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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26238 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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Can you imagine a US Constitutional amendment that, if proposed, would actually get passed these days?

The relevant part of the US Constitution is:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

So, either 2/3 of both the House and the Senate, or 2/3 of the states must propose it, and then 3/4 of the state legislatures or conventions in those states must support it, for it to become part of the Constitution... as I understand it at least.

What sort of possible amendments could you imagine would actually pass and become part of the US Constitution in today's political climate, if they were proposed?

I find this to be an interesting question because it is a barometer of what the various factions of US politics actually agree on, despite their various differences, and also a barometer of how much polarization there is in today's US political situation.

I think you posted this as a response to the wrong comment.

Correct, thanks.

A lot of the structural issues might get enough of a consensus together if it comes off the back of an especially catastrophic failure. The (frequently observed) tendency for the US government to shut down is addressed more or less completely in other systems by this being a trigger for snap elections until a coalition can form capable of funding the government. Similarly you could imagine the executive excess and some of the more creative theories on presidential criminal immunity to be punctured if something truly egregious in a cross-partisan sense occurred.

  1. The size of the Supreme Court shall be permanently fixed at 9 members. All Presidents are guaranteed one appointment per term. If there is no vacancy during the term, then the President may vacate any single judge to create a vacancy at the conclusion of the Presidential term. If there is more than one vacancy, the President may appoint additional interim justices who will automatically be vacated at the start of the next Presidential term. [EDIT] The Senate may veto permanent appointments by a two-thirds majority. Interim appointments may not be vetoed.

  2. The House of Representatives shall be expanded to 1,000 members, with additional districts being added proportionally. The House of Representatives must conduct its business in a way that allows members to participate without being present in the chamber. Members shall be required to maintain residency in their district, spending no less then 50% of the calendar days per year there.

  3. Birthright citizenship shall be granted only to children where at least one biological parent is a citizen or resident having legally remained in the country continuously for a period of at least 3 years. Children may have no greater than two biological parents.

  4. The non-state district of Washington, D.C. shall be formally dissolved and the land de-annexed to the original states from which it was obtained. Congress may designate property within the current district to remain federal enclaves immune to state jurisdiction.

They didn't ask for constitutional amendments which are good ideas, or which might receive grassroots bipartisan support, they asked for ones which stand a shot of actually getting passed.

1 seems plausible, if you could make each party think it was their own idea and defending against incursions of the other party.

2 seems very unlikely, all of the politicians are stuck in their ways and in the DC culture and are not going let through a Bill that limits themselves in this way.

3 has absolutely no chance, the Democrats are not going to do anything that discourages illegal immigration, especially if it can be spun as race-related, and having noncitizen children born in this country and then being deported to a country they've never been to is way too easy to stir up emotions about.

4 seems unlikely for similar reasons to 2. The politicians love DC, they're not going to do something that messes with the status quo unless it's strictly good for them.

Birthright citizenship shall be granted only to children where at least one biological parent is a citizen or resident having legally remained in the country continuously for a period of at least 3 years. Children may have no greater than two biological parents.

So even the children of citizens would be subject to a residence requirement? I don't think any other country does this and it's an easy way to get thousands of stateless people.

No, I intended this to mean "only to children where at least one biological parent ((is a citizen) or (resident having legally remained in the country continuously for a period of at least 3 years))".

I don't think the parentheses go there. "is (a citizen) or (resident having legally remained in the country continuously)".

I've always liked the idea of appointing each justice to a single 18-year term. That would mean every president is guaranteed at least two picks, with no single president having the ability to appoint a majority.

The size of the Supreme Court shall be permanently fixed at 9 members.

I think 13 would be better. Not for political reasons, but because 13 original colonies.

The House of Representatives must conduct its business in a way that allows members to participate without being present in the chamber.

They should've done this after 9/11.

Congress may designate property within the current district to remain federal enclaves

If that were extended to the original district, the Pentagon would be eligible....

Theres a decent argument for aligning the number of justices with the number of circuit courts of appeal (each justice is currently responsible for handling certain issues related to one or more circuits), which would put us at 13 (the 11 regional circuits plus DC and the Federal Circuit)

It already is, I'm sure. Congress can designate federal enclaves basically wherever it wants to and doesn't need an amendment to do so, but I was just clarifying that rescission of D.C. didn't imply state jurisdiction.

Mandatory retirement ages seems like the least objectionable, lowest-touch policy that would reduce the impact of any singular sc appointment.

While it'd never get amendment consensus (though may not need it) I always liked the epps/sitaraman proposal of just appointing by default any circuit judge to the supreme court and randomly empanelling 9 of them to hear cases in a given timespan.

I agree that a mandatory retirement age for elected officials could happen in the near future based on what’s happening with the 2024 election. Similar to how limiting the president to two terms wasn’t put into the constitution until FDR broke tradition by running for four terms, Biden’s age (and Trump’s to a lesser extent) represents a serious risk to the country.

While neither of these men are as feeble/sick other side likes to portray, four years in an extremely high stress job for men who would be in their mid/early eighties respectively could end catastrophically. There’s a serious chance that whoever wins in 2024 is removed from office by their cabinet sometime in the next term due to age related cognitive decline. And the damage that’s done before that happens in a bad scenario could be significant.

The size of the Supreme Court shall be permanently fixed at 9 members. All Presidents are guaranteed one appointment per term. If there is no vacancy during the term, then the President may vacate any single judge to create a vacancy at the conclusion of the Presidential term. If there is more than one vacancy, the President may appoint additional interim justices who will automatically be vacated at the start of the next Presidential term. [EDIT] The Senate may veto permanent appointments by a two-thirds majority. Interim appointments may not be vetoed.

This would be a huge centralization of judicial power in the Executive, and would be an immediate red-flag legal reform for a court-packing scheme in democratic backsliding countries. Any sort of coherent party or dynasty state would easily be able to exploit this to establish executive control over the judiciary.

Just on the veto side, the legislative break is a joke of a check or balance. Any president to win the American system has such a broad geographic coalition that they'd have more than a 1/3rd presence in the Senate, and thus basic party discipline would bar all but the most outrageous picks. This leaves nearly all the power in the President's hands.

Just on the presidential appointment side, just two concurrent Presidents of the same party/dynasty would be able to create almost overwhelming shifts in court composition. An incredibly hostile 7-2 court would easily become a 5-4 near-even split in just two elections, and would completely flip if, say, the President 'resigned' right before the 'transition,' thus elevating their vice-president to president, and letting said president get their own appointment for a 3-judge shift in 2 elections. Because there's no obligation to wait until the end of a term to replace a judge, any Presidential office worth it's salt would immediately reshape the court as their first act in office, while exploiting any absences for more.

The interim appointment without veto is also incredibly prone to abuse, as it directly encourages the ruling party to run intimidation- or elimination- campaigns against the judiciary. Just from the start, since any judge can be replaced, and because the natural incentive for the President is to replace the most hostile/opposing party judges, the incentive for any judge to not lose their seat for -insert personal reason here- is to comply with Presidential pressure and not stick out. If they do stick out and are removed- on pretext, for actual reason, resign 'under pressure', whatever- the President can immediately appoint a party loyalty. It wouldn't matter that the next president can appoint their own judge from the 'vacated' judges- that just means they can re-appoint loyalists, who can easily be counted on to make letter-if-not-spirit of the rule considerations. (Like, say, not counting an interim-replacement against the once-a-term appointment, letting pro-forma Vice President ascents appoint further judges, letting the same President make an additional replacement per time they assume the presidency, and so on.)

This would easily enable a system of court packing political loyalists and removing independent judiciary elements from the top court.

I agree with your first issue that SCOTUS justices should still require a majority for senate confirmation. Otherwise it centralizes too much power in the hands of the Executive.

I disagree with your issues on the "one justice per term" side. Most of what you brought up can already happen in the status quo, but it does so extremely unevenly. Trump got three picks in one term by sheer luck. It was fortunate since he (or really McConnell) appointed principled conservatives, but one should always be wary of what could happen on the flip side. At least having some consistency in the timings would make it feel like less of a lottery to both sides.

I think reasonable people could disagree on whether getting to remove a justice is net-beneficial or not. If the SCOTUS had a solid reputation for nothing but principled legal analysis, then it would be bad. But in many ways the SCOTUS has effectively become "the other legislative branch" in that it flagrantly ignores the spirit or even the letter of the constitution. If that's the reality, then it probably should be more responsive to public opinion.

If that's the reality, then it probably should be more responsive to public opinion.

Why so? What's so good about "public opinion," anyway, that "the other legislative branch" — or any other branch of government — should be responsive to it?

This goes to the founding principle of democracy. Democracy, and a (regulated) free market are the two pillars of national success in the modern age. Any country that lacks one or both of them ends up nearly always being a pretty bad place to live in.

This goes to the founding principle of democracy.

But then, doesn't this depend on how one defines "democracy," and which element of it is essential to "national success in the modern age"?

For example, the Global State of democracy Initiative comes to mind, particularly their diagram of their conceptual framework. I note that "responsiveness to public opinion" would mostly fall under portions of one branch of four — "Representation" — and maybe the "electoral participation" subheading of the "Participation" branch; together, this is only a small portion of the framework. Further, there's "Judicial Independence" under the "Rule of Law" branch pushing in the opposite direction.

Or look at the well-used "democracy scores" criticized here, here, and here. The sort of definitions of "democracy" wherein Fidesz winning straight majorities of the electorate is a lack of democracy. Wherein the voters getting what they want is "populism," which is bad and a grave threat to Our Democracy — after all, "populism" lead to Hitler. (As a podcaster I listen to put it, the core question so much of our modern society and "leadership" perpetually asks about any issue or choice is "What Would Hitler Do?" — so as to automatically select the opposite choice. "Reversed stupidity is not intelligence," sure, but is "reversed evil" good?)

