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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26205 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.

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.

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.

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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