laxam
2yr ago
Previous incarnations of US conservatism (think late 1800s, early 1900s) were deeply critical, if not outright hostile, to capitalism.
"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. "
I can't think of a time where a recognizably conservative movement in the US was anti-capitalist. The WJB style populists might, in some sense, be called conservatives (them being as much a religious revival movement as a political movement) but, I think, instead they just demonstrate the difficulty of applying modern categories too closely to the past. After all, one would hardly call Grover Cleveland, whose faction WJB drove out of power in the Democratic Party, the left of the contemporary Democrats!
It was only with Reaganism (about the time when Cowen was a young lad) that the shift towards equating rampant capitalism somehow became associated with being "right-wing". Perhaps there is a generational divide here.
This is really just absolute nonsense. The association of capitalism with the American right-wing is about as old as the country itself, depending on exactly what you mean by capitalism and 'right-wing'. It's telling that the modern left thinks of the Jeffersonians as the 'conservatives' in the First Party System but really both parties in that era were pro-capitalism. The Federalists were an alliance of commercial and incipient industrial capitalists in the Atlantic port cities and the Republicans were agrarian capitalists more interested in trade and export. As you trace the lines forward, probably the only really thorough-goingly anti-capitalist sentiments you'll get are from the pro-slavery apologists like Fitzhugh but, even then, in practice the pro-slavery faction of the Democrats just wanted the same kind of export oriented commercial capitalism that the Old Republicans had. The post-Civil War Republicans were very pro-capitalism, so was the Conservative wing of the Democratic party. As the left-leaning labor wing of the Democrats developed and the various flavors of the original Progressive movement came into being you got anti-capitalism showing up again in American politics, but always invariably from the Left. Some of the more elitist strains of Progressivism are arguably more right-leaning than left but they just show useless the scale can become in the margins.
Honestly, the anti-capitalism of the New Right comes more from a deep-seated leftism at its heart. It's mostly young people who come from a youth cultural milieu that is extremely left wing (both socially and economically) and it just kind of swaps in a cultural conservatism (although one that honestly feels weirdly different from the Christian conservatism of decades ago) while maintaining the anti-market prejudices of their roots. In that way they're kind of like the original Populists, but they're not usually particularly closely related to the actual cultural roots of 19th century populism: few people who consciously identify as 'New Right' have an agrarian, Christian background and are instead usually suburban or urbanites from more-or-less de facto secular backgrounds.
laxam
8mo ago
While it was normal for communists to call everyone fascists in the 1920's (Social Democrats were 'social fascists'), the earliest I know of was Truman comparing Dewey to Mussolini.
laxam
10mo ago
The practical outcome of the US government being afraid of its armed citizenry wasn't a bulwark against tyranny, it was the enabling of Jim Crow
Armed resistance in the South was crushed. Except in Louisiana, Jim Crow was imposed at the ballot box, with a decent helping of more normal threats of violence.
Armed black men were a bulwark of African American freedom.
laxam
11mo ago
In tech, staying at a job for more than 3 years is seen as coasting. Devs are increasingly expected to do everything, because 'everyone should be full stack' and everything that isn't feature development (testing, staging, canaries) get deprioritized. Overworked novices means carelessness, carelessness creates mistakes.
This may be true amongst the Dev Set, but it's very much not once you get outside of that small corner of 'tech' and into the infrastructure side of things. While there are plenty of greenhorns puttering around, there are also the true gray beards who have been in the same position for decades and know literally everything about the systems they administer (and design and build).
I'm a network engineer and there are enough grizzled old men on my team that our collective experience no doubt stretches into the centuries, and several of these guys have gotten a big chunk of it at this one place. We just had a guy retire last year who started in the late 70s...
laxam
1yr ago
At the same time the boomer nostrum of "just go in and give them a firm handshake" might have worked for (white) men back in 1955, an age when people were happy to hand out junior executive positions to (white) dudes they just met, but it's just silly in this day and age.
