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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21999 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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In my latest essay, I try to list the major points I'm aware of that puncture the progressive narrative on economics, without trying to directly touch on the Culture War's social fronts.

Reality Has a Poorly Recognized Classical Liberal Bias

I think most people here have enough exposure to libertarianism that they are at least aware of these issues (even if they don't agree with them). If you think I missed one or I'm somehow dead wrong please do indicate so.

In other words, economic feasibility had to be achieved to consider such things at all; formalizing the changes in law is a lagging indicator.

it is trickier, it is similar to slavery: economical progress enables to get rid of it (or makes it much easier), but activism/law also has its place and is necessary to eliminate some abuse that would be present otherwise

Slavery was legal and then made illegal in the West. As a matter of classic liberalism in terms of morality, it was never great to treat some humans as property since that's pretty darn coercive. Economically, coercion usually is not very efficient.

At no point do I or would I say a policy intervention is never called for. I am not an anarcho-capitalist. Some externalities demand government intervention. We should tax carbon and price congestion, for example.

Economically, coercion usually is not very efficient.

Slavery can make sense for the slave owner economically if they have an efficient system for preventing rebellion/runaways/etc or can outsource enforcement to the government or someone else, but yeah the idea of being slavery being efficient overall is something I've never understood. You can beat someone into working a good deal, but getting the best out of them is tough through coercion. Some of the smarter slave owners even realized this and would pay cash incentives (or other similar rewards) to productive slaves. Sometimes they would even rent out their slaves to others and allow the slaves to keep a portion of the earnings!

Slavery starts with a disadvantage to begin with, any system with six people working for their own incentives has a numbers and morale advantage over a system with five workers who gain nothing and one lazy layabout who captures most of the gains for themselves.

Then add on that the market distortions of "free" labor adds less individual incentive for owners to invest in new technology that could clear up the workforce to do other economically productive things for someone else who still needs labor. Why spend hundreds of thousands investing in automation when you have a free work force subsidized by the police state? And yet this automation is what we need, so workers can go do jobs that can't be automated yet.

It's also less efficient at distributing labor, a large slave owning operation is functionally a mini planned economy. The owner says who does what, and while the smaller nature of it compared to a country doesn't make it as inefficient, it still suffers.

That doesn't mean slavery can't and doesn't work, even the worst systems still tend to be a little productive because people are doing labor in them but overall as a society having a bunch of rent seeking middlemen tends to be a drain on growth. We see a similar thing now where some labor markets have an opposite issue, workers/unions have too much power and demand a bunch of busy work like elevator workers literally taking things apart and putting them back together that could be better spent elsewhere growing the economy through labor that is actually needed.

Architects have dreamed of modular construction for decades, where entire rooms are built in factories and then shipped on flatbed trucks to sites, for lower costs and greater precision. But we can’t even put elevators together in factories in America, because the elevator union’s contract forbids even basic forms of preassembly and prefabrication that have become standard in elevators in the rest of the world. The union and manufacturers bicker over which holes can be drilled in a factory and which must be drilled (or redrilled) on site. Manufacturers even let elevator and escalator mechanics take some components apart and put them back together on site to preserve work for union members, since it’s easier than making separate, less-assembled versions just for the U.S.

If slavery is the balance leaning too much towards the employers where they get lazy and inefficient, stuff like this is the balance shifting too much towards workers.

Slavery was universal in the ancient world, and in some form (state slavery, chattel slavery, serfdom/peonage) right up until shortly after the Industrial Revolution. If non-slaveowning societies really were so much better than slaveowning ones, you'd think some great emancipator would have come along and started wrecking all those slave societies, but they didn't. So slavery's economic inferiority is not inherent in the human condition but a product of modernity. Probably before you have machines, treating people as machines pays off.

Slavery was universal in the ancient world, and in some form (state slavery, chattel slavery, serfdom/peonage) right up until shortly after the Industrial Revolution. If non-slaveowning societies really were so much better than slaveowning ones, you'd think some great emancipator would have come along and started wrecking all those slave societies, but they didn't.

Those economies were a pittance compared to the world of today and the free nations are far more wealthier than the less free ones in modern times so it seems like this exact thing happened. Slavery and other similar rent seeking behavior is less of a detriment in a weak economy with weak competition than a global one with more competition.

So slavery's economic inferiority is not inherent in the human condition but a product of modernity. Probably before you have machines, treating people as machines pays off.

And vice versa, the economies that became more free and more capitalist and more willing to use positive incentives to encourage work instead of allowing as many rent seekers to profit off of things they didn't do brought us into the modern world.

It's not the only factor, there's a ton of different important details. But personally unproductive leeches are a drain on society whether they be a slave owner or a union worker demanding busy work.

Those economies were a pittance compared to the world of today

Irrelevant even if true (and I'm not sure a meaningful measurement is possible).

Slavery and other similar rent seeking behavior is less of a detriment in a weak economy with weak competition than a global one with more competition.

There was plenty of competition in Europe and around the Mediterranean Sea... but slavery still persisted.

But personally unproductive leeches are a drain on society whether they be a slave owner or a union worker demanding busy work.

Being a slave owner doesn't make you a personally unproductive leech, any more than being a factory owner does.

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