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I think this is basically true. If you have today's American or modern values, most any particular thing cited in this thread has something 3x worse even 50 years ago, and worse farther back. If you value things like religion, chastity, the TFR, national pride, or even go further back and value conquest and racial purity (this is not intended to be snide) things are clearly going wrong. But dumb regulations, endorsing foreign violence, corruption ... all are actually better now than eg 100 years ago.
edit: Moldbug would claim this is technology masking political/civilizational decline. This is significantly true in many of the areas Moldbug claims it in (although I don't think we're going to descend into something like South America like moldbug claims), but the political 'progress' in the last century more than compensates for it for most peoples' values. If you're philosophically willing to 'die for your freedom' and conceive of freedom the way most to today, then (purely as a comparison, this is in no way a real tradeoff) being mugged a few times is more than worth homosexuality and free love being legal.
There are definitely exceptions, like "private actors being able to build things" or "government competence at large-scale projects" or "homeless people everywhere", but liberals are in fact noticing those. Especially the first two are the kind of thing Ezra Klein wold talk about on his podcast, they're not taboo like OP complains.
And aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Dumb regulations are far more numerous and worse today.
On average, yes.
But major counter examples exist. Trucking, airlines, and beer all got significantly deregulated. We are coming up on a century past the New Deal, and a lot of big gov overreach peaked in the 60s and then Carter started the neoliberal turn.
Housing is perhaps reaching a turning point as Blue cities/states face reality that zoning is bad/racist. Not sure if building infra is going to improve in that left-on-left fight over green energy/rail vs. environmentalism.
The day to day business of a trucker is far more regulated now as I understand it. GPS and electronic logbooks mean accounting for every minute and making sure the various regs are followed is practical and practiced.
Not being able to build things mostly falls out of the National Environmental Protection Act (thanks Dick Nixon), but there's a lot of other regs like building codes and energy requirements that are continuously getting stricter.
Yeah I think you’re right about the micromanagement of truckers (and other areas with ubiquitous monitoring. We already have cheap cameras/trackers/recorders and now AI can make analyzing the data cheap too. Privacy will be so very dead in most areas of life/work soon.)
The deregulation in the 70s was more about competition between firms.
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OP:
Me:
And - It would be shocking, a complete departure from history and plausibility, if literally everything about the present was better than the past. But, by most peoples' values, the vast majority of things are better now.
I probably should've been more explicit above that I think the 'modern values' that are being satisfied are incoherent and wrong, but OP is trying to criticize the modern world on its own terms and, as a result, failing.
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