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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   32578 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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More on Trump's tariffs.

I ran into a very interesting comment on reddit last night:

Trump's ICE thugs raided a roofing company in Washington State to arrest three dozen people.

https://apnews.com/article/immigration-raid-bellingham-washington-roofing-company-73dfd3d3ca1af12503108616f3726e12

I guess my 31 year old unemployed brother that weighs 400 pounds and plays Halo all day and occasionally destroys the plumbing and breaks the toilet seat and makes my 68 year old mother clean up the mess will just have to get out his tacking hammer and get busy.

MAGA.

To which I respond... yes. That's exactly right. Suppose ICE actually deports enough illegals to cause significant shortages in farming, roofing, factory work, construction, etc. Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?

The author of this comment would immediately answer with "well, he's so fat and lazy that he ain't gonna, so there". To which my response is, very well! Then we shall all go without roofs. Now of course, people are capable of far more than you expect them to be once their backs are actually up against the wall. People will leap into action if there's no other choice. But, supposing he's right and it does turn out that no one answers the call, then we shall simply go without. A nation, a culture, a race that does not provide for itself, should go without. This, I imagine, is one of the core ethical commitments that separates MAGA from its opponents.

Are we actually going to deport enough illegals to make a difference? Probably not. Is anyone in the administration consciously implementing the program I've described here? It may have occurred to someone in passing, but it's probably not written down in a secret master plan anywhere. But still, you can see here, dimly, the outline of a program that would actually give Trump's base exactly what they wanted, in a very direct way. Which is pretty neat.

I guess it's time to drop this take: did we accidentally end up reintroducing slavery?

I don't say this lightly. The archetype/stereotype of the immigrant worker is a man who has come over to America to work for an illegally-low wage (that is still more than he could earn by staying in the corrupt shithole he fled from), and faces challenges such as: he can't get the law on his side if his employer abuses him (because then he'd be caught and deported), his failure to meld with the local culture places him at odds with the native population, and his children are pseudo-orphans because their parents are only able to raise them for as long as they aren't caught and deported. And what do we, the natives, get out of the exploitation of this man's travails? Cheaper products as a result of cheaper labor.

"Cheap labor" is the motivating force for capitalism, and business owners have always sought it out wherever it could be found. First, it was slaves taken from Africa and the Native American population. After the Civil War, it was the native-born blacks and dirt-poor whites who helped build the industrial cities of the Eastern US. Towards the end of the Cold War, it was overseas countries where quality of life, wages, and cost of living were all low. At some point, immigrant labor also gained a share of labor power.

Now, to an extent, I like the world that the Neoliberal World Order built, but all those blue-haired Adbusters-reading leftists are directionally-correct that we are addicted to cheap labor and ignore all the externalities that come with it. Is it right to just shut off the supply like Trump is trying to do? Should we not wean ourselves off of it now that the world is so interconnected anyways? Is it fair to keep racing to the bottom for more-work-for-less-paychecks even as we speculate about the wonders of total automation that seem so tantalizingly closer with every passing day?

While illegals make less than native workers doing the same jobs would, their wages aren’t illegally low and most don’t complain about the treatment from their bosses.

Yeah, certainly in large wealthy cities most illegal migrants make much, much more than the federal minimum wage.

The bad thing about slavery isn't that they did it for free. In fact, they didn't even do it for free, they got room and board.

The bad thing about slavery was that they (or their ancestors) were forcibly abducted, transported (across state lines!), and put to work at gunpoint, with their children being born into the same situation. Illegal immigrants can leave at any moment and their kids cives Americani sunt.

It sucks that there are people born every day into poverty in third world countries. However, people who illegally (often perilously)come to this country for opportunities they don't have at home obviously will not benefit from being sent home. They know what home is like and they made the decision to come here anyway. We can talk about whether they are good for the country, but the argument that illegal immigration is bad for the illegal immigrants just doesn't hold water.

I can acknowledge that, yes, obviously, it still really beats slavery, but I can see that it still seems unfair and quite uneven.

Does the math work? Average apartment rent in the US is $1750 / month, so $21000 / year. Some quick Googling shows that in the US, the average factory worker salary is about $35000 and average construction worker salary is about $40000. In reality it's probably significantly less since I am guessing that the available figures don't include many illegal aliens' wages and under-the-table arrangements.

So unless something changes to either increase the salaries or make housing cheaper, we seem to on average have a situation where as a blue-collar worker you'd be paying half of your salary in rent. Add on other vital spending like food and health insurance, and pretty soon you have a situation where there isn't much money left over to do anything besides just survive.

Granted, deporting illegal aliens would likely drive up blue collar wages, but it could also lead to increases in prices on things like food so the benefits are not completely straightforward. Let's say that deporting illegal aliens does substantially increase blue collar wages. Even then, unless the government does something to lower housing costs, it still seems that the situation would be pretty dicey for the average blue collar worker. And Trump, as far as I know, barely talks about housing. He and his administration do not seem to give the issue of housing affordability much attention at all. Yet it is probably the single biggest economic expense for most Americans, and the supply is not matching the demand.

You know that average apartment rent is higher than something approximating half of apartment rents?

In any case, many construction workers do not live in apartments. They might rent a room in a house($600/mo in my metro) if not living with a partner(and if they are, two incomes makes rent much more affordable). They might live in a trailer park(generally cheaper than apartments). They might already own a house.

The problem is the unemployed brother whose elderly mother is cleaning up after him, and what is this guy doing about it? Why is he not kicking his brother in the behind to sort himself out? Why isn't he fixing the toilet instead of letting Mom do it?

Whether or not there are illegal immigrants being used as cheap labour, this is nothing to do with his family problems. If he's unable to help, or unwilling to help, blaming Trump for "ICE thugs" is not going to be any good for his elderly mother trying to survive in her home with this kind of constant hassle.

Maybe a few "ICE thugs" showing up to drag the brother out of the house wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. Then this guy could go virtue signal about "I love the idea of persecuted brown people so much more than my own real family" somewhere else.

Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?

This depends critically on the amount of collateral poverty you would need to create for each such vacancy filled.

That in turn is an empirical matter.

To build on this, I want to just quote Kelsey Piper's tweet discussing jobs programs versus domestic manufacturing https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1907980342272852436:

"well, we need to bring manufacturing back" this isn't how to do that. "well, how would you do that, then?"

