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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3834 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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When it comes to the building of "parallel institutions" as a political strategy, what would a monarchist parallel institution in a modern, democratic society look like (other than either a 24/7 ren faire or a mafia syndicate)?

Aren't many corporations basically this?

A modern corporation in the liberal West, and even more so in illiberal parts of the world, is basically a highly hierarchical organization with military-style chains of command, and frequently strong top-down control and one key leader, that is embedded inside larger society.

A stereotypical cult.

Monarchism worked historically by making it easier to get men on the battlefield. Stability, incentive structure, Divine Right—those are all post hoc, paling in comparison to the ability to coordinate violence.

It faded away as state capacity increased by other means. Monetary, communications, and logistics technologies lead to professional standing armies. Those have huge advantages over the feudal retinue-of-retinues.

I don’t think you can justify a monarchy without attempting to wrest back the monopoly on violence. But a straight fight really isn’t the goal of a parallel institution. That leaves engineering situations where the host state can’t or won’t leverage its advantage. Which, in turn, means distance and information control.

Historic tradition has given birth to the superstition among the French farmers that a man named Napoleon would restore to them all manner of glory. Now, then, an individual turns up, who gives himself out as that man because, obedient to the “Code Napoleon,” which provides that “La recherche de la paternite est interdite,” [#5 The inquiry into paternity is forbidden.] he carries the name of Napoleon. [#6 L. N. Bonaparte is said to have been an illegitimate son.] After a vagabondage of twenty years, and a series of grotesque adventures, the myth is verified, and that man becomes the Emperor of the French. The rooted thought of the Nephew becomes a reality because it coincided with the rooted thought of the most numerous class among the French.

Read Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire.

Now imagine if Trump had turned a little to the right and been shot through the temple on live TV. Then the GOP nominates some ghoul, who betrays the MAGA cause, betrays the MAGA faithful.

Baron Trump would in that moment, if he chose, be your parallel institution. Monarchy isn't about institutions, it's about sacred blood. About devotion to an individual and a bloodline as superior. That's the kind of drama needed.

Buy land somewhere in the middle of nowhere and organize a town there. Never sell the land to your citizens, just "rent" at a pittance, but with rules attached. Maybe don't rent either--require buy-in to the company that owns the land. There are all sorts of rules against rent discrimination, but as far as I know no rules that you must not discriminate when seeking "private investment." So long as you retain ownership of the land it remains legally possible to control immigration (decide who you allow to live there), and when worst comes to worst you have a good enforcement mechanism to kick people out.

At this point your best defense is illegibility. Do really legally weird, technically complex things that judges won't understand and have no business ruling on. Use blockchain smart contracts as much as possible. Build tenuous chains of trusts managed by corporations owned by nonprofits owned by churches. Generally, make it quite difficult to classify what you're doing according to existing laws, thus forcing your enemies (and enemies will arise if you succeed) to either force strained interpretation of existing law or sponsor the creation of entirely new laws in order to target you. Ideally the whole thing takes place in a sympathetic jurisdiction (right now, Texas would be best, then probably Florida) where even explicit government rulings against you are not necessarily enforced.

Try to use dollars as little as possible (another reason to rely on crypto). They can be confiscated or inflated away.

The nice thing about such a circumspect strategy is that it's not coup-complete. Your resistance will generally scale with your organization. If you act fast you can have thousands of people living in your town before the federal government realizes anything must be done about it. Attract (and filter for) the right kind of people and the benefits of such a town will speak for themselves.

I'm no monarchist but I do think such "parallel" societies will become necessary soon. I want to raise my kids somewhere they'll have intelligent peers, an actually challenging primary school system, and no danger of state abduction if they say the wrong thing to a school therapist. I think many others feel the same and have reasonably resilient jobs or skills that can handle a move to the middle of nowhere to get such a community started.

Do really legally weird, technically complex things that judges won't understand and have no business ruling on.

Has there ever been a judge who said "I have no business ruling on this, therefore 'Not Guilty'?"

force strained interpretation of existing law

For 80 years it's been established precedent that growing wheat on your own fields for your own use still counts as interstate commerce, because not buying wheat reduces the prices that other people sell it for. "They can't get you by straining a legal interpretation" is not good advice.

What I have seen in crypto is the SEC creating legally unjustifiable rules that make life impossible for productive people until they're struck down by the courts. The SEC wants existing laws to apply to crypto when they don't, and will bend them to the breaking point to pretend that the laws say what they want them to say. Meanwhile Congress isn't super supportive of crypto but it's just not a top priority to make clear rules about it.

The point isn't actually to create something so complex a judge won't understand it. I'm not sure that's possible anyway; they can bring in experts to simplify or whatever. Ideally you force them to rely on experts rather than government cronies. A good expert is reluctant to oversimplify and, if you've done this correctly, probably sympathetic to your side by nature of the field he's chosen. A judge's job is to interpret existing law, not rewrite it to apply to new things.

