I elsewhere speak of both Adam Smith and Karl Marx, who are often portrayed as opposites. Only, the latter deeply respected the former, writing of Smith’s vital role in ‘bourgeois revolution’ - a necessary intermediate stage on the road from feudalism and monarchic despotism to final-stage worker paradise.
Mind you, it’s a pity 99% of moderns know next to nothing about these two thinkers, beyond inaccurate clichés. (See: Adam Smith – Liberals must reclaim him.) Smith was brilliant, helping set in motion many of the positive sum processes I’ll speak of below.
Alas, though the younger Marx offered cogent insights into economics and historiography, he was an utter failure at predicting future events. Eventually, he became a quasi-religious figure, a tool of neo-feudal lords, who made him the iconic saint of a state religion, excusing murderous tyranny.
But his biggest mistake was assuming that human beings are too stupid to read Karl Marx! And thereupon draw lessons, taking actions that render his scenarios obsolete.
That's exactly what FDR and others of the 30s thru 50s did, performing reforms that Marx never imagined possible, sharing significant power with the working classes and luring them into a prosperous middle class. Indeed, for a while there, our Rooseveltean Reforms seemed to toss Old Karl into the dustbin…
...till a new generation of oligarchist fools set to work obeying almost to the letter his predicted patterns of dimwitted, self-flattering greed, restoring vast disparities to French Revolution levels. Thus they have resurrected Marx, his books now fizzing again across all the world’s campuses and ghettos.
Elsewhere I talk about the worst of these would-be lords and their sycophant lackeys, the so-called neo-monarchists, who now openly call for a return to rule by ‘unitary executive” kings, claiming that “freedom and democracy are incompatible.”
At all levels and in all ways, they are the very best friends the Marxists ever had.
But here I want to talk about the vast majority of those on the right. Not the neo-monarchist extrema, but a far larger number whose core hypocrisy – continuing to claim fealty to free-enterprise – is easily exposed as two-faced pretense.
== What is the ‘C-Word’? ==
What chafes me about 'capitalism' ravings from all sides - from far right to far left - is how almost no one ever defines the term or shows even a clue of understanding its meaning or implications.
Worse, almost no one nowadays mentions the other c-word... competition. Even though – unlike ‘capitalism’ -- we can actually agree (a bit) what competition means!
...though the truth is diametric opposite!
Across the last 50 years, every measure or action that has lessened effective competition in the U.S. has been perpetrated by hypocrites of a sellout Republican Party -- a cabal devoted to replacing flat-fair-open-creative competition with privileged oligarchy and monopoly.
In contrast, the Rooseveltean social contract - which Republicans strive to demolish - enhanced creative competition, including entrepreneurship, small business startups, inventiveness and the most vigorous era of new products and services, ever.
(I invite cash wagers on all of those assertions, which are overwhelmingly proved.)
Liberals did all that (if imperfectly) by:
- Using regulations to limit the power of mighty corporations and oligarchs to quash upstart competitors.
- Using tax policies to keep wealth disparities low enough so that - while getting-rich remained an incentive-allure for creative enterprise - the rich could not tower outrageously above us all, like lords. Or gods.
(Example: there was a time when you’d see a rich or famous person flying First Class, now and then. They mostly rode the same airplanes, sipping mimosas in seats only 2x as large as ours. Alas, no longer. And note that all modes of transportation decline when the rich abandon them.)
- Using tax laws to encourage R&D, productive capital and hiring workers, rather than Supply Side parasitism.
- Encouraging unions (who were vigorously anti-Leninist) so that the working class joined the middle class, a feat Karl Marx never expected and that tossed all his predictions into history's dustbin. For a while.
- Creating a vast ecosystem of community colleges and universities that allowed many children of field hands and factory workers to transform into professionals and entrepreneurs.
- Liberal social programs and justice reforms that reduced the nasty, unjustified, though all-too human practice of prejudice. And thus (only partially, so far) achieving Adam Smith's top recommendation to stop wasting talent! ...
...Because, as Friedrich Hayek said (before the mad right perverted his memory), any competitive system will function best when it involves the largest number of knowledgeable, empowered, confident and eager competitors, unencumbered by insipid bigotries.
All of those endeavors – which define liberalism at its core - had great effects at many levels: fighting injustice, improving lives, preserving freedom - but with an added benefit that (alas) no democratic politician or liberal philosopher has had the savvy to explain...
…that all of those endeavors also enhanced flat-fair-creative competition! And hence our creative inventiveness.
(I exclude mutant-liberalism - the so-called far-left - whose arrogant demands to equalize outcomes, rather than opportunities is almost as jibbering loony as the entire-right's devotion to restored feudalism.)
And that’s my capsule argument about the C-Word that is no longer spoken aloud by ‘conservative’ writers or pundits.
== C-Words ... all words... merit scrutiny! ==
Alas, no liberal pundit or politician ever points to this hypocrisy, or that the Founders and the original Tea Party rebelled primarily against cheater oligarchy.
Moreover, anyone who actually reads Adam Smith knows that - were he alive today – Smith would be a flaming Democrat.
That hypocrisy – betraying and almost never even mentioning the most important c-word – competition - spans the entirety of today’s conservatism, with that one exception that I describe elsewhere...
...those neo-monarchists who thus have one virture... evading hypocrisy. They are totally open about their hatred of fair competition! They openly espouse completing the antipodal migration of conservatism, from once-upon-a-time extolling competition all the way to openly justifying its utter suppression.
From Adam Smith to Louis XIV.
Again, unlike every other kind of contemporary conservative, at least members of that extremum – while nauseatingly evil imbeciles – are no longer hypocrites! I'll grant them that.
----------
See my posting: The Return of Neomonarchy.
197 comments:
Picking up from the previous thread with Jon...
Talk of using HCQ or "Infectant" to treat Covid is why I no longer believe in the use of transparency to cure society's woes. The more info the masses have access to, the more rubbish con artists with a YouTube account can use, to come up with invalid scientific relationships that the averagely informed viewer can't separate between truth and fiction.
Facts matter... eventually. But Persuasion matters now. I've watched Scott Adams (ie the Dilbert guy) effortlessly weave a possible explanation of stupid things Trump does to make it appear possible Trump is more clever than he appears. Then I watched Scott's views get picked up and go viral amongst the Right despite the fact twisting that it requires for it all to make sense. The persuasion only needs to last as long as the current news cycle to move onto something else. Scott even tracks his persuasion accomplishments where he debunks MSM "hoaxes" which get picked up by Joe Rogan, Fox News and even Trump himself:
"Fine People Hoax, Drinking Bleach Hoax, Russia Collusion Hoax, Covington Kids Hoax, Russian Bounty Hoax. Need more?"
This is who you're fighting. Not facts but persuasive arguments that require only a 2-3 day shelf life. I'm not a fan of Scott. But he has an amazing gift to turn Trump's garbage into something palatable for those who can't see the con.
Bah Joel. You completely misunderstand that the key use of transparency is RECIPROCAL ACCOUNTABIITY. Unlike the previous 5 'accountability arenas' developed by our society... markets, democracy, science, courts and sports... the internet is immature and lacks a system of RITUAL COMBAT that the others all have to demolish bad products.
My attempts to get folks to use veifiable-falsifiable and cash based WAGERS is an effort to get a crude version going online.
If you seriously are curious about how to do it even better... For a rather intense look at how "truth" is determined in science, democracy, courts and markets, see "Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competition." (https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/disputation.html.)
…. This early version leaves out a Fifth Arena that actually makes the point even better… sports! No league or team would survive any given weekend without benefiting from tight regulation to keep cheating to a minimum, illustrating a core truth that also applies to the other four great competitive-creative arenas markets, democracy, courts and science….
... that competition only delivers its cornucopia of positive-sum benefits when there is both transparency and cooperatively created regulation to deter the age-old human curse of cheating. Cooperation and competition are essential partners, not opposites.)
This early version appeared as the lead article in the American Bar Association's Journal on Dispute Resolution (Ohio State University), v.15, N.3, pp 597-618, Aug. 2000,
To repeat myself. As a "fire up the guillotines" leftist, I don't want equality of outcomes, I want proportionality of outcomes. That a critter whose primary skill sets are bullshitting and dicking around with spreadsheets should be worth tens of thousands of times as much as a farmer or engineer is an outrage worthy of revolution.
Joel G:
You can fool enough of the people enough of the time to get what you want right now, but not what you will need later.
Dr. Brin:
You write:
<<
But [Marx's] biggest mistake was assuming that human beings are too stupid to read Karl Marx! And thereupon draw lessons, taking actions that render his scenarios obsolete.
That's exactly what FDR and others of the 30s thru 50s did, performing reforms that Marx never imagined possible, sharing significant power with the working classes and luring them into a prosperous middle class. Indeed, for a while there, our Rooseveltean Reforms seemed to toss Old Karl into the dustbin…
...till a new generation of oligarchist fools set to work obeying almost to the letter his predicted patterns of dimwitted, self-flattering greed, restoring vast disparities to French Revolution levels. Thus they have resurrected Marx, his books now fizzing again across all the world’s campuses and ghettos.
>>
Marxian dialectic, meet Seldon's Paradox! Marx made a psychohistorical prediction, which, by Seldon's Paradox, set into motion psychohistorical forces that negated Marx's prediction.
When the oligarchy takes Marx's predictions seriously, then it negates them; but that very success makes the oligarchy not take Marx's predictions seriously, which sets those predictions into motion. When the oligarchy bets that it is secure, then by Seldon's Paradox, it isn't.
From the oligarchy's point of view, Marx's predictions are as true as they are false. I call that the Marxian Paradox. The solution to the paradox is the circulation of aristocracies.
DG I agree with you. But the moral argument is less effective than the practical one... that allowing the creation of a towering oligarchy has ALWAYS proved a disaster and cannot possibly have good outcomes now.
In effect, it means making your second billion$ should be HARDER and require fostering of more creative solutions than the 1st billion$. Instead of easier.
Paradoctor's Seldon Paradox posting gets post of the day!
Dr Brin in the previous comments:
I do wish Maher could make his points with sufficient asides to make them clear.
It wasn't even about obesity this time. It was about freedom of speech requiring us to tolerate and even defend speech we don't like. And I'm all on board with that sentiment. But he makes it all about the cancel culture and trigger warnings from the left, while not even mentioning in the conversation that the overt danger to "speech we don't like" is not from flame wars on Twitter or cancelled speeches on campus, but from armed thugs actually attempting physical intimidation and murder. And that comes from the political right.
I am way too busy and bored to read locum's latest. Someone speak if he has said something vitamin-rich, even if still obsessive/insane.
I would take his own unintentionally-appropriate advice on that. To wit:
I have neither the time nor the patience to sort the good from the bad.
Don Gisselbeck:
As a "fire up the guillotines" leftist, I don't want equality of outcomes, I want proportionality of outcomes. That a critter whose primary skill sets are bullshitting and dicking around with spreadsheets should be worth tens of thousands of times as much as a farmer or engineer is an outrage worthy of revolution.
Be careful what you wish for. You know who agrees with you, flaming leftist? Trump supporters. They also want revolution over some of the same grievances, but you probably won't like the outcome they pursue.
Cari Burstein:
One of the silliest things about whining about people wearing masks outside is they have no idea even why they're doing that. For example, I wear a mask when I go grocery shopping, and I usually place a lunch order at a place across the parking lot before I go shop, then come back and pick it up. I usually don't bother to take my mask off when walking through the parking lot because it's only a few minutes and it's more effort to take it off and on than just leave it on.
That's exactly what I was screaming at the tv about over Maher's rant. He had just gotten through complaining that Fauci and the CDC and social media giants unfairly censored discussions about COVID which later turned out to at least in some cases have merit--that the authorities in the matter didn't have all the answers, so they had no business meddling in other people's discussions. Also, not yesterday but in the past, he has argued that no one should tell him how to manage his own health, as if COVID restrictions weren't about mitigating spread. But then, in almost the same breath, he laid down the law to young people wearing masks, harming no one, as if he was the objective authority.
Also, it's unlikely you'll catch COVID outdoors, but I'm not sure how reliable that is with the newer more transmissible variants. In a crowded area outdoors I can see it still being a concern.
I've even heard anecdotal tales of people meeting one-on-one outdoors and getting the Omicron variant. The thing is, wearing a mask seems like such a small inconvenience for the possible benefit--akin to wearing a seatbelt or brushing one's teeth--that I don't understand the pushback from right-wingers which treats it as an unbearable burden, one they'd rather risk COVID than endure.
if they would prefer not to get sick (because really who likes being sick?) why is that something he wants to scream about? I haven't been sick in years and I'd like to keep it that way- wearing a mask is such minimal effort for that I might just keep wearing them in grocery stores forever.
I have also noticed that I've had maybe two or three colds in the entire time since March 2020 whereas I used to have more like one per month. And to the extent that that is a result of masking or intense hand-washing, I would prefer to keep that streak going even were COVID itself to disappear as a Trumpian miracle.
Paradoctor:
When the oligarchy takes Marx's predictions seriously, then it negates them; but that very success makes the oligarchy not take Marx's predictions seriously, which sets those predictions into motion. When the oligarchy bets that it is secure, then by Seldon's Paradox, it isn't.
I think that's kind of how psychohistory works. In some cases, even the foreknowledge which allows you to try to change the outcome only leads inevitably back to the outcome. Like the parable of the Appointment [with Death] in Samarkand.
Of course, there are some outcomes for which that is not true, but for those cases, psychohistory would inevitably give a much fuzzier prediction.
I think I sort of get it now, a paradoctor is somewhat akin to a metaphysician...
FOUNDATION used psychohistory as a fanciful literary trellis upon which to weave a story with these themes/vines:
- remote island of hope amidst a vast, hostile environment (Shangri-La or Terminus)
- imminent and unstoppable yet survivable collapse (World Powers or Galactic Empire)
- small band of noble academics as a 'seed store' of technology and Enlightenment culture
- lone, heroic leader of that 'happy few' (Asimov admired Shakespeare)
- respect, even love, for all of humanity (with special deference to farmers)
- Greek mythological analogies such as Prometheus, Odysseus, Athena, Pan
(speculation, and mostly appearing later in the 1951/2/3 trilogy)
As such, psychohistory was focused on prediction and manipulation (mostly using probabilities). I see psychohistory more as a study of analysis and synthesis (using differentiation and integration). Classic scientific reasoning as taught in high school (eg biology and physics). Less Marxian and more Smithian I suppose, although both are above my paygrade. Widespread computational thinking, especially when applied to things like anthropology, psychology, and sociology, is a more desirable and achievable goal than is the charting and controlling of human destiny. Paradoxes arise from partial or biased knowledge. And in the worst case, doctrine. I've always disliked Foundation's assertion that the public's ignorance of psychohistory is a good and necessary thing. Maybe on the personal level, ignorance is bliss. But for civilization, it's a catastrophe as Wells said.
Lorraine:
I am a doctor of philosophy: I heal sick philosophies. I specialize in the use of paradox to treat pathological dualism.
scidata:
I've always disliked Foundation's assertion that the public's ignorance of psychohistory is a good and necessary thing.
It seems to me that the public's ignorance would be a data point in the predictions. In other words, psychohistory would predict certain outcomes with more certainty presuming the condition of public ignorance were met. Under different conditions, perhaps without public ignorance, the predicted outcomes would change, and probably be less certain (though not entirely uncertain, as discussed earlier here).
One thing Foundation readers tend to forget is that the job of the Foundation was to favorably influence the future, not just to know what the blind hand of determinism has made inevitable for the next thousand years. If the future was inevitable, there would be no point to a Foundation at all. Part of their job was to set up certain conditions which psychohistory says will produce the future they prefer.
In the particular case of reducing the interregnum to from 30,000 years to 1000, one of the necessary required conditions might well be public ignorance. That doesn't mean that that particular condition is always necessary for every outcome.
scidata:
Check out "Psychohistorical Crisis", by Donald Kingsbury. It is set in (roughly) the same galaxy as Foundation, 1000 years later, with the 2nd Foundation in control. The crisis is about possession of psychohistory itself. Various factions compete to find the equations; some eventually succeed. Meanwhile a rogue apprentice psychohistorian predicts this leakage, and invents an alternative psychohistory immune to Seldon's Paradox. It is a 'science of negotiation' instead of a 'science of control'; independent agents tend to converge to mutually acceptable outcomes; the only ones left out are those without the new equations. The book ends on the eve of a decisive war-game between the two systems.
@Paradoctor,
A few years ago now, at the urging of someone here, I did read Psychohistorical Crisis. With all due respect to our host and Isaac Asimov, that book scratched my itch for more of the 1950s-style Foundation stories than anything else has.
But one thing that bothered me was the society's familiarity with Earth and with specifics of Earth history from our present and past. The early Asimov books had established pretty firmly that the location of humanity's origin had been lost to the fog of antiquity. I wish the later books, including Kingsbury's, didn't feel the need to keep repudiating that premise.
Don Gisselbeck (and others),
…outrage worthy of revolution…
Yah, yah. I've heard this (and related lines) all my life. Thing is that revolution was already fought countless ages ago, your side lost, and humanity is better for it. Not just a little better. We aren't extinct. THAT kind of better.
Most humans in most situations will use a code of ethics that works moderately well for small communities where they know most everyone. Most humans for most of human existence lived in those conditions. Our default sense of "justice" is based on the oldest nomadic HG rules. In nomadic bands, the power and wealth of the person (often a man) at the top isn't some outrageously high ratio to the average. For most of humanity, that worked well enough even if we weren't happy with our position and the higher murder/violence rates.