First, think about what you are hoping to accomplish. Is this a jobs program? Is the point to have high-paying factory jobs for the non-college men who used to work in those jobs, independent of whether the output of those factory jobs is cost-competitive or quality-competitive with foreign-made goods? You can run a jobs program, if you want - America is absurdly rich, we can really do absolutely anything at all that we choose to make a priority - but you can't serve two masters here. If the point is a jobs program don't expect high quality goods or goods that are competitive on the export market, because that requires embracing automation and new mechanical processes and the people working these jobs have no incentive to go full speed ahead on that, and since you've chosen to give them a captive market you don't have a good way to push them on quality or on price.

To my mind, if we're going to do a jobs program it's silly to make it a factory jobs program. Factory jobs kind of sucked. My own quixotic dream of a jobs program is to put our national muscle behind fixing our perilously broken education system. Kids benefit a lot from one on one tutoring; hire a million Americans to offer one on one tutoring to every student between the ages of 5 and 9 to fix our horrifying collapse in general reading ability. Boys learn better if some of their teachers are men, so make sure half of your hires are men. There, jobs program, and the work isn't 'undercutting Vietnam in the garment industry', it's raising the next generation. If you don't like my personal idea, fine, but I think if you list the pros and cons of five different jobs programs you thought of in ten minutes apiece 'take back the textile industry from Vietnam' isn't going to be the most appealing of any of them.

What if your aim isn't a jobs program? What if it's defense? That's also fine, but keep in mind you still can't serve two masters; if this is about defense then we are going to laser-focus on defense production, and we're not treating this as a jobs program at all. Go to every manufacturer of munitions, planes and cars in the country. Ask them for all their suppliers. Acquire those companies, or partner with them, or hire a bunch of their leadership, and pay them to start up a plant in the US. Instead of scaring our allies with bizarre threats to add them to our territory, which has made many of them back away from commitments to the American defense industry, build those ties very strongly and start asking them for purchase agreements. Find really good CEOs who grew a complex logistical business in a related industry rapidly - yes, Elon Musk absolutely qualifies here, frustrated as I am with him - ask them to take responsibility for a supply chain and 10x production in the next two years, and give them the resources they need to do it. Send Ukraine an obscene amount of materiel, enough to actually win the war instead of just be stalemated in it. Make advance commitments to buy the munitions to do that, to support those companies in growing capacity.

What if your goal is neither jobs nor defense, but fostering the growth of an industry in the US that could stand on its own two feet once it existed but will never get started? Here's where tariffs actually make sense, but they should be relentlessly narrow, specific and targeted. What do you want to sell? Who in America is trying to build it? What inputs do they buy from abroad? Make it a priority of our trade policy to get them those inputs cheaply. Most of what you're doing is, once again, buying bits of the supply chain and hiring people who know how to do it, plus subsidizing them, but tariffs will be part of the picture. The CHIPS act was this done well. Every single tariff and every single subsidy should have an incredibly specific objective in mind, and if it isn't working to achieve that objective should be adjusted.

What if your goal is to negotiate a free trade agreement? Well, we've successfully negotiated lots of free trade agreements, it's not exactly a totally unknown art form. Have smart, competent, skilled negotiators with knowledge of the other side's constraints, resources, political concerns, and where we have leverage. Have bilateral negotiations; emerge with a deal; have Congress ratify it. Trying to do many-to-one negotiations doesn't work because it is so visible that a country's behavior to date has nothing to do with the tariffs that were imposed, because the way the tariffs were imposed puts many other countries' leadership in a position where doing what we want would be deeply unpopular at home, and because no one involved knew anything about the countries they were throwing tariffs at.

Again, we can do any of these things. We are not a country on the brink of becoming a failed state; we can execute on ambitious, ludicrous, serious things, and we absolutely should. We just have to figure out what we want and then line up the levers to get it done. I've always found something beautiful about the capacity of healthy societies to change gears on a dime, to set down their knitting and go do a shift at the munitions factory, to build cities in the dust overnight. We can reshore

Endquote (I'm too lazy to do the block quoting for all that.)

I actually disagree with her - I think we have proven relatively definitively that jobs programs in the United States currently do not work. Not because jobs programs are a bad idea in a vacuum, but because the government and the way we as citizens interact with the government has become so corrupted, that major government programs are doomed to fail horribly in my opinion.

Then again, perhaps a blatant jobs program would be better than the corrupt crap we have going on today?

Also, I don't think that manufacturing in the U.S. would lead to low quality. Yes we would have automation, but we would also need people to staff the plants. And the fact is, young men just tend to enjoy and be more drawn to working with their hands than working on computers all day. For the most part, at least.

Her take reads to me as a very well thought out, but stereotypically feminine and coastal elite view of the problem.

Again, we can do any of these things.

This is the part that is wrong. We actually can't do any of these things, at least not to any degree of scale and competence. There are too many veto points, too many interest groups, and too many fief-building bureaucrats for anything that requires coordination beyond an executive order. And, there is insufficient faith in competent government execution and trust in expertise even if these things were not true, such that it would probably fail from lack of good-faith cooperation anyways.

That doesn't mean that tariffs are better than nothing. I appreciate Althouse's dictum that better than nothing is a high bar. But for all the people who cry that we have to do something, well, this is something and it can be done.

Kids benefit a lot from one on one tutoring; hire a million Americans to offer one on one tutoring to every student between the ages of 5 and 9 to fix our horrifying collapse in general reading ability. Boys learn better if some of their teachers are men, so make sure half of your hires are men.

Yeah, that's a good point, but the problem is, for example: the kind of guys who would have gone into teaching instead of doing blue-collar work, because their families wanted them to get out of the manual labour grind and improve themselves, are still going to go into teaching today, but the guys who got a job on the assembly line instead of becoming teachers are not going to do that today.

It's not a simple choice between "well gee will I study to become a primary school teacher or get a job in the box factory, I have the skills and aptitude for either". The guys who got a job in the box factory were not academically qualified to be teachers (I'm not saying they were stupid, I'm saying they were never going to be teachers and they knew it, their families knew it, everybody knew it).

So it's a bit like the "learn to code" mantra - if there aren't any box factories anymore, those guys are not going to be teaching nine year old boys how to read gooderer.

So there is going to be a tranche of people who would have done manual labour/blue-collar work, but now manufacturing is either off-shored or automation is coming for those jobs. What do you do for them? Some of them may be able to start up small businesses of their own (there is certainly plenty of room for 'local guy to do small handyman jobs around the town') but not all, and certainly not all of them are going to be able to pivot into teaching.

AI is probably coming for the white-collar jobs as well, but there may be more wiggle room there for "okay so maybe I'll re-train as a teacher". I think something like a jobs programme probably is the best we can hope for, and there is a ton of work in the voluntary/public sector that could be done under the aegis of that, but it'll be tricky to implement: local government that isn't cutting the grass or filling the pot holes because of lack of budget to do that kind of work. Voluntary services that need a handyman/janitor/caretaker but don't have the funding to employ one full-time.