In the end, unless you are literally hidden you can't really overpower the state, only force it to expend political capital that might be better spent elsewhere. That's the strategy. It's worked well for Uber and Starlink; you just have to build capital (in whatever form that takes--maybe gaining powerful allies, a sympathetic narrative, or just being fully "established" so that their crackdown looks more like eviction than prevention) faster than your enemies build a cohesive resistance.

Hiding is a good option if you have a very aligned group of people, but as soon as someone defects the jig is up.

Starlink is very much a traditional "ask permission first so you don't have to ask forgiveness later" project, and they didn't start making the big asks (of the FCC) until they were already in good with NASA. IIRC the worst incident I can think of where SpaceX strained its sympathy was a Starship hop test years ago, where the FAA claimed (albeit vaguely) that SpaceX had exceeded what was allowed by its launch license, but the fallout only delayed their next test launch by like 5 days.

Uber is a really good point. Start an axitay abcay service instead of a taxi cab service, then grow it fast enough that people will scream bloody murder if you take it away based on taxi cab regulations, and you're fine? (mostly; Austin kicked out Uber and Lyft for a year at one point) But Uber bought "grow fast enough" with $30 billion in investor cash; gaining power and sympathy more affordably might be a lot harder.

I could have sworn I heard about traditional internet companies lobbying against Starlink recently, but I can't find it anywhere. What I did find [1, 2] is somewhat unfavorable treatment by the government but as far as I can tell (which is not very far) not egregious.

Anyways, I do think there's naturally more sympathy for charter cities than for Big Business. People live in them. They're In in Silicon Valley. Going against them means potentially evicting thousands of people, angering just about everyone. You'd have to be ready to fight but I think it might be possible, especially if you're in Texas and federal action against you becomes a states' rights issue too.

Within a decade or two, if things continue as they have been, I expect a soft nullification crisis. No state will come out and directly nullify a law, but instead they will not only refuse to enforce the law, but do everything in their power to hamper federal enforcement. We saw this in Texas when they took border enforcement into their own hands; from what I can tell the feds backed off because it was a bad fight to pick. Kicking thousands out of their city has worse optics than that so I think there's a good chance a big enough city can survive the inevitable legal battles.

Traditional cell phone companies lobbied against the Starlink+T-Mobile service recently, if that's what you're thinking of?

I don't think "going after" a charter city means evicting everybody. It just means outnumbering the cops who want to enforce the charter city's laws with cops who want to enforce state/federal laws instead. The optics of that are going to very much depend on the specifics of the laws being enforced against nullification or rendered null against local enforcement, and are to some extent going to depend on surrounding culture and random chance. The Short Creek raid and the YFZ Ranch raid were superficially pretty similar, but the latter was a lot more effective long-term, in part because the wider culture had turned further against polygamy and much further against underage marriage and sexism in the interim. If your idea of local laws is (peeks back up thread) "intelligent peers, an actually challenging primary school system" then (assuming you can't fix every demographic gap yourselves) you're fine until/unless the surrounding culture turns much harder against the typical disparate impact of academic challenge. If it's "no danger of state abduction if they say the wrong thing to a school therapist" then you're fine until/unless the culture turns much harder ... in favor of childhood gender transition against parental wishes, I'm assuming?

And then on the other side, you have to worry about whether the culture is going to turn in the other direction and make your efforts moot. Are the "Wobblies" going to turn your current residence communist any time soon? (I read about them in now-70-year-old books!) Wouldn't you feel silly if you'd gone to found a new city in the middle of nowhere to avoid that, with a bunch of equally anti-communist fellows, to wait out a particular End of the World that never came? The other trouble with selecting for the most radically anti-anything people around is that radicals (including reactionaries - at least some other forms of radicals haven't already seen how their ideals fail...) tend to get weird in ways you don't like just as much as in ways you do. I respect the kids-must-have-intelligent peers crowd, but if you get the ones who are so extreme about it that they don't consider e.g. "move to Los Alamos" a solution (23 AP classes offered, because "kids in a small town full of nuclear physicists" is a sweet peer group), well, let's just say that I'm not sure they're going to be able to keep up with the nuclear physicists' kids even in that specific desideratum.

Good points.

I don't think "going after" a charter city means evicting everybody. It just means outnumbering the cops who want to enforce the charter city's laws with cops who want to enforce state/federal laws instead.

Well, I don't think you'd really have cops enforcing your laws, or "laws" at all. There would just be a set of criteria determining citizen eligibility for housing, employment, etc. Your only enforcement mechanism is keeping people out (and maybe fining them for smaller infractions). Laws can be struck down easily as unconstitutional, tenancy rules and employment rules are different. Basically a parallel legal system not necessarily quite as beholden to the prevailing interpretation of the constitution.

For example, as far as I know i's not legal for towns to have immigration laws at all, but it is legal for them to restrict new housing, de facto ensuring that only rich people can live there. It's not legal to hire based on IQ, but it is (or at least, was until recently) legal to hire based on criminal record. If you own all the land you can legally create rules that mimic good law.

