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I've been thinking about why some people are terrified of Trump while others, like me, are more indifferent. I mostly tune out Trump news because I assume much of it involves scare tactics or misleading framing by his detractors. When my wife brings up concerns about his supposedly authoritarian actions, my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it - and if it's legal, then that's how the system is supposed to work. I have faith that our institutions have the checks and balances to deal with any presidential overreach appropriately.
This reminded me of a mirror situation during 2020-2021 with the BLM movement, where our positions were reversed. I was deeply concerned about social media mobs pressuring corporations, governments, and individuals to conform under threat of job loss, boycotts, and riots, while my wife thought these social pressures were justified and would naturally self-correct if they went too far. The key difference I see is that the government has built-in checks and balances designed to prevent abuse of power, while social movements and mob pressure operate without those same institutional restraints. It seems like we each trust different institutional mechanisms, but I can't help but think that formal governmental processes with built-in restraints are more reliable than grassroots social pressure that operates without those same safeguards. Furthermore, the media seems incentivized to amplify fear about Trump but not about grassroots social movements - Trump generates clicks and outrage regardless of which side you're on, while criticizing social movements risks alienating the platforms' own user base and advertiser-friendly demographics.
I don't like trump because he's made my situation materially worse and is likely to continue to do so. I don't like trump because he profits the outgroup at the expense of the ingroup. I don't like trump because I'm ideologically and morally opposed to his positions. I don't like trump because I think he is, personally, a very immoral individual.
In principle, you could convince me that any particular complaint is overblown. There are plenty of immoral, harmful, outgroup people I don't feel nearly the vitriol for. But Trump is the perfect storm; He's not just a villain, he's a villain that gratuitously kicks puppies. Sure, the media environment contributes to what you call "terror", but that's strictly adaptive. Everyone on my "side" would agree, sober-minded, that Trump is the single most important political figure to oppose. Adding a component of emotional motivation increases the time and pleasure in doing so. Consider any ideological cause leftists and liberals are interested in: creedal citizenship, wealth redistribution, climate change, alphabet people, etcetera. Assuming conflict theory, it's obvious that "Depose Donald Trump" is the first step in promoting any of them. The only reason to do anything else is if you believe in mistake theory instead-- but Donald Trump is congenitally incapable of admitting mistakes (except in the "fifty stalins" sense) which means any attempt to find common ground just gets ran over by his conflict theory instead.
But how? Unless you are a rulebreaker or someone who gets money from the government for non-poverty or oldness related reasons you cant have been. If you are amongst the rulebreakers, certainly you knew you were, right? The rules as written are much harsher than the Trump rules. The third option is tariffs.
If you are a government subsidy for non-poverty reasons-er, well that could always have ended at any time right? Was your work nonpartisan? Like were you researching how to grow trees with wood 2x as strong in 1/18 the time? Or were you doing something else?
The tariff affected I see and understand. Its a rapid change in the business environment, and those always suck. If you can show me an approximately equal amount of outrage about the passage and implementation of Obamacare you are certified fresh to complain about the Trump tariffs.
Tarrifs and fewer immigrants increase cost of living. Plus he's personally annoying, and that counts.
Were you born after 2008? because people were definitely Big Mad. The outrage reduced over time, but only because Obamacare is actually decent policy. (And if you want to argue that, explain why even Trump still hadn't gotten rid of it.)
Anyways, if you want to make a 1-to-1 comparison the outrage about Obamacare is definitely bigger than the outrage over tarrifs. Immigration and healthcare are flamewar lightning rods, but barely anyone actually cares to discuss trade policy.
I'm a government contractor. I believe my work is relatively nonpartisan, though if I doxxed myself maybe you would find a reason to disagree. But apparently the trump administration doesn't, because the contract I'm on got renewed... just, after a whole lot of time-and-money-wasting nonsense.
Not generally, from you. Its not good policy at all. Medicaid should be abandoned not expanded. Implementing the mandate and coverage on preexisting conditions has caused a cost spiral in the personal/family health insurance market. Trump hasn't gotten rid of it because 1) He has never had close to the votes; 2) He doesn't really care, its not his issue; and 3) Taking away benefits causes farm more wailing than imposing diffused and hidden costs. The cost to the economy of Obamacare is equivalent of probably a 100% tariff on all goods in perpetuity.
Okay, so your argument is that:
I have two counterarguments.
#1: Narrow
Point #2 is wrong. Obamacare is good. Therefore 3 and 4 are wrong, and there's no contradiction.
#2: Broad
Even if I were to admit that obamacare was bad, that would not be sufficient to demonstrate a contradiction in my position, because my position rests on the particular degree of trump's badness, and also on the utility of opposing him.
Consider this non-political example:
Bob is clearly worse than Jim, no question. But it would be more rational for me to be emotionally motivated to oppose Jim. No amount of anger and hatred would reverse bob's actions, or even be particularly likely to deter future Bobs. But the right emotional reaction to seeing Jim about to kick a puppy might let me intervene in time to stop him, and perhaps even deter future puppy-kickers from doing what they want.
