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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30098 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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Everyone likes free money, right? Building houses is good, having kids is good, paying less for life saving medications is good, taking power out of large landlords hands is good. But maybe trying to apply emergency price gouging laws to non-emergency situations is not so good. Maybe write a law that you have to lower prices when things are good as quickly as you raised them when they weren't so good. What are Trump's plans?

Are you familiar with the Econ 101 arguments against price controls?

Are you familiar with the PoliSci 101 arguments against campaigning on sensible economic policy?

We really need to teach all this in schools. Sure, two thirds of the people will forget it all, but it would be really useful if that additional third of people exists.

The libertarian can scream bloody murder at a policy that has never ever worked, economically speaking. But that would be missing that that self same policy has a great political track record. Hell, once the shelves are empty, you can just blame those awful wreckers and have fun trials.

Free money is insane. It is also very popular.

This is why Thomas Jefferson disliked democracy by the way.

The 17th amendment, and the turn to the popular vote for president, were mistakes.

Universal suffrage was a mistake- not in a 'repeal the 19th' sense, in a 'only landowners should vote' sense.

I'd be so fascinated to see landowner suffrage, in the sense of how the West would look. How would we chop up Wyoming if you needed acreage to vote?

In the United States, most people are expected to own a home, and there is already a system for keeping track of owners of their primary residences for tax purposes.

Sure, but I have friends who rent who could afford land in another location.

Don't kid yourself that suddenly the government would get better at tracing things than they are now.

I think it's kind of implied that if NYC residents buy land in rural Alaska to be able to vote and then spoof primary residence requirements, that enables them to vote in rural Alaska, not in NYC.

Which would produce vast electoral college and house of representatives implications!

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There is a fundamental disconnect between libertarians and progressives. In my debates with progressives, I've basically come to the conclusion that they don't view supply and demand the way I do. I, a libertarian-leaning centrist, believe it to be a fundamental law of the world, which follows very quickly from a few basic facts regarding limited supply and how people respond to financial incentives. That's not to say I buy it hook line and sinker, I know there are some economist notions about free markets that don't make sense in most real world situations, like that everyone has complete knowledge and will act accordingly.

Progressives seem to believe supply and demand to be something changeable, or a specific viewpoint of a situation, or at worst, a Western colonial system rigerously enforced to privilege white men over marginalized groups. Once might argue that this falls into the post modernist progressive track record of believing that human nature and/or reality itself is all malleable, and we can change it if we try hard enough.

I don't have enough debates with modern conservatives to know whether they have what I would consider to be a realistic view of supply and demand, or if they have their own fantasy picture of what the would should be like in their heads. I'd be interested to hear what they think.

I would gesture vaguely at Lee Kuan Yew for the ideal of conservative paternalism, or the Bismarckian creation of the German welfare state. There are certain situations which allowing free markets and individuals to make bad decisions is harmful to the nation, and interventionism can be worth the loss in efficiency.

As such, paternalism's policies are not set in stone and are highly specific to the region the politician comes from.

The caveat is that conservative paternalism's aim is to enact reforms to prevent communists, socialists, and progressives from gaining power, to keep the status quo. The latter's aims with reform is to enact revolutionary change unmoored from economic realities.

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