These are called community employment schemes over here, I don't know if there is an American equivalent, but if manufacturing/heavy industry is now dead as a source of employment, unless you're expecting everyone to start becoming an Uber driver or the likes, then some kind of government jobs programme is what is needed. The ideal would be "these are real jobs where people are employed at market rates and get health insurance and pension benefits" but the problem of course is no money to pay for that, so that's where government has to step in and then we're talking about spending even more on social security/social services which is another problem in itself: where does the money come from to pay for that, unless we're expecting the Miracle of Superhuman Intelligence AI to make things so cheap, and the economy so booming, that there is the magic money fountain flowing to pay for all this.

Kids benefit a lot from one on one tutoring; hire a million Americans to offer one on one tutoring to every student between the ages of 5 and 9 to fix our horrifying collapse in general reading ability.

Whom do you plan on hiring for this? I can assure you, the median underemployed/NEET man is not a fit for the role.

To quote John Adams, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." The point is eminently not for our children to go back to the manual labor or agricultural drudgery of our ancestors. Any immigrant will tell you that they are working hard to enable their descendants to be lazy.

Does the sequence proposed by Adams lead to a "weak men, hard times" cycle? Perhaps, but it seems profoundly stupid to deliberately crash the good times in the hopes of producing strong men, instead of finding a way to preserve them for as long as possible, when we are on the cusp of technologies (AI, eugenics, etc.) that may allow us to do just that.

it seems profoundly stupid to deliberately crash the good times in the hopes of producing strong men, instead of finding a way to preserve them for as long as possible, when we are on the cusp of technologies (AI, eugenics, etc.) that may allow us to do just that.

If you actually think that AI is going to make a big impact on the economy, it seems rational to try to onshore industry and crash the email/finance/coding class. In an AI boom scenario, the email/finance/coding classes will be out of a job first, and it will take time and human elbow grease to get the AI-run-and-assisted factories up and running. Whatever happens with the tariffs will be gentler than what would happen if every single corporation in America replaced ~everyone whose primary job was with a computer with GPT-7 Pro once it demoed.

If you are an AI near-term-ist it makes a ton of sense to blow up an industry that is going to be destroyed anyway in order to begin rebuilding an industrial industry that might-or-might-not be accelerated to stratospheric levels by AI. If we assume that AI can radically reshape industry, we might as well start working on that project now, particularly if we are in a competition with China, who is roughly on par with us in AI and already has a large industry. Supposing that AI makes industry 100% more powerful over the course of ten years: the United States needs as big of an industrial base as possible when that AI drops or it potentially loses in meatspace very badly to countries like China.

Eugenics will not meaningfully affect anything for 40+ years (if it takes off, which it is unlikely to).

I am not an AI near-term-ist but if you really think AI is going to take off, worth considering what that might mean.

It's perfectly reasonable for a parent's preferences to run artist>engineer>war>400 lb NEET who acts like an ungrateful wretch>homeless addict.

A son who reads poems at coffee shops and has interesting friends is nice. A son who's mostly known for eating all their family's food, messing up the plumbing and leaving it that way is not. The latter is surprisingly common among the working class families in my life.

I won't discipline my kids well enough so they can live in a prosperous economy without wireheading themselves off scraps, therefore we can't have a prosperous country.

Can't have shit in Detroit vibes

The good times are always temporary. Having an entire society essentially doing nothing but poetry simply means that no production happens and you import laborers and goods because you don’t want to produce things. And eventually your wealth dissipates shipped off to other countries or paid out to guest workers who send the money home.

The desired cycle does seem to be of the "Hard times create strong Slavs, strong Slavs create hard times" version.

Before we go without roofs, roofing companies will increase the wages they offer employees, and roofing companies will increase the quality of life they offer employees (fewer days a week, shorter hours). This is exactly what we want: greater quality of life for lower income and middle income Americans, at the direct expense of the upper class who waste our precious resources on ugly cars, biohazardous laws and Peloton machines. Contrary to popular belief, it has always been a zero-sum game.

The rich can absorb the hit if fixing their roof goes from $15K to $35k. The middle class, less so.

Increasing roofing prices increases housing prices. That affects far more than the "upper class".

Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations

Sorry, is the theory here that inducing a recession will increase labour force participation? That is very observably not what has happened in every previous recession. If the theory is that mass deportations will mean this time is different and the reverse will happen because there will be millions of new vacancies opened up, well there are demand side effects too. Obviously no-one knows precisely, but estimates of illegal immigrant remittances tend not to be above 20% of total earnings, so even before considering any other mechanisms you'd need to deport at the very least four illegal immigrants to create one vacancy in an equivalent role on average, and this is before one even begins to consider things like complementary task specialisation. This means that any increase in unemployment downstream of a recession will be extraordinarily difficult. Given that the US labour force is something like 170 million+ people, if a Trump recession produces just a 1% increase in unemployment, you'd need to deport over 6 millions illegal immigrants just to get back to where you started. This isn't just a question of, as you say, 'he won't deport enough illegals to make a difference'. It's that even a small recession would wipe out any possible labour market improvements from even the most thoroughly pursued program of deportations.

The fact is that being able to coast by on gig economy money, for instance, is a symptom of a society becoming wealthier. It might be bad from a social cohesion and personal fulfilment perspective, but 'make society poorer so people have to work harder' seems like a pretty silly experiment to carry out, and rather unfair on everyone else who doesn't fall into that category and whose lives will become a whole lot harder.

I'm also not convinced this is a major problem. U-6 unemployment is below 8% at the moment, which is only marginally above the lows it reached prior to the early 2000s recession, GFC and Covid.

For all intents and purposes, yes. This (among other things) is what i voted for.

Democrats' rhetoric surrounding immigration and wages has always stood out to me as an obvious example of politically-motivated doublethink. "The experts" are asking us to hold two contradictory axioms simultaneously. One is that maintaining a supply of "off the books" labor is essential to the survival of multiple industries (such as roofing and agriculture) and that ideally we should be increasing the supply of labor to reduce costs (ie wages) even further. The other is that the available supply of labor has has little if any effect on wages (ie costs).

This allows the Democrat to maintain a smug confidence in thier own intellectual and class superiority through convincing themselves that the working class only opposes immigration because they are a bunch of ignorant racist hicks who do not understand the nuances of economic theory, and have been "tricked" by men like Trump into voting against thier own interests, rather than people with legitimate grievences and concerns, who don't like seeing thier wages under-cut and culture denigrated.

I also agree that the moral judgment towards willingness to work and "going without" is one of the core ideological differences between the Tea-Party/MAGA right and other political factions within the US.