Consider this second example:
Jim is clearly bad. But if Jim is willing to get angry with me about Joe, it's politically expedient for me to join Jim in his anger so we can intervene against Joe together than to be angry at Jim first.
So you like Obamacare and dislike tariffs. Thats fine. Whats the cost imposing measure that was implemented before tariffs that you dislike as much?
Zoning laws. I hate, hate, hate them. They're also mostly a Democrat thing, so there's an example of me being appropriately mad at "my side" for acting against my interests.
Aside from that--
Other tariffs. Excessive FDA regulatory burden. The existence of patent law. The Jones Act.
I could go on.
Zoning laws are more bipartisan than you let on, and, given that most local governments are saddled with many state and federal mandates, are unfortunately necessary. In a more libertarian world you might be right, but I can't say I've ever lived in that world.
But consider this, town of 20k people with mostly or all high income single family units plus a quaint downtown. Now, the school district is "awesome" (in other words it contains children who are intelligent and nonviolent/disruptive). Some developer decides to knock down 10 houses and build a 40 story slum. This just absolutely blows up the finances for the town. They now need a whole new plumbing system, double the cops, and, most expensively, their school now sucks. These kids pay way less per capita in taxes, plus they run around stabbing other kids. Libertarianism has many good aspects, but far too many on that side dont understand you need to do things in order. You cant have no zoning laws without repealing the CRA and eliminating the public school system. It just doesn't make sense.
Tariffs are another similar case. When you think about it, it is objectively unfair to American workers that we have the FDA, EPA, NLRB, OSHA, etc and then they have to compete against someone who can burn coal and dump arsenic into rivers.
I'd be very interested in your patent law take. I've worked in it extensively and it mostly works well outside of pharmaceuticals and a few "innovative" patent categories (which IMO the patent acts as written shouldn't ever have applied to. To get an idea of those categories of what IMO are fake/illegal patent categories see Bilski v. Kappos, Mayo v. Prometheus, and Alice Corp.
I don't actually think I, or anyone actually knows what the Jones act does. It outwardly seems fairly stupid.
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A rare return from the field of economics is the fact known for >200 years that increasing the supply of labor literally only ever benefits the ownership class. The idea of foreign laborers as beneficial because they make goods cheap is somewhat reversing causality. Goods have to be cheap because we have so many foreign laborers. If people couldn't afford the staples, they wouldn't buy them. The outcomes from there are: goods cost less, or workers are paid more, or revolution.
"Cheap goods" are an illusory benefit. You shouldn't be thankful big ag can bring in >100,000 H-2A workers so your strawberries are only $5 a pound. You should be furious that your compensation hasn't scaled proportionally so you can afford strawberries at $10 or $15 or $20 a pound; you should be furious at the greed of banks and corporations, at the incompetence and corruption in government, that has allowed the rampant inflation from the probably $0.50 a pound strawberries cost in 1970. Or the $0.25 for bread and the $1.25 for milk.
Your stresses over cost of living are the direct consequence of these three events:
Also bankers being bankers, amidst all that.
This should be an entire post. In brief, the wealthy have too much to lose by the ACA being repealed, and the #1 way to improve healthcare in this country is to deport >50 million people.
Set aside the immigrant/native question for a minute. Is it your belief that killing half the workers in the US would make the other half materially better off? Because that is the implication of your claim.
(A: it won't, of course, because, broadly, more labor => more production => more Stuff That People Want)
It doesn't matter if you make $10 an hour and strawberries cost $5 or you make $100 an hour and strawberries cost $50. The way you bring down the price of strawberries is by producing more strawberries. Repeat x1b across literally everything.
In the spherical cow hypothetical of half the supply of labor vanishing with literally no other negative effects, yes, quality of life for the remaining would improve profoundly. This isn't a matter of "belief," it's history and biology. Wherever civilized and sufficiently stable nations have recovered from sudden and large declines in population, golden ages have followed. It's ecological succession as applied to humans.
Not to be taken as personally misanthropic--I'm quite pro humans, quite pro there being many, many more. The US is simply not presently equipped for its number of inhabitants, and this is not a problem that can be solved without first deporting 50 million people.
You describe the mechanism. Yes, flooding supply is how you decrease prices. I'm not denying the mechanism, I'm saying its benefit is illusory. Abundant cheap offshore labor is how you produce abundant cheap plastic garbage. We wouldn't need abundant cheap plastic garbage if bankers hadn't destroyed the value of the dollar, if the owners hadn't outsourced so much labor, and if those same owners hadn't stalled out worker compensation.
That's all the economy is, now. The ongoing attempt to outrun the consequences of those decisions.
