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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   32446 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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If we see a crash on par with the great depression, the 30% of people that normally tune out politics are going to vote. Last time that happened, we got FDR and then leftist politics for 2 generations. This time it will be worse, since social media, if captured, allows for much tighter control over the narrative. Is that really worth the risk?

The great depression was a monetary depression caused by the Fed and/or the gold standard. It had very little to do with tariffs, and everything to do with deflation.

Considering the dollar has lost something like 98% of its value since then, and we haven't been on the gold standard for over 50 years, I don't think that's going to be a problem.

You are essentially saying that mass disruptions to the economy come only from deflation. In my view, that's a bit of a presumptuous statement to make about a system so large that no human being can really conceive of it in its entirety.

I'm certainly not arguing that I know that tariffs of this scale will collapse the system. What I am arguing is that making rapid changes of that scale has the capacity to cause large, unforeseen consequences. And that such consequences may not be easily reversible. From a political calculus standpoint, it's a very dangerous move.

I'm not essentially saying anything, I'm specifically saying the great depression had a primary cause, and that cause was monetary in nature. Yes, there were tariffs that came after the crash, but they were ancillary to the main cause and not the main story, unless you're telling a fable.

What I am arguing is that making rapid changes of that scale has the capacity to cause large, unforeseen consequences.

The great depression is not the example to make this point.

Okay, fair enough. You're engaging with the specific case, when the point I'm driving at is the generalization; that drastic changes to the rules by which the economy functions can have large and sometimes very negative consequences. If you want to apply that generalization to the case of the great depression, then yes, monetary policy that resulted in an insufficient money supply was a key factor. So was a large asset bubble. We could just as easily look at the case of the Spanish Price Revolution to see what happens when the government drastically increases the money supply without understanding what the effects of that will be.

None of that detracts from the fact that ideological economic changes, imposed literally overnight, are politically risky if the ideology doesn't match reality.

Last time that happened, we got FDR and then leftist politics for 2 generations.

Note that for Europe, the outcome of the great depression was even worse by many metrics.

There is a reason why some worship the economy as a malevolent Outer Deity. When angered, its destructiveness can be on par with Adonai.

I am vaguely in favor of carefully testing the limits of what is offending the economy when there are good humanitarian reasons for it (e.g. in healthcare), but the US -- which historically was the biggest proponent of free trade -- becoming protectionist feels more like directly defiling the its altars and expecting it will continue to grant its blessings.

Agreed. On economics I'm quite conservative in the traditional, Chesterton's fence sense of the word. Re-routing the irrigation ditches with a nuclear explosion and still expecting the crops to get watered is a very risky bet.

What’s traditional about offshoring a nation’s manufacturing base to a foreign (and potentially hostile, like China) country? The EU couldn’t produce a fraction of munitions needed to keep pace with Russia during the beginnings of the Ukraine war. Visit American post-industrial hovels like Youngstown or Detroit and compare those images to the protectionist bogeymen of 100 years ago. And ask yourself why nations dependent on free trade have significantly low fertility levels.

Chesterton’s fence was demolished decades ago, and the rich beneficiaries of free trade policy are finally forced to notice thanks to Trump.

Detroit

The collapse of Detroit proper is a story of conventional urban decay and long precedes the decline of "Detroit" the auto-industry cluster. The factories were in the suburbs (Dearborn for Ford, much more widely distributed for GM because so much of the early growth was by acquisition). Some of the auto suburbs are post-industrial wasteland (e.g. Flint) but most of them aren't - notably including Dearborn.

And ask yourself why nations dependent on free trade have significantly low fertility levels.

Ah yes, notoriously high fertility... East Asia?

It was a dumb idea to let China into the western trade networks in the late 90s. There I agree with you. But that doesn't change the fact that reversing course on a ship this size is not something that can be accomplished overnight. Trying to do so will simply sink the ship.

I think it's easy to loose site of how much we still have to loose. The poor people in Youngstown or Detroit are still better off than their counterparts from 100 years ago. At least nobody is starving on the street in the present day US.

Fertility rate collapses have occurred in countries as diverse as North Korea and Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Iran, Argentina and Zimbabwe. It is unlikely they are the consequence of free trade.

  • Last time that happened, we got FDR and then leftist politics for 2 generations.

We also got Hitler, Franco and Mussolini. So we may be lucky and not get FDR.

They took power while the existing regime was shaking itself apart. Franco most obviously so, but the other two as well.

The 30% vote against whoever is in power. 1929 US was fresh off of a decade of republican rule. So they gave it to the dems. The Wiemar republic was a pretty left wing entity. So the 30% swung it to the right.

It's really unlikely that a right wing party crashing the economy would result in people moving more to the right. If anything, it would kill the biggest electoral advantage that the republicans have traditionally enjoyed, benefit of the doubt on the economy.

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