Somewhere along the way, though, we started trading outside our kin groups. Rules of justice honed for one band of people don't necessarily align with another band, so newer 'minimal' rules had to be found (barter markets were born) and enforcement techniques invented (early laws and 'trade courts'). We even went to the trouble to invent money, writing, mathematics, and so on because those systems demanded it of us. The effort proved to be worth it because those who did it… got wealthier from top to bottom in a society. The people (mostly men) at the top became outrageously wealthy and it could be measured in anything from grain to gold. The people in the middle who worked in the markets also got richer as could be seen in the number of children they could keep alive to reach an age (just barely) to have their own children. Trade between kin groups saved homo sapiens from extinction during the last glacial period.
The code of ethics we employ in small bands is still related to our older choices, but those systems don't work well in markets where you can't possibly know with whom you trade. You can't even know how many people are involved behind a trade you make with someone, so how can you possibly value their contribution to the asset being traded?
No. The old codes of ethics are still useful in smaller settings, but they fail miserably in larger markets that literally saved humanity from the usual fate of primate species which is to go extinct in a couple million years. There IS a decent ethic most of us apply in markets, though. It's not an amoral system. It can't be since it is composed of humans with attitudes.
Suggest we start a revolution in order to bring into markets our older ethics useful for small bands to displace the one IN USE in markets, and I'll pick up my pen/weapon to oppose fools would I honestly believe could get billions killed over a stupid choice. The 20th century saw people try to oppose markets and I would stack the bodies of about 200 million dead at their feet… and blame them. These fools include followers of Marx would didn't understand Marx. More can be found among followers of Darwin who did not comprehend Darwin. Then there are the folks who thought History could be developed as a Science. Many of the people who died in wars and under totalitarians last century died over such stupid ideas.
No. I'll support opposing oligarchs who would enslave us, but you many not try to fit an unfit ethic as our guide in markets.
Prices are what they are for a DAMN good reason.
Larry Hart:
I agree that knowledge of Earth (or as they say, Rith) is discontinuous with Foundation. Perhaps they found our Rith's location in the 1000 years since? Or let's admit that it was a parallel time line, what with name changes like Rith for Earth and Splendid Wisdom for Trantor.
But I think Kingsbury more than makes up for this by his resolution of Seldon's Paradox. From top-down prediction/control to a network of negotiation/creation. It's like the transition from first-order combinatorial cybernetics to second-order recursive cybernetics.
Larry,
"...even the foreknowledge which allows you to try to change the outcome only leads inevitably back to the outcome."
If I understand correctly, the later Dune novels addressed this in a different way...if only one or a few precogs are extant, the future can be swayed, but if there are millions of players, humanity is stuck in a chaotic zugzwang. That was the whole point of the kwisatz haderach. I think.
And yes, it's a Foundation plot point that Earth got misfiled in human history, which I suspect would be inaccurate unless Sol III became just one more radioactive cinder among thousands of planets made uninhabitable amid the tides of centuries of interstellar wars of conquest. If it survived, it would have enough archeological evidence to become, basically, Disney Earth, fully staffed with docents and reenactors, and make a mint selling tours packages.
Re: ideology...
Most Americans have little clue what Marxism is, let alone what Marx wrote - I know that in my youth I had it confused with totalitarianism. A few years ago I met USAF members and their kids who were convinced that Barack Obama was a devout Marxist. AND a devout Moslem, which would be two hard schools of thought to incorporate into a single brain. Then again, one particular bunch of humans used the battle cry, "Christ and no quarter!"
Pappenheimer
Alfred Differ
"Prices are what they are for a DAMN good reason."
NO!
Just think about the price of van Gogh painting. Think deeply about it. It is so high because some obscenely rich people want to have exclusive use of it. That is a really, really lousy reason.
Unknown: In "Psychohistorical Crisis", Rith was indeed Disneyfied, with docents and reenactors and tour packages. One of the chiefs of the Second Foundation made himself popular by digging up a fossilized WW2 bomber from the Coral Sea, renovating it, and flying it around Rith.
Here's an aspect of Disneyfied Rith you forgot to mention: selling off artifacts, real and fabricated.
reason,
You not liking the reason doesn't make it lousy.
Value is an observed property of a trade... not of the asset being traded. Price is a statement about what humans think when prioritizing what we want... not a placeholder or proxy for anything about the assets we want.
If some fool wants to part with ridiculous sums for art, I recommend trying to sell them tulip bulbs too. Get that money out of their hands and back into the market where it will do some good as it moves around.
-----
We all have wants we prioritize.
We can't have everything we want. Not even the richest can pull that off because they don't know everything they want.
Prices speak to how we prioritize, so I won't tolerate people messing with them any more than I'll tolerate them messing with my priorities.
I AM willing to find compromises that lead to a common ethic, though. That's the real lesson Smith was driving home in Wealth of Nations. He described a system in broad use and showed its relationship to the virtue named Prudence. He gave examples for how it worked and why it was prudent. His railing against feudal lords and stupid rules was based on prudence.
-----
When y'all can demonstrate an understanding of the actual ethics code in use by the vast majority of us using markets*, I'll listen to suggested tweaks. I won't tolerate suggested revolutions founded upon a failure to grasp the majesty we've created.
How many people here have actually read Adam Smith? (Our host obviously has.) I don't mean read everything cover to cover. Take a simpler test. Who has read 50 pages of Wealth of Nations? Who has read 50 pages of Theory of Moral Sentiments? How many know what Smith's actual profession was?
* Obviously some don't use it. Some cheat. What constitutes cheating, though, depends on what the rules are. That all depends on us giving a damn to know what the rules are which means distinguishing them from the rules we use in smaller bands and families.
Hi Alfred
I have read Adam Smith - I found his writing to be clear and understandable - if a bit strange to modern eyes
But I think its time for me to go back and re-read him
The nonsense about equality of "outcomes" is like a massive straw man - the PROBLEM is massive inequality of outcomes but the solution is "Less extreme inequality" - which is NOT NOT NOT "equality"
IMHO, the most intriguing thing about Smith was the possible influence on him and "Wealth of Nations" by Ben Franklin!
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2142684#metadata_info_tab_contents
Pappenheimer:
"...even the foreknowledge which allows you to try to change the outcome only leads inevitably back to the outcome."
If I understand correctly, the later Dune novels addressed this in a different way...if only one or a few precogs are extant, the future can be swayed, but if there are millions of players, humanity is stuck in a chaotic zugzwang.
I haven't read past the first four novels. But there was an almost-throwaway line in the original Dune which influenced my thinking on the subject. Something that Paul says about there being a kind of Heisenberg-uncertainty in his prescient visions. It helped that I was taking Physics 108 the same semester I read that book for the first time.
And it's only because I spent this last spring binge-watching Criminal Minds that I happen to be familiar with the term "zugzwang".
"How much longer can I go on being an atheist?" :)
Paradoctor:
I agree that knowledge of Earth (or as they say, Rith) is discontinuous with Foundation. Perhaps they found our Rith's location in the 1000 years since? Or let's admit that it was a parallel time line, what with name changes like Rith for Earth and Splendid Wisdom for Trantor.
There are all sorts of ways one might retcon an explanation, but that's not what I was looking for in a reading experience. I wanted further adventures of the 1950s "Foundation" stories. I could live with the changes to proper names, knowing that the author had to take liberties for copyright reasons, but I felt the direct involvement of our planet of origin was out of place.
But I think Kingsbury more than makes up for this by his resolution of Seldon's Paradox. From top-down prediction/control to a network of negotiation/creation. It's like the transition from first-order combinatorial cybernetics to second-order recursive cybernetics.
As I said in the previous post's comments, I can like a work and still be critical of it. I agree with you on the overarching theme being immensely satisfying as a sequel. I wish he had left "Rith" out of it, but I still enjoyed the book.
By the way...
I am a doctor of philosophy: I heal sick philosophies. I specialize in the use of paradox to treat pathological dualism.
If Dr Brin hadn't already given "post of the day" to an earlier post of yours, I would nominate that one.
Alfred - you missed the point entirely. The price of unique items is RENT. And that price is distorted by extreme inequality. Of course a van Gogh would produce more value if was a public library. The problem with private property is that it is EXCLUSIVE - you can't increase freedom by making more things exclusive - so the extreme anarcho capitalist position that property rights are sufficient is absurd on it's face. But concentrating only on negative feedbacks and ignoring positive feedbacks is blindness. The price system is not well determined - it doesn't converge on a stable equilibrium. I think you are deep down assuming it does, and I think there is no evidence to support it.
(Edited because I left a phrase out.)
Alfred, what was the "damn good reason" the price per gallon of gasoline in the US remained at over $5, rising near $6 in some markets, until Congressional action almost happened, while the price of crude oil on the international markets had long since dropped dramatically? What price driver beyond "irrational levels of greed" do you see there?
"no democratic politician or liberal philosopher has had the savvy to explain..." What about former Labor Secretary Robert Reich? He often implores us to aspire to genuinely free markets and fair competition as articulated by Adam Smith .
I am as far-left as someone who accepts the realities of capitalism can be, and I am always urging my Marxist pals to reexamine the Wealth of Nations. They mostly balk. Maybe it's not dense enough for them? :)
Larry it is assumed in the Asimov universe that the ROBOTS know all that history. And I make it a plot element in FT.
Duncan, relativly near equality of OPPORTUNITY is the thing that enables competion/creativity to thrive. "Don't waste talent."
mondoJ
Robert Reich is great! Now show me who listens to him? He's only maybe 30x as influential as I am, which is pretty pathetic, alas.
Try urging your Marxist pals to actually, actually study MARX! With a wager on the table that they don't know shit. alas
A billion dollars is far too much power to give anyone. My attitude towards ubermenschen is that of Vaush, https://youtu.be/Trn7Em-Rezc
I am aware of the dangers of Nazbol vortex. The problem is that the Free Market (bless its Holy Name) is heading rapidly to a place where we have highly talented, motivated people who are filled with rage and equipped highly advanced means of killing.
I will remind you of the libertarian motto: if you can't compete, die. You denied that on the same thread you insisted everyone should be responsible for their own self defense, presumably including those of us incapable of it.
Jon S:
Alfred, what was the "damn good reason" the price per gallon of gasoline in the US remained at over $5, rising near $6 in some markets, until Congressional action almost happened, while the price of crude oil on the international markets had long since dropped dramatically? What price driver beyond "irrational levels of greed" do you see there?
I don't speak for Alfred, but I think I know the gist of how he'll respond. The two of you don't mean the same thing by "the price".
Gas can be $5 or $6 per gallon because people will (if grudgingly) pay that much and more to keep their cars running. At any given moment, there is probably a huge gap between the floor of possible gas prices (the break even point after oil extraction, refinement, and transportation to gas pumps) and the ceiling (the point at which consumers will no longer buy). Within that range, prices will be set by a certain amount of trial and error, but I suspect the sad fact is that while people will complain about $6/gallon gas, they'll pay that much and more if they can't find it any cheaper.
You most likely perceive gasoline as something on the order of a public utility like electricity or running water--something essential to the functioning of society which society has an obligation to provide at a "reasonable" cost, whatever that entails. If so, you should make that argument explicitly, because I doubt Alfred perceives things in quite that manner.
Dr Brin:
Larry it is assumed in the Asimov universe that the ROBOTS know all that history. And I make it a plot element in FT.
That was not assumed in the 1950s stories, and IIRC, Kingsbury's book didn't include the incorporation of Asimov's robot universe into his Foundation universe.
I know I sound critical of what you did with the series, but that's not my intent. I enjoyed Foundation's Triumph for what it was, a kind of ending to the series as Asimov perceived it in the 1980s and 1990s, robots and all. But ever since I read the original trilogy in 1980, I've had a hunger for further adventures in the simpler universe as it was left in the year 376FE, or so. Even Asimov's 1980s books were not that, fun as they were on their own terms.
Kingsbury's book scratched that itch as much as it could, and my reviews and critiques of it are with that sensibility in mind.
Duncan, relativly near equality of OPPORTUNITY is the thing that enables competion/creativity to thrive. "Don't waste talent."
That is ONE of the enabling requirements
But if the "winner" - wins it ALL then that essentially closes the competition to further competitors
The winner can "Win Big" - but if he/she wins too big.......
I'll chime in that Robert Reich has a regular syndicated column in The Guardian, which has a daily readership in the millions.
Dr. Brin has a few best-selling novels (in the low millions of readers, once) and very occasionally gets to chime in on some publication with readership in the low 10ks.
"He's only maybe 30x as influential as I am, which is pretty pathetic, alas." is an utter lie of a brag, off by many orders of magnitude.
Larry, hypothetically the cost of an end product should vary with the cost of producing it.
In the recent run-up of fuel prices, the cost of the end product dramatically exceeded the cost of producing it, and excess profits were diverted into stock buybacks, not increasing the corporation's ability to do what it's theoretically incorporated to do. The fact that the price plummeted so quickly when investigations were threatened demonstrates clearly that there was no "damn good reason" other than near-insane levels of greed to keep the prices so high for so long.
Gasoline is also unusual, in that its price ceiling is fixed not by what consumers are willing to pay, but the point at which what they're forced to pay exceeds what they get paid for going to work. Few job openings these days pay enough for someone to live within mass-transit distance, and while the cost of electric vehicles is still coming down, it's not yet at the level where our theoretical factory worker can trade his second-hand Chevy in on a brand new F-150 Lightning (assuming he could even find such a thing, given current supply restrictions).
Within that range, prices will be set by a certain amount of trial and error, but I suspect the sad fact is that while people will complain about $6/gallon gas, they'll pay that much and more if they can't find it any cheaper.
Years ago I read an article in the New York Times, which sadly I can no longer locate, about gas pricing. The retail price at the pump is mostly set by the price the station pays to their supplier, with only pennies of profit. The writer (or the person he was interviewing) owned a few stations in upstate New York and was charged different prices for his gas at each station. Supposedly this was because of delivery costs. One day he followed the truck around and discovered that the same truck was delivering to all of his stations, and the price he was charged bore no relation to the distance the truck had driven.
Apparently the big companies that individual stations are franchisees of set the price they charge stations based on algorithms about what people will pay, so wealthier areas get charged more, and areas with few alternatives are also charged more. (Just as airline companies use algorithms to differentially price tickets based on things like browser history and the location of your IP address.) So to get a new competitor in the business they can't just open a new gas station but must set up a whole new supply chain to compete with an oligopoly.
Whether this information imbalance — not to mention the oligopoly between oil well and gas pump — is free-and-fair competition is probably what we are debating.
That was not assumed in the 1950s stories, and IIRC, Kingsbury's book didn't include the incorporation of Asimov's robot universe into his Foundation universe.
IIRC, YRC. :-)
Jon S:
Larry, hypothetically the cost of an end product should vary with the cost of producing it.
That's what I meant by the floor. The low bound of a product's price will be the point on which the seller just barely profits from the cost to himself of getting to the point of sale. But the ceiling--the upper bound on price will depend on what a buyer is willing to spend on the product. And how low other sellers are willing to drop their price to attract buyers.
I've heard that fast food restaurants pay mere pennies to produce a standard drink, and that the profit they make by charging multiple dollars for a drink accounts for most of their total profits. But no one threatens government action to lower the price of soft drinks, because one may do without the drinks if one wishes, but also because most consumers aren't turned off by a price of $1.50 or $2.75 for a drink. Point being, in that case, the cost of production is almost incidental to the market price.
Gasoline is also unusual, in that its price ceiling is fixed not by what consumers are willing to pay, but the point at which what they're forced to pay exceeds what they get paid for going to work.
That's the argument I spoke of in favor of gasoline being a sort of public utility, something necessary to the functioning of society rather than a personal consumable. I think there is some merit to that line of argument, but it has to be made explicitly, not assumed to be universally accepted.
And it's not just about driving to work. Back in the Obama years when gas went above $4 and approached $5 per gallon, there was talk of suburban living becoming untenable because people couldn't afford to get from place to place. That's the sort of thing which prompts government intervention in the market.
@Paradoctor
Thanks for the Donald Kingsbury reference. I had a short e-chat with him two years ago to invite him to join my LinkedIn Asimov & Psychohistory group, which he did. Alas, he hasn't posted anything there as yet.
Just a reminder, a mechanic with Musk's fuckup rate would be fired in a day.
mathhew that compare to Reich was on a logarithmic scale ;-)
DG was this addressed at me? If so… meds? “You denied that on the same thread you insisted everyone should be responsible for their own self defense,”
I care less about preventing billionaires than: 1- ensuring theyu are under true transparency
2- Severe restrictions on political power
3- each subsequent billion comes arder.
4- the wealth correlates largely with truly important role in fostering positive sum goods/services… like self-landing rockets and electric cars arriving 15 years early. (A mechanic with Musk’s rate of fostering spectacularly beneficial breakthroughs (along with some big messes) would be a billionaire.)
and my personal peeve:
5- a TAX on sycophants.
Gas prices are rigged in CA by a cabal of companies who yearly arrange for ONE of them to have a failure at a crucial refinery. We MUST invest in publicly owned backup refineries etc that kick in when that happens.
Finally, in 1970 most of us were peeved at Asimov for uniting the Robot and Foundation universes. I still think it was a mistake. But I did my best with the premise and details.
I can't proof read. The comment was directed to Alfred.
Do you deny that wealth equals power? We try to limit the power of governments, why shouldn't we limit the power of private tyrants.
