laxam
1yr ago
Income taxes aren't slavery because they don't force you to work. A 100% land value tax really would be like confiscation of property-in-land.
laxam
1yr ago
It's just crazy to me because of the way the majority party in the British Parliament has more or less unlimited power to do whatever it wants, without limit outside expectations of facing election, and yet you can get quite substantial majorities with <40% of the overall vote. Democracy truly is a cultural institution there. There are no safeguards and yet they do OK.
In the US, if we had multiple parties like the 2.5 parties in the UK, more popular vote minority control of the House would happen, probably (something that's actually rather rare in American history; when it does happen, it does indeed tend to produce a minority House, but never less than a 40% vote share), although perhaps not quite to the same degree. Third parties in American history have tended to be geographic or regional parties, which limits the damage they can do to the two main parties.
The Senate, of course, has nothing to do with the national popular vote. The relationship between the Senate winner and the popular vote is mostly mediated by whether the class of Senators up for election includes a California Senator or not. Who wins the Senate or how the Senate composition ends up being determined is going to be a total wild card in this scenario, I think.
The Presidency would be interesting. The Electoral College has an absolute majority requirement, with the alternative being a contingent election in the House. Since the House votes by states and not by member, this would leave the outcome more or less entirely divorced from the national popular vote. Believe it or not, this is how the Framers originally saw Presidential elections going most of the time, with the EC failing to find a majority and the election being forced to the House, except when a 'man of national renown' (read, at the time of the Philadelphia Convention: Washington) had the charisma, fame, and respect to garner an outright EC majority. Partisan politics ensured this never happened but, if you moved to more than two parties, it would become more common, I think.
There's always been an authoritarian streak to leftism going back to Marx
And, you know, that other guy.
I think listening to a bunch of Marxists about Kant is an exercise in futility. Everything is ego defense of Granddaddy Hegel, all the way down.
EDIT:
But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely
This is Marxism in a nutshell. The ideological superstructure is determined by the material substrate, not the other way around. If you find this disturbing....well, now you know why they find it so important to try to blame Kant for Naziism (you know, that famously individualist creed).
laxam
21d ago
The CIA really does organize coups, but the guy that lit himself on fire is a garden-variety nutter.
Has the CIA actually coup'd a government since the Church Commission?
laxam
25d ago
Either way I think the most important development in all of this is that post-internet, nationalism cannot really be a thing.
Someone has never run into a bunch of people from different Balkan countries online.
laxam
1mo ago
Austrian economics correctly states that this leads to over-investment: investment is unbacked by corresponding saving, causing a bubble and mis-allocation of economic resources.
I was waiting for this. The rest of the post prior has all of those usual """dog-whistles""" that it was like a twist in a movie you can see coming from miles away.
Is it 2008 again? I remember the internet being full of this kind of thing (and being one of the contributors!).
Anyway, it's important to point out that 'full reserve' theorizing is not 'Austrian' economics, it's Rothbardian Austrian economics. The original ABCT doesn't require it to avoid business cycles and Hayek's formulation can be re-cast in essentially monetarist terms as about the interplay of the supply and demand for money without much modification. The supply of loanable funds (a nominal quantity) does not necessarily represent the full production possibilities of the underlying economy (a real one). That is, there are 'real' savings that are not represented by nominal savings at a given price level/quantity of money. The demand for money will be driven, in part, by the investment possibilities created by real savings, so a full reserve banking system will under invest in production, while the fractional reserve system the Rothbardians are against would be able to invest enough for the economy to reach its production possibilities frontier without going beyond it and generating a business cycle.
As to the rest of your post: a lot of what you're talking about with population discount rates would probably be covered in post-war Keynesian literature on the propensity to save/consume. The empirical validity of a lot of it varies, I'm sure, but I can't imagine it's any more questionable than your last two paragraphs.
laxam
2mo ago
The reasons for why civil rights legislation, including affirmative action, have been enacted and are maintained in the US have at least at much to do with external as with internal policy. The original context for the enactment of the CRA and all the legislation meant to make racial equality not just a theory but an actuality was America's ideological content with the Soviet Union, a country that could lay a credible claim to an antiracist practice that made it very attractive to Third World masses and First World intellectuals; since it was also known that the equitable treatment of African-Americans was one of the main areas where United States had, to put it mildly, failed, it was also imperative for the US to show that it was working to fix it.
While this is true -- as in, you can find people talking about doing things during the Civil Rights Movement for this reason, up to and including Eisenhower administration officials and Earl Warren --, it's also true that the Civil Rights Movement itself was both older (ie. the NAACP dates to the 1900's decade and the organized lawfare against Jim Crow is as old as Jim Crow, with Booker T Washington being the silent hero here. Plessy was a test case brought by early civil rights activists in cooperation with the railroad companies) and that it had been scoring wins prior to the Cold War and the decline and fall of the European empires. Successful school desegregation cases date back to the 1920's and there were increasingly serious efforts to pass a national anti-lynching bill in that decade, only cut off by the coming of the Great Depression.