Democrats' rhetoric surrounding immigration and wages has always stood out to me as an obvious example of politically-motivated doublethink. "The experts" are asking us to hold two contradictory axioms simultaneously. One is that maintaining a supply of "off the books" labor is essential to the survival of multiple industries (such as roofing and agriculture) and that ideally we should be increasing the supply of labor to reduce costs (ie wages) even further. The other is that the available supply of labor has has little if any effect on wages (ie costs).

These are not contradictory because immigrant (especially illegal immigrant) and native pools of labour are not easy substitutes, they have very different skill mixes - and when I say 'skills', I don't mean that American citizens are all accountants or nuclear engineers, I mean in the most basic sense. Hence because of complementary task specialisation it is possible for new illegal immigrants to, on average, depress the wages of other illegal immigrants but not, on average, natives, and for such influxes to improve native productivity. It's a bit of a waste of a median American to be working in the fields, but in a constricted labour market wages in non-skilled fields get pushed up until people are pulled out into those fields, which is bad for productivity and standards of living in the long run. In a way it's the logic of automation.

Of course, there will be some in the American citizen labour pool (especially, ironically, recent legal immigrants) who are similarly unskilled to the average illegal immigrant, but the way to remedy that is via fiscal policy and redistribution of the native productivity gains which immigration facilitates.

I do not believe you.

I believe that to the degree that substitution might be difficult it is difficult because affluent blue tribers on the coast want it to be difficult, and actively work to make it so.

I believe that "They are doing jobs Americans wont" is code for "I don't think I should have to pay 'the help' the going rate" and "I don't want an emplyee with legal rights and delusions of equality, I want a serf I can exploit"

Finally i beleive that @coffee_enjoyer is correct that roofing companies will start increasing the wages and quality of life they offer thier employees before we go without roofs. If they don't, screw 'em.

the way to remedy that is via fiscal policy and redistribution of the native productivity gains which immigration facilitates.

It's pretty amazing that the solution to the harm caused by liberal immigration policy is to give even more money to liberals in the department of economic equity to distribute according to equity metrics designed by some other liberal consultant from harvard.

Like all those "teaching coal miners to learn to code" programs that, wow, didn't get any coal miners good jobs, but sure did hand out a lot of money to the kind of people whose nonprofits run those programs.

It's so obvious to anyone on the outside how relentlessly self-serving this leftist managerial ideology is, how is it seemingly impossible to notice from the inside?

It's pretty amazing that the solution to the harm caused by liberal immigration policy is to give even more money to liberals in the department of economic equity to distribute according to equity metrics designed by some other liberal consultant from harvard.

Don't be facetious. The proportion of money redistributed via welfare which goes to administration of that welfare is pretty low, and that mostly consists of ordinary administrative workers not high-level policy wonks.

Like all those "teaching coal miners to learn to code" programs that, wow, didn't get any coal miners good jobs, but sure did hand out a lot of money to the kind of people whose nonprofits run those programs.

Lol. To the extent that 'learn to code' was ever a real policy, which it never really was, the vast vast majority of the funding changes downstream of that discourse didn't go to non-profits. In any case what I meant by redistribution was, well, redistribution.

It's so obvious to anyone on the outside how relentlessly self-serving this leftist managerial ideology is, how is it seemingly impossible to notice from the inside?

Lazy and trite. There are problems with left-wing non-profits, especially in the post-Floyd period, but that has nothing to do with genuine government redistributive programmes which do a lot of good and have relatively low overheads.

It's pretty amazing that the solution to the harm caused by liberal immigration policy is to give even more money to liberals in the department of economic equity to distribute according to equity metrics designed by some other liberal consultant from harvard.

To my knowledge, the primary means of redistribution in the US is the EITC which does it on the basis of income. That doesn't seem very objectionable to me.

The primary means of redistribution is Social Security, which does it on the basis of age.

To which I respond... yes. That's exactly right. Suppose ICE actually deports enough illegals to cause significant shortages in farming, roofing, factory work, construction, etc. Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?

The dream held by parents around the world is not 'I have done backbreaking labor roofing the houses, tilling the fields and manning the production lines - I hope that my child will live the same life,' it is 'I have done backbreaking labor roofing the houses, tilling the fields and manning the production lines so that my child doesn't have to.' Rather than grubbing around in the dirt with a hoe, we built massive tractors and combines to the work of dozens? Hundreds? of men. And more cynically, we outsourced the production lines to Bangladesh and roofing houses to illegals. But boomers and their children got to put on their white collars and push papers around in an office all day! Or, you know, become neets and shitpost on 4chan.

Tell me, do Chinese people tell their children to dream of a job on the production line or do they force them to study 20 hours a day for the gaokao in hopes of escaping a life of manual labor to do the white collar jobs that you sneer at? The future is not retvrning to backbreaking labor, but forging a new path that avoids both the perils of neetdom and the grievances of the dispossessed. The future lies in recognizing our love of zero-sum status games and squaring that with a world where there's fewer and fewer high-status jobs to go around.

A nation, a culture, a race that does not provide for itself, should go without. This, I imagine, is one of the core ethical commitments that separates MAGA from its opponents.

Really...? When is the last time you heard MAGA supporters agitating for cuts to welfare and entitlements because those who do not provide for themselves, should go without? When has Trump ever supported anything resembling what you just said? The core ethical commitment that separates MAGA from the rest of the country is a revanchist bent to make the libs/globalists/elites suffer as they have. The reaction to the supreme court striking down Roe v. Wade wasn't jubilation about saving the unborn (although I did hear of some Catholic circles where this was the case), it was gloating about how arrogant Hillary and RBJ were in assuming that the arc of history was inevitably bending their way as they girlbossed their way to grinding the deplorables beneath their high heels. The reaction to DOGE isn't that cutting government spending would improve the union (see: all the arguments regarding the magnitude of the spending cut versus the actual federal budget), it was joy at the suffering of entitled, lazy government bureaucrats and globalists who care more about HIV in Africa than fentanyl abuse in the rust belt.

Whether the anger is justified is a whole other conversation, but consider this: If MAGA were forced to choose between 1) a debatably prosperous country where libs in New York and San Francisco flourished via tech/healthcare/finance and MAGA strongholds stagnated or 2) crushing the 'globalist agenda' and doing to those industries what was done to manufacturing, with questionable benefit to MAGA strongholds, which do you think they would choose?

If you take away the animus for the libs, the MAGA coalition collapses. You see it here where there is largely consensus against any kind of woke topic, but bitter arguments around the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the tariffs.