Just for clarity, there were no boomers looking for work in 1955. A substantial balance of boomers were looking for their first job during the doldrums of the 1970s economy and a not insignificant portion during the early 80s recession.
laxam
1yr ago
There's a chapter in Anna Karenina where Levin, the lovesick landowner and sometime friend of Anna's brother, returns to his estate after trying and failing to win the heart of Kitty, a young woman who is still too caught up in the thrills of court life to take him seriously. While there, there is a scene where he assists his tenants with harvesting the grain, spending most of a day just working side by side with them. Tolstoy describes this experience like next to nothing else he describes in the whole book, lauding it in a way that almost feels utopian. You can feel Tolstoy's agrarianism shine right through.
I've never found the idea that paradise involves no work very convincing.
laxam
1yr ago
My proposal. We should solve this. My best guess is we need to add mini-legislatures somehow. Congress finds a way to delegate rule-making to smaller focused legislatures that will retain the legitimacy of congress and being Democratic.
It's called the committee system and it has existed since the first Congress.
Subject matter committees allow Congressmen to specialize and the institution to begin to develop durable, institutional knowledge. The problem is that Congress is far too small to allow Congressmen to specialize, given the size and scope of the Federal government, and they're too busy fundraising these days to do a good job of it, anyway.
Still happens, though. Mike Gallagher's China committee is a good example.
laxam
2yr ago
"We know better than you how you should use your land", is roughly analogous to, "We know better than you what you should put in your body".
laxam
1yr ago
Right now, I live in a townhouse in a master-planned new urbanist suburb. It's medium density, I have no yard, and the houses barely have any. There's a mini-park every few blocks, the elementary school is in the neighborhood itself, some blocks are designed extra long to prioritize sidewalks and eliminate street crossing, and the "town center" has a supermarket, a coffee shop, and a few adequate restaurants. We go there all the time, often on our onewheels.
We used to call these 'small towns', and they used to be a central part of the identity of a portion of the American populace. Looks like they're being reinvented with a new name.
laxam
2yr ago
I actively do not trust real name accounts, and avoid real name forums, for that reason: if you’re making money I don’t trust you, if you’re not making money I suspect you’d like to that you’re just lurking on that pawn hoping for a promotion
I would say there's an exception for old people who have been on the internet for a very long time. Back in the 80's and 90's, it used to be a LOT more common for people to use their real names, just because there was no great perceived need for pseudo-anonymity.
laxam
2yr ago
Economists realized a long time ago that models used for competition between firms don't work to model behavior within firms, and almost nobody in a firm is actually working with the goal of "make the most money for the firm".
In other words, institutions are principal-agent problems all the way down.
laxam
8mo ago
because apparently the lesson they learned was "fake being moderate on the campaign trail and then exploit it once in power".
It's worth calling out that this was the lesson they learned from Obama. Obama campaigned as a moderate then, twice, betrayed the expectations of people who wanted a moderate. He was expected to do things like help heal racial divisions, not just by being a black man in power, but by actively holding the door open to black Americans to enter the political mainstream. Instead he said Trayvon Martin looked like he could be his son. He was expected to reform American healthcare (a very key issue at the time, when lots of people were losing access to employer provided health insurance during the Great Recession) but ended up creating (what was perceived as) a complex and expensive left wing boondoggle.
This pissed a lot of people off, but only people who were paying close attention. Republicans cleaned up in the House in 2010 and in the Senate in 2014 because only the people who care about politics enough to pay attention voted in mid-terms. Democratic strategists noticed and they started to reconsider the Clinton strategy of actually being a moderate and thought about, instead, just looking like a moderate in election season. They felt like the learned the wrong lesson from 1996, where Bill's hard turn right had led to him recovering his popularity and resoundingly beating expectations after becoming the first Democratic President to lose Congress in half a century. Gore, despite his obsession with global warming, was nevertheless one step above a Blue Dog in a lot of ways and Kerry was considering an acceptably moderate alternative to John Edwards. It was only when Obama swept in 2008 and then still won re-election 2012 that it was decided that actually being moderate wasn't what mattered.
laxam
9mo ago
She apparently earned it in the sense that she was on the phones calling all the Party people she needed to call to prevent an open convention pretty much the moment Biden dropped out. She apparently has some kind of knack (hard to call it a 'talent') for internal party politicking that got her where she is today.