I don't have time to respond to the rest right now, sorry. It's a pretty half-baked idea to be sure. I would be extremely surprised to see some kind of conservative resurgence at this point. The best we can hope for is a national divorce.

I want to raise my kids somewhere they'll have intelligent peers, an actually challenging primary school system, and no danger of state abduction if they say the wrong thing to a school therapist.

Yes to all. So my kid is in a carefully selected private school. In the suburbs of a major city. This is a service you could buy today.

Private schools' main benefit is selection effects, but they select based mostly on income. You're paying out the nose just to be among other people who can and are willing to pay out the nose. This is a problem because while income is correlated with IQ it's not a particularly strong correlation, and you'll still end up with plenty of slow kids in class who drag the rest of the class down.

To be clear, what I'm looking for is a school system that sorts people based on intelligence and allows the quick kids to actually move ahead. I expect you'd pretty quickly have elementary school kids doing college-level tasks (to the extent "college-level" means anything) if they're allowed to set the pace rather than letting it be set by the slowest rich kid in the neighborhood. Given a group of kids 2 standard deviations above average (so 5% of all classrooms) you should probably be entirely done with high school before 9th grade using only half-days.

Private schools are definitely the best existing solution, besides maybe one-on-one private tutoring, but they're insufficient. They don't get the outcomes they should be getting. And the things I mentioned (challenging education, intelligent peers, sensible mental health policies) aren't the only benefits of living in a sane jurisdiction, just the most salient.

I think this used to be called "Gifted and Talented" programs when I was in elementary/middle school. I don't know if they still exist.

Even if they don't explicitly point this out, language immersion programs have a similar functional effect for ensuring your kid has higher-than-average-quality peers (and, if your kid is legitimately over-performing, it's a great distraction). They're also less likely to be targeted by progressives because it's not a sciences/excellence thing.

Yeah, I was in one and it was utterly insufficient. The peers, at least, were great, but the curriculum was still quite slow. Still better than nothing, but a long way from what's needed.

To be clear, what I'm looking for is a school system that sorts people based on intelligence and allows the quick kids to actually move ahead.

Isn’t this just selective public schools like those in some big cities like NYC where the student body is like 75% Asian?

If it is I'd like to learn more about them.

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

How much do you pay for that though? Seems like a humongous cost.

Cheaper than building your own Galt’s Gulch?

If everyone was paying private school tuition rates I think you could actually build a Galt's Gulch for no additional cost.

Possibly.

If true, that raises the question—why is private school so overpriced?

My understanding is that private schools are commonly cheaper per student than public schools. And somehow have smaller classes. Public schools are wild profligates with our tax dollars.

I have never found a serious source for this in aggregate (probably publication bias), but I have a suspicion that outcomes correlate negatively with funding. It's not hard to look and see that the districts that spend the most per student tend to also be the worst performing overall.

Some of this is higher costs in urban areas, and frequently bad districts can have some really good magnet schools. And I'm also not really of the opinion that this means cutting funding would improve outcomes.

I mean, is it overpriced? Education is just expensive and we don’t see it up front with a public school because the government pays the bill. Indeed, Catholic schools typically cost less than public schools spend.

One of the Bernalillo County (where Albuquerque, NM is) Republican Party’s big talking points is that the Albuquerque Public Schools district’s total budget is poorly spent by government.

Divided by pupil, the cost is a few thousand dollars more per year than tuition at Albuquerque Academy, the swankiest of our two prep high schools and the one with the biggest, showiest campus. At that price, we should be turning out Silicon Valley/Harvard/MIT-level high school grads, but we’re not.

If existing tuition could fund education plus Galt’s Gulch, but you aren’t getting the latter, then yes, it’s charging too much.

I agree that those public schools are probably also overpriced. Catholics probably aren’t the only ones delivering education at that price point, but I haven’t really looked into it.

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Gatekeeping through price is its main feature, so it's just following demand.

That seems likely. But then where does the money go? Higher salaries? Marginal improvements in materials?

You could imagine a private school which gets 90% of its performance from <90% of its dollars. In a public city, it has to spend the extra dollars on inefficient stuff to keep the poors out. In this gated community, the gatekeeping is done, so it’d be able to stop spending.

I suspect distinguishing which dollars are which is nontrivial.

To a lesser extent this is true of housing in general. I think plenty of people would be happy living in much smaller houses/apartments if they were sure they could do so in a good neighborhood with other successful, like-minded people.

It makes me wonder about the legality of constructing some kind of "landshare" where people need to literally buy their way into the community. Most of the money would be going not towards the land they're buying, but some kind of community trust holding an index of stocks. This way you still get the price gatekeeping without the inflated land prices.

Someone developing a cult following and convincing enough of their followers to move to a remote physical location where they can outvote the locals. Then they can vote for their own sheriff and government officials that will let them run things as the cult leader wishes. In Wild Wild Country they bussed in homeless to win county elections.

This isn't quite like a monarch because the cult members are always free to leave. It requires the cult leader maintaining a system of loyalty and devotion so that cult members will submit to the leader's rule.

Orban's Hungary looks like a pretty decent first draft.

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