“The dream held by parents around the world is not 'I have done backbreaking labor roofing the houses, tilling the fields and manning the production lines - I hope that my child will live the same life,' it is 'I have done backbreaking labor roofing the houses, tilling the fields and manning the production lines so that my child doesn't have to.”

This is true but I would also strongly prefer my son to be a roofer or an assembly line worker than a 400 lb NEET. While the idea that we’ll automatically get back to the idealized somewhat fantastical version of the 1950s of good values and high employment in a productive industrial economy if we just mass deport and tariff is also a fantasy…. I do think we’ve gone astray as a society when able bodied men are permitted to be jobless parasites while we’re also importing a helot class to do the types of jobs we need able bodied men to do. I don’t have all the answers on how to fix this but I think it’s at least worth commenting on

Happily, MAGA does not have to choose between just the two options you listed. There is a middle path where the globalist agenda is crushed via onshoring manufacturing which yes, will increase costs for the coastal elite who own big corporations, but will also raise wages for the working and middle class.

I think it is a serious error to assume the MAGA coalition is held together by a desire to "own the libs". Thats what some figures may cathartically tweet about, but the actual voters that matter care about their jobs, the cost of groceries and morgtages, and their kids education. On all of these the proggo left has failed misrably the past few years, which is why in 2024 the GOP, not the DNC, won the lion's share of the working class vote.

There is a middle path where the globalist agenda is crushed via onshoring manufacturing which yes,will increase costs for the coastal elite who own big corporations, but will also raise wages for the working and middle class.

It could also decrease those wages, in fact it‘s very likely. First there‘s the obvious loss in purchasing power through tariff-induced inflation. And secondly, the american consumer loves consooming too much. He will eat the seed corn if you leave him alone with it. Other countries used to make up for it with their savings, ensuring the american worker‘s productivity was higher than it would be if he had to rely on his own meager savings for investment.

I find this economic story at least as plausible as trump‘s ‚my trade deficit is your profit‘ . Partly because my theory doesn‘t rely on the very adventurous claim that the rich guy is actually being exploited by the poor foreigners who send him the stuff he consumes.

Dubious and clashing economic narratives aside, you have to concede that the argument in favour of tariffs is necessarily weak and specific to certain non-typical situations, else tariffs between US states would be a good idea.

Happily, MAGA does not have to choose between just the two options you listed. There is a middle path where the globalist agenda is crushed via onshoring manufacturing which yes, will increase costs for the coastal elite who own big corporations, but will also raise wages for the working and middle class.

Or alternatively, the economy crashes as it will if the current trajority continues and the MAGA coalition gets kicked in the balls and tossed out of office in 2026 and 2028 after which all tarrif powers are taken away from the president and things are put into place to stop them from ever having this much power again.

Certainly a possibility, but I think it unlikely.

Expound if you will, People always vote against the party that is in power when a big crash happens and that is in circumstances where it isn't immediately obvious who and what caused the crash.

the cost of groceries

Is the cost of groceries going to go up or down with tariffs on imported groceries and with reduced Mexican farm labor?

After democrats have restricted demand and subsidized supply right into the toilet, republicans seem to be interested in doubling down on restricting supply but this time without demand subsidies. Have we tried increasing supply instead?

After democrats have restricted demand and subsidized supply right into the toilet

Did you mean this the other way around?

Hah, yes.

There is a middle path where the globalist agenda is crushed via onshoring manufacturing which yes, will increase costs for the coastal elite who own big corporations, but will also raise wages for the working and middle class.

Do you actually expect that onshoring manufacturing will raise wages (relative to the cost of goods and services) for the majority of working-class and middle-class Americans? Have similar approaches worked in the past?

Yes, because yes. 1945-1979 saw a massive expansion in the American manufacturing sector with wages that were, adjusting for inflation, median wages, and CoL, comparatively much higher than they are today. Now will a new American manufacturing boom look like that one? No, it will be much more heavily automated and high tech, but the funny thing about robots is they still need a large number of people to operate, maintain, repair, upgrade, and pioneer more uses for them. A factory I worked at actually hired more workers despite completely automating the actual assembly line and ended up passing out a lot of raises as people skilled up.

1945-1979 saw a massive expansion in the American manufacturing sector

A good place to start in analyzing this (which is true, btw) is to ask "why?" Better yet, to ask "what were the prevailing macro conditions that allowed this to happen?"

Tracing that, you'll probably stumble upon the answer that is accepted by all serious economists and historians; after world war 2, ALL of the countries that had the human capital, technological proficiency, and public infrastructure to support a massive scale manufacturing sector were literally blown to shit and had suffered massive amounts of prime age male death ..... except for the USA.

1945 to 1979 happened as a fait accompli because no other country on earth could - at scale - do it.

In 2025, this is not the case. We would be immediately competing (with drastically higher labor costs by law) with several other countries (two of which who have larger absolute populations than us) who have spent the last 40 years (re)developing their manufacturing sectors.

But wait - we're already close to optimal in terms of manufacturing value add. The Chinese beat us out because they have three times the population and negative three billion times the respect for human rights. So when you, or anyone, says "bring back manufacturing!" - what in the actual hell do you mean? It's already here. Especially the best of it. In terms of high-end technical manufacturing (complex systems, aircraft, large machinery, etc.) the U.S. is so far out in first it's not even a competition.

The "manufacturing jobs" people like you seem to want are, what, exactly? Lightbulbs? Tee-shirts? Flip-flops? These are not jobs that pay well. These are not jobs that support families. These are not jobs that make strong communities. These are subsistence level toil.

Shit that will never happen. Building a factory takes longer than these tariffs will ever last, which is just under four years tops if Trump is willing to let the entire GOP burn to death in the midterms. This is a historic fuckup, Trump just metaphorically blew his brains out on live TV with this shit.

You should consider that the odds of "literal war with China" happening in the next four years is relatively high, possibly 100%, the odds of the US winning are decent, and if Trump gets the US started onshoring before obliterating the industrial capacity of our main rival (which is why the US had such a nice industry between 1945 - 1979) before that happens he might be hailed as a hero and genius.

possibly 100%

The odds of me shitting my pants in the next five minutes are possibly 100%. I probably won't, but if I do then I guess the odds were 100% all along. Also you're not obliterating the industrial capacity of China WW2-style with anything less than carpet-nuking.

No, what I mean is that it is possibly already baked in – I dunno how likely this is but Trump, as POTUS, may know that we're going to war with China in less than four years.

Also you're not obliterating the industrial capacity of China WW2-style with anything less than carpet-nuking.

On the one hand, touché.