By about the late 1940's, national public opinion had swung decisively against segregation and it was just a matter of time before politics aligned around doing something about it, Cold War or not.
laxam
3mo ago
The point is that the Israelis aren't actually a source of instability in the region, except in terms of their relationship with the Palestinians. Get rid of the latter and you've solved the problem. Get rid of the former and you've still got a problem because they're a radicalized Islamist population which hates all of their neighbors.
laxam
6mo ago
I'll preface this by saying that I'm transgender, and I had dysphoria since I was a child myself, but I am a bit of an old-fashioned "truscum" as I don't really fully subscribe to the mainstream leftist trans views. I do know some people in the "neutral middle" - most of my more right-wing friends are opposed to the excesses of the trans movement, but otherwise either don't care or just passively go with the medical consensus.
Do you think there is such a thing as 'non-binary'? Is there something meaningful and connected to your experience of dysphoria in neo-pronouns?
laxam
6mo ago
Very few of these sneers are coming from the BEA or BLS directly, who mostly are just grinding out the incredible work they have always done (along with all the other statistical agencies in the Federal government), and whose feet I worship at.
But the sneers themselves remain dumb. They come from the ideologically incurious. The puffed up underinformed. The boys at the BLS know that the sub-aggregates matter, too, that's why they do stuff like break things down by industry, region, or state. But the commentariat just knows the national macro aggregates look good, so why won't the deplorable love Biden? He's an on old white guy, isn't he? They love that shit.
laxam
7mo ago
If by the "Ukrainian people" you mean the people in charge behind Biden and Zelensky.
No, I mean the people who threw out and would have killed another leader they were unhappy with if he hadn't gotten away less than a decade ago
laxam
9mo ago
This being Star Trek, Kirk of course has to draw a lesson at the end. And he does . . . but fascinatingly, it's a lesson about hate, not about racism. Racism does not exist for Kirk. He is not even considering the issue.
I've not watched the episode, although I'm familiar enough with it in outline.
The reason the lesson can be about hate is because racism was viewed, in the 1960's, as about hate. Race hate was one of the parts of the contemporary definition of racism. In the same way pre-21st century ideas about racism might say something to the effect of, "It's judging someone on the basis of their race", people in the 1960's would understand racism to mean -- at least in part -- hating someone on the basis of their race. That is to say, the lesson of the episode is 100% about racism, just not as we know it.
laxam
10mo ago
Mental health in general is almost entirely about whether something substantially prevents someone from functioning normally.
laxam
1yr ago
They're giving UA everything good it can possibly use.
Yeah, and all the really good stuff is dependent on a level of infrastructural support and training the Ukrainians can't replicate. Instead, they get the stuff that can be deployed independently, which is usually old or relatively less effective.
Also, if Wagner were near-peer, they'd be wiping the floor with the Ukrainians.
laxam
1yr ago
Wasn't there a Senator recently who spoke about having to use a SCIF in the basement of the Capitol to interact with classified documents?
I think it's entirely possible this is a problem limited to the upper-reaches of the Executive branch. I don't think Congress gets to be flippant with its handled of classified material (except to the extent the Speech and Debate clause allows them to verbally release it from the floor of their chambers).
laxam
1yr ago
Personally, I think the organized efforts of the media, big tech, and the federal security apparatus to both conceal truths harmful to democrats and propagate lies harmful to Republicans is probably what, if anything, is going to get the Democrats elected in 2024.
It's kind of weird how that didn't get enough Democrats elected in 2022.
Or 2016.
Or 2014.
Or 2010.
laxam
1yr 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
1yr ago
Newscaster English is actually a Mid-Atlantic English, not New Englander. Yankees have a definite accent (actually, several) that isn't the national homogeneous English you hear in movies and on TV.
laxam
1yr 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
18hr ago
Yes. Multiple times in our history, our politics has chosen the openness of the electoral system over strict adherence to the law.
This kind of prosecutorial discretion used to be considered 'wisdom', the kind of compromise that keeps the system going at the expense of absolute legalism.
laxam
4d ago
But it's telling that the companies that exist right now that fit the bill are also in Texas and Massachusetts these days, that used to be more rare.
That's like, emphatically not true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Route_128#%22America's_Technology_Highway%22
Silicon Valley may be flashier and, at times in the last few decades, may have been 'bigger' or 'denser' when it comes to its tech startup scene, but the Boston Tech Corridor is old and still producing (and more diversified -- biotech and other startup intensive fields have more of a presence in Boston than in the Bay Area). This kind of thing follows prestigious universities. Even Texas used to be a big spot for this kind of thing in the meat of the 20th century for that reason, although I think it dropped out of the startup mushroom scene for a while.
laxam
11d ago
You'd have to be pretty simple to think that most of the political stuff you read on Reddit or Hacker News isn't deeply manipulated.
You ever notice how political arguments usually have the same arguments, even the same sources? Plenty spreads through the networks of social media, I'm sure, but the idea that they're working from the same songbook because it's been provided to them by an organization is pretty credible. There's a LOT of money floating around, ready to chase after social influence.
Summer's argument is that the output gap at the beginning of the Biden administration was much smaller than the scale of the stimulus bill the administration was attempting to pass. It's possible to say, "We need some stimulus, but not that much, which will be inflationary".
Your second link is March 2020.
And Summers was warning about the scale of the stimulus package in February, 2021.
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