People talk about democracy being about "consent of the governed," but, as people since at least Lysander Spooner have been pointing out, this ends up relying on very strained and atypical definitions of consent. I once pointed out somewhere online (I don't remember where or when) what happens when you compare "consent" in the "consent of the governed" meaning with "consent" in modern "affirmative consent" ethics; what happens when you transpose the definition from one context to the other, in either direction.

Or, one can talk about "representative government." But what does it mean to "represent" someone — particularly to "represent" and "empower" someone who cannot act themselves, but require you to exercise power on their behalf. What makes a parent or legal guardian a good representative of a child, a mental patient, a senile elder? One who stuffs their Alzheimer-afflicted mother into a cheap nursing home and drains her accounts to spend on oneself is not "a good representative." But, the overly-permissive parent who lets their kids have chocolate cake for breakfast is also not "a good representative" — in not doing the hard, uncomfortable work of saying "no" and setting boundaries, they are, in their own way, putting their own interests ahead of their children's best interests as well.

Hence, that Rousseau-citing essay I keep coming back to, wherein, since the Iron Law of Oligarchy ensures an elite ruling class, the only question is whether that ruling class acts in their own interest — whether via direct exploitation of the masses, or by populist pandering to the whims of the mob — or they act for the best interests of society as a whole — the "general will" — whether the electorate vote for it or not; and that "democracy" is best defined as the latter, as distinct from the "non-democratic" former.

Linguistic descriptivism vs. prescriptivism. One can complain about the use of "literally" as an intensifier, and yet the linguistic shift continues (as it did long, long ago for the word "very," with a remnant of the original meaning lingering in the adjectival usage). It seems to me that more and more people — particularly influential ones — define "democracy" as something more along the lines of the above — or even just 'democracy is when the correct people are in charge' — wherein "responsiveness to public opinion" is a relatively minor component at best.

I should really write a longer effortpost on this, since I've heard you and several others use the term "oligarchy" this way. This line of thinking is common enough on this forum that it deserves a dedicated response. Until I get around to that, I'll type out something briefer.

I think you're warping the term "oligarchy" in a similar way that leftists have warped the term "racism". I feel it's not motivated out of a desire to be maximally descriptive to people unfamiliar with the ideas, but rather it's being used to smuggle in political arguments through wordplay. In short, it's the noncentral fallacy, i.e. the thing Scott once described in this article.

I agree there are issues with scoring democracy. But the response shouldn't be to turn around and declare that nothing short of 1:1 representation of popular-request:elite-policymaking is a "democracy", and that anything which falls short is an "oligarchy". That's setting up an impossible standard for democracy, and furthermore is not how average people would use or understand the term. There's a big difference in how much popular will impacts policy in democracies like the US or Germany, vs how much it does in Russia or China. Meaningful voting for which politicians get in power is one of the best ways to ensure popular will remains important.

On some of your specific points:

wherein Fidesz winning straight majorities of the electorate is a lack of democracy.

Fidesz winning fair elections is democracy working correctly, but Fidesz can do things that then hurt democracy. Heck, this can even happen without enacting specific policies simply by breaking norms. I'm not an expert on Hungarian politics so I won't use examples from there. Instead I'll point to something like J6, which absolutely tore at the fabric of American democracy. It didn't do that because of any direct outcomes (Trump was not kept in power), but the fact that many on the right excused Trump's behavior or even celebrated it means other more competent right-wing politicians could are more incentivized to contemplate an actual coup in the future.

when you compare "consent" in the "consent of the governed" meaning with "consent" in modern "affirmative consent" ethics;

Modern definitions of "consent" in sexual contexts are completely screwed up, and I criticize them as much as I criticize anything else. They shouldn't be the basis of broader definitions of democracy... or anything really.

define "democracy" as something more along the lines of the above — or even just 'democracy is when the correct people are in charge' — wherein "responsiveness to public opinion" is a relatively minor component at best.

The people who do this are hacks who abuse words to try and gain leverage over the instruments of power. Pushing for the "correct" people or "correct" policies inevitably degenerates into pushing for "things that help the leaders themselves the most". The correct response is to call out the people who hold this opinion for their shortsightedness, not argue that the only thing that can stop a dictatorship of the left is a dictatorship by the right as many people on this site do.

You make some good points, though I think the status quo is even more vulnerable in some ways. What would be a better way to try to equalize presidential influence over the court, do you think? Currently it seems a bit too based on luck, whether people die on the job while your party controls the Senate.

What would be a better way to try to equalize presidential influence over the court, do you think?

Not trying to, and not trusting anyone who pushes for it with any degree of power.

'Equalizing' presidential influence is not a good goal for the same reason equity-driven politics are bad for treating people equally, as it's a non-standard extremely open to abuse and manipulation as any President whose coalition is not politically dominant on the court can claim that they are not yet equal, and thus entitled to further reshape the court to their influence. It's a license for un-equal influence in the name of establishing an outcome, not a consistent process, with the state of said outcome being defined by the people in power with all the opportunities for bias and self-interest it implies in self-justifying why they should get away with more.

By and large* I am not a fan of having executive- or party-controlled replace their predecessors, and while I am also not a fan of the executive having no influence whatsoever, the modern movement to equalize presidential influence of the court is part of a more banal effort to establish partisan control of the courts by a political party that for decades has viewed itself in historically determinist terms as the inevitable majoritarian ruling party, and more recently the only legitimate party of governance. Said party's think-piece networks and partisans openly muses other efforts to gain partisan dominance of the courts, ranging from explicit court packing to pressure campaigns to create new vacancies, with enough variations that I have no faith of any broad sincere desire to equalize presidential influence over the courts, only to equalize their influence on the courts on the way to re-establishing partisan dominance and deference previously enjoyed.

*One of the few exceptions I tend to have is for court systems established by external/illegitimate powers (such as occupation authorities, colonial authorities, or coups) and/or which self-select their own successors without executive and/or legislative input (which creates insular captured-interest blocks of whoever dominates the internal replacement process). Even then, I'd far prefer that a new administration allocate a share of new appointments with the opposition, and not grant themselves direct majorities. Yes, I am aware this basically never happens.

Currently it seems a bit too based on luck, whether people die on the job while your party controls the Senate.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is your reminder that Joe Biden was one of the specific leaders who introduced 'Borking' to the American lexicon, and that Democratic federal and Supreme Court politics have only escalated since then.

Adversarial court politics was not always the way, and it did not have to be the way, but it was the result of choices, specifically of the Democratic Senate leadership generation deliberately deciding to employ and normalize character assassination, appointment allocation, and other techniques to try and shape court composition. From Borking and other slander campaigns to the Bush-era Federal appointment stonewalling to arranging protests outside of judges houses or inside the Senate working areas, if there is a lack of goodwill to appointing Democratic judges, I'd wager it has some slight thing to do with Democratic conduct toward their peers on the topic.

None of your proposal address this very contemporary and living history, nor is there a reason why- in the face of very real and very earned distrust- a 'reform' that hyper-concentrates the ability to abuse judicial appointments in the hands of a party with a contemporary history of defecting on judicial norms that expects to be the primary beneficiary of the reform would be a beneficial thing at a constitutional level.

Why not mandatory requirement for the most senior jurist. Otherwise you end up in a situation where a first term president gets to remove his worst impediment on the bench and replace him or her with a toady. That removes independence of the court. But if you make it most senior the odds of removing the biggest impediment is 1/9.

That would work too. The critical goals are (1) to regularize appointments so that there is a more linear relationship between winning the Presidency and influencing the Court that is less based on luck, and (2) taking Court-packing off the table completely.

Which of these would have high popular support, let alone institutional backing?

Maybe number 2?

And while I don’t doubt the ability of our current discourse to turn any one of these into a partisan shibboleth, number 3 is already there.

The size of the Supreme Court shall be permanently fixed at 9 members. All Presidents are guaranteed one appointment per term. If there is no vacancy during the term, then the President may vacate any single judge to create a vacancy at the conclusion of the Presidential term. If there is more than one vacancy, the President may appoint additional interim justices who will automatically be vacated at the start of the next Presidential term. [EDIT] The Senate may veto permanent appointments by a two-thirds majority. Interim appointments may not be vetoed.

Interesting, would probably heavily moderate the supreme court members (to avoid being the one that gets yeeted next term).

The House of Representatives shall be expanded to 1,000 members, with additional districts being added proportionally. The House of Representatives must conduct its business in a way that allows members to participate without being present in the chamber. Members shall be required to maintain residency in their district, spending no less then 50% of the calendar days per year there.

This feels like the direction of the legislature for the past century. More "democratic", but less practical. I'm still a little annoyed at the amendment that changed how senate seats are selected. It basically stripped the state governments of their representation in the federal government.

Birthright citizenship shall be granted only to children where at least one biological parent is a citizen or resident having legally remained in the country continuously for a period of at least 3 years. Children may have no greater than two biological parents.

I'm generally more of an open borders advocate, because I think people should be allowed to work and live wherever. And citizens should be allowed to hire and rent to whoever. The birthright citizenship has always felt like a frustrating sticking point. I'd be in favor of this.

The non-state district of Washington, D.C. shall be formally dissolved and the land de-annexed to the original states from which it was obtained. Congress may designate property within the current district to remain federal enclaves immune to state jurisdiction.

I live in Northern Virginia, please let Maryland have all of DC.

Interesting, would probably heavily moderate the supreme court members (to avoid being the one that gets yeeted next term).

My hope is that it would incentivize retirement to create the vacancy in order to take the choice away from the President.

I have often fantasized (ever since 2004) about a Republican winning the popular vote and losing the electoral college and galvanizing support on the right for an EC reform amendment or more states signing into the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, but realistically I can't assume that Democrats would continue to be interested in such a reform after the EC turns out to benefit them, even if I can promise that I personally would.