Duncan,
Thank you. I can easily believe you've read at least some of Smith's work. If you find time to re-read any of it, I always encourage people to read it in the intended context. Smith didn't see himself as an economists… let alone as we define economists today. He taught moral philosophy back in the days before Kant's followers had their reductionist impact upon the field.
Both of his big books were really about how certain virtues worked in real life. HIs background ensured he told these stories in terms of virtue ethics.
The reason I like to point this out is a modern belief that markets are amoral is fundamentally flawed. Most of us are not moral philosophers by training, so we often stick to the intuitive model Aristotle documented without even realizing it. We can see this in our languages and stories, though we seldom take the time to do it. Through that lens, it's pretty easy to notice when anyone objects to the behavior of a particular billionaire, it is likely they are objecting this his character… or lack thereof. They are using virtue ethics even if they don't realize it.
I'm with you on the size of that strawman. Massive inequality IS a serious problem. My objections aren't about recognizing the problem. They are about the techniques some offer to solve the problem. Certain techniques have been tried all through the 20th century and led to the deaths of tens of millions… often with each attempt. Certain techniques are known failures… much like trickle down concepts.
Less extreme inequality is a laudable goal. I think we can get there through steps that free the people at the bottom. The vast majority of 'capital' is trapped in the heads of people who feel powerless. We can do something about that.
Don Gisselbeck,
I will remind you of the libertarian motto: if you can't compete, die. You denied that on the same thread you insisted everyone should be responsible for their own self defense, presumably including those of us incapable of it.
I understand this comment is directed at me. Sorry for not getting to it earlier.
You are guilty of two gross errors here, but I'll take them (for now) as attempts to paraphrase my position and take a moment to help clear the confusion.
1. Libertarian Motto: There are some who feel that way. I don't. I think it is grossly unethical and violates one of the few things all humans have in common. Individuals aren't the social atoms of which communities are made. Families are. Whether they are small or large, competition within a family is quite different than competition between families. Followers of Ayn Rand are simply wrong about what altruism means to us because individuals aren't the atoms and 'family' as a concept is a fuzzy thing. My wife wasn't part of my family when she was a kid. She is now. Her mother wasn't when I married my wife. She is now.
There are vocal libertarians who would like you to believe that Motto represents us. It doesn't. It is a gross failure to understand what humans actually are.
2. Self-defense: What I actually argued way back is our Police have two conflicting duties* and can perform both moderately well only occasionally. I used that point to argue we were better off having our own security because those hirelings would not have such a conflict.
I get that not everyone can hire security forces. That doesn't mean they can recognize the conflict and do something about it, though. Whether I'm rich enough to hire personal security or not, I can still take responsibility for my family's security. After recognizing the conflict among police forces, failure to adopt that responsibility feels to me like abdication of duty… to the people I love.
I'm not interested in depriving people of what security they can derive from local police, but I will point out what should be a glaring failure. The police don't protect people at the bottom of the social ladder very well. In many places, those members of our community are often seen as adversaries by the police. Who gets protected is often subject to a color wheel decision process.
* For the sake of helping anyone from having to search back through the threads, the conflicting duties are as follows.
1. Arrest law breakers, secure evidence, deliver suspects to local prosecutors.
2. Protect a community, the people in it, and their property.
reason,
If you want to argue that certain things should not be sold in a market, I'll consider any reasonable suggestions. We don't sell people anymore and I think that's a good thing. I doubt I would support preventing art from being sold, but I don't think that's your position.
Sounds to me like you put a high price on a van Gogh as well. In other words you'd agree with a bidder backed by private money that the art was worth… a lot. Where you wouldn't agree is what was to be done with it. Maybe. If so, that's the WHOLE POINT of our markets. How much you are willing to forego in order to achieve your ends IS a price. The bidder backed by private money intending to capture the piece for a private display is doing the same thing at the abstracted level. Markets abstract.
I'm not much of a fan of the extreme anarcho capitalist position. Too simplistic. Too ripe for the actions of many to become coherent creating groups and factions large enough to enforce meta-rules which defeat their simplistic modeling of markets.
However, I'm not sure I agree that increases of freedom conflict with making things exclusive. We are heading for a post-scarcity world where much of everything will be both exclusive and shared. The bulb I use to light a room will be exclusive, but the means for making it won't. We aren't there for a lot of things yet, but we are close enough on some of them that I don't feel like I'm arguing Ivory Tower principles when I defend some of what markets do.
Be very careful arguing that anything is inherently absurd with me. I'm likely to want to examine your assumptions. I might wind up agreeing with you, but I enjoy a good debate that winds up with me learning something new.
——
As for the price system not being well determined… of course it isn't. You say that like it would be a good thing if it was. I strongly disagree. Equilibria lead to stasis and people who capture meta-market rules.
I want NO equilibria.
I want innovation goring sacred cows.
This is necessary for our civilization to survive.
Jon S,
The reason gas prices stay high is people are willing to pay up to a point before using outside-the-market forces to bring prices back down. When people do that they are "cheating" by threatening political consequences. When suppliers collude to keep prices up, THEY are cheating in a way we try to make illegal.
Fundamentally, though, we are willing to pay quite a bit for gasoline. We just don't like it.
The 'damn good reason' is our desire to acquire gasoline IS reflected in the price.
——
There's a Chevron station down the road from that that consistently has its price about a dollar higher than most other stations. Almost no one stops there to buy gas. It's such an oddity for me that I watch it occasionally and wonder what's going on there. It's as if the owner doesn't want to sell gas.
My wife stopped there the other day and bought a couple gallons. She'd messed up and was near empty. (After that she drove over to the local CostCo and filled the rest of the tank at a MUCH lower price.) She told me what she observed before departing, though. The guy running the place ran out to her pump and read the numbers on it, carefully noting how much she bought, and then he ran back inside.
What possible sense is there to the behaviors we've seen at this one station? Well… someone might own it as a tax deduction. Another possibility is it acts as a front for some other kind of business. Maybe it's a way point for criminal transactions. I don't know. What I do know is the price they set makes some kind of sense to them even if it makes no sense to me. I know this because they've been at it for over two years. They have a 'damn good reason' for their price demand that influences whether or not be buy any.
——
Prices abstract away most of the information we can't possibly know about a possible transaction. Prices make it possible for us to simplify our choices enough to act… or not when we prioritize all our wants. We CAN know our side of a transaction much better (though not perfectly), so prices enable us to make do in a world of partial and imperfect information.
Larry,
…because I doubt Alfred perceives things in quite that manner.
Quite right. 8)
My only quibble is to advise against using terms like "floor" and "ceiling". They aren't that solid. In recent history we saw people buy bonds at negative interest rates which startled many who thought that a bond returning 0% HAD to be the ceiling price. [One buys bonds at prices relative to their maturity value. A 0% rate means the bond price IS the maturity price before maturation date.]
The words that work better are "bid" and "ask".
If you own asset X, I can bid a certain amount to you to coax you to sell. You can ask a different amount to coax me to buy. The bid/ask difference is the 'spread'.
The unfortunate truth about gasoline in the US (especially out west where I live) is we'd pay a LOT more than we currently do… if we had to do it. Long before that, though, we'd act as voters and threaten coercion of the asset owners. I know I say that like I think it is a bad thing… and I sorta do think it is a bad thing… but the asset owners aren't innocent lambs. It's still a bad thing, though, because price controls of all types mask the underlying reality of the market. They hide from us the true bid/ask values which means we don't really know exactly how we prioritize these purchases.
Energy prices aren't even the most egregious distortions we see. Look in the banking sector and you'll see a WHOLE lot more distortion and a related failure to understand the underlying value banking services bring to our lives. It's there and a big deal. Just ask the people who are locked out of using these services.
Alfred, "willing" is doing some pretty damn heavy lifting there. And you're the one who contended that there's "a damn good reason" for all pricing...
Alfred Differ:
Police have two conflicting duties*
Glad you cleared that up, because last time around, I thought you were asserting that police have no duty to protect citizens.
The words that work better are "bid" and "ask".
As the husband of a Realtor, I am pretty familiar with those terms, but I don't expect that most people are. Certainly not in the context of our normal daily transactions, in which the "ask" is pretty firm, and the "bidder" essentially chooses whether to bid the asking price or not to bid at all.
However, the point I was making with "ceiling" and "floor" was slightly different. In response to "The sale price should be proportional to the production cost," I was pointing out that the production cost set a kind of lower bound on what the asking price could be expected to be, whereas the value to potential buyers set a kind of upper bound, and that with gasoline in particular, there seemed to be a huge range between the two in which the price might fluctuate. Production costs might mean I'd sell gas at no less than $4.50 per gallon, but if they had to, people would pay as much as $6 or even $7. In Europe, they often pay the equivalent of $10 or more.
This is not a bid/ask dynamic, at least not the type seen in real estate or stock trades. In the gasoline example, the lower bound is on the ask price and the upper bound is on the bid. What stabilizes a price at any given time isn't a settlement between bid and ask, but rather "what the market will bear" in the sense that if I set my price too high above the lower bound, a competitor has plenty of room to undercut me to leech into my business while still making a profit. Consumers might be willing to pay $7 if they have no choice, but if Costco or Woodman's is letting it go for $4.99, they'll go there instead.
Alfred - sorry you have missed the point again. I am not particularly hung up on van Gogh - it is just that it is a particularly good example of the problem. Very rich people can take things that really would be more productive in the public realm out of it. And they do this by paying rent, not by prices that are part of a competitive equilibrium (because what they are buying has some element of uniqueness). The market calculates prices based on existing wealth, if wealth was distributed differently, then the prices would be different. Taxes come primarily out of rent (as pointed out by Henry George).
But rents are an opportunity, precisely because taxes affect rents first - they show just how much room for adjustment there is the price system which could be taxed. Now I am absolutely with you if you think we need to be careful how to design our tax and benefits systems to minimize distortions in the price system that is allocating resources to the production of things that benefit everybody, but that is completely from claiming that all taxes are distortionary. High inequality and the frequent absence of pricing for externalities is distortionary and wasteful.
Sports leagues that build up competition build up fans providing a better product.
One other bit of information regarding gas prices that may have been brought up here previously is that while prices quickly skyrocket when crude prices rise, it takes a while for them to drop when crude drops. This has been attributed to stations being forced to sell gas for no less than they paid for it; when they pay at a high to refill the storage tanks, until they sell off the high-priced gas they don't drop the price. They need to at least break even or they will be out of business soon.
“Do you deny that wealth equals power? We try to limit the power of governments, why shouldn't we limit the power of private tyrants.”
Only 1 of us here denies that. What almost ALL Americans share is a trained distrust of authority. WHICH authorities you fear determines left-right. It happens that current facts AND 6000 years of human experience show that the human tendency for the wealthy to cheat (and not compete) is the worse threat. Though, like Alfred, I am capable of turning my head toward government and saying “we’ve got our eyes on you, as well.”
My biggest complaint about Joe Biden? Not ONCE has he spoken to the long list of failure modes in our current system that Donald Trump exploited to grab unprecedented power and abuse his authority. Not once has Jobee said “Let’s systematically fix those failure modes, even if it means reducing MY power, as president.
Not only is that absolutely necessary. It is also something that would play very well for the midterms! It would make him and his party look truly sincere.
- Amendment to the absurdly broad War Powers Act
- Elimination of blanket Presidential power to declassify information, plus EXPIRATION DATES ON ALL LEVELS OF SECRECY.
- Use DEFINITIONS of crimes to hem in the President’s now-universal power of pardons.
- Drop the Justice Dept’s ‘finding’ that presidents cannot be sued or prosecuted, replaced by a “slow prosecution” process that limits a president to ten hours a week dealing with outside (e.g. legal) matters. That would deal with the silly argument of the ‘finding’ while still saying no president is above the law.
- Require financial statements & tax returns be public and create a commission to rule on conflicts of interest, like forcing the Secret Service to pay top rates at Trump hotels, or foreigners flocking to do the same.
- Strengthen the 25th amendment without needing a new amendment! It was originally intended to deal with non-hostile transfers of power due to incapacity. A president with a fanatically loyal cabinet and/or VP is immune. But look at it closely. A VP (like Pence) who cannot persuade a majority of cabinet fanatic loyalists could till appeal to an “other body” created by Congress! One incremental step: establish the amendment’s “other body” out of the nation’s most august retired judges, scientists and presidents. (See Chapter 16 of Polemical Judo, “Exit strategies: Surprising aspects of the 25th Amendment.”
There are so many other things JoBee could do that would incrementally protect us, in case a monster ever returns to the White House.
See more at Polemical Judo, by David Brin: http://www.davidbrin.com/polemicaljudo.html
TheMadLibrarian:
...stations being forced to sell gas for no less than they paid for it; when they pay at a high to refill the storage tanks, until they sell off the high-priced gas they don't drop the price. They need to at least break even or they will be out of business soon.
When prices are falling, though, what happens when the competitor across the street sells gas for $3.50 and they're still trying to unload their expensive stored gas at $6? They'll never sell anything.
I think I could make a case that the important figure is not that they sell the gas in their storage tanks for at least the cost of that gas, but that they sell it for at least the cost to refill the storage tanks next time.
"Glad you cleared that up, because last time around, I thought you were asserting that police have no duty to protect citizens."
Under current US law, they don't - courts have ruled this on more than one occasion.
Since dear Bill Maher has come up again, there's a quote from his July 29 Overtime program you can see here (it's at 4:30): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9qkIrvZVSM
They are talking about the Forward Party, the "middle" party that Andrew Yang wants to organize, and Bill says:
"What would happen--my prediction--is you could have it, a sensible middle party, and...what would happen is it would force the Democrats to go back to being the sensible middle party."
He basically states that the current Democratic party is not a "sensible middle party." Which begs the question, in what ways is the Democratic party currently not "sensible?"
His answers would seem to be that the Democrats are too woke; that they don't recognize gender (men are men and women are women--period); that they do not listen to the concerns of those who live in the country; etc. Which seem to me to be those parts of the Far Left which you emphasize do not control the Democratic party, although they do sympathize with them.
If you agree with Bill, I would be interested to know how the Democratic party--as shown through the actions of its leadership and the bills it tries to pass--is not "sensible." And how Democrats should expel these non-sensible aspects from the party.
A.F. Rey:
His answers would seem to be that the Democrats are too woke
Even though Maher is on the right side of the democracy vs fascism battle, he has some very specific betes noire that he holds against the Democratic Party.
He hates Islam, especially right now after Salman Rushdie was attacked, and he blames Democrats for being insufficiently willing to profile Muslims as potential terrorists.
He hates any kind of COVID restriction policy.
He blames Democrats for every excess of wokeness that the right caricatures the left with.
If you agree with Bill, ...
Well, I don't. Not on this issue, anyway. So, y'know...
I would be interested to know how the Democratic party--as shown through the actions of its leadership and the bills it tries to pass--is not "sensible." And how Democrats should expel these non-sensible aspects from the party.
The essence of this sort of argument seems to be that the Democrats allow the Republicans and the media to portray them as the most extreme of the leftists on Twitter. A "sensible" third party apparently means one who legislates the way Democrats do, but without the baggage Democrats have been associated with by their enemies.
One other bit of information regarding gas prices that may have been brought up here previously is that while prices quickly skyrocket when crude prices rise, it takes a while for them to drop when crude drops. This has been attributed to stations being forced to sell gas for no less than they paid for it; when they pay at a high to refill the storage tanks, until they sell off the high-priced gas they don't drop the price.
Um, yeah. Not buying that as an explanation, or else the gas prices wouldn't rise so fast when oil spikes, because that gas was bought at a lower price, and competition from nearby stations would keep the price low. (And given the length of the refining chain, by that logic a rise in oil prices should take longer to work its way through the supply chain than overnight.)
This "sensible middle party" has no positions. On anything. At all. Yang refuses to commit to literally anything in interviews. Their only apparent purpose is to attempt to siphon voters away from the Democratic Party, which in the current political climate puts them on the side of the fascists running the Republican Party.
Jon S:
Their only apparent purpose is to attempt to siphon voters away from the Democratic Party, which in the current political climate puts them on the side of the fascists running the Republican Party.
Like Ralph Nader and maybe Jill Stein, Andrew Yang seems to personally believe that the American people are sick of both Democrats and Republicans, and thirst for a viable alternative. However, like Ralph Nader and definitely Jill Stein, I suspect he is being funded and whispered into his ear by the fascists running the Republican Party.
He hates Islam, especially right now after Salman Rushdie was attacked, and he blames Democrats for being insufficiently willing to profile Muslims as potential terrorists.
Yeah, I remember from his pre-Trump days (or was it his early-Trump days--hard to remember that far back), he was really down on Muslims. He made it sound like the religion was especially corrupt.
Well, I don't. Not on this issue, anyway. So, y'know...
I was referring to Bill saying the Democrats would move toward the center, not any of his other issues. But then I was directing my comments at Dr. Brin, too. (I need to remember to be more specific when posting. :o)
A.F. Rey:
Yeah, I remember from his pre-Trump days (or was it his early-Trump days--hard to remember that far back), he was really down on Muslims. He made it sound like the religion was especially corrupt.
He's down on all religion, but he seems to particularly characterize Muslims as terrorists, and he sees failure to acknowledge that profile as akin to failure to acknowledge that AIDs was rampant in the gay male community. He's disdainful of liberals and Democrats for refusing to racially and ethnically profile.
I was referring to Bill saying the Democrats would move toward the center, not any of his other issues.
Well, I don't agree with him on that either. The Democrats are the sensible center right now, although their big tent tolerates leftist and left-leaning representatives who win their districts. They also tolerate Republican-lite Senators who win their states, as far as that goes.