The problem there is that was also the talent Hillary Clinton had and she was much better at it.
laxam
10mo ago
You take on a risk and want to restrict others to deal with it?
Sounds like fascism, to me.
laxam
10mo ago
Slaveowners were a tiny portion of the British population. They were powerful disproportionately to their numbers, but they would never have been able to resist abolition by force like the American South could.
If the Revolution has failed/never happened, the British slave owning population would have been much larger and more widespread -- remember, most Northern states abolished in response to the ideology of the Revolution.
laxam
1yr ago
Libertarianism is incompatible with democracy. I think this is the obvious realization that people like Hoppe had.
Libertarianism + democracy is the end of libertarianism for two primary reasons.
The problem the anti-democracy crowd have is that Libertarianism is incompatible with any other alternative, too. It's always in the interest of those with power to limit the liberty of someone. This is why non-anarchist libertarians tend to like governments of 'limited and enumerated powers, with checks and balances to prevent the concentration of power in one branch'.
laxam
2yr ago
Clint is an actual conservative, though, so I can trust a conservative interpretation is closer to the actual intended meaning of his movie than I would with Knives Out.
laxam
2yr ago
Judges are perfectly able to second guess the judgment of Executive Officials. That's a big part of what judicial review is. If the Secretary made no serious effort to ensure beneficiaries of the program actually 'suffered direct economic hardship as a direct result of a war or other military operation or national emergency', the judiciary is perfectly empowered to say, "You acted unconstitutionally".
laxam
2yr ago
But the problem with the focus on talking about how "White Culture" reproduces its values is the terrible fucking optics of being so blind to the broader perspective. Not all truths are pleasant, but this is a case where it would be worthwhile for Okun to start asking about how valuable those things are in the first place.
This is a cost of getting too deeply into the social construction worldview. If you see something as literally not having value separate from its role in maintaining social hierarchy, it's definitionally impossible for you to ask how valuable those things are in the first place. The role in in maintaining the hierarchy is axiomatic to the value judgment.
laxam
2yr ago
Voluntary organization and the whole concept of a 'civil society' is actually central to classical liberal philosophy and practice.
Land value taxes are good because they're extremely efficient and minimize deadweight loss in the tax system (intuition: Taxing something means you have less of it because you're causing a marginal decrease in the supply of that thing, whether it's labor, capital, or consumption goods. New land is not generally produced, so taxing land value minimizes the loss from that decrease in supply).
100% land value taxes are no more just than 100% taxation on anything else and are a form of paternalism at the end of the day.
laxam
9mo ago
Acknowledgement of reality. A peace deal now without hard guarantees is just a pause, a frozen conflict so more can be taken in the future.
laxam
9mo ago
Well, no, the power with the largest degree of choice was Austria: Serbian politics were determined by terrorism and nationalism, so no individual politician had any real ability to stop radicals from doing radical things. But Conrad really was an individual driving force behind the 'Preventive War' against Serbia. While he had allies and supporters, if he had been able to show restraint the war would not have happened when it did. And, if the war did not happen when it did, the window on the German General Staff's plan for avoiding unwinnable two front war was closing as the Russian Army modernized.
You likely would have seen, then, an 18th century style Diplomatic Revolution and return of a waltz of powers as Russia became the clearer threat to the balance of power and Germany lost confidence in its ability to win even a swift two front war.
Of course, the actual best outcome for everyone would have been Frederich William accepting the Crown from the Gutter and a unified Germany coming into existence with responsible government from the start, without the Prussian military apparatus as an independent political power within the state, and with the conservative Junker class on a socio-political backfoot. Or, alternatively, the sequence of events leading to Mayerling never goes off and Franz Josef bumps his head a little hard sometimes in the 1890s, replacing the old reactionary with a young, liberal King-Emperor. Or the first Alexander was a bit more prudent on that cold winter day and the iron hand of the second (and the inept hand of his son) never got near the Autocracy.
Alternative historical speculation is hard and uncertain.
No shit. They need cash and weapons now, not the support of internet contrarians who will always hate them because they had the audacity to be invaded by the Russians.
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