Once Trump is gone, one way or another, there might be bipartisan interest in clarifying the scope of some executive privileges that he has laid claim to, but that all needs to be far enough in the rear view mirror, like FDR's four terms, for it to not get polarized.

The concept of contingent elections, where state delegations of House representatives choose the president in the case of no electoral college majority, will not last long after the next time one happens.

If a foreign adversary tries to take advantage of US weakness during a chaotic lame duck session, for example if Trump wins after a campaign promising to dismantle NATO and China thinks it's a good time to make a move on Taiwan while the US is distracted, we might get a new amendment like the 20th that shortens the lame duck period.

But I doubt you'd be able to pass anything more than boring no-brainer kind of amendments like the 27th. Maybe one that requires Officers of the US (maybe clarifying that to include the President) from trading stocks, but again, only after the immediate controversies with a partisan valence are well in the rear view mirror.

God. Electoral reform is my literal single issue. I don’t care if you are a convicted baby-eater, I’ll vote for you if you make it a campaign issue.

Now, if only anyone at our local level was actually interested in the subject…

reform how, and what's the value you see, if you don't mind me asking?

I think my phone ate a beautiful appeal to the national character, so…

Approval or ranked choice voting. Best chance to supersede existing partisan lines. Also improves skin in game. Downsides insignificant. Parties have no reason to adopt, so I will signal-boost as a local issue.

I think something to keep in mind here is that right leaning people (and to a lesser extent moderates) may now have a fear of anything related to updating election procedure because at this point they've had years and years of "lets make this common sense change that everyone can clearly agree on and has no downsides and absolutely does not privilege the Ds at the cost of the Rs" messaging.

This immune response can be pretty severe between all of the COVID related changes, calls for electoral college updates (and perhaps also fears about D's importing new voters).

It has the potential to pretty significantly hamper otherwise good ideas.

You might as well say registered Dems have been trained to think “voter suppression” when they hear “reform”, because that’s the messaging around ID requirements. Gerrymandering too, though it hasn’t been in the news as much.

In practice, yeah, the establishment would probably jump on all of these to discourage anyone from making the change. All the more reason to push local first.

Yeah not criticizing your approach or interests, I just have the suspicion that you might get confusingly aggressive pushback or skepticism (including on here) because of these events.

I like the EC but prefer the Maine approach (ie overall winner gets the two votes; rest is district by district)

Why would you want gerrymandering to have more influence?

Why do you want machine politics to have more influence?

Yes, gerrymandering impacts races. But so do machine politics (and fraud). By making elections district level you limit the impact of machine politics and fraud. In addition, you change the nature of the presidential elections. Texas is now ripe for democrats to campaign in. Ditto California.

But this does it in a way that doesn’t create real incentive to cheat and still maintains some geographic overbalance for small states.

If nothing else, the electoral college shields the country from various shenanigans that would happen if you opted for "sum vote totals from fifty different systems": Every state is incentivized to muck with its vote totals, especially with plausible deniability, and it's unclear what enforcement mechanisms the states would have to keep each other honest. IMO voter ID rules and election hardware security become even more contentious when every vote cast nationwide effects the outcome, and, say, Alabama "accidentally" certifying totals with three extra zeros at the end probably doesn't violate their laws. At least right now, the EC bounds state voting issues to only their own electoral votes.

Everyone adopting the Maine system is tolerably close, and doesn't have this problem. I think it's a reasonable choice.

The problem (which the Maine plan addresses quite well) is also that it heavily favors large states. California has 54 electoral votes, equal to 6 Alabamas. What this means is that winning California is hugely important, where a state with only 3 votes for all practical purposes doesn’t matter. And thus the concerns of states with huge EC counts have an outsized effect on federal policies— especially those that affect other states more. I think that’s why our regulations on land use end up wonky. They’re designed to work in urban areas where a wetland isn’t on simeone’s working farm, but on land that nobody wants or uses. If the president had to appeal to rural Alabama the way it has to appeal to LA, those kinds of things would be less likely.

You're conflating federal policy with House of Representatives party politics.

In American federal political terms, both California and Alabama are equally irrelevant, not important, because neither are particularly competitive in presidential campaigns. Presidents don't disproportionately consider the views of states that will go for them regardless, but rather for the states they need to woo to win.

Similarly, the Senate is infamously a body which gives disproportionate favor to smaller states. Flat voting weight regardless of population lets small states like Alabama extort larger states if the larger states want agreement- or at least a non-fillibuster- of their interests. The Senate is where most of the extortion-pork in budgets comes from, because it's the Senators who must be appeased.

In the House, disproportionate weight doesn't come from the voting strength (which is proportional), but rather the number of committe seats. Large states- particularly large mono-party states- can leverage their strength as a voting block to vote their members into key positions that mutually reinforce. What makes California so central in the House is the point that the California Democrats have so many of the votes not just in the Congress, but within the party.

The Maine system is arguably even better to this end since it even further decentralizes things. No matter how sketchy the results are in Milwaukee or Atlanta or Detroit, there's a cap on how much damage you can do.

Maybe if there is another financial crisis or 911 there may be an amendment to ensure that there are minimal delays for stimulus or other action for exigent circumstances. Crisis tends to unite the parties. The Constitution, and system of government overall, for all its flaws and downsides, has proven successful enough despite everything thrown at it and every challenge it has faced, that I cannot see the need to amend it. although i can see something related to campaign finance reform.

Ah, the Palpatine Maneuver.

Maybe if there is another financial crisis or 911 there may be an amendment to ensure that there are minimal delays for stimulus or other action for exigent circumstances.

This is one of the most horrifying amendments I can imagine. If there's ever a constitutional clause that grants broad emergency powers to the executive, the president will find an excuse to declare a "state of emergency" from which we will never again emerge. We would still be in a "state of emergency" from Covid if such a clause existed.

This isn't even a hypothetical: there are currently 42 national emergencies in effect, though thankfully the COVID one did end on April 10, 2023.

Line item veto.

It was briefly introduced in the 90s, but ultimately declared unconstitutional. It would be a method of breaking the "giant omnibus bill" system of government, by allowing the president to remove pork-belly spending at will. ((One proposal I've seen would restrict the veto to bills passed by a simple majority, bills passed by a two-thirds majority that would allow congress to overturn a veto would be immune from a line item veto, so if we really put together a compromise bill that has near unanimous congressional support it would be immune))

How about instead introducing a rule that renders legislation that includes riders automatically unconstitutional? I'm not sure how you'd enforce it in the American system, but lots of other countries have such provisions that actually prevent the degenerate case of those giant omnibus bills.

I would actually love that, but I also don't know how you could write the rules in such a way that bad actors (i.e. the same bad actors who pervert legislation into omnibus bills today) wouldn't just find a loophole.

Then you get stuff like this where the executive completely reverses the meaning of the legislation.

This is both hilarious and worrying at the same time. If I were a principled governor, I would remove everything from the next bill except the letters that said "send nudes", "dick butt", and "The governor is no longer allowed to veto specific provisions in bills"

And...that newspaper article is actually in favor of this? Is this parody? Satire?

Utter domination of the media by the Governor's party.

Seems fixable by better defining it as a "line item", not "arbitrary subset of words" veto ... until the legislature gets the bright idea of making the entire bill one long line item.

Or fixable by the next GOP governor of Wisconsin taking it to even further extremes by selectively crossing out letters to rewrite a bill to say "All civilians are legally mandated to own tanks and BILL CLINTON IS A RAPIST INFOWARS.COM"

The courts (whether left or right) would slap that one down faster than you could say "Gay frogs". The right is held to the intersection of the left and right's standards; the left to no standards at all. By both sides.

If each bill was only one item that would be a huge improvement. Want to pass a 6000 page bill? Break it up into 6000 items and vote on each one individually.

I was imagining the legislature would work around the limit by doing something akin to minification to make the bill technically one "line item" that does 6000 things.

The Law as JavaScript? That's horrible.

Education is like a religion for Democrats sometimes. Even though almost everyone in the West now has a machine capable of streaming much of the world's knowledge to them in an instant, they act as if it is the 19th century and public schooling is necessary to save masses of illiterate farm kids who live tens of miles away from the nearest library from ignorance.

Probably the biggest actual effect that public education has on society these days is not that it educates. It is that it emancipates the work force from child raising, keeps kids off the street when they are at a rambunctious age, and teaches kids how to sit still and take orders from boring authority figures. It also occasionally helps some kids to escape abusive relatives. Public education also helps Democrats because it gives them a way to funnel kids through a system where they have disproportionate influence.

However, I think that for the most part Democrats' attitude to education does not primarily have to do with any of these factors. They seem to, for the most part, actually believe in the rosy views of public education and its didactic benefits that they espouse.

Of course. Education as a public good is…like, part of our national mythos. Didn’t you watch Schoolhouse Rock as a kid?

Some of this is a legacy of our early years, which were unusually literate, usually for Puritan reasons. That was propagated through the Laura Ingalls Wilder tradition and on to modern children’s literature. There’s also the influence of Prussian and British schooling. And all this is before the modern Civil Rights movement, which was defined by educational policy.

What I’m getting at is that it ain’t just Democrats. No Child Left Behind was passed in 2002. Before that, students were the first line in the War on Drugs. The GI bill has shaped American families since WWII. Prior to 2020, antivaxxers were best known for bringing back measles in the public school system. A significant fraction of the middle class will choose their home to get a better-rated school district.

Education is one of the legs of the stereotypical American Dream. Is it any surprise that the major political parties act accordingly?

It's the same in most of the west though. In fact, if anything the US is more laissez-faire than many other western countries in respect to education - homeschooling is literally illegal in mine, for example.

Public education also helps Democrats because it gives them a way to funnel kids through a system where they have disproportionate influence.