But then I was directing my comments at Dr. Brin, too. (I need to remember to be more specific when posting. :o)
Well, I often put my two cents into comments directed to someone else, although I hope I usually mention that fact right off and don't presume to speak for anyone else.
AFR tyhere are times when I wish Maher would delineate more clearly the distinction between a sensible liberal position (e.g. stop opressing women with unrealistic body images) vs. its crazy extension (e.g. it is body shaming to urge folks to exercise and control apetities for the sake of their health and everyone's taxes.)
But it is standard lefty nonse4nse to proclaim that liberalism must only be about their symbolism fetishes at cost of building the wide coalition needed to defeat the Foxite -confederate treason cult.
Maher is 90% right that our common goals are HARMED... very, very badly ... by aggressive-nasty-antagonistic symbolism police. And there is huge overlap between those folks - our own side's mad cultists - and those who betrayed us in 1980, 88, 94, 2000, 2010 and 2016, growling and snarking and betraying the only (Union) coalition that might save civilization.
Imperfection is different from evil.
Even after all that Biden and Pelosi have accomplished, that demographic still spews acid hate at them. And anyone who complains is "attcking progressives." No. We are criticiosing traitors to the very causes they claim to espouse.
And no, it does not weaken our side to complain about our mad wing of creepy symbolism bullies.
To be clear:
Yes, the FAR left CONTAINS fact-allergic, troglodyte-screeching dogmatists who wage war on science and hate the American tradition of steady, pragmatic reform, and who would impose their prescribed morality on you.
But today’s mad ENTIRE right CONSISTS of fact-allergic, troglodyte-screeching dogmatists who wage war on science and hate the American tradition of steady, pragmatic reform, and who would impose their prescribed morality on you.
There is all the world’s difference between FAR and ENTIRE. As there is between CONTAINS and CONSISTS.
But I tell you now, anyone who does not come down HARD on those seeking excuses to repeat the betrayl;s of 80, 88, 94, 2000, 2010 and 2016 is NOT a soldier in this Union army. Your vote is one rifle shot aimed generally at the grays at Gettysburg, after which you turn and leave the battlefield.
We need more than your damn vote.
It's all about subtext.
By talking about fair-open-level-equal competition, Dr. Brin is actually making the moral argument that cooperation (aka 'collectivism') equals morality as a supreme & unmitigated good.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/701478
Also know as the Morality-as-Cooperation (MAC) theory, this argument draws on non-zero-sum game theory to describe seven well-established types of cooperation which are believed to be universally 'good' in scope & uniformly 'moral' across all types of human society.
These seven types of cooperation are often described as follows:
(1) the allocation of resources to kin;
(2) coordination to mutual advantage;
(3) social exchange by transaction;
(4) conflict resolution through contests for dominance;
(5) conflict resolution through dovish displays of submission;
(6) the division of disputed resources; and
(7) the recognition of prior possession.
This MAC theory is problematic for a number of reasons, the most important (imho) being linguistic bias, insomuch as each & every one of these enumerated moral 'goods' contains its own immoral synonym, as in the case of (1) 'the allocation of resources to kin' being synonymous with nepotistic in-group bias, (2) 'coordination to mutual advantage' being an euphemism for conspiracy, (3) 'social exchange by transaction' being a stand-in for exploitative mercantilism, (4) 'conflict resolution through contests for dominance' being Might_Makes_Right & bullying, (5) 'conflict resolution through dovish displays of submission' being appeasement or surrender, (6) 'the division of disputed resources' being confiscation & reallocation and (7) the 'recognition of prior possession' being the perpetuation of wealth inequality.
But, you don't have to take my word for it, you can read all about MAC theory at the link provided above, which is then immediately followed by a number of well-read & knowledgeable critical responses.
I've made this point over & over:
Words don't mean what you think they mean and the term 'competition', especially as heavily modified by Dr. Brin, is used to signify 'cooperation by rule obedience & submission to a greater moral authority' rather than its textbook definition.
These self-styled progressives are absolutely terrified of 'competition', and so they've attempted to do away with it, by redefining it exclusively in terms of fairness, equality, equity & cooperation.
In Dr Brin's own words:
Cooperation and competition are essential partners, not opposites.
Best
Looking from the outside - the Dems are NOT NOT NOT a "left wing" party - they appear to be significantly to the right of our "National Party"
And when you look at positions the people support the US people are well to the "left" of the Dems
Even if they think they are not
Looking from the outside - the Dems are NOT NOT NOT a "left wing" party - they appear to be significantly to the right of our "National Party"
As I've said repeatedly, the Democrats are equivalent to the left wing of Canada's Conservative Party. Bernie Sanders and AOC would fit comfortably into our centrist Liberal Party.
America doesn't really have an equivalent of our NDP, which is left by Canadian standards (but not very far left by European ones).
Reading this item about the preference for group chats as opposed to more public social media like Facebook or Twitter. I can't help but notice that this blog serves that function for me.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/13/opinion/group-chats-social-media.html
...
On my Twitter feed, strangers rant. Instagram feels like a beautiful day at the beach with the theme song to “Jaws” in the background. Facebook is like a phone book to me, something I need in the house but don’t use often. My group chats are where I go with work drama, or an article I can drop like a bomb, or my random hot take about the best carb (where my potato people at?). They’re serious. They’re frivolous. They’re where I can be online but stay human.
...
But the real secret to a good group chat isn’t disappearing messages — it’s trust. My group chats are made up of friends I would unbutton my pants in front of after a big meal. What we say to one another is unguarded and real.
That’s not to say that these should be places where anything goes. The unwritten rules of group chats are the same as in real-life friendships: Be a decent person. Walk away from anyone toxic.
...
This sounds like even more (Negative) fun:
https://prospect.org/justice/conservative-plan-to-subvert-antitrust-enforcement/
An attempt has been envisioned to get the (Extreme) Court to rule the delegation of legislative enforcement by regulatory agencies unconstitutional. This implies plentiful opportunities for unforeseen consequence.
Cooperation and competition are essential partners, not opposites.
It's Orwellian, the type of redefinition that our host engages in, and he does it very very well because he is exceptionally talented.
Step 1: Start with a term like 'Competition' or 'Freedom'.
Step 2: Apply a modifying adjective to said term, something like 'well-regulated', 'limited' or 'fair-open-level-equal', and create a new term along the lines of 'Well-REGULATED Competition' or 'LIMITED Freedom'.
Step 3: Empathize the modifier over the original term in order to synonymize & equalize the original term with its modifier.
Step 4: The modifier of the modified term is then further synonymized in order to create an entirely new equivalency, insomuch as the term 'regulation' requires (and equals) cooperation and 'limitations' signify a lack & deficiency of the described quality.
Step 5: Since the term 'Competition' now EQUALS Cooperation and the term 'Freedom' now EQUALS a term that best describes 'a lack or deficiency' thereof, your brand spanking new definitions are as follows:
Competition is Cooperation and Freedom is Slavery.
And the 'C-Word' means darn near anything that our host wants it to mean.
Best
_____
@Duncan & Robert:
Please tell us more about how the US Democrats are the EQUIVALENT OF or the EQUAL TO something entirely different than what they are, like some other political party or perhaps a Rutabaga, because there's a new campaign slogan in there somewhere, waiting to be born.
You meant to write emphasize, not empathize?
The key is teamwork: a firm involves teamwork, wouldn’t exist without it. There is some degree of competition within the firm—and, naturally, competition with other firms.
Alan Brooks:
The key is teamwork: a firm involves teamwork, wouldn’t exist without it.
In sports, two rival teams compete against each other for the win, but the cooperate in producing entertainment value that fans will pay for.
In politics, corporations compete against each other for market share, but cooperate in instituting a fascist government.
There is some degree of competition within the firm—and, naturally, competition with other firms.
There was a recent CEO of Sears who was supposedly a fan of Ayn Rand*. His brilliant plan was to make the individual divisions of the company compete with each other to demonstrate profitability. So for instance, the IT department and the Sales department each had to try to beat each other as to how much revenue they could generate.
* I say "supposedly" because this doesn't actually sound like something Ayn Rand would be in favor of. It's something she portrayed the villains of Atlas Shrugged doing in their quasi-communistic Starnesville factory, the one John Galt resigned from for just this reason.
Clearly vitamins have him making polysyllabic incantations. From a quick skim tho, alas poor L raves that he - a flatlander - can see 3D.
No other society ever empowered such a huge fraction of the population to leverage their skills and training to compete effectively in fields of their own choosing. In L's beloved feudal realms - 99% of human history - cheaters at the top crushed potential competitors. He never glances at that.
SO no excape dude. You are an utter traitor to the very concept of competition, as you are to America.
Jon S.,
"Willing" certainly IS doing the heavy lifting. I don't want to sound flippant, but that is often true of existence verbs.
There IS a damn good reason for all pricing.
That does not mean we like them.
That doesn't even mean we know them at a collective level.
Prices aren't matters of public deliberation. They are matters between traders and the ghosts of all those who contributed to asset X being traded without any of them grasping it en toto.
Larry,
Production costs often DO set a floor for acceptable 'asks', but there are plenty of counter examples that show it isn't true in general. Any asset that carries with it a cost of ownership (think retail goods occupying shelf space) might get dumped by an owner at a price that fails to recover production costs. Every money-losing movie provides another example since theaters are rarely able to set ticket prices proportional to movie production budgets. There is a LOT of guessing going on.
Even home prices show that the theory doesn't always work. I'm currently working at resurfacing our stairway. Dumped the carpet. Putting in a more modern look involving hardwoods. Will I recover my investment in a future sale? Who knows.
Producers like to think their prices should be proportional to production costs, but markets treat those costs as sunk. Buyers don't have to give a damn. The floor is an illusion.
reason,
I don't think I'm missing your point.
I'm pointing at another point that undermines your position.
For example…
Very rich people can take things that really would be more productive in the public realm out of it.
You likely accept this without much examination of how anyone can possibly know it. I don't. You are describing a 'merit function' that I argue CANNOT exist. What you and others call 'productive' is not something upon which we all agree, so optimization isn't just impossible. It's undefinable.
The market calculates prices based on existing wealth…
Indeed it does. Trades are always priced relative to what the traders have. That's why they are best measured as ratios. I'm not paying $X to buy a slice of pizza for lunch. I'm paying a percentage of what I can afford for the slice. At the register it looks like I pay $X, but that's not how humans make their decisions.
Beer and hotdogs at a baseball stadium vs a retail store shows there are other variables in play too. I'm not really buying the beer and hotdog. I'm buying an experience.
High inequality and the frequent absence of pricing for externalities is distortionary and wasteful.
I'm mostly with you on that point… until you use the term 'wasteful'. Again, you assume a merit function that can't possibly exist. Many like to think it does, but try to write it down and you'll see (eventually) the impossibility. It's not just hard to do. It is literally impossible.
Alfred Differ:
Production costs often DO set a floor for acceptable 'asks', but there are plenty of counter examples that show it isn't true in general.
I said "a kind of floor". All exceptions duly noted.
Even home prices show that the theory doesn't always work. I'm currently working at resurfacing our stairway. Dumped the carpet. Putting in a more modern look involving hardwoods. Will I recover my investment in a future sale? Who knows.
Yes, but your home isn't just a commodity you buy and sell. It's also a consumable thing that you live in for X years of your life. Part of the value of having a home is in its usefulness to you as shelter, and part of it is the desirability of the particular house as a place to live.
Even moreso with a car. I'm the kind who keeps a car until it literally rusts apart. I will never sell a car for what I paid for it, let alone at a profit, but I don't consider myself cheated for all that.
A gas station owner is buying gasoline to sell. The commodity has no other value to him. So he at least wants to sell it for more than he bought it for. Sure, under certain circumstances, selling at a loss ends up being better than the alternative if the alternative is not selling it at all, but that's not the happy path.
Producers like to think their prices should be proportional to production costs, but markets treat those costs as sunk. Buyers don't have to give a damn. The floor is an illusion.
Hey, I was arguing against "Prices should be proportional to production costs," remember? :)
Why did the orange asset keep above-top-secret nuclear and signal-intelligence documents? Snafu? Avarice? As souvenirs? As leverage against prosecution? To sell?
If to sell, then he's a traitor. If from snafu, or as souvenirs, then he's a moron. My cynical father taught me that a fool is worse than a crook: for you must police a crook, but a fool is a force of nature. So when I call him an 'orange asset', that's my way of being an optimist.
Who informed on him? Someone told the DOJ that he had the documents, and where he had them. So who's the snitch, the mole, the rat? Jared? Ivanka? Meadows? Melania? The Secret Service? And who but a criminal worries about snitches, moles, rats?
@Paradoctor,
I'm guessing you already have seen this ad by The Lincoln Project.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcVSC-BgTww
The best line is the subliminal whisper, "She wants to escape!"
Another reason that he might have taken them was "because they are mine"! The characteristic that is bigger than his idiocy is his narcissism.
I agree with this. The problem I have is that a power ratio of one to ten or even one to one hundred is acceptable. The power ratio between untermenschen like myself and a critter like Musk is more like one to one million.
Simple question, should teh ebul gummint use its oppressive power to make it possible for us untermenschen to live decent lives?
Alfred, I say "willing" is doing some pretty heavy lifting in that example because for many of us, there is simply no choice. You purchase gasoline at the available price, even if that price is disconnected from anything except the avarice of ExxonMobil executives and the like, or you don't go to work. If you don't go to work, you don't get paid. If you don't get paid, you can't buy groceries or pay rent.
Thanks be to a number of (actually rather horrific) circumstances, I no longer have to work to survive. (Which is fortunate, as one of those circumstances means I am no longer able to work to survive.) But when I was still working, while I lived in a house in Puyallup's South Hill area, my job was in Auburn. Thanks to someone working very hard to ruin public transit so that he didn't have to pay so much for the tags on his Mercedes SUV back in the late '90s, the only way for me to get to work was to drive. I could shop around among the fuel stations between here and there, but I was required to purchase fuel at one of them - "willing" didn't enter into it. And if (as appears from casual observation to be the case) the oil companies colluded amongst themselves to keep the price high, my "shopping around" mattered not a whit.
"So move closer!" I hear the cry. To which I challenge you to check out the housing market in Pierce and King Counties in Washington state, and then figure out how I was supposed to afford to buy another house when I was pulling down twelve bucks an hour (telephone customer service for Verizon).
Larry,
Homes owned vs rented is the trade your wife will know all too well. Both have value to me, but which one I choose depends a great deal what it means to my long term cash flow. I'm not among the folks who think these things make good investments with respect to capital gains, though. It's obvious they are all about rents and depreciations.
One exception to the investment rule, though, occurs in places where school districts involve firm neighborhood boundaries. Your kid's access to education is something upon which you'd place high value.
Anyway, I DID notice you weren't arguing for proportionality. You were suggesting it was weaker. Maybe a step function. I'm arguing the relationship is even weaker than that. It's an illusion that looks like either one until a bunch of us catch the 'animal spirits' and show it's really about whatever we feel at the moment. Consider tulips and pet rocks.
Jon S.,
because for many of us, there is simply no choice.
Yah. I figured that was where this was going. It's not true, though. You do have a choice. It's just that you don't like it. It's like the choice a thirsty man lost in the desert has to make when a gouging salesman finds him and offers to sell him some water. Buy or don't.
You weren't required to buy gas even in the example you gave. You chose to buy gas in order to keep your job. No one made you buy gas. YOU wanted to keep your job and that forced your hand in many ways. Your alternatives likely sucked, so I won't pretend there was anything pleasant about it.
I have a number of circumstances associated with my life in the 80's that forced my hand in many ways too. Through most of the late 80's I was noticeably below the poverty line. It ALL hinged on my choice to stick through grad school and complete my degree. I spent way too long doing it, but one choice dictated many results. If that doesn't sound as vital as 'keeping your job' please understand I was training for a job that I thought would lead to long term security. Turns out I was wrong about all that, but I didn't know that in the late 80's.
I won't use the 'move closer' argument. I used to, but then I tried it. It's damn difficult. Through the 80's I learned to live on mass transit routes, though. I DID manage to ditch my car between '85 and '96 and that made all the difference between renting and eating vs just renting. Took awhile to learn how to make my time productive as I sat on buses that went everywhere except where I wanted to go, however.
——
My way out of that kind of poverty arrived like a smack in the face one day when someone said "You choose to be poor" and took the time to explain it as something other than a disdainful attack. He pointed out my choices and asked what alternatives I had. Whenever I said "none", he shook his head and said "leave that path" as the alternate.
His explanation worked on me, but not because he was exceptionally persuasive. Turns out I had already begun to take steps to "leave the path" I had been on. I was disenchanted with becoming a professor by then. I hadn't given up, but I wasn't taking the job search seriously. I was beginning to take any kind of job that produced frequent paychecks instead of education related ones with miserable pay and infrequent checks.
The biggest change, though, was the fact that I'd fallen in love and was no longer willing to be poor. (See? Not Willing!) She really didn't expect it of me. No doubt she thought her new relationship involved a guy heading for academia. I was already in mid-pivot, though, and went toward software engineering in the financial sector. They were throwing money at anyone with a pulse in the mid-90's. I left a path I had never imagined I'd leave. But I did it and ALL the related constraints that seemed like requirements upon me collapsed. My old choice had caused them. My new choice undid them.
Sure. There are other constraints on me now that are related to other choices I've made along the way. I see them, though. I know what they are and how they came to be. I can undo them if I so choose.