On the other hand, Chinese trade flows through overseas shipping. A war with Taiwan might involve carpet nuking levels of destruction (the Three Gorges Dam is within Taiwanese striking range) but is more likely to involve interdicting Chinese trade routes and might also involve striking their port assets. If China loses the war, its fleet, its merchant marine, and its port infrastructure, even without destroying industrial capacity or critical infrastructure it will hamper their exports for years.

More comments

If the US goes to war with China it will have to be over Taiwan. Now, given that the American right has spent the last year + in outrage at the notion of sending military aid to help a foreign nation, what do you think the reaction would be if Trump declared war in a situation where the Chinese claims are way more credible than any of the Russian bullshit. I know MAGA world hates China, but after spending years positioning itself as the remedy to failed interventionist establishment foreign policy, declaring war on China seems difficult to square with that.

After the Chinese kill American service members? Forget Trump declaring war, Congress will.

You underestimate the economic illiteracy of the Democrats. I can see them keeping the tariffs and adding more taxes and redistribution on top to "reduce the impact on marginalized members of our society"

Nah dog, that's crazy talk. It's Trump, doing the opposite of him is the only thing the Dems really stand for. They'd want to overturn this shit even if the tariffs were actually good.

Biden kept Trump's China tariffs. Trump even made a point of it during the campaign.

I can see them keeping the tariffs

Biden, who is probably the most protection-friendly figure in the entire Democratic establishment, had a whole four years and didn't do anything significant. Any of the plausible 2028 Democrats at the moment it is hard to see continuing with this policy.

You what. The 100% EV tariff and massive solar and battery tariffs he did just don't count? Or do you count on people not knowing about them?

https://x.com/HouseDemocrats/status/1908218153404117109

For today's Democratic Daily Download: meet @RepDeluzio from Western PA.

He explains how Trump's trade policy has been a chaotic mess, but that tariffs—if done right and paired with strong pro-worker and industrial policies—can help supercharge manufacturing.

We're offering hardworking Americans real policies to strengthen their families and communities—not fake populism to distract from tax giveaways to robber barons and huge corporations.

Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, [...]

Sure. Let us crash the economy so that the PMC will have to work in the fields instead of designing iPhones or being a DEI compliance officer or living from day trading. The basis for a prosperous nation is honest, back-breaking work, not fancy technology.

A nation, a culture, a race that does not provide for itself, should go without. This, I imagine, is one of the core ethical commitments that separates MAGA from its opponents.

Sure. If cocoa beans do not grow in a country, its citizens should go without chocolate. If they don't have oil, they shall go forgo petrochemicals and combustion engines. If they can not support a semiconductor production chain, they shall not have computers. The population shall acquire disease resistance the hard way until they can develop a vaccine, just as God intended.

After all, this is kind of the program which turned Cambodia into a superpower when it was implemented by the Khmer Rouge, so it will surely Make America Great Again as well.

If they can not support a semiconductor production chain, they shall not have computers.

We have already produced and imported so many electronics, there is most likely a decent amount of perfectly-good computing power that is just rotting away in landfills right now. If we lost the ability to make more microchips, it would certainly suck, but also, we're probably already drowning in chips that are powerful enough to run Half-Life 2. Your smartphone is powerful enough to run at least 50 copies of Microsoft Excel. It won't be the end of the world.

There is a vast gulf between "it is the end of the world" and "it is no big deal".

For example, if I were to lose the use of my legs tomorrow, that would not be the end of the world. Wheelchairs exist, and my job does not strictly require me to be able to walk. However, it would be a big deal, on roughly the same order as if an economy is forced to rely on salvaging landfills for working computers.

Capacitors die, mobos fry. WCoil knows a lot more about restoring old hardware, but I do know it doesn't run forever and refurbing them needs a similar level of technology to creating them.

If cocoa beans do not grow in a country, its citizens should go without chocolate.

The US grows a small amount of cocoa (and coffee) in Hawaii. Both can also be grown indoors, which is a function of capital costs (and energy, I suppose) in ways that aren't economically competitive today because cheaper (import) alternatives exist.

Note: I am not suggesting that this is a good trade policy, only that "go without" is maybe a bit overstated.

Iirc greenhouse grown products are generally more efficient than conventional agriculture; third world labor costs are the main reason for importing so many tropical fruits.

Coffee and cocoa are specifically difficult to grow so they might be an exception.

Iirc greenhouse grown products are generally more efficient than conventional agriculture; third world labor costs are the main reason for importing so many tropical fruits.

That second part is another way of saying "It's more efficient to grow tropical fruits conventionally with third-world labor than to grow them in greenhouses anywhere".

Well yes, child labor in impoverished countries is the reason oranges are cheap. But an autarkic America wouldn’t need to give up oranges or pineapples or sugar or rubber. Possibly tequila or rooibos or saffron, but those haven’t been successfully grown in other low-labor cost environmentally identical locales.

tequila

You can't make tequila in America because "tequila" has to be produced in specific regions in Mexico, rather like Champagne from France. You can get American agave spirits, which may be made similarly but has looser rules like the "sparkling wine" moniker. Agave can be grown in a couple of southwestern states.

Sure. If cocoa beans do not grow in a country, its citizens should go without chocolate. If they don't have oil, they shall go forgo petrochemicals and combustion engines. If they can not support a semiconductor production chain, they shall not have computers. The population shall acquire disease resistance the hard way until they can develop a vaccine, just as God intended.

Is it go without or 'only the wealthy and the black market?'

Let us crash the economy so that the PMC will have to work in the fields instead of designing iPhones or being a DEI compliance officer or living from day trading.

In all seriousness, all of these things have extremely dubious and probably negative value to society. Two of these are very directly negative-sum extractive behaviour with sketchy arguments for redeeming value, and the third arguably is plus has staggeringly-negative externalities including the prevalence of one of the other two.

The maze has you, Neo; doing these is not prosocial or something that should be aspired to. The most that can be achieved building a society on those is being a rich city-state like Dubai or Singapore, not a great power.

In all seriousness, all of these things have extremely dubious and probably negative value to society. Two of these are very directly negative-sum extractive behaviour with sketchy arguments for redeeming value, and the third arguably is plus has staggeringly-negative externalities including the prevalence of one of the other two.

If this is true for the two non-governmentally related jobs of the three, why do they pay well? Of course, day trading usually doesn't (and for the purposes of the entire economy the number of people who support themselves off of it is a rounding error to zero), and yes maybe the Iphone designer produces value only by harnessing pointless fashion cycles, but a) this is a symptom of a wealthy society that there is enough excess productive value to be poured into what is fashion, and b) the average white collar American is not a DEI officer or Iphone designer, they are in prosaic but necessary fields like logistics or accounts.

If this is true for the two non-governmentally related jobs of the three, why do they pay well?