I don’t think this is the main benefit to democrats from the public school system. Notably democrats don’t seem to think they’re very good at indoctrinating the youths through it even if they were trying.

Instead I think it’s that it’s a form of employment- and typically one of the bigger employers in any given area- which influences its employees to vote democrat. The other option for most teachers is probably ‘be a housewife’ after all, and housewives vote pretty Republican. Likewise I have a hard time believing that school janitors, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, etc don’t vote much more democrat than their private sector counterparts. I think it also goes beyond just voting; teachers unions and small dollar campaign contributions from teachers are key sources of contributions for democrats.

Instead I think it’s that it’s a form of employment- and typically one of the bigger employers in any given area- which influences its employees to vote democrat.

There's another form of employment that has basically no accountability for results. It's called "welfare".

People on welfare tend to vote for parties that promise more welfare (expanding the education system and increasing administrative burden on companies being the two most common ways), and their interests follow naturally downstream from there (even though a good chunk of people- welfare recipients or not- don't realize that).

I don't think there's anything more complex than that going on, but it's also why you can't meaningfully reform these systems- if you went back to 1950s standards in these areas, you'd both cut welfare benefits off from a massive number of women and incinerate the 4-8 years of their lives they spent getting a useless degree certified to receive that welfare. The sociopolitical ramifications of this would be interesting, to say the least; the last time the economy contracted that hard it forced the New Deal.

Notably democrats don’t seem to think they’re very good at indoctrinating the youths through it even if they were trying.

D+30 for young women, and an even split for young men? It's only the men the teachers need to worry about indoctrinating into the "you're trash and deserve this" philosophy (and they're clearly doing that quite well, aided by parents who grew up in a milieu of "the sexes are co-operating" and try to enforce it blindly)- for the women, cashing the checks is good enough.

What are you on about?

If you’re determined to be a cynic, welfare is the bread and circuses required to stave off revolt. How does that describe education?

A more sympathetic description might be that welfare adds slack to the economy, allowing employees to take more risks without getting relegated to the debtors’ gaol (or revolting). It’s a hedge. This is also not a good description of public education.

Are you trying to argue that welfare recipients are drawing money from “ expanding the education system and increasing administrative burden on companies”? What does that mean?

welfare is the bread and circuses required to stave off revolt

My assertion is that "bread and circuses" comes in the form of government creating [the need for] bullshit jobs for people who won't tolerate not having a job. We could make education vastly more efficient, and we could take away the degree pipeline for people whose jobs won't require them, and we could demolish most of the regulations that mean companies have to retain certain kinds of employees, and we could dismantle a good chunk of the administrative state.

But we won't do that. And the reason we won't do that is because the people in these positions are a significant (and politically powerful) fraction of the population who won't accept having "no place" in the economy, and they won't accept being consigned to a basic income that pays the underclass the same as them (or dependent on homemaking for an [indirect] income)- they're capable of doing more damage in a revolt, so governments obviously have to pay them more to make them not do that (which, come to think of it, is a major problem with UBI that I've never heard anyone discuss before).

Are you trying to argue that welfare recipients are drawing money from “ expanding the education system and increasing administrative burden on companies”?

I'm arguing that the people who work in those fields are, to a significant degree, themselves welfare recipients, and thus "the people who work in the education-managerial complex and support increasing the size of the education system and mandating companies increase the number of management jobs" is equivalent to "welfare recipient voting for more welfare", even though said welfare recipient might not fully recognize it as such (because the system is laundered through the guise of employment).

Even though almost everyone in the West now has a machine capable of streaming much of the world's knowledge to them in an instant, they act as if it is the 19th century and public schooling is necessary to save masses of illiterate farm kids who live tens of miles away from the nearest library from ignorance.

How many kids do you think would teach themselves math via the internet? Or how to read?

If you want to argue that there's a more efficient and/or effective method of delivering universal education than the status quo, I'm quite willing to believe that. I do not find it plausible that internet-based autodidacticism is one of them.

After 12 years of public school what percentage of adults remember how to do anything but basic arithmetic? PIAAC puts 10% of adults in the US at numeracy level 4 or above. The sample question they had for level 4 gave you table of expenditures for three months and asked you compute the mean.

Chicago spends about $30k per pupil per year which would put them at around $360k total for 12 years of schooling. I just can't imagine there isn't a better way to spend that money given the absolutely abysmal results we're getting. The usual answer is that we need to keep doing what we're doing but more and better. The problem is we've been trying that for half a century now with no meaningful improvements.

IIRC the usual result of "unschooling" (where no curriculum is imposed) is being about two years behind through most of primary/secondary school; kids actually are pretty curious. Not 100% sure about how reading fits in, though.

Unless my memory fails me, unschooling is, despite the name, a form of homeschooling; the children have more control over subject matter, but it still assumes there's someone taking responsibility for teaching them (including necessarily ancillary skills).

Unless my memory fails me, unschooling is, despite the name, a form of homeschooling; the children have more control over subject matter, but it still assumes there's someone taking responsibility for teaching them (including necessarily ancillary skills).

It's variable per household, naturally. I've met 'unschoolers' who range from what looks to me like pretty normal homeschooling (though very sensitive to ROI on time spent) to parents who literally just let their kids do whatever they want and don't pressure them into anything they're not 'ready' for. I've met kids who are reading at college level by age 10 and I've met kids who aren't functionally literate at age 15.

Arguments for and against homeschooling resolve, I think, into fully general arguments about to what degree parents should be able to raise their own children as they see fit.

Arguments for and against homeschooling resolve, I think, into fully general arguments about to what degree parents should be able to raise their own children as they see fit.

I don't really think that's true except in the vaguest sense. An argument about the effectiveness of homeschooling could theoretically be deflected by saying "it's my prerogative to not educated my children*", but very few homeschooling advocates are making that argument as opposed to arguing that homeschooling leads to superior outcomes. Arguments about outcomes in turn focus on the validity and interpretation of data.

*FWIW, existing laws on homeschooling suggest the existing consensus is "no, it isn't". Arguments about parental rights vs child's interests tend to turn on conclusions about outcomes rather than vice versa.

(I will also note that my point about unschooling was not whether or not it was good or bad relative to public schooling but that it was certainly not equivalent to handing a child a tablet with internet access and telling them to figure it out themselves; homeschooled children are usually more closely instructed than their traditional classroom peers)

Arguments for and against homeschooling resolve, I think, into fully general arguments about to what degree parents should be able to raise their own children as they see fit.

Once the delusional or factually incorrect claims about the practice are excluded from conversation they do, but plenty of arguments against homeschooling are based on ‘it delivers worse results’ or ‘it somehow takes money from public schools’.

Robin Hanson on healthcare:

"What we want is health, i.e., a long healthy life, but when we sit down and draw up a contract, what we buy is health care, i.e., a certain degree of attention from health care specialists."

Education is the same way. The more human time and attention is dedicated to education (i.e. how much it costs), the more you signal that you care about educating children. The thing has been replaced by the symbolic representation of the thing. We would be in much less of a student debt crisis if middle-class women didn't have to get (subsidized) 4-year degrees in order to get childcare jobs at the government-run daycare.

Many don't stop at 4 years. They'll go back to get a masters or something terminal.

This is a policy choice. There is no law of the universe that says you have to pay childcare technicians teachers more if they have a master's degree.

It's their culture. They're indoctrinated early.

We would be in much less of a student debt crisis if middle-class women didn't have to get (subsidized) 4-year degrees in order to get childcare jobs at the government-run daycare.

First off, I am in no way arguing that being a kindergarten teacher requires a masters degree. I can think of a half dozen 16 year olds off the top of my head who could shadow an elementary school teacher for a week and do fine taking over.

But expanding that system to the general population would be a disaster because of lots of reasons(mostly that there is no bureaucracy-legible way to find those people), and I somehow doubt women who want to become teachers would stop going to college to save money if that was an option.

In the first place, teachers are mostly teachers- or should I say they become teachers- because they believe in the education system and the benefits of formal education. But furthermore, the option to get a four year teaching degree for significantly cheaper than a traditional four year degree already exists. Everyone who wants to can go to community college and save like $20k a year for at least two years; in my state it’s three years in practice because community college credits universally transfer to state schools. Actually, speaking of Texas, there’s a program to do remote learning from a low-performing state school while enrolled in community college and get your teaching certificate entirely through community college for much cheaper. You know who uses it? Women that want to be housewives but need to kill time until their boyfriends get more established. Career teachers choose to go straight to university in the presence of cheaper alternatives that don’t hurt your career because government hiring isn’t allowed to care about the institution granting a diploma.

And realistically, what’s the alternative to a degree requirement for teachers specifically? It’s a good proxy for ‘values education enough to plausibly care about the job’ ‘smart and functional enough to do the job’ and ‘cooperative with the giant all-consuming bureaucracy that governs every aspect of the job’. No other proxy seems legible enough to the bureaucracies that run the public school system.

And realistically, what’s the alternative to a degree requirement for teachers specifically?

What if they did an apprenticeship, like a blacksmith in the old days? Watch a good teacher teaching, talk with them about how they do things (maybe do this with a few people to even things out), hands on learning, then be supervised for teaching easy classes, then go and teach with supervision... then you're a teacher! Add some basic maths, logic, English and science tests to make sure they're not stupid and you're good to go.

I say this because education degrees don't necessarily teach people how to teach. In Australia education degrees often get below-average students and they don't teach classroom management as opposed to progressive ideology.

The bureaucracies aren't doing a good job, they're part of the problem. All this useless admin that eats up time and money. It's a problem in healthcare and a problem in education, spending and admin multiplies while results are stagnant. Privatize, charterize, get rid of the bureaucracy.

See figure 3 and figure 4: https://www.cato.org/publications/k-12-education

They do this, it's called student teaching.