Don Gisselbeck,
If your last question was directed at me (I'm not sure) I'd say the answer is "no". Neither should it use oppressive power to make it impossible for you to live a decent life.
YOU are responsible for doing what you can to enable a decent life. Government can help, but only up to a point. They can remove and discourage cheaters to ensure you don't spend your meager treasure in a negative sum spiral into poverty.
I'd challenge you to point out exactly how a billionaire (pick one) harms you. If you can pinpoint the exact harm they do to you, it's possible you'll be able to describe a "cheat" for which we can construct a mitigation. It's not easy, though. Rich people do all sorts of distasteful things, but precisely naming the harm isn't easy.
Córy Doctorow has ideas that might help Democrats win more:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/16/do-stuff-talk-about-it/#under-a-bushel
The catch is a strong possibility of alienating the donors. Given the dystopic potential of our current direction, it might be a worthwhile risk.
Alfred Differ:
Homes owned vs rented is the trade your wife will know all too well. Both have value to me, but which one I choose depends a great deal what it means to my long term cash flow.
My point in this context was that you don't necessarily have profit in mind when you make certain improvements to the house you actually reside in. Some improvements are simply for your own benefit. Whereas if you're an investor whose aim is to rent or sell the place, then any improvements you make will likely be with an eye toward charging more increased rent or in sale price than the improvement cost you. And that the gas station owner with respect to the product is in the investor role more than he is in the homeowner role.
One exception to the investment rule, though, occurs in places where school districts involve firm neighborhood boundaries. Your kid's access to education is something upon which you'd place high value.
Off topic, but I understand very well. When our daughter was born, my wife meticulously researched nearby school districts and came up with a very short list of districts that we would even consider moving to.
Anyway, I DID notice you weren't arguing for proportionality. You were suggesting it was weaker. Maybe a step function. I'm arguing the relationship is even weaker than that. It's an illusion that looks like either one until a bunch of us catch the 'animal spirits' and show it's really about whatever we feel at the moment.
All I'll say in response is that "whatever we feel at the moment" in somewhat influenced by a consciousness of profit vs loss on the transaction. Not entirely determined by that, but it's one of the factors. Especially when profit, as opposed to personal consumption, is the point of the transaction.
Consider tulips and pet rocks.
I'd also throw in poly-bagged mint-condition issues of "The Death of Superman". Or for some people, the entire stock market. :)
I'm not sure what point you're making, though. In none of these cases did people buy with the intent to sell for less than their cost. In fact, the whole point was that there would be plenty of new suckers who would pay much more than your cost.
If you're saying that the things took on a perceived value of their own which has nothing to do with the cost to produce, then sure. People infused them with value which seems irrational looking back into time. But I don't see that as refuting anything I said on the subject. In fact, it reinforces my point that people are reluctantly willing to pay even more than today's high gas prices if that's their only option for obtaining it.
On third parties and instant runoff voting...
This has bugged me for some time, and I think I finally figured out how to articulate that. If "first past the post" is a problem, why isn't "last past the post" just as much of a problem instead of the solution? In the current system, whoever had the most votes wins (even if even more votes are not for them). In the proposed solution, IRV, whoever has the least votes is eliminated and has their votes re-apportioned. Mathematically, both processes seem to suffer from the same deficiency.
I think the reason IRV seems better is because, in the modern day, most voters seem to care more about who they don't want elected than who they do want elected. In 2016, Jill Stein and even Gary Johnson are said to have "taken votes away" from Hillary, allowing Trump to win. Why not say instead that those voters were more enthusiastic about someone else than Hillary, so Trump was the one with the most solid support? Because all of those non-Trump voters probably despised Trump more than they wanted their particular candidate to win. I wasn't kidding when I said my cat would be a better president than Trump, but that doesn't mean I expect that my cat would be the best possible candidate. I meant that he is better than the worst possible candidate.
Joe Biden won the nomination in 2020 because the Democratic Party perceived him to be the one candidate who could oust Trump in a general election. He wasn't most people's favorite Democrat, but Democrats cared more about beating Trump than they did about which Democrat would replace him.
So it seems to me that instant runoff voting is superior to the current system only because the current political climate has our top priority as preventing one candidate or another from being elected. Who actually wins to oust that candidate is of secondary importance. I'm not sure Alexander Hamilton and the boys meant for our elections to be that way, but that seems to be where we are.
Translation, "If you can't compete, die."
Some people here need to watch the latest from Adam Something.https://youtu.be/yDEL1pTYOhs
Why is proportionality of outcomes so hard for libertarians to understand?
Alfred, my alternative to working was literally to die, starving to death as I watched my wife and daughter die for lack of insulin. There was no third path. Various charitable programs turn out not to be very charitable when you're a forty-year-old man whose disabilities are all invisible. (Can't imagine they'd be any more charitable toward a man with no real disabilities at all, who just wants an alternative to buying gas.) And as I mentioned, there are no buses in this region - to anywhere. There used to be a line that ran about three miles from this house (which we bought when our circumstances were better and the prices were about half what they are now), but that was shut down around 2000 because the revenue loss from auto registration meant there was no money for transit that didn't pay for itself.
I mean, I suppose I could have become one of those guys hanging around the freeway offramps holding a cardboard sign, but it doesn't look like they're making much money either...
And you have yet to enlighten me as to the "damn good reason" that gasoline prices reached almost $6/gal when the oil companies could have kept turning a very nice profit while charging station owners considerably less.
I will retract my claim that the libertarian motto is; if you can't compete, die. It is instead; if you can't compete, you deserve to live a life that is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short".
@Don Gisslebeck,
The distinction between "a life that is...short" and "die" being one without a difference.
So it seems to me that instant runoff voting is superior to the current system only because the current political climate has our top priority as preventing one candidate or another from being elected.
As someone living in a multi-party democracy, that's not really the attraction of IRV.
Philosophically, I support the NDP. I haven't actually voted for them in years, because polling showed that they stood no chance of getting elected in my riding. Instead I've voted for the Liberal candidate, because although I disagree with some of that party's policies I agree with most of them — just not as many as with the NDP. I do not support the Conservatives, which ditched their progressive wing a generation ago and are now solidly right-wing populist. (I have, in the past, supported a Conservative government, but Joe Clark is long gone.)
So with FPTP I vote Liberal. With IRV I'd vote NDP, then Liberal. (If Bernier's People's Party become more significant locally I might have to add Conservative as a third option — the American equivalent might be choosing between Liz Cheney and Ron DeSantis.)
A big problem with strategic voting (which is what I've been doing for years) is that it hides the true level of support apparently minor parties have in the population. If every NDP supporter does like I do, the party has no chance of getting elected. IRV would provide more transparency in terms of what voters actually want, while still letting voters support 'acceptable enough' candidates if their primary choices are too much a minority opinion.
All of which ignores the personal element. Federally right now I'd vote Liberal even if the NDP had a chance in my riding, because my current Liberal MP is an amazing chap, hardworking, caring, and with solid ethics. He listens to everyone, is open to discussion and changing his position, and looks for ways to meet everyone's needs. (He managed to get his Private Member's Motion unanimously supported in Parliament, which almost never happens.) An honest, hard-working politician is worth a lot, especially when I know he actively listens to opinions counter to his own.
Ayup.
It's the duty of the company (to the shareholders) to charge all the market can bear. Unless you are deliberately undercutting a possible competitor to your captive market. Back in the pre-capitalist days, merchants who charged huge prices for grain during famines - as teh markets say they should, never mind the death rate - were well advised to hire armed guards. Which wouldn't help when the king's men came knocking, as Richard I's did at the siege of Tyre when he found merchants hoarding grain to jack the prices even higher.
Humans can instinctively understand the concept of "price gouging" even though it's hard to define. Someone is taking advantage of their suffering. Marx was right about that.
Robert:
"So it seems to me that instant runoff voting is superior to the current system only because the current political climate has our top priority as preventing one candidate or another from being elected."
As someone living in a multi-party democracy, that's not really the attraction of IRV.
Philosophically, I support the NDP. I haven't actually voted for them in years, because polling showed that they stood no chance of getting elected in my riding. Instead I've voted for the Liberal candidate, because although I disagree with some of that party's policies I agree with most of them — just not as many as with the NDP. I do not support the Conservatives, which ditched their progressive wing a generation ago and are now solidly right-wing populist. (I have, in the past, supported a Conservative government, but Joe Clark is long gone.)
Your second paragraph seems to agree with me, even though your stated intent is to disagree.
A big problem with strategic voting (which is what I've been doing for years) is that it hides the true level of support apparently minor parties have in the population. If every NDP supporter does like I do, the party has no chance of getting elected. IRV would provide more transparency in terms of what voters actually want, while still letting voters support 'acceptable enough' candidates if their primary choices are too much a minority opinion.
Yes, I suppose that's one asymmetry between the one with the most votes winning vs the one with the least votes being dropped. With IRV, someone has to (eventually) get a majority to win, meaning more votes fer 'im than again' 'im. There's no equivalent to that in "First past the post" voting.
I'm still thinking that dropping the lowest vote-getter must have an equivalent problem to electing the highest vote-getter. But I admit I haven't been able to come up with a specific example of that being a problem yet.
An honest, hard-working politician is worth a lot, especially when I know he actively listens to opinions counter to his own.
I think extreme partisanship is more of a problem than even "first past the post" is. Personally, I would rather see Adam Kinsinger or Liz Cheney in their respective houses than their more Trumpy colleagues, but if I were in a position to vote for either of them, it would be with the knowledge that a vote for Kinsinger is a vote for Kevin McCarthy as speaker and a vote for Cheney is a vote for Mitch McConnell as majority leader. Whether or not I admire their personal integrity is irrelevant, because their presence increases Republican power in their houses. Even if they personally vote against Republican bills which I oppose, those bills will be more likely to pass with Republican majorities than without.
It used to seem virtuous to vote for the best candidate, regardless of party, but these days, it seems as if the party is all you are voting for. If you give Republicans a majority, you'll get one outcome. If you give Democrats a majority, you'll get a different one. It almost doesn't matter who those individual Republicans and Democrats are. Sure, Manchin and Sinema make a difference, as to Kinsinger and Cheney, but only because the majorities in both houses are so slim.
I messed up the reference above, because Liz Cheney is also a Representative, not a Senator. Ok, Mitt Romney, then. Point still stands.
Alfred,
"You likely accept this without much examination of how anyone can possibly know it. I don't. You are describing a 'merit function' that I argue CANNOT exist. What you and others call 'productive' is not something upon which we all agree, so optimization isn't just impossible. It's undefinable.
I've heard this type of argument of before. It is analogous with the arguments fundamentalists make about science - that it can't tell you what things are. But as our host has pointed out, it can narrow the field - it can tell us what it isn't.
One of the most basic ideas in economics is the idea of diminishing returns. The more money you have the less each extra unit earned is worth to you. A corollary of that is that a dollar taken from a rich man and given to a beggar is always a net win. So only considering short term consequences the easiest way to increase total welfare is a simple Robin Hood policy, take from the rich and give to the poor. This may not actually be the best policy because it will have longer term consequences (and the production to satisfy the changed structure of demand will not be there). But the onus should always be on those arguing against this to show why that is preferable not the other way around.
I think a simple reductio ad absurdum argument can illustrate this. Imagine a world in which most of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small proportion of the population. These rich people have plenty to eat, wear, more than enough housing and plenty of time. There country has rich agricultural land but a high population. And what they like to do is hunt or play golf, i.e. engage in pastimes that require a lot of relatively empty land. So they enclose this land and remove the local population who were growing food on the land. Then the local population starts to starve. This is all well and good according to your agnostic welfare function, we can't compare on allocation of resources to another. I call bullshit. And this has happened - for instance in Scotland and Ireland.
IRV increases the chance that other parties can actually build enough of a following to compete with the big two in elections. Part of why people cling so much now to party affiliation is because there really aren't any viable alternatives. Voting for a third party currently translates mostly into hurting whichever of the big two parties aligns better with your priorities and that you would have given the vote to instead. Under IRV new parties could develop enough to actually impact elections, and there'd be more pressure on the bigger parties to pay attention to the priorities of those voting for those parties to keep them from bleeding off enough of their voters to actually win.
I highly doubt under a proper IRV system that the current Republican party would survive without a schism. The two party system is primarily what keeps it together. This is no doubt one of the reasons they're not big fans of ranked choice voting.
Curi Burstein
YES! I keep trying to get Americans to see that a lot of the problem with their country is caused by the two party system, where other parties are only enemies to be defeated and not potential coalition partners - without success mostly. It also means that playing referees is not so attractive a strategy. When there are many competitors, they want a fair competition, when their are only two cheating looks easier than competing.
On a completely different point, Our resident Libertarian Alfred at one stage mentioned that he sees the unit of society not as individuals but as families. In fact in Germany where I live that traditionally is how the law functioned. If your parents went broke you had to bail them out, same with your children up to the age of 27. Gradually they are trying to move away from this. For two reasons - 1 - it is a poverty trap, you can be pulled down by forces you have no ability to control, 2 - many families are dysfunctional and tyrannical. In fact one the most important features of social democratic society is that is FREES people from their families. People can leave if they want to. I know some conservatives see this and think it is a bad thing. But how can a libertarian believe this?
Libertarian means different things to different people. I think one thing almost all the strains of libertarian agree on is individualism, but the pro-capitalist libertarians seem to show a strong tendency to draw the battle lines between the individual and the state, whereas I (and maybe others, maybe not) tend to draw the battle lines between individuals and institutions, and I treat families as the latter, along with business, government, religion, and even mores and folkways. To me personal freedom is economic independence being a low-hanging fruit, and economic freedom is freedom from economics. But I don't profess to be a libertarian, even a left libertarian.
Those interested in both A. Smith and K. Marx may find How Adam Smith Inspired Karl Marx - Economic Update with Richard Wolff interesting. Admittedly, I find Dr. Wolff (like most Marxians) to be a bit doctrinaire, and altogether too preachy, but I find his presentation here to be quite even-handed.
It used to seem virtuous to vote for the best candidate, regardless of party, but these days, it seems as if the party is all you are voting for.
Years ago, Father Bob Ogle (Catholic priest) was also an MP, running for the NDP. (Canada's most left-wing party.) He made it clear before the election (and after) that he would follow his conscience even when that meant voting against the party. He was sufficiently popular and respected that even staunch conservatives voted for him.
Maybe that's not possible now, but I think it's an ideal worth upholding, if one finds such a candidate.
If the GOP is leading us towards a political national emergency, voting Democratic in the presidential election is a sane action.
A viable third party would take awhile to get up to speed. Then convincing enough of the electorate to vote for an acceptable candidate would take a longer time. We’d need someone who knows a great deal about foreign relations. A good third party candidate who has enough experience/knowledge re foreign affairs is a tall order.
Biden had four years experience as VP, which made him more of a rational choice than he already was in 2020.
At any rate, we wouldn’t want to vote for someone such as Ralph Nader for potus—would we? An open question.
There's probably better language to use to discuss it, but IRV (or ranked ballot, which is what it's often called up here) is in some ways like voters negotiating for who represents them. In effect the ballot says "I most want candidate B, but if I can't have them I'd like D, if if she's not in the running them I'll take A…". FPTP is basically "I want B or nobody" which is how we regularly get politicians with less than 40% of the vote. (Generally right-wing, because our right-wing parties form by fracture and recombination, with the righter-wing party usually taking over.)
Suppose that David agreed to bake a pie for everyone here, but only one so we had to vote for the type of pie. If the choices are apple or pumpkin, then FPTP works as well as anything. But if the options are apple, blueberry, rhubarb, lemon, pecan, pumpkin, or saskatoon then it gets harder. Personally I'd really like a saskatoon pie, but if I vote for that in FPTP I'm likely to get stuck with whatever has a plurality with the rest of you, so I'm better off trying to guess which of the other choices are most likely to get voted for and chose the one I like best from that sublist. With IRV I can safely pick saskatoon (in the faint hope that enough of you also like it, or want to try it) knowing that if that's the least popular option I still get to express an opinion and ask for an apple pie. I might really want saskatoon pie, but I'm OK with apple and I'd rather have that than rhubarb so my vote still counts.
I'm still voting for saskatoon. What my ranked ballot is saying is that if that isn't an option I still have preferences, and my vote still counts. When we finally settle on a pie over half of us will be saying that while it may not be our favourite pie we still like it. I suppose if we get down to the fifth runoff we might be voting more against ("I'm not that find of lemon but at least it isn't pecan") but up here at least most runoffs happen in the first couple of recounts.
We actually did have non-FPTP elections for city councils in a couple of Ontario cities. (Municipal elections here don't have parties and often have larger numbers of candidates, like maybe a dozen.) Our right-wing provincial government stopped that because apparently letting citizens decide how to govern their own towns is undemocratic. (This is the same government that is bringing in American-style strong mayors with much more power — that can only be used to enforce provincial cabinet priorities. And only in the cities that didn't vote right-wing in the last provincial election.)
A good third party candidate who has enough experience/knowledge re foreign affairs is a tall order.
I get the impression that being good at foreign affairs isn't particularly useful in getting elected president. I mean, look at Trump…
Robert:
In effect the [IRV] ballot says "I most want candidate B, but if I can't have them I'd like D, if if she's not in the running them I'll take A…".
That's a good way of putting it.
Our right-wing provincial government stopped that because apparently letting citizens decide how to govern their own towns is undemocratic.
America's right-wing has gone the extra step. They now denounce the very concept of democracy and bellow that "We're a Republic!" as if that somehow means that representative government isn't supposed to reflect the will of the population.
