vorpal_potato
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User ID: 782
vorpal_potato
8mo ago
If this synopsis of the book is in any way accurate, Davis's arguments are so undercooked that it should come with a health warning.
I checked the book, and that Twitter thread's summary of the final chapter, "Abolitionist Alternatives", is completely accurate. Davis complains about people asking what should happen to honest-to-god violent criminals, and then goes on to waffle for 13 pages without actually answering it. Then the book ends.
The only point in that chapter where she gets concrete is when she mentions the idea of making all or most crimes into pure torts, to maintain deterrence without incarceration. Unfortunately she balks at asking the obvious next question: what if the criminal can't or won't pay the fine? What if, for example, the guy who committed an armed robbery has no worldly possessions except for $12 and some meth? The historical answers have usually been some mixture of slavery, outlawry, and/or exile, and I doubt she'd be too keen on any of them.
vorpal_potato
8mo ago
I think it would be easy, like Chau does, to point out that of the 4 big “eugenicons” only Hanania is ostensibly libertarian and otherwise poke holes in it.
Charles Murray is also libertarian, and has explicitly described himself as such, so that makes two out of four.
vorpal_potato
9mo ago
I dunno, I think he just likes angering people.
He's said publicly (though I can't dig up a source) that a certain amount of trollishness is a deliberate PR strategy. Clickbait article titles get clicks. Viral edgy-tweeting gets people to follow him on twitter, which he can then follow up with calmer tweets pointing people at articles on his substack. Some percentage of those people will subscribe. (A fairly large percentage of them will later unsubscribe or unfollow -- this strategy tends to attract non-thoughtful angry ideologues -- but enough people stick around.)
I'm not sure to what extent he's just going with this strategy because it works, but it does seem to work.
vorpal_potato
9mo ago
[...] providing compensation without incurring tax.
In what country does this work? In the US, at least, bonuses are taxed as ordinary income. (They're included along with salary and tips in box 1 of the W-2 form that the employer files with the IRS.)
vorpal_potato
11mo ago
They do get training; and that training, however far it may fall from perfection, does make a difference. I would bet that the 20th percentile policeman is better at restraining people like Neely than the 80th percentile vigilante, even assuming that both have the same equipment and the same amount of backup.
The actual history here is that unions didn't do squat about unsafe work environments. The workplace safety revolution was a top-down thing, imposed by management on a grudging and resentful labor force. Why did management do it? Because the shift to no-fault worker's compensation put a price on danger, and companies responded rationally by paying people to make the workplace safer. Often the safety rules were imposed by insurance companies in exchange for lower premiums.
This is a huge success story for well-designed incentives, the sort of thing that ought to be in every history textbook as a demonstration of how meaningful change actually happens, and yet people keep attributing it to unions for some reason.
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