Some states do let people start teaching before earning their degree, and some do allow the degree to be from a much cheaper community college. My daughter's pre-K teacher just sent a letter home about this, asking to include activities with the kids in her (regional college) coursework. I am unworried, it is pre-K, I can teach her to read and count myself if it comes to that.

Anyway, it's true, but not any more true than for at least half of jobs currently requiring a college degree. An admin assistant doesn't really need to study... whatever it is that the median low level administrator studied in college, yet here we are.

Anyway, it's true, but not any more true than for at least half of jobs currently requiring a college degree.

yeschad.png A system of apprenticeships is a great way to cut down on degree inflation and to ensure that the skills people learn are actually applicable.

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No one's ever going to convince me that anyone believes this is actually legal. The Wisconsin Amendment reads:

Appropriation bills may be approved in whole or in part by the governor, and the part approved shall become law, and the part objected to shall be returned in the same manner as provided for other bills.

Striking out single letters is the kind of thing that only an extremely dishonest legal genius could love. Any normal person would read this as allowing a governor to reject parts of appropriations bill, not provide an opportunity to completely flip the meaning of sentences.

Agreed. 43 states have some extent of line item veto and you don't often hear about really flagrant abuse of it, so I assume it works well enough in practice.

More importantly it kills the ability to trade. You want X; I want Y. I prefer X to not Y and you prefer Y to not X.

So we agree to X and Y. But now the governor can strike X and keep Y. Outside of comity, why would you support X to override the veto?

Given that I can’t count on you to override the veto, I’m never going to give you Y in the first place.

The worst part is that it doesn't necessarily flip the meaning, but everyone is going along with it as if it does. Each of the spending increases could easily be interpreted as a one-time thing. "For 2023-2425 increase spending by $150" is interpreted by everyone as meaning, "increase spending by $150 each year 2023-2425", but the more straightforward interpretation is to increase spending once over that timeframe.

It would be nice to be a nation of laws, rather than of raw power.

And yet every mainstream media story on it was congratulatory in tone towards the governor, and no lawsuit appears to have resulted. It's almost as if the words don't matter, only who and whom.

Maybe because everyone, including the GOP, liked the modification?

The article says the GOP have used the tactic before too, so presumably they don’t want to challenge it too much, it’s likely they’ll win back the governor’s office at some point.

It's ridiculous, but it's also like 40 years old and has been litigated in the state supreme court already.

They haven't used it nearly so blatantly AFAIK. I expect the actual reason it hasn't been challenged is because the modification is not all that extreme. The article itself mentions that the budget increase doesn't even keep pace with inflation. Why expend political effort to fight something they probably would have done anyways?

The governor broke the law in a terrible way, claiming vast powers for himself, but used them only to achieve a fairly small, very popular, and somewhat bipartisan goal. It was pretty smart tbh and something I hope Republicans know to copy if/when they get office.

I think a provision banning politicians from trading on the stock market would be popular.

Just preregistering their trades a week or so in advance would probably be sufficient.

Not particularly easy to get through state legislatures, though. To actually pass an amendment it doesn't have to be popular with normies, it has to be popular with politicians.

that depends. midterms matter

It might be possible to pass an amendment banning federal politicians from owning stocks though. How many state legislators actually have federal ambitions? Probably not the majority.

How many state legislators are making big bucks on the stock market? I'm betting not many.

In my state state legislators are mostly wealthy business owners who have large nest eggs.

Many state legislators are pretty affluent small town business owners, real estate developers, doctors, ‘pillar of the community’ type people who will certainly own equities.

They mostly aren't super rich but plenty of them are well off at least by local standards. Even a lot of middle class Americans will have hundreds of thousands to single digit millions of dollars in their 401k/IRA accounts. I guess you could exempt index funds.

They should not be completely banned. They should be forced to put their investments in a blind trust. They can set up with all types of investing strategies depending on their appetite for risk.

maybe trading is banned, but politicians can hold existing investments.

A blind trust serves the same purpose. You can still hope to protect your investments from market swings, since a professional portfolio manager will monitor the news and react to market signals, but insider trading becomes much harder, since there's no direct contract between the politician and the manager.

Of course, there can be various ways to circumvent this, but it's much easier to prove the collusion when the co-conspirators aren't a married couple that naturally talk to each other every day.

I mean, in theory it's good if you can't imagine any Constitutional Amendment being passed, because it means that there aren't any that obviously should exist but don't?

The last one was 30 years ago and was about changing Congressional salaries, the one before that was 50 years ago and lowered the voting age to 18. I think they're generally supposed to be very rare and about dry procedural stuff, it would be bad if that weren't the case.

if you look at a timeline the pattern is not so much that they happen at a low frequency but instead that there are periods of a few decades where amending the constitution is possible, and larger periods when it isn't.

They're still very rare by design in the absolute of course.

If gay marriage was seriously threatened/thrown out by SCOTUS I could see an amendment passing to ensure certain states don’t try and ban it.

You think there are 38 state legislatures that would pass it?

Absolutely, Biden won 25 states. To get to 38 you add in IN OH MO KS IA NE TX FL NV NC TN KY AK and those are just the easiest ones. I honestly think it would pass easily. Is there serious opposition to gay marriage left in America?

I’m with the others.

I can’t imagine someone here in Texas campaigning on the subject. There’s a bunch of people who wouldn’t care, a bunch of religious objectors, and a bunch who’d get an “ew” response and find an excuse not to show support.

What there aren’t are fervent supporters. Obergefell holds, Lawrence was decided 20 years ago, and it’s hard to find a gay Texan being photogenically oppressed.

Worse, gay marriage is very Democrat coded. That means it’s synonymous with COVID shots, spurious prosecutions, and Hillary fucking Clinton. I wish I was exaggerating.

Now, Texas does have a deep red identity. But I’d be willing to bet most of those other states have similar scenarios. The religious objections to gay marriage don’t see much play. That doesn’t mean opponents have found reasons to offer support.

I can’t speak to the others, but Texas has no mechanism for supporting a gay marriage amendment unless the Republican Party wills it, and the Republican Party definitely doesn’t.

I don’t even see all of those states passing such an amendment. They might not ban same sex marriage again (though I could see it from one or two of them), but they’re definitely not all passing a bill in favor of SSM.

Which of those states do you think wouldn’t pass it? Gay marriage has over 70% support nationally and it seems to me there is no organized opposition to it. This is all a hypothetical exercise but I think it would pass fairly easily.

Gender equality before the law must have even higher support, and the Equal Rights Amendment has failed to be ratified for 100 years now because plenty of state legislators know that the signal something sends to their base can be very different from the plain text of a law.

Or because they understood it would lead to a host of things people don’t really want even if at a basic level they say “equality before the law.”

In Indiana, marriage is still on the books defined as between an man and a woman and does not recognize same sex marriages from other states, it's just currently superceded by Obergefell.

I think KS, IN, NE, TX, AK, and KY are extremely unlikely to pass any such amendment. And I don't think the states Biden won are guaranteed, either. I think instead you're mistake the opinion of the court with the opinion of the country.

Nationally support is over 70% for gay marriage. Obviously differs by state but the opinion of the country is clearly on the side of allowing gay marriage.

Who cares? We're not talking nationally, we're talking about 38 separate states. I don't care that there are millions of Californians who are in favor of gay marriage, I care whether the Wyoming state legislature would approve an amendment to the constitution.

That opinion, by the way, is completely downstream of the opinion of the court, wrongly decided.

There's a difference between supporting gay marriage and supporting a Constitutional amendment to explicitly allow it, though. There are a lot of meta-concerns in the latter around the Constitution that don't exist in the former. I'm not sure I'd bet a lot against such an amendment passing, even if there were some serious threat against gay marriage in some states, but I'd almost certainly bet against it.

Indiana’s questionable. SSM was forced on the state by court order shortly before Obergefell, it has no legal protections for LGBT people seeking housing or accommodations, and it has Republican supermajorities in both houses. Missouri’s similar, as it also lacks LGBT protections and has Republican supermajorities. Kansas and Nebraska would probably be more likely to vote for it, but they have some of the same factors.

Texas would shock me, given how much its Republican governor and legislature have been leaning into the culture war. I think Tennessee and Arkansas would also very likely refuse to hold a vote, since, according to this site, barely over half the population of each state supports SSM, and I’m guessing support is substantially lower among the Republican base. Heck, I could see both states outright banning SSM if given the opportunity. Kentucky has a bit more public support for SSM, but I could easily its legislature sitting on the issue as well.

One important thing to consider is that no state would even need to hold a vote on the issue. If the legislature just doesn’t discuss it, nothing happens. And in that case, no Republicans would need to worry about getting primaried for voting in favor of a constitutional amendment, and few if any legislators would be electorally punished for their lack of action. Inaction is the easiest path for any legislator or legislature to take.

Those certain states are enough to keep it below the majority threshold.

I disagree completely. There might be 1-2 states who would try to ban it (even then I think they would approve “civil unions”) but think you easily get to 38 who would pass it and call it marriage.

Age limits for Congress and/or the Presidency. It’s simple to understand and therefore could have a popular groundswell of support. The Constitution already has age minimums for these elected offices. Public opinion polling shows that a majority of Americans are fatigued of old people like Trump and Biden running the show, so there could be bipartisan support. State legislatures already have age limits for certain other privileges such as obtaining a driver’s license (or needing to retake a driving test at a certain age). I could definitely see this happening especially in the next few years.

Gonna cause a ruckus once we get immortal cyborgs though.

'Why is our race of immortal super-minds only allowed to be governed by infants?!?!?!?!'

You’d probably need an effective date say ten years in the future to get support of current older politicians. Perhaps pair with a better pension for any politician that ages out under the amendment

In the event of an extreme economic crisis I can see a form of debt brake amendment becoming viable. It would take a lot, but it's possible and Germany passed a constitutional amendment to implement its debt brake (with some exceptions) in 2009. Switzerland also has one (again with limited exceptions, but it's mostly followed).