Of course, what they mean is that the system is supposed to reflect the will of the white Christian conservative males, no matter what anyone else thinks. And they're pretty close to saying that out loud too.
What I really like is ranked choice combined with multi-member districts. Combine multiple house districts into a larger district, hold ranked choice voting, and then take the top N candidates.
In the pie ranking example, it would be like eliminating the least popular pie until there was 2 (or 3) types, and then baking those pies. With multiple winners, you have a much better chance of a minority party or less popular pie getting picked.
It is why I support the Fair Representation Act
https://www.fairvote.org/fair_rep_in_congress#why_we_need_the_fair_representation_act
Lorraine:
I think one thing almost all the strains of libertarian agree on is individualism, but the pro-capitalist libertarians seem to show a strong tendency to draw the battle lines between the individual and the state, whereas I (and maybe others, maybe not) tend to draw the battle lines between individuals and institutions, and I treat families as the latter, along with business, government, religion, and even mores and folkways. T
Perhaps what libertarians are advocating is freedom from coercion. Family dynamics aren't necessarily about coercion, but sometimes they are.
Perhaps what libertarians are advocating is freedom from coercion.
Some of them. Others seem to want freedom to coerce, as long as it's one of the means of coercion that they approve of (usually involving economic imbalances, in the ones I've encountered).
Whether such folks are truly libertarians or not is a question on par with whether the Westboro Baptists are truly christian.
From what I've seen only right libertarians frame liberty as absence of coercion. They also tend to favor (IMHO) a very excessively narrow definition of coercion (someone with a gun to someone's head). Even when I was a left libertarian, my frame was liberty vs. authority, not liberty vs. "statism."
Family of origin is a total crapshoot. My own luck in that regard is well above median. My parents were lower working class, but (thank God) very secular and basically liberal. But I know (intimately) plenty of horror stories. The (generally right) libertarian doctrine of "exit over voice," in my opinion, should be aimed at family first. I'd venture the Germans definitely have the right idea demoting the formal role of family in law, as described in a prior comment.
"It's the duty of the company (to the shareholders) to charge all the market can bear. ".
But don't be too short-term about it. Build up your long-term profits with long-term customers.
Maher is 90% right that our common goals are HARMED... very, very badly ... by aggressive-nasty-antagonistic symbolism police. And there is huge overlap between those folks - our own side's mad cultists - and those who betrayed us in 1980, 88, 94, 2000, 2010 and 2016, growling and snarking and betraying the only (Union) coalition that might save civilization.
I would have agreed with that statement some five years ago, but recent developments in the left are very different from that picture. At this particular time in history it is almost invariably the anti-woke left, the "class reductionist" left, the so-called "dirtbag left", that amplify every negative factoid and distort every positive fact about every Democratic politician, and also are invariably the people (among nominally left of center people) who share items from RICMO (Russian influenced and controlled media outlets). So-called woke leftists, especially sexual minorities, but also religious minorities, racial minorities, etc., including ones who a few years ago were very harshly critical of Democrats and even of voting within the two-party system, are really closing ranks for the Democrats, and against what David calls the "splitters" (although we tend to have far more insulting designations for them).
"It's the duty of the company (to the shareholders) to charge all the market can bear. "
You're referring to maximizing profit, which is not the same thing as maximizing sale price. At a higher price, you will make fewer sales. At a lower price, you will make more sales. Somewhere in there is an optimum price which maximizes profit.
Robert:
Others seem to want freedom to coerce,
Yes, how dare anyone infringe on their freedom to infringe on others' freedom!
“being good at foreign affairs isn’t particularly useful in getting elected president...look at Trump”
Which is one reason among many to have voted for Biden. We didn’t vote for him merely because he wasn’t Trump; though that alone was reason to have chosen the Democratic ticket.
Trump was the first president voted in not because of his merits but, rather, because he wasn’t someone else.
He wasn’t Obama.
He wasn’t Hillary.
He isn’t Biden.
Larry,
…you don't necessarily have profit in mind…
Ah. Very true. What we really see when that happens, though, is that many improvements do not produce a monetized value. The stairway improvement project going on in my house right now is all about making my wife happy. Doesn't really matter to me what it costs as long as it doesn't impact us much. I SUSPECT it will improve the house value, but that's a secondary benefit.
…poly-bagged mint-condition…
Heh. I remember the 'kids' going crazy in the late 80's buying everything and stuffing them in those bags. They had gloves on when they bought them and immediately moved to preserve their 'investments'. I thought at the time it was all a scam, but publishers sure did produce a lot of it. My coin collecting skills said there was too much supply, so the game was really about fleecing those 'kids'.
In none of these cases did people buy with the intent to sell for less than their cost.
None of those cases… yes. We've seen recent cases in the bond market where it did happen, though. Real head scratching moment. People were forking over MORE than the maturity value of bond.
Bond buyers are a terribly cautious clade as a general rule, so it's unlikely they were being stupid. Something was going through their minds the rest of us didn't see. Best I can figure is they figured they'd lose LESS money that way than with every other choice they had including stuffing a mattress. Weird. Maybe there aren't enough mattresses to stuff with a few trillion dollars.
…reinforces my point that people are reluctantly willing to pay…
Yes. I may have neglected to point out that I agree with you on that. We'd pay quite a bit for gasoline. We'd do some dumb political things first, though. Gasoline prices are actually pretty low compared to we'd tolerate if we couldn't apply political pressure on the markets to keep prices down.
I think Jon S made the point for all of us. He wanted to keep his job. His options were unthinkable.
Jon S,
I want to be extra careful to avoid sounding like the monster Don Gisselbeck is describing. I likely DO get where you are coming from, though. My sister's employment options eventually dried up as her terminal illness advanced and that left her with no insurance in a state that didn't seem to give a damn and a federal bureaucracy that cared more about forms being filled in the right way than the fact that Catch-22's exist leaving her dependent on ER doctors while pharmacies were unreachable. She finally passed last summer. It was a grisly way to go that I would not wish upon the most evil person I can imagine.
Still… she had choices she exercised right to the end. None of us liked them. Not even a little. The stress of watching her die slowly likely killed my brother too. Heart attack. Still… choices were made including ones that meant life or death.
My sister lucked out (slightly) in being married to someone who was just barely healthy enough to try to help her. By the end, we had her stashed in my parent's old house paying no rent while his tiny disability check covered a few utility bills. They spent almost nothing because they had almost nothing and didn't ask for much. See the choice?
After she passed, her husband finally did ask for help and got it. See the choice? He really didn't want to ask, but he mustered the courage and did it. And it worked out. He's still mostly independent today, but not paying rent.
——
I get that various charitable programs turn out not to be very charitable. My wife has more of those stories than I do. We won't ever donate to some of them as a result.
I suppose I could have become one of those guys hanging around the freeway offramps holding a cardboard sign…
A hard choice. Turns out some of them make a fair amount, but I'd highly recommend selling anything over begging. Anything. You need at least some dignity to continue living.
——
The reason gasoline prices reached that high is people were willing to pay (from one side) and others were willing to shock the supply and confidence in the supply (from the other side). Wars always shock our confidence in supplies of most everything. Prices become volatile when we are shocked.
Oil is bought and sold via the futures and options on futures markets. It's not just people pulling oil from the ground, putting it on a ship, and delivering it to your neighborhood so they can rape and pillage our banking accounts. It's not just oil either because real commodities markets have replacement/displacement opportunities. Your oil might come from nearby or from overseas, but what gets refined from it depends on what the futures market indicates would make the most money. Each barrel could be a slew of products.
Ultimately, though, Putin is trying to take Ukraine. He shocked energy AND food futures. Price stability requires there be no shocks… and he knows that. War mongers use shocks as weapons, so be sure to add him to any list of people to which you want to assign blame.
Don Gisselbeck,
You aren't even trying. Some libertarian pissed on your breakfast cereal, I suppose and you are angry at all of us as a result. Your complaints aren't aimed anywhere close to where I am, though.
If you are going for the "poor, nasty, brutish, and short" description I recommend you read up on Hobbes. He was spectacularly wrong about many thing that people still believe are true today. I think he even claimed he could square the circle. Hmpf.
"Tooth and Claw" libertarians is the group you are trying to describe as if they represented all of us. What they believe to be true is (in my not even remotely humble opinion) a wonderful demonstration of their inhumanity. They aren't really libertarians, though. They are anarchists first.
reason,
…arguments fundamentalists make about science…
Heh. I assure you I'm not rejecting fact because I dislike it.
By training, I'm a theoretical physicist. (Economists generally hate us.) That means I play with mathematical models like kids play with toys. I love them. I'm fascinated by them. In Europe, they'd likely label me as an applied mathematician because the distinction between the two groups is mostly a matter of style. Either way, I can talk your ears off about how we model perceived reality.
I am politely informing you that some of what people believe can be modeled in economics can't be done because of assumptions they make in forming the model that are likely to be either false… or ill defined. It's the ill defined stuff that gets us into trouble the most. We think we have a good definition (e.g. a merit function for resource usage optimization), but it turns out we don't because people don't agree. In that disagreement, tempers flair and we start accusing each other of wanting to kill babies. Or something like that. Accusations of inhumanity fly fast and furious when we get angry.
"Diminishing returns" is a sound concept. No disagreement there.
"Robin Hood" isn't, but for exactly the reason you named. It's a short term win that tempts people to play a negative sum game. Everyone loses (even the rich guy) if people spend too much on securing their wealth or stealing it from someone else.
———
As for your reductio ad absurdum scenario, that's exactly what's been tried for a few thousand years. Recent lords of the land simply had more wealth with which to fence the land and enforce their exclusivity rights. Populations did starve too. It's been tried over and over and is a demonstrably stupid choice for the rich guys building fences. For some odd reason, the peasants get upset and start killing people. Peasant revolts are as common through history as famines were.
Still… it's got to work better next time. Right? Our new lords are smarter. Pfft! Modern weaponry is available to peasants too.
This is all well and good according to your agnostic welfare function, we can't compare on allocation of resources to another.
No. The point I'm making is there does not exist a unique merit function. You can compare all you want, though. YOU can construct a merit function that makes sense to you and many others, but it is incomplete in two important senses.
It can't truly model everything you value.
It can't model more than a small group without depriving most people of choices regarding 'best use' that they can't communicate to a central clearing authority.
You can build a merit function that tries, but in doing so you become a dictator. You become one of those lords about whom the peasant get upset.
———
I do think the social 'atom' is the family, but I'd never tolerate that poverty trap you describe. Parents should have some responsibility for their children up to some age, but that's about it.
I want individuals free, but recognize that most of us treat family bonds as fundamental elements of our character. Ayn Rand followers ignored something very important to most of us.
A lot of us do use the 'freedom from coercion' concept, but it's better understood as a definition of liberty.
Liberty is a state of being where one is free from coercion.
See?
That doesn't mean your life will be rosy and contain wonderful options for all your choices. It means no one is threatening you to make certain choices. No PERSON is coercing you. (Include corporations and government in there because they are composed of people.)
As for libertarians who support coercion… well… they aren't lovers of liberty. Period.
———
I really want to say 'kin' instead of 'family', but I'll confuse most Americans. The social atom is not just about blood relatives. You can choose your kin, but will likely include a number of blood relatives among them. You can also eject kin.
The point being that the Ayn Rand followers dismissed a fundamentally human behavior. Altruism isn't the point. Humans do what humans do and we are fundamentally social animals.
Alan Brooks:
Trump was the first president voted in not because of his merits but, rather, because he wasn’t someone else.
Biden was the second such president. Oh, there are good reasons to like Biden on his own, but 80 million people didn't come out during a pandemic just because Biden was the most popular candidate in history. They came out to make sure Trump didn't get a second term.
Alfred Differ:
"…poly-bagged mint-condition…"
Heh. I remember the 'kids' going crazy in the late 80's buying everything and stuffing them in those bags. They had gloves on when they bought them and immediately moved to preserve their 'investments'.
It wasn't just nerds in their parents' basements. Wall Street investors were counting on huge appreciation of those comics as well.
You know I'm a big comics fan, but I buy them to read, not to sell. Even I could spot the financial scam.
I thought at the time it was all a scam, but publishers sure did produce a lot of it.
Well, they got their money from the initial sale. What happened to the resale value of the comics was not important to them.
We've seen recent cases in the bond market where it did happen, though. Real head scratching moment. People were forking over MORE than the maturity value of bond.
...
Best I can figure is they figured they'd lose LESS money that way than with every other choice they had including stuffing a mattress. Weird. Maybe there aren't enough mattresses to stuff with a few trillion dollars.
Paul Krugman wrote about European banks being able to "pay" negative interest rates, and he gives much the same explanation. In some circumstances, it apparently is worthwhile to pay a bank for the service of keeping your money safe. Stuffing mattresses involves a risk of loss or damage to the physical money, plus (as you rightly point out), there are only so many dollar or Euro bills to stuff. I don't think it is possible for Bill Gates or Elon Musk to fully convert their fortune to $100 bills or gold bars.
This brings up a bugaboo of mine which always bothered me when I was first old enough to listen to seminars on money management. Like a mantra, they always mentioned that investment carried risk, but it was necessary because holding onto your cash also carried risk--of losing out to inflation. Like, the dollar in your mattress will only be worth 85 cents because of inflation, but if you invest it and earn 6%, your dollar will be worth $1.06.
Somehow, they always acted as if inflation didn't apply to the investment scenario. To me, inflation is a wash--it applies equally to the investment and mattress scenarios. In the mattress, the number of dollars remains constant. With investment, you can earn more dollars, but you also risk losing dollars. Inflation drops out of the equation.
Libertarian Alfred talks about 'freedom from coercion', even while acknowledging the need for voluntary self-regulation (aka rule obedience) in order to create & maintain fair-level-open-equal competition & a just society.
The key word above is 'voluntary'.
Unfortunately, Robert, Matthew, Larry & Dr. Brin appear to reject this 'voluntary' component (to, albeit, varying degrees) and they propose a coercive, mandatory, non-voluntary but apparently sensible external rule set, one authored by an expert & enlightened ruling class, for the express purpose of creating & maintaining social justice & fair-level-open-equal competition...
A system which is otherwise known as totalitarianism & the very antithesis of Alfred's 'freedom from coercion' libertarian subtype, proving once again that it is a very short journey from freedom & liberty to the involuntary servitude of slavery.
It's tragicomedy at its finest.
Best
Alfred, you seem to be totally missing everything I'm saying. I'm sure it's not deliberate, but your worldview appears to include things like family members who are always both willing and able to help ("able" is something especially missing in my particular world). Sometimes there are no alternatives to being coerced that don't involve death, whether outright or slow. I've spent time living in a tent in the woods, in the past - I'm not unfamiliar with unusual alternatives.
They no longer existed.
The only reason we're all still here is because everyone in this house is on disability, and J (my wife's other husband) gets 100% military-related disability pay from the VA. If I'd had to continue commuting to a $12/hr job some 40 minutes' drive away while the price of gasoline approached half of that per gallon, we would have wound up losing the house, losing medical benefits, and losing our lives.
I don't really think there's any point in continuing this particular conversation, though. We seem to have reached what I've seen called "the point of rupture" - that point at which it becomes clear that the concepts being used in communication are not shared between two parties.
Jon S,
I agree that family isn't always there for you. Some won't do it. Some aren't able. Some have unacceptable demands. I get that lesson, though I'll spare my own family members and in-laws by not putting my opinions of them here.
Choices are still there, though. We can 'make' family if we have enough scraps of dignity left in our hearts to believe we deserve help. We can also take the path you took toward disability. (I almost did in 2013 long after I'd climbed out of my hole I'd dug in the 80's.)
Making family is not an option most people think of in general terms, yet we all do it. Consider the people who post comments here. Some of us know each other moderately well now. In a pinch, some might actually help each other if they are asked and able. For example, my employer is trying to hire a difficult position to fill. I'd go to bat for some of the people who comment here if they have the job skills. Living around here is damn expensive (Southern CA is outrageous), but if they found the choice interesting… I'd help make it happen. I'm not 'suggesting it' to anyone, though. The choice has to come from their end.
We can drop this if you want, though. I DO want to stop before tempers flare enough. I'd much rather stay friendly even if I am perceived as clueless. 8)
True dat...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/opinion/republicans-cheney-trump-democracy.html
...
We have to stop saying that all these people are duped and led astray, that they are somehow under the spell of Trump and programmed by Fox News.
Propaganda and disinformation are real and insidious, but I believe that to a large degree, Republicans’ radicalization is willful.
Republicans have searched for multiple election cycles for the right vehicle and packaging for their white nationalism, religious nationalism, nativism, craven capitalism and sexism.
There was a time when they believed that it would need to be packaged in politeness — compassionate conservatism — and the party would eventually recommend a more moderate approach intended to branch out and broaden its appeal — in its autopsy after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss.
But Trump offered them an alternative, and they took it: Instead of running away from their bigotries, intolerances and oppression, they would run headlong into them. They would unapologetically embrace them.
This, to many Republicans, felt good. They no longer needed to hide. They could live their truths, no matter how reprehensible. They could come out of the closet, wrapped in their cruelty.
But the only way to make this strategy work and viable, since neither party dominates American life, was to back a strategy of minority rule and to disavow democracy.
...
Alfred Differ:
Making family is not an option most people think of in general terms, yet we all do it. Consider the people who post comments here. Some of us know each other moderately well now. In a pinch, some might actually help each other if they are asked and able.
