, on a personal level, incentivize maximizing the number of low-power groups you personally are considered a member of. This is what creates the “oppression Olympics” and is a well-recognized issue by the Progs.
The answer to all of these is roughly “based on who they consider their group, and whether that group considers them a member.” We don’t have to hash any of these out mathematically because we already do so socially quite effectively.
I mean could you actually pass as an Amerindian gay underclass transman? Maybe. Are you going to? Probably not. It’s just not that serious of an issue.
We aren’t organizing members of society in a lab here. It can be worked out heuristically like every other part of society and system of societal ranking.
Again, I’m anti-prog but these just aren’t good points of opposition.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
It does actually do a lot of flattening too though right? Prog reforms have massively increased the power and wellbeing (in a revealed preferences way) of the American and maybe even global underclass and definitely put a damper on the ultra-elite. Between increases in the underclass ability to act freely without fear of arrest, ability to use substances as desired etc, combined with the idea that even billionaires are using the same iPhones and having many comparable experiences, I’m not sure there’s ever been a better time to be on the bottom.
Sure it uplifts some PMCs who run some programs, but they generally have very little power and freedom personally.
Plus the whole destruction of institutions thing has even left fewer ladders to climb, which is great for flattening at a societal level.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
Oh yeah my bad on the first point, typing on a phone leads to speaking loosely.
Yeah, defining groups is difficult, but not impossible. Cleave reality at the joints and all that. Race+gender+class+sexual orientation gets you most of the way there.
I don't think there is any sensical definition of "groups" and "power" that can make this not crazy. Even if we go just numerically - why 100 highly virtuous people, who had broad knowledge, exemplary behavior and excellent morals, should not have more power than 100 crazy drug addicted rapists with IQ of 72? I don't think anybody who is not hardcore anarchist, whatever party he is voting now, would sign up under them having the same power.
Power is just the answer to the question of who, in a contested matter, gets what they want. Given that progressives continually make efforts to allow the 72 IQ drug addled rapists what they want, and progressive politicians and prosecutors continue to get elected, I’d say you’re just factually wrong.
As to the banding together stuff: that’s not the main point here. Yes lots of ideologies band together to gain power. My point is that the progressive system makes it a moral imperative to do so specifically in the direction of lower power groups taking down those with more power.
Either way, I’m not sure this is really the place to answer all of the questions you listed. The literature on this topic is frankly more fleshed out than it should be, and it’s not all just gobbledygook. The only point I was trying to make is that progressivism, the ideology that has taken the world by storm and has millions of supporters who have restructured society in order to further its mission, is not nonsensical. Has some inaccuracies sure, like all ideologies do, but it would be insane to write off such a set of beliefs as incoherent without a serious attempt to understand.
I mean I’m no progressive, so I’m not surprised I’m failing to explain it well.
But yeah, if you’re a group of one and compared to a group of a million, and you, by your nature, have about the same amount of power as one of those million people, then the progressive project requires giving you massively increased opportunities, respect, and voice. In reality it’s not going to go for a 1,000,000X boost, but the point is leveling things to the extent practicable. However, progressivism doesn’t really acknowledge the “minority of one” that libertarians do, so it’s a nonsense example. But yeah, if you’re part of an otherwise equal really small group, progressivism will probably try to give you a hand up relative to the big group. That seems obvious if you look around, given the prevailing idea of assisting “minorities”. Once you factor in that both power and number is considered it ends up being basically exactly the expected order of priority.
And yeah people belong to a lot of groups, and yes it is beneficial under progressivism to slot yourself into increasingly niche and powerless groups.
Your police comments don’t make much sense frankly. The point isn’t that no person should have power over another, it’s that no group (and there are a set number of defined groups that qualify here, not just drawing random lines) has any more power in society broadly than any other.
Doing that necessarily requires some people to have power over other people. It requires those who would naturally be on the bottom of society (or near it) to band together to exert power over those who would otherwise be more powerful. It is attempting to neutralize the dog-eat-dog state of nature where the most capable win and the least capable die.
It’s not a freedom-maximizing ideology obviously. The crime and such are certainly problems but that’s what happens when you advantage a small, weak group (mentally ill homeless) relative to a large powerful one (urban professionals).
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
Not equality of number, but equality of power. My apologies, I should have specified. In reality I think it works out loosely to something like
(# of people in group1)X(avg power of people in group1)=(# of people in group 2)X(avg power of people in group2)
and so on for every demographic group and subgroup of people. Mind you it's normative rather than descriptive. This naturally results in the standard intersectionality ladder (hierarchy of oppression) that you can see in implementation when combined with intersectionality theory. Black women are both small in number and low in societal power, and so need an extra boost relative to proportional representation compared to white women, who are equal in size but smaller in power compared to white men. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, but we're lifting valleys here, not individual dirt flakes. We're flattening mountains, not flattening individual rocks Harrison Bergeron style.
Frankly I think it makes a lot more internal sense than a lot here give it credit for. Of course I'm sure the average White Christian man doesn't enjoy the idea of having the same amount of power at a group level as the average Roma woman, but hey, that's kind of the point.
Yeah, and I consider myself to lie in that quadrant, but it’s a fraction of a fraction of the national population, and not a particularly organized one. Worst of all they aren’t super likely to vote. I live in an area that has probably a majority who are “hillbillies” and it’s only once in a blue moon that they’re able to get a candidate into meaningful state office. Federal doesn’t have a chance because there simply aren’t enough concentrated in one state (maybe WV? I’m not from that area).
An actual constituency large enough to make a difference? If you could organize, it might be possible to pull off influence on one single-issue topic, like the anti-abortion crowd has pulled off, but I don’t know that you could influence either party the same way they have. In no small part because of the fact that any given hillbilly voter is diametrically opposed to both major parties on some issues, unlike the anti-abortion people who can align with Rs on their pet issues and be mostly neutral otherwise.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
Oh I certainly agree with that in practice, but it seemed to me that it was just a sad deviation from the theory, rather than an actual doctrinal goal (to the extent that a loose group of people who frequent certain blogs can be said to have a doctrine). Of course, like any loose set of ideas, each person carries their own personal bundle.
I don’t doubt that everyone smuggled in their own values via intuitions, and I have my own per theory that this is because values are mostly actually just expressions of biologically rooted emotional reactions.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
You can get a lot of info out of even just a “thumbs up, thumbs down, neutral” rating. If you’re combining it with background info on the rater and ratee then you’ve got yourself a pretty good set of data.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
That would give power to demographics in proportion to their population, no? My understanding is the intent is equality, not proportional power.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
I was always under the impression that a core part of the Rationalist project was rejecting prior societal judgement of things and instead autistically determining effectiveness through experiment and first principles.
I don’t see why “crystals are woo” would be any less thrown-out than “computers aren’t alive” or “polyamorous relationships are bad.” Heck, even just the prior step of “woo stuff is ineffective/bad” would have to be thrown out to start to have any ideological coherence: Frankly I’d be disappointed in any Rationalist project that didn’t address woo topics from a neutral open-minded perspective.
I agree that the states are fighting tooth and nail on this one, and progress is slow-going, but it’s slowly moving towards a more favorable legal environment and certainly isn’t moving to a more restrictive one, at least overall nationally. For an issue that isn’t particularly popular and is extremely unpopular among the educated and wealthy, that’s doing pretty good.
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