A combination of a big swing to the GOP, another tea party movement and a huge recession under an unpopular Democratic president trying to shore up support could do it, but it's still pretty unlikely. In the end, I suspect that a debt brake would be more constraining for Republican than Democratic administrations, because the demand for tax cuts would provide (welcome, I'd say, but still) constant downward pressure on spending, which even Republicans are loathe to cut for things like defense and medicare.

I think too many people in power have learned from MMT how money, banking, and government finance actually works, so it would probably take a few generations for people to forget those again for debt-hysteria to strongly return. In addition to the plain logic, all the evidence is that strong fiscal policy is the answer to extreme economic crises, rather than a target for blame.

Even the eurozone seems to have learned that their anti-fiscal-policy stances were a mistake and caused the first big crisis to flatline growth for the last 15 years. So the Maastricht 3% deficit limit is finally being scrutinized and softened to allow for better counter-cyclical fiscal policy. And in the US we've gone from Obama being confused and thinking he needed to fly to China to make sure they'll still 'lend' us money, to now the massive covid stimulus packages without a peep about becoming Greece or bankrupting our grandchildren.

Now the conversation is more correctly about inflation instead of solvency. And while regular people do hate inflation, even way more than is warranted, I'd guess that's too nuanced and subjective for much support of a constitutional amendment around debt/deficit.

I think too many people in power have learned from MMT how money, banking, and government finance actually works, so it would probably take a few generations for people to forget those again for debt-hysteria to strongly return

This seems like a fringe opinion. Countries that have "figured out how money works" and lean into debt-financed government spending tend to end up like Argentina or Turkey.

We've just experienced an episode of high inflation due to government stimulus. If anything, we've learned just how dangerous MMT can be.

Why would returning to historical levels of deficit/GDP be considered hysteria?

We've just experienced an episode of high inflation due to government stimulus. If anything, we've learned just how dangerous MMT can be.

I'm not sure the government stimulus is the best single explanation for the high inflation of the last few years. If you want to blame the government, then I think overreaction to COVID would be a better angle of attack, since a recent Indicator episode looked at why there is a disconnect between ordinary Americans, who claim to be miserable, and economists who say that despite what Americans say in polls they're spending more like they're happy (high spending on travel, etc.), and it concluded that a lot of indicators of Americans being happy with the economy are actually due to pent up COVID spending. Basically, people didn't get to go on vacations for a year or two and now that things have opened up they have a bunch of money saved up that they're still spending, in spite of inflation.

If this explanation is correct, it might mean the government stimulus is part of the saved up money that Americans are now spending, but I somehow doubt that one time payments of $600 per person in December of 2020, and $1000-$3000 in 2021 are the best explanation for a sustained increase of prices across the economy. That just doesn't seem like a parsimonious explanation of what we're observing.

If this explanation is correct, it might mean the government stimulus is part of the saved up money that Americans are now spending, but I somehow doubt that one time payments of $600 per person in December of 2020, and $1000-$3000 in 2021 are the best explanation for a sustained increase of prices across the economy. That just doesn't seem like a parsimonious explanation of what we're observing.

This spending was financed by government debt. Debt that that wasn't paid off. In a standard Keynesian model a sustained increase in the level of government debt leads to a sustained increase in the price level all things equal. Monetary factors also matter a lot, but the Fed was also being expansionary and allowed inflation to increase rapidly and didn't want to tighten policy and cause deflation, since that would lead to a recession in the standard Keynesian model.

The Eurozone situation would have presented an extreme moral hazard if the PIGS had been more generously bailed out with no drama. That's not to say the ECB was particularly intelligent about it or that the Germans and Dutch weren't largely responding to domestic populist demands to cut off those profligate mediterranneans, but if you look at the kind of fiscal climate you had in Italy or Spain during the early-2000s construction booms where like penniless teacher couples were being handed €3m loans to open their own hotel or whatever you can see that change was necessary. Monetary integration without fiscal integration is unustainable, people were rightfully angry that every Greek doctor was reporting an income of €12,000 a year and taking the rest tax-free in cash while Austrian and French doctors had to pay 40%+ tax rates on every penny they made above a low amount, there was a lot of built-up rage about it.

Agreed on all counts I think. But despite the rage and desire to punish, they did have to accept the economic reality and Draghi finally set it right in 2012 with the "whatever it takes" admission, which was correcting the first main issue. Then I think since covid and looking at the 15 years of poor growth, they've been coming around on the problems with deficit limits, which is the second big economic problem. These things reflect what necessary compromises had to be made 30 years ago to get buy-in, and what were the dominant narratives at the time (where central bankers and monetary policy were seen as sufficient wizardry to manage an economy).

I don't know about becoming Greece, but inflation was elevated largely due to fiscal policy and the price of servicing government debt is real and increasing. MMTers will say that you can just inflate the currency further into nothingness or confiscate everyone's wealth to pay the bills, but I don't see how becoming Argentina is much better than becoming Greece.

MMT just gives the descriptive reality & logic of how things work now and throughout history, including how the base interest rate is simply a policy tool to subsidize savings (which can be set at 0% any time we desire to not pay that subsidy). Argentina is currently serving as a good example of why giving savers free money, in proportion to how much money they already have (increasing the interest rate), is probably not the tool you're looking for if you want to combat inflation (shocked pikachu there). As for the USD inflation, it appears that most currencies around the world experienced about the same cost-push inflation coming out of covid, while having fairly disparate levels of counter-cyclical fiscal injections and unemployment levels, so it's not as obvious as it may seem.

The Greece point is that the conversation was simply incoherent just 10-15 years ago, but has moved significantly toward productive correct debates about the preferred size of government and inflation constraints, rather than a fear of large numbers and negative-sounding words debt & deficit. So that's my prediction that the world is moving farther away from arbitrary limit rules on those, rather than looking to embrace the wisdom of Germany in 2009 or 1992.

To be fair, I think when you're talking about crisis situations in places like Greece you're dealing as much with a question of solving politics as solving economics. In a normal country fiscal stimulus is probably better, but in a country with endemic political clientelism, implementing austerity can be a brake on the kind of corruption that's been dragging the economy down in the first place.

Yeah there's nothing stopping anyone from doing a bad job running a government, but I'm skeptical that austerity is going to significantly hamper the corrupt actors anyway. That often seemed more like a 'just-world' convenient justification in each of the sovereign debt sagas. Greece would have been fine (at least in this sovereign debt regard) if they hadn't given up the drachma, and they ended up fine once the ECB finally realized it was their job to simply fully back all member states.

Any government will need to have various checks against spending getting out of control, such as having a proper budgeting and auditing process. But once you land on the size of government desired, the taxes and especially the debt & deficit are just dynamically emergent results based on the private sector's savings desire and the level of exporting. Net exporters acting like their lower deficits are evidence of good sense & morality is more of that just-world confusion. Trying to force a country to shoot themselves in the foot economically based on those debt/deficit outcomes being too large for someone's aesthetic preference (or bad faith justification) is a destructive angle that it seems people are not falling for as much anymore.

Yeah there's nothing stopping anyone from doing a bad job running a government, but I'm skeptical that austerity is going to significantly hamper the corrupt actors anyway.

I mean it'll stop the specific problem they had with corruption, which was taking on debt and spending it all on politically connected patrons rather than investing it into more productive uses. If you assume they will spend funds on more productive uses there's a stronger argument for stimulus than if you can count on corruption being so bad that it'll get squandered.

I don't think you can chalk it up to aesthetic preferences - for Greece specifically we have the comparison of the modern day vs the post war era up till the oil crisis, during which they kept the budget controlled and growth was steady and reliable.

To take a more extreme example of the political circumstances mattering more than pen and paper economics, austerity in the US might mean one thing we're familiar with, but austerity in Argentina means they stop printing money, which is probably necessary to tame inflation regardless of whether or not austerity is actually a good idea in abstract.

But once you land on the size of government desired, the taxes and especially the debt & deficit are just dynamically emergent results based on the private sector's savings desire and the level of exporting.

This might be beyond me. What do you mean?

I mean it'll stop the specific problem they had with corruption, which was taking on debt and spending it all on politically connected patrons rather than investing it into more productive uses.

It just doesn't really sound like reality here to me, talking about huge complex government budgets like this. Is the premise something like, they'll do all the necessary & proper spending first, and then at the end of that, if they are still allowed to issue some more bonds before hitting some limit (with some kind of timing, like the last day of each period?), then they'll max that out and give the money out to the cronies? So the hall-monitors from other countries try to perfectly set a limit on them in order to just allow enough for the proper spending which should be prioritized? If the leadership is simply corrupt and untrustworthy, why wouldn't all that 'favored' spending be mixed in with all the 'proper' spending, and the distinction being possibly subjective anyway?

Good governance is hard and I don't know all the ways that other countries and US states for example try to deal with these. The euro monetary union countries definitely have a tricky setup to deal with, without a 'united states of europe' fiscal authority. I can imagine the psychology of being in other countries and feeling a lack of trust of others' behavior. It just seems like everyone is moving away from thinking that arbitrary limits on the fiscal outcomes are workable solutions.

This might be beyond me. What do you mean?

That chart of sectoral balances is the fastest way to really intuitively understand that financial assets are zero-sum. So when we talk about the government deficit, we're simultaneously talking about the non-government's surplus. You can slice everything into any number of different sectors, but a common useful separation is 'government' vs 'domestic private sector' vs 'external / rest of world' sectors.

What we find is that the private sector really wants to be running a surplus at almost all times, because people like to build up savings for security. So that's why in general the government almost always has to be running a deficit, injecting financial assets (money, bonds) into the economy. When the private sector is in deficit, that means people are collectively spending down savings and/or running up private debt, and we see it tends to end with a significant recession where the private sector forces itself back into surplus by cutting spending.