When you describe family as the atom of society, I take it you are talking about people who genuinely care about each other's welfare. As opposed to those who are legally constrained to act as if they care. The caring doesn't always happen just because of blood ties. But the fact that such caring does occur is the most significant flaw in Ayn Randism, whose fundamental premise is that there is no such animal.
Larry,
Always beware of seminar speakers selling investment ideas/books. They've made their money after the sale and have no fiduciary responsibility to you.
I did a temp job supporting one of those speakers once. I sat in the back and sold the books and tapes. Outrageous prices were extracted from people desperate to change things in their lives. These folks subjected themselves to several hours of what was effectively an info-mercial and then emptied their bank accounts and maxxed their credit cards. I felt unclean after that job and didn't accept another one like it… even though I was pretty good at it.
Inflation isn't a wash, though. The problem with stuffing your mattress is you get only the subtraction effect as your money's relative value wastes away. If it is invested, you get the wasting effect and capital growth and dividends… if you play the game well.
The average S&P 500 return per year beats inflation most of the time, but much of that comes from people believing it will and plowing their money in to buy a limited supply of stocks. What's truly astonishing is just how long this belief has continued.
Locumranch,
I believe you are mistaken about our host's rejection of the voluntary aspects of self-regulation. He and I are more alike (though not exact) than I think you realize. He IS more willing to use regulation than I am in many ways, but he'd likely compromise about how things are done if liberty-respecting options are properly advocated.
Also… I AM willing to regulate markets… I just don't want it done stupidly. Our markets are the primary tool by which we've freed ourselves from feudal overlords. Few truly understand how they work and how we did it. Even a lot of economists fail at this.
I'll let the others defend themselves, but I suspect you misunderstand them to some degree too.
As for short journeys, I'm mostly inclined to agree… but not because the journey is truly short. The problem is people walk a path toward servitude and don't realize they are on it. There are several ways to leave the path, but they won't if they don't realize where it goes. I think the journey is fairly long, but it doesn't look like a journey into servitude until the very end.
Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" explains the features of the path rather well.
Larry,
You are spot on about actually caring. That's how we make 'kin/family'. Some call it making friends. I view it as 'acts of love.' Getting to know someone (making that internal copy) binds us in ways that precipitate consequences.
If I understand Rand's position, that form of 'altruism' was best described as 'unwise'. We were better off if we turned away from it. It's a position that rejects Love as a virtue and labels it as a trap. Of course... I think that is bullshit. Humans love. Period.
Acts of love require difficult choices and always have consequences... for all involved.
Alfred Differ:
Inflation isn't a wash, though. The problem with stuffing your mattress is you get only the subtraction effect as your money's relative value wastes away. If it is invested, you get the wasting effect and capital growth and dividends… if you play the game well.
I didn't say there is no point to investing. Just that the point is to try to make money. Whether that dividend outpaces inflation, keeps even with inflation, or doesn't quite make up for inflation, you're still better off having more dollars than having fewer dollars. The downside or cost of investing is the risk of loss.
But it's not about inflation. Your tolerance for risk vs reward should guide you as to how much you are willing to risk in order to have a chance at reward. Regardless of inflation.
When I said inflation was a wash, I meant that it plays equally into the mattress and investment scenarios. Whereas the money gurus always talk about how much is lost to inflation in the mattress, and how much is gained in pure dollar terms by investment. As if inflation doesn't affect the latter. (They also inevitably say that higher risk means higher reward, as if the word "risk" doesn't mean what it does.)
The average S&P 500 return per year beats inflation most of the time, ...
In the downturns around 2001, I remember being hit with the realization that a fund could truthfully claim to "outperform the S&P" if the S&P lost 20% and your fund only lost 12%. I mean, the claim is true, but neither one beats the mattress.
but much of that comes from people believing it will and plowing their money in to buy a limited supply of stocks. What's truly astonishing is just how long this belief has continued.
Land prices can appreciate because most people seem to need some, and as the saying goes, "They're not making any more of it." That's not entirely true of stocks, but as you mentioned a few hours back, wealthy people need some place to park their money. It's not just about earning dividends--there simply isn't enough cash in the world for it to all be that liquid. So perhaps, equities are needed for very much the same reason that land is. Or at least an analogous reason.
Alfred,
I really don't know what you are talking about I'm sorry. I think we are arguing past each other. I'm not in favour of a planned economy. But I'm in favour of some redistribution. In fact, I'm in favour of a UBI sort of arrangement (I prefer to call it a national dividend) but I'm all in favour of market economy, but with an active attempt to reduce the extreme inequality that often comes with it, particularly by putting a floor under the bottom and creating strong headwinds for those at the top. And I think you can make social welfare arguments for it. Not with precisely defined optimization conditions, but with plausable and modellable welfare functions. And I'm sure you can also demonstrate the implausability of extreme inequality being optimum. Insisting you cannot model these things and so shouldn't do anything is exactly how fundamentalists try to combat science.
Alfred Differ: my employer is trying to hire a difficult position
Once again, I almost jumped at a misread:
my employer is trying to hire a difficult person
I've learned to read thrice before commenting once :)
Alfred Differ:
You are spot on about actually caring. That's how we make 'kin/family'. Some call it making friends. I view it as 'acts of love.' Getting to know someone (making that internal copy) binds us in ways that precipitate consequences.
I had roommates in college who were a tight enough bunch that they felt like family to me. That's not true of just any roommates, but it was of this particular group. Sadly, we've drifted apart in the intervening 40 years. I'm not sure if permanence is required to make someone truly "family". Maybe so.
An older sister of my college girlfriend was very supportive of me when the girlfriend broke up with me, and for a long time, I considered the older sister to be family. I was even the best man at her wedding, having just met the groom for the first time, because she wanted the wedding here in Illinois, and none of his friends made the trip from Virginia. It saddens me that she has lately become a staunch Republican who uses terms like "woke liberals" in her annual Christmas letter. At one time, I would have said that the family aspect was more important than the political, but at this point...I just can't. (Other things also came between us long ago, but I always believed we'd make up. No longer.)
When I first met my wife, I was comfortable with keeping things as a dating relationship. But when her father needed surgery and might have possibly died (he's still with us 27 years later), I realized I wanted to be more than just a date to her--I wanted to be family. I'm glad there is a social mechanism for making that happen.
If I understand Rand's position, that form of 'altruism' was best described as 'unwise'. We were better off if we turned away from it.
I don't think you're being hard enough on Rand. Her position is that that form of altruism doesn't really exist, and that people make themselves miserable when they feel constrained to act as if it does.
She's right if she only means that we don't care that way about everybody just because they are human beings. But she's wrong to go to the other extreme--that we can only care about our own selves. There's a good line I remember from Kurt Vonnegut's novel God Bless You, Mister Rosewater. It comes from the mouth of Eliot Rosewater's father, a conservative Senator who is kind of an antagonist in the novel, but Vonnegut doesn't do villains. This is from memory, but pretty close to exact:
"I love my wife...more than I love my garbageman. And that makes me guilty of that most modern of sins, dis-cri-mi-na-tion!"
(Never realized until now that Senator Rosewater was probably somewhat based on Senator Goldwater. The book was published in 1964)
How much coercion and taxation (oh, sorry, "theft") will you accept to allow us uncompetetive untermenschen to live decent lives? Remember that as AI improves more and more of us will become uncompetitive. Why get your bike fixed when a replicator can make a new one?
reason,
There are ways to do UBI's that I'd tolerate. There IS a serious competitive advantage given to people near the bottom when they aren't feeling trapped by $12 jobs like Jon S described. Other (better) choices open up and I'm willing to pitch in to open those doors. My willingness is voluntary, though, and I'd ask that someone's unwillingness be considered and respected.
My willingness means the merit function I'm inclined to use likely has broad features in common with yours. As long as neither of us treats them as anything more meaningful than heuristics, we are not going to oppose each other. The danger I point out is when someone's heuristic becomes how they judge the moral character of someone else. Judgements are to be expected, but we are all better off if we examine the ground under us as well as the person being judged.
I'm likely less inclined to create those strong headwinds for those at the top. A strong floor sounds like a solid idea, but headwinds sound to me like picking winners which gets too close to planned economies. Still... if we were debating details, we'd probably find some areas where we agreed. Where we didn't, I would politely try to point out the dangers and ask that other ideas be considered.
Modeling precisely is not possible, though. It's not just undesirable. It's theoretically impossible. Once that belief is abandoned, the remaining models are heuristics upon which reasonable people can disagree because they don't share objectives. Merit functions are all about objectives and we don't all agree on what's best. One of the few ways to get most of us to agree involves considering what is worst. 8)
scidata,
Heh. We hire a lot of them too.
IT is full of difficult people. 8)
Don Gisselbeck,
How much will I accept? Very little.
My response is unpleasantly simple.
Get off your behind and find a better way to contribute to our civilization. Please try. We'd all be better off if you succeed.
If bike repair fades into something only hobby people do (no way to make a viable income) then so be it. I don't need buggy whips either.
IMHO, a big selling point to UBI's is the idea that we should never discourage someone from working.
As in, if someone can make a little extra money working on a bar Friday nights, don't put his welfare at risk.
Translation, if you can't compete, you don't deserve to live.
Lorraine, your "it seems to me" is quite a confession. My 'demand a wager' challenge does not work on leftists. But if it did, I would challenge you over your assertion that those screaming about symbolism crimes are the reasonable ones. It is an assertion as baldly false and spectacularly ridiculous that it is in a league with MAGA.
Every time I run into a person who admits the right has gone mad, but still votes Republican, it is justified by citing weird bullying crap from the woke-police, then proclaiming 'all liberals are like THAT!"
@Dr Brin,
My reading of Lorraine's post is diametrically opposite of yours. I read her as saying that the "woke" liberals are the ones rallying in defense of the Democratic Party.
Am I wrong? This is what she posted (emphasis mine) :
So-called woke leftists, especially sexual minorities, but also religious minorities, racial minorities, etc., including ones who a few years ago were very harshly critical of Democrats and even of voting within the two-party system, are really closing ranks for the Democrats, and against what David calls the "splitters"
* * *
Don Gisselbeck:
Translation, if you can't compete, you don't deserve to live.
Since Alfred said he would conditionally support UBI, I don't see how you can say that.
I think what you're hearing is "If you can't compete, you don't deserve to win the competition." Which is like, well, duh. But not the same thing.
If you can't compete, you don't deserve to live
Well. Since we are back to that bullshit, let me take a moment to explain myself to others.
When 'competition' comes around as the topic du jour around here, take it as a sign to step up and show how we all do this even when we think we aren't. Whether I defend the 'tax is theft' or 'private security' positions or one of the others isn't really my main interest. Having our ideas compete is.
Take for example, Howard's very reasonable assertion that UBI's shouldn't discourage someone from working. That's an excellent point because one of the dangers with disability and other forms of welfare payments is they impact the dignity of the recipient. If someone is reminded monthly that they can't cut it as a viable member of our civilization, they might become conditioned to actually believe that bullshit. Let someone retain some dignity and they are much less inclined to undermine themselves and self-limit their choices among terrible options.
I could easily get behind a UBI plan that stayed way behind the scenes making it unclear to people trading with UBI recipients from where exactly the money came. Cash is impressively difficult to distinguish when it comes to your source, so no one need know my current income status when I trade with them.
——
I follow a young woman on Twitter who is pretty good as a science communicator and recently started working at NASA as part of a graduate degree effort. She's a little touchy at times about topics outside that swim lane, but she's a real person with a real life containing broad interests. She's a package deal and only fools tell her to stay in one swim lane.
That young lady has real experience with homelessness and starvation. She's put up with physical and mental abuse. She ran from her homeland and is now in the US doing what she says she never dreamed possible. Yet… she made choices that got her where she is and it sure as hell didn't involve help from her blood and in-law relatives. I just saw a smiling picture of her and Nelson the other day, so she is proof that choices can be made that alter one's life course.
How did she do it? She can tell stories about individual choices, but isn't inclined to do so. They still cause pain and there are too many trolls on Twitter. I don't have to ask, though, because I can see her underlying 'skill'. Her dignity remained intact enough to avoid death. She could have given up and the world wouldn't have noticed. She didn't. That's a choice that changed her life. Sounds trite since suicide ends a life, but she fought despair instead.
------
Now consider choices you've made in your life. Tell me you haven't occasionally chosen to "stay alive". I'll bet you can't.
Welcome to The Competition.
The C-word is COERCION.
I think I understand everyone's position fairly well:
Dr. Brin wants to legislate social fairness & mandate a level playing field in order to facilitate limited (as in 'controlled', 'restrained' & 'regulated') competition, whereas Robert, Matthew, Larry, Jon & Reason want to legislate social caring and enslave others to provide financial & emotional support to those (free-riders, invalids & parasites) who can neither compete nor provide for themselves.
Alan_B argues that libertarians are heartless bastards who want others to succeed or fail on their own merits -- his words (or, are they Don_G's ?) are 'Compete or Die' -- but that's a gross over-simplification because absolutely NO ONE is stopping Alan_B, Don_G or any other potential carer & sharer from sharing & caring their hearts out for all those who are in need.
Libertarianism merely insists that sharing & caring must be a matter of CHOICE, not a matter of force, servitude & coercion.
Alfred clearly 'shares & cares' in his own way; I've spent the last thirty years giving my 'pound of flesh' to all those in need, even long after it became clear that the needy can never be satiated; and, simply put, charity isn't a good deed when it's compelled & involuntary.
So, if you want to Tikkun Olam, knock yourselves out. Have at it.
But, don't you dare stand over me & mine, snapping your moral whips as if you were the Pharaoh's enforcers, while you use compulsion to force other people to build your pyramids for you.
It won't end well for anyone.
Best
I'm curious, how many hours a day do I need to work to have a lebenswertes Leben? What quality?
The Free Market (bless its Holy Name) thinks that people like myself should be working 90 hours a week for bad room and board and an ever-growing debt to the company store. (At best)
The evil, oppressive government has stepped in and said, "no, you can't do that". My life is pretty decent because of government limits to the power of private tyrants. The government has even put limits on enclosure, so I can ski and hike in the mountains.
I think we should go further. We should structure the laws and social mores of our society to make it possible for all of us untermenschen to live decent lives. We should have jobs that require no more than the hunter-gatherer 3-5 hrs a day, basic food, clothing, housing and medical care. We should have access to the internet and the means and opportunity to recreate. If the ever-glorious Free Market refuses to provide these things, then tax it.
"Every time I run into a person who admits the right has gone mad, but still votes Republican, it is justified by citing weird bullying crap from the woke-police, then proclaiming 'all liberals are like THAT!"
My observation is that much of Trumpism is people who believe that *everybody* are selfish corrupt cheaters. It doesn't make sense that the other side isn't cheating. So our side needs to do a better job of cheating.
Don Gisselbeck,
I think you are trolling now and I've had my fill. I'll take note of the Nazi references and call this interaction with you at an end.
Locumranch,
You've been told more times than I can count that you've misinterpreted our host. You've been told by more than one person. It takes a special kind of obstinacy to persist.
In fact, you've probably met that kind of obstinacy in many of your patients. Think about those people who persisted in making poor health choices for 40 years and then showed up in your office demanding a magic pill to cure them of their diabetic condition and all the related consequences.
No one here is cracking that whip on you. Any who suggest it are likely to produce allies who would try to defend you on the grounds that they'd be next. There is a huge difference between coercion and judgement and the latter is the worst you suffer around here.
LoCum,
You’re confusing me with another commenter: I never said/implied that libertarians are heartless bastards; scarcely have ever mentioned libertarians. Went to a libertarian meeting once, but the attendees snapped at each other, calling each other statists and adding, “you don’t speak for me.” After that, I paid little attention to libertarians.
——
Larry Hart,
One reason Biden was chosen by voters was that he was on the Foreign Relations Committee for a dozen years, when Trump was dining at International House Of Pancakes.
Trump, again, was the first president voted-in due not to merit—but mostly because of his shallow charisma. Charisma has frequently been neglected as an explanation regarding politics.
UBI
The main "justification" IMHO is that the people with the wealth today did not create that wealth
When I patent an idea my patent is actually a thin veneer on top of the structure required to make that idea work - without all of that past technology the "new idea" would not work
Its the same with absolutely everything - a lone human in a state of nature is "cat food"
Every job we do - every penny we make depends - on the vast amount of work and learning that has been done since Ugg first threw rocks at a rabbit
That is the common heritage of ALL humanity
I am fairly sure that sharing that way would NOT be a good idea for human progress!!!
But it does provide a massive justification for a Universal Basic Income - or a "National Dividend"
Alan Brooks:
Trump, again, was the first president voted-in due not to merit—but mostly because of his shallow charisma.
Ok, but earlier you said he was the first president to be elected not for who is is but for who he isn't. I assumed you meant he wasn't Hillary Clinton, or more generally, he wasn't a socialist Democrat groomer.
And I said that Biden was the second such president, elected because he wasn't Trump.
Charisma is a separate issue.
Charisma has frequently been neglected as an explanation regarding politics
It's my day for Vonnegut references. In his first published novel, Player Piano, Vonnegut postulates that the presidency will have become more of a ceremonial tv role, filled by a charming, handsome empty suit. This was back when the earth was cooling in 1953. Before Trump. Before Reagan as governor. Even before the Nixon/Kennedy debate.
Locumranch,
Likening Pharaohs to socialists is a brain twister for this old Canuck, or anyone who actually knew or worked with Tommy Douglas or Ed Broadbent. Kindness, forbearance, and humanity personified. I do admit to considerable ignorance about the left in the Excited States.