Well, "negative-sum" doesn't mean an activity doesn't pay well, or even that it doesn't provide value to an organisation paying you in excess of what they're paying you - it just means that it hurts others by more.

To give an obvious example, fraud is highly profitable, but it's negative-sum; it hurts the fraud victims (and those who have to put in effort to not become victims) more than it benefits the fraudster. A less-obvious example is modern advertising - there is certainly a positive-sum component to advertising (specifically, creating awareness of deals) but there's also a negative-sum component (specifically, manipulating the advertisee into taking deals that do not benefit him) and as marketing psychology has improved that negative-sum component has grown very large (if I were Czar, I'd at least consider requiring advertisements to be as unsophisticated as 1930s ones; 1930s advertising, when it wasn't just straight-up fraud, was clearly overall positive-sum). Zvi makes a case that online gambling is negative-sum, despite it being profitable. There's a case that TikTok and other social media are negative-sum, and while certainly some of these are unprofitable others aren't, which is related to why I think an outright "smartphones were a mistake" is a colourable position (certainly I've specifically avoided getting one for myself).

There are a bunch of profitable negative-sum activities around. Obviously, a lot of them wind up illegal, because this is like the 101-level case for where governmental intervention can benefit everyone, but a lot are legal at any given time due to either novelty or potential collateral damage/political costs of attempting to stamp them out.

In all seriousness, all of these things have extremely dubious and probably negative value to society

If you're a Luddite; I see no other way to object to designing iPhones. Day trading is volunteering to be a cog in the machine which discovers prices, which is useful (most people who try end up as lubricant instead of cog, which is why you probably shouldn't do it). DEI compliance is net negative of course, but there are easier ways to get rid of them which Trump has already started doing.

The most that can be achieved building a society on those is being a rich city-state like Dubai or Singapore, not a great power.

Dubai has only the day traders. Singapore has only the day traders and the DEI compliance officers (a bit different than the US version). The US, a great power, has all three. So does China (at least including Hong Kong), another great power candidate at least. So does South Korea. So does Finland.

If you're a Luddite; I see no other way to object to designing iPhones.

With respect to smartphones: yes, I'm a Luddite. Zvi's made the case at length regarding the depression epidemic. Also, since I know you don't like SJ, and it's pretty obvious that smartphones helped it nucleate by bringing normies and, well, women onto the Internet, the only hole I can currently see through which you can maybe wriggle out of damning them for that would be to claim that (smartphones helped the alt-right more than they helped SJ ∩ the rise in culture war temperature from amplifying both sides is outweighed by the differential).

The literal iPhone i.e. Apple smartphone also has a business model heavily based around fashion cycles. Fashion cycles are waste, pure relative-at-expense-of-absolute.

Day trading is volunteering to be a cog in the machine which discovers prices, which is useful (most people who try end up as lubricant instead of cog, which is why you probably shouldn't do it).

I'm generally of the view that this beach can tolerate wooden shacks but that building multi-storey brick buildings on it is asking for trouble.

The most that can be achieved building a society on those is being a rich city-state like Dubai or Singapore, not a great power.

To be clear, "building a society on those" =/= "having those in existence". The USA, USSR and PRC all built their power on manufacturing, which is real positive-sum activity.

manufacturing, which is real positive-sum activity.

Unless it's iPhones being manufactured, presumably?

I'd split hairs to some degree regarding manufacturing vs. marketing, but I'll admit to a flub there.

(I'm not at 100%; I've been doing a circadian rhythm loop-de-loop the past, uh, two? three? days. I think I've been up for nearly 24 hours, though I'm barely even sure of that at this point. Might try and sort this out after some sleep; I don't think attempting it now would be productive.)

The USA, USSR and PRC all built their power on manufacturing, which is real positive-sum activity.

There's nothing in particular positive-sum about manufacturing compared to other things. Manufacturing things people don't want, or at least less than they'd want the raw materials, is negative sum

As for the USSR... have you noticed it isn't around any more?

And the USSR did exactly that- it turned perfectly good raw materials into products no one wanted and paid for it with the money from exporting oil.

The tariffs discussion has made me realize that some people who praport themselves as intellectual, above the average redditor, are just as childish in there understanding of how the world works just in different ways, often interpreting reality through overly idealized or abstract neoreactionary frameworks instead of lib marvel ones.

The fundamental error is supposing there's some huge reserve of able-bodied but idle people sitting around. Prime Age LFPR is near an all-time high. Most of the people who don't have a job have a good reason for it (e.g. caretaking, education, age, disability) or are looking for one.

Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?

Why is it wonderful? I actually don't think Trump's base voted for a plan to make everyone so poor we have to flog the elderly and disabled back on the assembly line.

As @Primaprimaprima observes, I think a moral judgment towards those unwilling or too lazy to support themselves is one of the distinguishing features of Tea-Party/MAGA right. That there is dignity and virtue in hard work and doing the needful but dirty job. That the slothful degenerate should be either pittied or whipped into shape rather than catered to. The "Gods of the Copybook Headings" are real and walk among us.

Also, it seems I have been blocked by this user. That's news to me.

So I fully agree with that on principle. There were two generations of overly soft parents that lead to a reasonable number of sociopathic moochers.

But living in a prosperous and high-trust society without degenerating into sloth, that's a core piece of what makes anglo civilization worthwhile. Destroying the prosperity rather than reinforcing those values is madness.

Destroying the prosperity rather than reinforcing those values is madness.

The dissidents already believe that half of the political spectrum has effectively forbade the American public from ever reinforcing those values, what is your solution to that?

One parent refuses to teach the child not to scoop the butter off the butter dish and eat it.

The other decides that everyone must go without butter.

What is to be done?

The other parent presumably believes that going without butter will force the first parent to work towards actualizing responsibility instead of whinging when told to do what they need to do.

Do I think this is realistic or practical? Not really, but that is the framing you are fighting.

Not only is it not realistic or practical, the goal is to have a house in which there is butter. Fixing the problem by removing the butter only gets us further from that goal.

Prime Age LFPR is near an all-time high.

Overall lfpr is in the dumps right now. No idea where to find "prime age" lfpr but some links would be nice.

Found some fred data:

The overall participation rate is doing ok, but not majorly changing recently: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060 But something is wrong, the line goes up way too much before 2000.

Let's delve into the cross tabs: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01300025

doing ok

And by doing ok, you mean nearing all-time highs?

Let's delve into the cross tabs: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01300025

When you take out retirees and students it looks much less dramatic, and even in the 25-54 bracket per some mercatus paper I can't find now even a substantial portion thereof is early retirees. Especially given that the figures for men have been stable post-GFC, it hardly seems like something worth crashing the economy over.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Hv9x

Overall lfpr is in the dumps right now

The population is getting older and more people are going to college.