(The other source of financial assets would be the external sector, where a net exporting country runs a trade surplus. Then you could potentially have the domestic private sector and the government both in surplus potentially. On the flipside, if a country is running a trade deficit, then their government deficits need to be even larger in order for the private sector to be in surplus.)

So this is the dynamic 'savings desire' of the private sector. The behavior could be affected by various psychological, historical, cultural factors, and could be incentivized or disincentivized by stuff like tax-advantaged retirement saving, etc. We might find that the Japanese people lose trust in saving for the future by buying stocks, and instead they largely want to build up huge monetary savings for retirement, which could cause the japanese government to need to issue a massive amount of bonds & currency for people to sit on (without any inflationary effect, just having to solve the paradox of thrift and fight off deflation).

I don't think you can chalk it up to aesthetic preferences - for Greece specifically we have the comparison of the modern day vs the post war era up till the oil crisis, during which they kept the budget controlled and growth was steady and reliable.

Going off some Greek sectoral balance charts here (which I would prefer to be flipped around 0 to look more useful) and from the paper they're quoting from. It looks like Greece had a moderate government deficit but their trade balance turned to deficit in the late 90s, which pushed their domestic private sector into significant deficit, probably running up a lot of private debt. Similar to the US at the time in the late clinton-era. Then Greece adopted the euro and was locked into effectively a currency peg with the likes of Germany, which essentially made the trade deficit structural from then on.

So then, during and after the financial crisis and great recession, the private sector was hammered and was trying to de-leverage and rebuild savings, which by necessity is going to force the government into massive deficit (as tax revenue falls and safety net spending rises, the normal automatic stabilizer reasons for this).

If the main moral failing (causing a larger headline government deficit number) turned out to be that they were running a trade deficit and had been suffering a private deficit for a decade, it doesn't really seem that damning. Hard to make corruption & profligacy actually work as a macro story (though I'm sure it's plentiful at the micro level).

IMO non of this is conventional economics and is widely seems as false to experts.

  1. It’s not just “descriptive/logic of how things work”. It had some truthiness in a few limited situations. An extremely well-diversified (like America dominant in all core industries) economy that can issue it’s own currency and if need be completely self-sufficient (commodity producer/tech dominant/manufacturing powerhouse). When the economy is operating significantly below capacity 2007-2020 and cam increase demand without causing higher inflation MMT appears truthy. One could argue simple monetarily policies would do the same.

  2. There is zero evidence COVID did policies (which were MMT or traditional Keynesian) did not result in a long-term permenent change in the price level. By costs-push I assume you are referring to supply chain disruptions as causing inflation. Under a supply-chain ONLY model of COVID inflation we would have seen the price level increase by 10% with lower output levels followed by the price level returning to pre-COVID levels while output returned to pre-COVID levels. At this point the evidence is overwhelming that a large portion of COVID inflation was due to excessive stimulus.

  3. I have no idea what your argentina remarks refer to. Printing less money and higher rates will 100% cause inflation to disappear. The issue is Argentina continues to print more base money to pay their bills. If Argentina quit printing money they would not have inflation.

there is also potentially something weird with USD inflation. i've heard a large proportion of physical US currency (up to 50%) is held overseas. however, i'm not sure what % of the higher money supply is held by foreigners. its possible that foreigners could be helping to pay for a significant portion of seniorage which incentivises the US government and US voters to inflate the money supply.

As for the USD inflation, it appears that most currencies around the world experienced about the same cost-push inflation coming out of covid, while having fairly disparate levels of counter-cyclical fiscal injections and unemployment levels, so it's not as obvious as it may seem.

There is actually a good correlation.

To be honest, intuitively I would have expected more correlation. But as far as this chart goes, the x-axis doesn't really look like what I'd expect, with almost all countries clumped closely together between .01 and .05, whatever those refer to (I was under the impression covid stimulus varied a lot more, like these charts show). Tracking down this paper from your twitter screenshot, this is Robert Barro who is apparently still interested in his old bizarre idea of ricardian equivalence, where consumers are supposed to be rational agents and thus should respond to government deficits by saving money instead of spending it because they know they (or their descendants) will pay more taxes in the future at some point...So I imagine that explains the strange x-axis here, working in extra variables that are relevant to him wanting to test his specific ideas about rational consumers looking at debt ratios and duration.

This series has a list of interesting proposals for amendments that are not policy-based but rather attempt to fix some of the areas where governance has fallen apart. For example:

  1. All Bills which raise or appropriate money, or which issue or limit the size of the public debt, or which fix the salaries of Officers of the Government of the United States, shall originate in the House of Representatives, and shall not be altered or amended by the Senate.
  2. The Senate shall vote on all such money bills within one year, voting by the Yeas and Nays, and the affirmative vote of a majority of the Senators duly chosen and sworn shall cause the bill to be passed. If, after one year, this vote has not been taken, the House may present the money bill to the President of the United States for signature, in like manner as if it had been passed by the Senate.
  3. These provisions may be enforced by judicial proceedings.

But even something as anodyne as this would probably become polarized once one group of people took up its cause.

Given how the rest of the constitution is interpreted nowadays, this part of the amendment seems very shortsighted:

the House may present the money bill to the President of the United States for signature, in like manner as if it had been passed by the Senate.

Nothing at all is said about whether the bill actually passes. That's clearly the intention, but someone will eventually decide that actually the wording means it's just a signature and doesn't necessarily have legal power.

Could be fixed by adding a simple line, "after signature by the President the bill becomes law." or something.

Any of the proposed amendments should be looked over by 10 dozen different lawyers to see what they can munchkin out of it before making it to the floor.

Can you imagine a US Constitutional amendment that, if proposed, would actually get passed these days?

Eternal commitment to Israel. Establishment of both parties would be for it.

Would cause some interesting results if the Palestinians managed to take the whole shebang over but decided to keep the name "Israel" just to see what happens vis-a-vis US support.

Like Pakistan, which was willing to become known as India when Modi floated the Bharat idea?

The most likely candidate I can think of is an amendment regularising the administrative state if it appears to be under serious threat from the conservative majority on SCOTUS. Nobody wants to live in a world where the clownshow that is Congress has to deal with the technical detail of bank capital adequacy or aviation safety, and very few people want to live in a world where those things are not regulated at all.

Before the McCarthy speakership fiasco, it looked like an Administrative Procedure Amendment would pass easily if needed with votes from Democrats, moderate pro-business Republicans, and conservative Republicans bought by the incumbent banks, airlines etc. I suspect in today's climate a lot of Republicans would be afraid of being primaried if they supported it (a majority of the voters in low-turnout non-Presidential Republican primaries appear to be the kind of anti-establishment conservative who would be happy to watch the world burn if libs were sufficiently owned as a result), so it would be difficult to get the required supermajority.

* IANAL, but my reading of the Constitution is that the administrative state is unconstitutional for the same reasons as the Air Force under any sensible interpretation scheme other than "living constitutionalism". But both the administrative state and the Air Force are good ideas, and should have been regularised by constitutional amendments which would have passed easily at the time.

very few people want to live in a world where those things are not regulated at all.

Do you mean "not regulated at all" or "not regulated by a federal bureaucracy"? If you mean the first, then yes I think no one really wants to live in that world, but also that is not what is at stake in this SCOTUS decision. The latter statement is what is at stake, and I think many people would want to live in that world if they could actually experience it. I wrote this comment in last week's thread. There are serious and fundamental problems with centralized bureaucracy. The kind of problems that constitutional amendments don't fix.

There are three serious alternative to centralized regulation by a bureaucracy:

  1. Market regulation. If there is a functioning and competitive market its not clear to me that anything really needs to be done to protect people involved in the market. Companies will have to compete with each other on every margin, including quality, price, and reputation. They will police each other on these things. This will cover nearly all of the minor stuff.
  2. Court and legal regulation. If there is a functioning common law court system then many of the serious fuckups can also be addressed. Deaths, serious property rights violations, and uses/threats of violence could all be addressed. This will cover nearly all of the major stuff.
  3. Localized government regulation. This will suffer from many of the same problems as a large centralized bureaucracy that regulates things. But it at least has a pressure valve. If the local regulations become too onerous and annoying, people can leave that jurisdiction.

#1 is striking in its naïveté. A free market, one that is functional annd competitive, actually requires a certain amount of governmental regulation to remain free, functional, and competitive. It does not happen by magic. Even the holy texts of capitalism make this point explicitly. For example, companies can do a number of things to stifle new entries to existing markets, which breaks the system. There are clear mechanisms that keep the system going, and they are somewhat easily circumvented with lax enforcement. Companies can temporarily collude or take other related actions to undercut a rising newcomer’s prices (the Walmart strategy), blanket them with legal fees (the IP/copyright route), contractually freeze them out (the Microsoft strategy), deceptively manipulate popular perception, or even outright lie, snipe key hires, unleash massive financial war chests, the options go on and on.

Walmart for example should not have been possible. They deliberately bankrupted thousands of companies if not more in their rise to the top. Do you remember this era? They are like the classic case of using their financial heft to artificially lower prices, drive local grocery stores out of business, and then raise the prices again. (And cheat countless suppliers and business partners along the way). And the scandals don’t stop. Why, even just yesterday I saw a story about how Walmart enriched itself by ignoring massive fraud and even lied to the government in the process. Note that Walmarts are too physically entrenched in various communities for much meaningful action to be taken, and boycotts just don’t work very well anymore.

There has been a century and a half long propaganda campaign against market regulation. Your using some of the ideas they came up with a century ago that have long since been neutered and debunked.

The pricing stuff is extra silly because you can talk yourself into thinking there is a monopoly or collusion based on any price change. Price goes down, ah it's the beginning stage of predatory pricing. Price goes up, ah it's the end stage of predatory pricing. Price stays the same ah they must be colluding because they don't have to change their prices.