Alan Brooks,
Don't have any experience with libertarians, but I went to a Green Party meeting once. They spent the entire time arguing about diaper disposal and ga-fawed and eye-rolled me when I mentioned planetary health or nuke proliferation. Plus I was in a suit (came directly from work at GM) which almost got me barred at the door.
Biden was elected not only for not being tRump, but also for being on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—and for his extensive experience in many other roles. Anyone who voted for tRump for not being Biden is not much worth talking to; if you can call it talking. (Monologue.)
tRump was elected potus because his experience in foreign affairs was affairs with foreigners, and business. If you were an Excited States citizen, you’d be more aware of it, as it would be your American derrière on the line.
I do feel guilty about the Green Party because I voted for Jill Stein in ‘16—not realizing at the time that it was a vote for tRump.
You continually attack the government which has made my life tolerably decent. It provided Pell grants, limits the power of private tyrants, artificially raises wages, and allows access to public lands. A little intemperate rage on my part should be understandable.
Assumed you are British, LH. If not, an apology.
So many interesting comments! Please indulge me a bit of a shotgun of brief but hopefully not trite replies before the onward drops...
Why replicate a bike if you can replicate a Chevaline? Perhaps the advances in 3D printing will precede thos in materials science.
Not sure what's meant by strong headwinds, but it seems axiomatic to me that nobody breaks glass ceilings unless somebody breaks glass floors.
If someone's being reminded that they can't cut it in a hypercompetitive society, it comes in the form of rejection letters, not benefit checks.
"no one need know my current income status when I trade with them" is something with which I agree wholeheartedly, which is why I'm opposed in principle to employers demanding applicants sign away credit report privacy. It really should be illegal in my opinion.
Player Piano was my go-to choice for which dystopian novel we're actually living in, until I read Manna by Marshall Brain.
LH show me how "woke liberals" are "rallying" to the DP.
After a FANTASTIC MONTH delivering so many things liberals should want, JoBee's polls went up THREE %! And you know the reason he is under 50% is almost entirely snarky refusual by the left to give him anything remotely like loyalty or gratitude or even pragmatic support.
Our effete, symbol-obsessed left needs to grow up and NOT do to us what they did in 1980, 88, 94, 2000, 2010 and 2016, growling and snarking and betraying the only (Union) coalition that might save civilization. Imperfection is different from evil.
You and I both know many of these folks who shrug and say : "I held my nose and voted against Trump, so what d'you want from me?" I want you to do what Bernie, Liz and AOC ask and SUPPORT the only coalition that can save the world. But right now... NOW... they are casting nets to find the next Nader or Stein.
Lorraine, PLAYER PIANO certainly represents many aspects of the danger.
Locum was passionately articulate in this whine-posting. If... alas... his plaint had anything to do with anything that any of us here believe or have said, it would have seemed somewhat heartfelt and persuasive!
Alas, under all that is the basic confederate hypocrisy. He wants a master over him with a whip. It should be a white, male plantation feudal overlord. An inheritance brat whose power to control comes from the age-old, failed model that made life hell for 99% of our ancestors.
I oppose it and will support regulations that spread the power widely so that - competitively - the max number of bright, empowered minds point out - and solve - the most errors.
I am no coercive over 'morality.' in fact I am highly critical of Woke Police! But I am coercive in vesting my loyalty to the only experiment that ever made a real human civilization possible... flat-fair-creative-diverse and free. I will coerce you into NOT coercing others to knuckle down to inheritance brats and lords.
Take for example, Howard's very reasonable assertion that UBI's shouldn't discourage someone from working.
When we tried a UBI in Canada, decades ago now, it didn't result in people no longer working. Some demographic categories worked less — teenagers tended to stay in school and got their high school diplomas rather than dropping out to work, for example — but overall there wasn't an effect on the average worker. Use of medical services dropped (and remember we have medicare so this was actually saving the government money).
Overall a generally positive experiment.
It's interesting to me that a number of impressive people back in the mid-20th century thought that Don G. would be right - they forecast a shortening workweek due to increased automation.
This was a massive failed prediction, obviously.
What wasn't considered (I think) was that the day laborers didn't own any part of the means of production, so they were shut out of the benefits.
I remember a short SF piece (Pohl?) that had upended the rich=more stuff equation; due to cheap automated production, the poor were stuck in a daily grind of enforced consumerism while the rich lived simple lives uncluttered by goodies.
Pappenheimer
I've often wondered if some of the more extreme Greens are devoted enough to the environment to get a crew cut and buy an expensive suit.
"What do the poor want with leisure? They're supposed to be working." Some upper class twit talking to Bertrand Russell.
It may be the massive chip on my shoulder, but I feel a lot of resentment from some people that I, "but a mechanic" have the time and resources to ski every month, play music and hang out with friends.
Expensive suits are green to the extent that cheap suits are "fast fashion," which is an ecological nightmare. Not sure where crew cuts enter the picture, reduced water and shampoo consumption, I suppose, would be green.
To cite a few famous examples, the "left wing" "journalists" most associated with RICMO, such as Max Blumenthal, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, etc., are also the most vocally anti-woke.
Pappen that Pohl story was "The Man Who Ate the World." Great stuff!
Lorraine if by "left wing" you mean in the old fashioned sense of demanding advancement for the working classes, above all else, then sure, those true leftists have no time for woke-ist symbol fetishism. Limiting the power of the bosses and inheritance brats to cheat and steal from workers is top priority. Though there were ironies:
- no force in American life was ever more anti-Stalinist than the AFL-CIO
- it took a long time for the labor movement in the US to become a lot less racist and less affiliated with organized crime (e.g. at the docks.)
Those and other factors propeled many fools in the working classes to drift toward confederatism and amnesia about the class war that is inherent in every nation. But part of it is our side shooting itself in the foot with utterly absurd fetish-masturbation yowls over symbols.
I asked my son to name any major language that is anywhere near as non-sexist in terms and grammar etc than English. He nodded: "Sure. So we need to finish the job!"
Well, maybe so. But I wish some young folks would notice THAT in making such demands they are being aggressively... English-phillic. Anglo chauvinistic, demanding that the approach taken by THEIR culture be the moral center of the world.
Alan Brooks:
Assumed you are British, LH. If not, an apology.
What? No, I was born in Chicago and lived all but my college years there.
locumranch is the one who uses British spelling and idioms.
Biden was elected not only for not being tRump, but also for being on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—and for his extensive experience in many other roles.
Biden was nominated for reasons like that. Also for being someone who could beat Cheetolini in electoral votes which requires the candidate to be at least palatable to white Christian men.
He was elected in November because he wasn't Trump.
Anyone who voted for tRump for not being Biden is not much worth talking to; if you can call it talking. (Monologue.)
In 2016, they voted for Trump because he wasn't Hillary. By 2020, the votes for Trump were because they liked all of the things about him that you and I despise. I doubt it was specifically because he wasn't Biden--as in "I might have given Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg a chance, but I just can't stand Biden." But in any case, that's not what we were talking about.
tRump was elected potus because his experience in foreign affairs was affairs with foreigners, and business. If you were an Excited States citizen, you’d be more aware of it, as it would be your American derrière on the line.
We've already established that I am a US citizen, but in any case, what was this accusation in reference to? You're the one who said he was elected because of who he isn't.
I do feel guilty about the Green Party because I voted for Jill Stein in ‘16—not realizing at the time that it was a vote for tRump.
What state are you in?
My brother in Pennsylvania voted for Nader in 2000. So he might have helped destroy the country before you did.
I'm thinking more about being taken seriously by politicians.
Don Gisselbeck,
Okay.
…intemperate rage…
If it were directed accurately, that might make some sense.
1. I received a Pell grant in my early college years. Reagan put an end to that so I turned to work study which turned out to be the far better option. I worked in the department where I chose to major, so the professors writing recommendation letters for me later actually knew me. No matter, though, because I'm willing to help people complete a college degree.
2. Power concentrated in the hands of government draws would-be private tyrants like cow patties draw flies. Concentrations of money draw sharks too. I'm all for suppressing tyranny, but think some of how people want to do it is unwise.
3. Artificially raising wages helps some and harms many. I argue it also harms the people it means to help. I'd much rather support a UBI than a minimum wage.
4. Government doesn't 'allow' access to public lands. You make them make those lands accessible. If you weren't interested in keeping them that way, others would make them do something else with those lands. I love the parks, though. All level of parks. I support them with cash from my own wallet.
Just skip the Nazi references and we'll get along well enough and avoid intemperate rage. No one here deserves your rage anymore than you deserve a short, nasty, brutish life. I'd much rather you enjoyed your life, but my hackles come up when you want to use power to make it so. Those are the same hackles that go up when rich people want to do it, so I'm not picking on you.
Also…
You aren't "untermenschen" as far as I'm concerned. I'm of the opinion there are no differences between us that are statistically significant. That goes for everyone here if we look past the affect two X chromosomes have compared to an XY set. That means you are equally capable of making choices that leave you among the petite bourgeoisie or on a path toward becoming (or supporting) a private tyrant. You have more power than you know, so please use it wisely.
duncan,
…people with the wealth today did not create that wealth…
Ugh. I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think that is a lame argument. No human in existence lives without standing upon the work of previous generations. The problem with your point is it supports the notion that property doesn't exist when it is clear from observable human behaviors that we believe it does.
If you create an innovation and put it to work in the market, it likely won't matter whether you patent it or not. Your idea will get noticed and copied (imperfectly) if it proves useful or valuable. The bulk of the value created by your innovation will wind up in the hands of the public either way.
If you create an innovation and patent it, the vast majority of the value it creates will still wind up in the hands of the general public. The patent… if you can defend it… gives you a chance of taking a slightly larger slice of the pie you slapped together from existing ingredients and put in the oven. If you do exceptionally well, you'll get to keep about 2% of the value, the copycats who weave legal fictions to avoid your patent will retain about 10% (at the most) and the public gets the rest because most of the value of most innovations isn't directly monetized. (Google has saved me a lot of trips to research libraries and countless hours among dusty stacks.)
I don't mind giving you a patent for a brilliant idea if it does two things.
1. Encourage you to keep innovating.
2. Get your innovation documented so copycats can work around you. (Once the patent expires… that means everyone.)
I want your mind engaged in creating more "common heritage" for humanity… and I'll support you acquiring a lavish lifestyle if you are any good at it.
I think a far better justification for UBI is that the common person today is rich enough (in terms of average real income) that we can afford it. We don't have to tolerate the miserably limited choices some (like Jon S) faced. We can do better by raising the floor above flood stage.
I'm not convinced Locumranch wants a master over him cracking a whip. He's concerned about CERTAIN would-be masters and likely to make choices that lead him to be under the whips of others. It's not that he wants it.
He seems like the guy told of many dangers of a diet with too many cheap carbs and excessive sugar. He worries more about people telling him what to think and winds up becoming a diabetic like they predicted.
The question is whether he will show up in a doctor's office demanding a magic pill so he can avoid having his toes amputated.
Alfred Differ:
He's [locumranch] concerned about CERTAIN would-be masters and likely to make choices that lead him to be under the whips of others.
He used to invoke the fable of the ant and the grasshopper quite a bit, but isn't the ant the scold in that scenario?
Sten and Nader could have saved us all AND got some coalition bargaining power, if they had simply said "I urge my supporters in these five states to vote for the Democrat."
They did not. They were egotistical monsters. Though from their effects upon us all, I would entertain the possibility of treason.
I hate few people more than I hate them.
Larry.
I haven't read him in detail for a while. I imagine he cast us in the grasshopper's role? It would make some sense as I can see him enjoying the role of the scolder.
That doesn't alter my view of him, though. He doesn't want a master's whip applied to him, but is failing to see how his choices lead there. As long as he's not destructive with respect to our civilization, we'd most likely defend him from the whip with matters regarding whether we liked each other never entering into the equation.
Alfred Differ:
I imagine he cast us in the grasshopper's role?
Yes, I suppose I can see it that way too, because he imagines us begging him to save us when we suffer the ill effects of our bad choices.
But I see the ant as the one telling the grasshopper what the inevitable consequences of certain choices will be, and the grasshopper as the one going, "You have no right to make me feel bad about my choices! Who made you king of the world?"
In other words, Dr Brin and Dr Fauci are ants. Herman Cain was a grasshopper, who eventually lived out that role to the fullest.
Dr Brin:
Though from their effects upon us all, I would entertain the possibility of treason.
With Jill Stein, I don't think it's even in question that she was a Russian agent, or at the very least a useful idiot. Remember the July 4 gathering she was at along with Ron Johnson and some other Republicans in Moscow?
Nader might have had a big enough ego to imagine that he really would be some kind of savior. But I'll bet he had a lot of secret or "secret" backing by Republican money.
My brother is much more leftist than I am, and he voted for Nader in 2000 because he really did think Bush and Gore were pretty much the same. I can forgive him that error back then, but people who repeat that canard today are either lazy, stupid, or outright liars.
However, if you live in a "safe" state, you may wish to vote third party to make a statement. It would be foolish to do that in a swing state.
LH, I apologize. Had thought that most of the commenters here are European; haven’t been visiting CB for very long.
There was no accusation, regardless, it’s only that many Europeans don’t really Know the US well—any more than vice versa.
@Alan Brooks,
No harm done. But I'm still curious which state you voted for Jill Stein in. It makes a big difference if it was (say) Wisconsin as opposed to California or Wyoming.
Being elected for not being someone else goes back further than Biden not-Trump and Trump not-Hillary. Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize for not being Dubya.
Paradoctor:
Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize for not being Dubya.
But he wasn't running against W. I mean, McCain could also have been elected for not being Bush.
“which state you voted for Jill Stein in”
Oregon. From now on am going to vote Democratic on everything without even glancing at the ballots. We’re in a limited national emergency.
Aside from tRump, all US presidents and potus-candidates were voted for due to many factors: including their abilities and experience. Trump was purely 7 Up—
the un-Cola.
The un-Obama.
The un-Clinton.
The un-Biden.
Anyone at CB would make a better president than tRump.
Alan Brooks:
“which state you voted for Jill Stein in”
Oregon.
Don't keep beating yourself up, then. Oregon's electoral votes didn't go for Trump.
In 2008, my mother (who hardly ever talks politics at all) apologized to my brother and me for assisting my dad (at that time, a crotchety old man in a nursing home) in voting for McCain/Palin. I told her the same thing--don't worry, he's not going to flip Illinois.*
Trump was purely 7 Up—
the un-Cola.
The un-Obama.
The un-Clinton.
The un-Biden.
I still take a bit of issue with that last one. In the 2020 election, Trump voters loved Trump. Or they voted for him because they couldn't stomach a Democrat--any Democrat. They didn't hate Biden in particular, not the way they hated Hillary in particular.
Anyone at CB would make a better president than tRump.
Just yesterday or so, I mentioned to Alfred that a mutual fund could truthfully claim to outperform the S&P if the S&P dropped by 20% and the fund only lost 12%. In that manner, even my cat would make a better president than Trump.
* It wasn't just a matter of Illinois being a blue state. Obama was our own. It's hard to remember now the incredible level of excitement here around his nomination and his election. When he ran for Senator in 2004, something like half of the state's Bush voters also voted for Obama.
"I still take a bit of issue with that last one. In the 2020 election, Trump voters loved Trump. Or they voted for him because they couldn't stomach a Democrat--any Democrat. They didn't hate Biden in particular, not the way they hated Hillary in particular."
One reason Trump is so popular is that he treats women the way they want to treat women. Which is a big overlap with why they hated Hillary.
Still, he wasn’t re-elected, his lemmings voted for him in 2016, as you write, because of animosity towards Hillary. But not for any qualities in tRump—save his charisma. (Franz Neumann wrote that The Leader had great charisma; and since he wrote it 80 yrs ago, you know who he was writing about.) tRump isn’t a fascist, though, he doesn’t even know what fascism is. He sees only the superficial. The pageantry.
Yet imo he’ll never be arrested, the only president who was ever arrested was Grant: for a traffic (buggy) violation in 1872. tRump might leave the country, for awhile; he might get a pardon...however being arrested/prosecuted is far less likely.
Alan Brooks:
tRump isn’t a fascist, though, he doesn’t even know what fascism is. He sees only the superficial. The pageantry.
He also sees the dictatorial power and the obsequious following. He admires Putin for being able to imprison or kill whoever he wants, and Orban for legally rigging the system.
In 2016, I used to claim that Trump wasn't a Hitler fascist, but he was a Mussolini fascist. I'm not so sure of that any more. The original meaning of fascism was that corporations stick together to their mutual benefit. Trump doesn't know mutual. He demands loyalty, but gives none. He fancies himself Vito Corleone, but he has no concept of the fact that the fictional Godfather rose to power by being a good friend who returned favors for favors.
"In 2016, I used to claim that Trump wasn't a Hitler fascist, but he was a Mussolini fascist. I'm not so sure of that any more. The original meaning of fascism was that corporations stick together to their mutual benefit. Trump doesn't know mutual. He demands loyalty, but gives none. He fancies himself Vito Corleone, but he has no concept of the fact that the fictional Godfather rose to power by being a good friend who returned favors for favors."
He postured like Mussolini.
Smart mob bosses are loyal to their minions. But Trump's narcissism completely overrides any attempt to be intelligent.
An appropriate sentence for tRump would be 1000 hrs of Community Service cleaning bathrooms in a VA hospital. If he doesn’t show up, he goes on record as shirking his duty to vets.
onward
onward
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