I'm going to have to ask for a citation, because this seems like an extraordinary claim and contrary to basically every historical example I'm aware of. What's the mechanism here? It is true that the recovery that follows an apocalyptic event will seem like a golden age compared to the apocalypse. However, the fact that hitting rock bottom leaves nowhere to go but up does not mean hitting rock bottom is welfare enhancing.
(I have a weird feeling you're going to pick the Black Death, but maybe you'll surprise me).
What are you actually trying to say? Like, what is the counterfactual scenario you are proposing? You say the benefit of material abundance is illusory, but also seem to expect that things would be better if instead of having more stuff workers were paid better. Is your position "actually, things would be better if we had less stuff"? If so, you should say that. If not, there's a basic problem where higher worker compensation and lower prices are isomorphic. If worker compensation rises but the amount of goods remain the same (per your stipulation) the result is the inflation that seems to incense you.
I guess “golden ages” are just the dead-cat bounces of civilizational history.
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All your objections are empirically wrong. HDI has risen over time, coinciding with the greatest increase in labor supply in the history of the planet. And in general, GDP is correlated with population growth
The more laborers you have, the greater the economies of scale, the more innovations you can sustain, the more surplus you generate.
GDP as an idea is like a belief that doesn't pay rent. It doesn't tell you whether a country is good, a benefit in raising it is not found in evidence. Given otherwise equal choices among westerners, >95% would rather spend their lives in #39 Switzerland or #105 Iceland over #1 China or #3 India.
HDI is a lagging indicator for what could be called civilization development factor C. C associates totally with homogeneity except in Singapore (75% Chinese anyway) and the US, whose C increased following predominantly European immigration and has consistently declined over the last 5 decades. Those countries with high C reached their peak before accepting significant numbers of non-European immigrants, now their C is in uniform decline.
Economics is a pseudoscience whose total positive contributions to humanity are counted on one hand. It endures because it is useful to power, laundering corrupt motive under the veneer of something scientific. "The GDP is high," they say. They mean "Don't believe your lying eyes."
Only pharmaceuticals stand as a market sector where surplus drives innovation, and there it is intramarket surplus from the profits of optional and less-critical therapies funding research in critical therapies. Abundant plastic garbage has resulted in no innovations, improving the delivery of said plastic garbage is not innovation. Millions of foreigners originating in H-class visas either stifle innovation, in itinerant farmhands preventing automation, or cheap tech roles for workers who, as H-class visa holders, are by definition not innovators. No innovation has resulted from the proliferation of Indian hotel, gas station/C-Store owners and low-class tech workers; among the behemoths, the rise of Indians in Alphabet and Microsoft, among many other corporations, preceded not innovation but enshittification. Amazon may be credited for leading to AWS, but Prime is now the lamprey on the whale of their hosting services. The billions who owe cheap computers for their access to the internet will stand in history as evidence directly disproving the utility of cheap goods.
We reached the moon in the 60s. Beyond medicine, the idea we have become more innovative is laughable. We do have better medicine, we do have better entertainment. Day-to-day life today versus the 60s remains worse. It's no coincidence video games, television, and cinema declined, and now the previous bastion of culture in the left is on the verge of collapse. In the absence of such distractions, we would have already seen revolutionary violence.
I didn't cite GDP, I cited GDP per capita. Critical difference. And while I wouldn't use GDP per capita to prove that any particular country is good, but I can use it to make statements about the general trend of increased goodness because it's very strongly correlated with a lot of measure of goodness like e.g. life expectancy that everyone agrees on.
Not well defined. Give me empirical data or give me death.
You're using no science whatsoever. I'll take "psuedoscience" over that.
You're trying to make an a priori argument but I reject this comparison on it's face and also empirically. Go look at a graph of utility patents granted in the united states: https://patentlyo.com/patent/2023/08/utility-patents-granted-calendar.html . It doesn't anti-correlate with graphs of "immigrants as a share of US residents." so I'm pretty damn confident that if you want to track down a graph of "noneuropean immigrants as a share of US residents" it's not going to anticorrelate with that either. It just correlates to graphs of US population growth. More people means more innovation.
Your argument is entirely based on vibes. That's cool, but I've got statistics.
Your modus ponens is my modus tollens, though: if the vibes don't match the stats, then either the vibes are wrong or the stats are wrong/irrelevant.
For example, looking specifically at that patent page, do you really believe that innovation from 2010 to 2020 was 2x or 3x the innovation between 1870 and 1990?
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Temporarily.
And now here sit we, these modern countries so proud of their female workforce, and wonder where the babies have gone that should have been the next generation of labor.
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Ok, but can you show yourself being Big Mad about it? That's what he's saying would be required for you to be in the clear.
Why would I be big mad about Obamacare? I liked obamacare. I think the benefits were worth the costs, regardless of the change to the business environment. I don't understand why I have to be mad about obamacare to be mad about tariffs, which are more disruptive and have no such benefits.
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