It's the perfect example of reasoning backwards from a conclusion.

Intellectual property is generally only possible through centralized regulatory regimes. Prior to global trade markets it was more about trade secrets and being first to market was the main benefit of innovation. I am much more sympathetic to the argument that IP is one of the good use cases of centralized bureaucracy. But it's ridiculous to blame the results of abuse of centralized bureaucracy on markets.

Walmarts are still cheap. They are still convenient. They do face competition with online ordering.

"Walmart complaints" often say so much about the priorities of someone complaining. Wal Mart is mostly fine and doesn't do anything wrong. Most economists, even left leaning ones are on board with that. They do have a PR problem in politics though. And it's great to appeal to voters when complaining about Walmart.

However, you either ignored the rest of my list or didn't read it. Third bullet points was "local regulation". If a city or locality wants to ban Walmart that seems fine to me. I'll try to avoid living there, or fight the ordinance if it comes up locally. You have not provided any mechanism by which a centralized bureaucracy could even fix this supposed "problem", in fact they often do the opposite! A centralized bureaucracy is more likely to tell all localities "no if Walmart follows these specific rules then you have to allow them in".

If Walmart is your biggest complaint you should be agreeing with me, not getting hung up on an ideological fight.

IMO selling at a loss to push market share and destroy competitors is already illegal. Probably not enforced enough.

I don't understand why. Uber is a great recent example of that. Their shareholders basically funded them selling below market price for a while. And then Lyft comes along and it turns out people that are price sensitive really don't have that much "brand loyalty". The shareholders bought a whole bunch of cheap rides, not a monopoly.

I thought it was more illegal than Wikipedia claims or I’m forgetting a key features of that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

It becomes illegal if it bankrupts Lyft and the man Uber have a credible threat of doing another price war with a new entrant discourages competition. At which point Uber can hike prices.

Things with network effects seems more prone to these claims. Things with weaker network effects wouldn’t. Truth is it’s stupid to sell below costs (unless you just forecasted wrong) unless you have a plan to make more from those sales later.

Predatory pricing is BS. Almost any company can be "guilty" of it. The courts have over time had to reign in the excesses in enforcement. But the original applications of those laws were comically and transparently political. As I sort of asked of Jiro: consider what kind of price change disproves predatory pricing. The answer is 'nothing' as far as I can tell.

Economists have a saying "dont reason from a price change". It naively applies to just understanding how supply and demand have changed. But it can also be some sage wisdom about not rushing to judge the activities of some company.

I don’t think it’s BS. It is tough to prove though.

That phrase I believe was coined by Scott Sumner and popularized my marginal revolution. I once had a prof use it all the time and didn’t know where it came from. Golden Age of the Econ blogosphere.

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They are like the classic case of using their financial heft to artificially lower prices, drive local grocery stores out of business, and then raise the prices again.

Did they ever actually do that step? Is there a documented case of it actually happening? Or did they just have lower prices by being more efficient and focusing on cheap goods, and then continue to have lower prices? And for that matter for groceries specifically I don't think they tend to be significantly cheaper in the first place, they just have similar prices to any other discount grocery store.

Do Walmart's prices even vary enough from store to store to justify such a strategy? They're not always the same between stores or compared to their website (in large part due to the cost of shipping if you're looking at groceries specifically) but it hardly seems like a big enough difference to be part of some predatory pricing strategy.

One possible problem: you can compare prices iff there's competition, which will depress prices.

Yup people have done that. One of the main findings is that existing competition doesn't actually matter very much. It's potential competition and goods substitution that matter a lot.

Imagine someone buys up all the old fashioned wood pencil producers. They then jack up the price. Suddenly no one is buying the pencils. They switched to pens and mechanical pencils.

Many people confuse a product for the market. The product was pencils, the market was "writing implements". Also there is often an option to just not have the thing at all.

The only way people actually corner markets these days (the last half century) without IP is by going after specific metals/elements, which rarely has impacts on end consumers, but definitely screws over certain producers.

Companies will have to compete with each other on every margin, including quality, price, and reputation. They will police each other on these things.

What if the biggest companies collude with each other to not police each other but to instead, use their hegemonic position in the market to crush any upstart rival that attempts to offer the public an actually superior product? For example, by using economies of scale to undersell any such rival long enough to put them out of business. Or by negotiating monopolistic deals with important suppliers so that no competitor actually can build their product at scale to begin with?

The same thing that happens with most market inefficiencies, they will get plugged by entrepreneurs trying to make money, or the inefficiencies are too small and no one will bother.

Company collusions were often regularly attempted and failed prior to when they were made illegal. It's a prisoners dilemma where new prisoners can show up and defect.

There is a fun way to deal with producers that sell beneath their own production costs: buy all of their products, put them out of business, and then resell the products you bought for profit.

The only sustainable way to "undersell" is to actually just make the products at lower cost. At which point it's just inefficient producers being sour grapes because they are losing.

Why do the suppliers want to limit their customer base just to help out another company? In that case compete with the suppliers, since they are strangely operating like charities rather than businesses.

There is a fun way to deal with producers that sell beneath their own production costs: buy all of their products, put them out of business, and then resell the products you bought for profit.

In addition to what @EverythingIsFine has written, there's also the question of leverage. Just like the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, so can a larger company sell below cost longer than you can keep buying their products using borrowed money.

You only have to do some of the buying. You can also just make the market aware of the discrepancy. It won't always drive them out of business, but it is a costly mistake on their part. Happened with one of the versions of PlayStations where they accidentally made it the cheapest computing platform in an effort to stay price competitive with Xbox.

This entire theory depends on market structure. The more you have economies of scale the more you can punish new entrants to limit competition.

In tech platforms it’s even more pronounced. Google wasn’t paying Apple tens of billions a year to be the default search engine for nothing. Microsoft or maybe a startup could have came in. Then the start up gets more data to improve their product and makes money selling ads to hire more engineers and flywheel takes off.

The models you talk about play really well for constant costs industries but not nearly as well for high fixed costs low marginal costs businesses and other industry structures.

For instance say a software costs $300 million to develop and has $0 marginal costs once developed. That company most of the time could use monopolistic pricing but if they smelled a start up entering the market they can slash pricing for a time to discourage their entrance and development of competing software. Something like this happens in niche markets and perhaps some rare disease drugs.

This only works in a world where contracts and lawyers don’t exist. Like, it’s often illegal to “buy another producers products and resell them yourself” in at least three ways.

It's called retail usually. And who is making it illegal? A centralized bureaucracy probably. Which is the thing I'm arguing against in the first place. It's a little awkward when the thing that is supposed to be stopping the problem is actually just preventing it from being fixed in the first place.

Buying someone else's products retail in a store will let you get a couple of them, but not enough to be profitable to resell. In order to get enough of them that you can resell them, you have to make a purchase from a wholesaler aor from the company itself and those purchases aren't going to be "walk into a store", they will come with contracts and the contracts can forbid reselling below a certain price.

Furthermore, even if you could buy the company's products below cost and resell them somewhat less below cost, you'd still be competing with the company, who's directly selling their products below cost, so it wouldn't work.

You misunderstood, I'm saying retail already does the thing where they buy someone else's product and resell it. The comment I responded to said that was illegal, which must be news to most Amazon sellers.

Also I mentioned elsewhere if you don't ha e the capital you just have to make the market is aware that the good is being undersold. The more undersold it it the better an investment it is to get it now. The less undersold it is, the less you are being pushed out as competition.

Turns out the optimal amount of underselling is at production cost which to me just sounds indistinguishable from competition. So we have people complaining that market competition doesn't work, and they point to market competition as their example.

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Do you mean "not regulated at all" or "not regulated by a federal bureaucracy"? ... The latter statement is what is at stake

I mean, not even that is at stake. Congress could still give agencies pretty broad authorities and pretty broad discretion. It would only be that, given the particular wording the statute uses, if there is an ambiguity, the gov't wouldn't auto-win every time. They'd have to cry a little tear for the poor federal agencies out there make their case in court for their reading of the statute.

A good point to bring up to MadMonzer. I'm sometimes happy to make the extreme version of arguments and not quibble over the details.

Nobody wants to live in a world where the clownshow that is Congress has to deal with the technical detail of bank capital adequacy or aviation safety, and very few people want to live in a world where those things are not regulated at all.

Perhaps not, but many people think they do.

(Perhaps it would be better to say, that there aren't many people amongst the general population who want that, but there are probably a lot of local and business elites who would be happy to do away with federal oversight within their domain)

I think you severely underestimate how much American conservatives despise the administrative state. See things like the REINS (sp) ACT.

Personally I think simple rules for a complex world (shout out to Prof Epstein) is probably the right path.

very few people want to live in a world where those things are not regulated at all.

If crypto has taught me anything it's that a lot of people do want to live in a financial world where those things are not regulated at all (at least for a while).

My experience of dealing with the crypto community is that Bitcoiners favour a world with no fractional reserve banking at all, not a world with unregulated fractional reserve banking. They think (incorrectly) that Bitcoin enables this. The wider decentralised finance community (most but by no means all of whom use Ethereum) think that decentralised fractional reserve banking should be possible, but attempts to do it keep blowing up.

It’s more that people are still in denial that the current world of financial regulation is there for a reason. It never fails to entertain me when a new crypto scandal leads to an “innovation” which is just traditional banking with extra steps. As Matt Levine likes to say:

In one sense, crypto is in the business of constantly reinventing or rediscovering the basic ideas of financial history

And I’m inclined to agree.

Well, until they lose all their money.

Stupid or bad actors losing money is in fact a form of regulation, there's just nobody to pin blame on for it.

That's likely largely a reaction to everything else being regulated to a fare-thee-well. You need a bevy of professional licenses to do anything useful and lucrative nowadays (with the possible exception of computer programming), crypto offers a (false) way out.

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