No idea where to find "prime age" lfpr but some links would be nice

FRED would be good place to start: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

The author and his brother needn't worry anyway, Polymarket chance of recession is at almost 60% already and that's with the high levels of uncertainty that Trump might just fold. There'll be plenty of unemployment and moving in with parents to go around again if we go into recession territory.

Especially since as we tend to see with businesses from steel and sugar tariffs, all the downstream employment depending on those inputs gets way more fucked than jobs in the industry being protected get grow.

60% chance of recession seems far too low given that the priestly caste is fully capable of manipulating the definition of "recession" to punish Trump just as they did to protect Biden.

Trump just stood up and said "Hey everybody, watch this!" and dropped a nuke. There won't be any room for the usual quibbling over what constitutes a recession or whose fault it is. The GOP will be lucky to elect another President before 2040.

Trump just stood up and said "Hey everybody, watch this!" and dropped a nuke.

Wait, are you being literal or metaphorical here? If literal, could I please have some further reading?

It's a pretty clear metaphor.

'Dropped a bomb' is an idiom that means delivering bad news. 'Dropped a nuke' is the former but much more impactful.

I figured I'd better ask because, well, it's not like Trump can't order a nuclear test, and it probably wouldn't even be the most shocking thing he's done this year (though ordering a nuke used in anger would). Hell, I'm not even sure it'd be a bad idea, if only to check that they still work.

I tend to agree unfortunately. The GOP's single largest electoral asset before all of this was being seen as better stewards of the economy. A large number of people voted for them purely based on that. If that image is utterly destroyed, we might see an electoral swing on a scale we haven't in recent memory.

Polling hasn't moved that way yet. But this also hasn't hit the working class yet. This is going to get messy.

We shall see.

just as they did to protect Biden

This is simply not true. Under Biden the US only had one quarter of negative real GDP growth, which is not famously less than two quarters, which not only is conventional definition but pre-Covid there is no recession typically considered so which was less than six months. The 'Covid recession' was obviously a special case because of the scale of the decline in a single quarter - 19% decline versus around 0.25% for the single quarter of 2022 contraction. If you consider 2022 a recession then you also have to include patently non-recessionary years a recessions including 2014 and 1956.

So we're just throwing the spring and summer of 2022 down the memory-hole are we?

What is this article supposed to prove exactly?

What is it supposed to prove? It is supposed to prove that the economy under biden was not all sunshine and cute woodland creatures. That the official definition of recession used by NBER, the FED, Et Al. was revised from "more than three consecutive months of negative growth" to "more than one full calandar quarter" the same week Biden would've crossed the old three month threshold.

That is that, the definition was revised such that declining growth for the last 2 months in Q2 plus the next 2 months of Q3 would not count because even if together they constitute 4 consecutive months of negative growth (a quarter being 3 months long), niether of the 2 two month blocks together would constitute "more than a full calendar quarter".

It is supposed to prove that the economy under biden was not all sunshine and cute woodland creatures

I didn't say it was. The economy does not have only two states of 'good' and 'recession'. Nobody considers any of the years of 1975-1980 as recessionary even though everyone agrees the economy was in the shitter.

That the official definition of recession used by NBER, the FED, Et Al. was revised from "more than three consecutive months of negative growth" to "more than one full calandar quarter" the same week Biden would've crossed the old three month threshold.

This is false (and if not do please provide a source), but it couldn't even possibly be true because there is no 'official' definition of recession in the US, recessions are determined by the NBER business cycle dating committee who don't follow any strict set of rules. Even here, there was never ever any kind of rule of thumb of three months of consecutive negative growth - the only widely accepted definition (to the extent that people accepted that there was one at all) was two consecutive quarters of negative growth, though there are good reasons for the NBER not to strictly stick to this (the 2001 recession saw three non-consecutive quarters of growth, but nobody doubts that as a genuine recession). So the question then is, should the dating committee have declared a recession based on past behaviour? Well, no. If 2022 were a recession it would be the first one in American history to consist of a single quarter of negative growth, and not even a particularly severe quarter of contraction either at -0.25%. It would have been completely at odds with past practice to declare 2022 a recession - there were single quarters of greater or roughly equal contraction not declared a recession in 1947, 1956 and again in 1957, since when there hasn't been an isolated quarter of contraction, until 2022.

I guess my 31 year old unemployed brother that weighs 400 pounds and plays Halo all day and occasionally destroys the plumbing and breaks the toilet seat and makes my 68 year old mother clean up the mess will just have to get out his tacking hammer and get busy.

These people might be screwed, but it would be nice to catch a guy like this when he's 18-25, before he's 400 lbs and has a decade of habitual sloth. There are many people right now in their prime years who have the potential to turn out like this brother, and changing the incentives might prevent them from falling into such a grim fate.

Then bring back the draft. The army is quite good at turning loser 18 year old boys into functional men.

It's not incentives that need to change, they need to be raised right.

What is "raising right", if not setting the incentives around a developing youth so that he grows up, instead of out?

(Wordplay aside, it's on the parent to set those incentives, not the state.)

Because those incentives are tied to other matters -- they are not completely independent choices.

For example, if you want to live in a high-trust neighborhood where people don't lock their front doors, this implies leaving an incentive for thieves to defect. If you want to be able to have Amazon leave packages on your stoop, that implies leaving an incentive for porch pirates.

I would also be fine with making the equivalent weight in illegal roofers legal and deporting the 400 lb Halo players -- it's a quicker way to get a legal labor force and likely will improve the culture too. I find it hard to comprehend the mindset of someone who thinks this is a good way to get sympathy. Aren't they supposed to claim he's got some disability? Are you sure this comment on reddit wasn't a conservative trolling?

You’re not supposed to feel sympathy for the 400 pound space marine, you’re supposed to feel disgust tinged with the hope that hard work will make him a real man.

Suppose ICE actually deports enough illegals to cause significant shortages

...

Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point

My first impressions is that it does not seem that the specific means matter at all in the reasoning here. Suppose you had some other mechanisms, any other mechanisms, let's call them X and Y. Suppose they were actually really good at performing these functions, so that we're able to say:

Suppose X cause[s] significant shortages

...

Suppose that Y contract[s] the economy to the point

Then presumably, the important bits of the conclusion hold, and you would still be in favor of X and Y on the grounds of the conclusion. Thus, I sort of don't think that there's anything really about immigration/tariffs, specifically, that matters.

So what do I think is really going on here?

Now of course, people are capable of far more than you expect them to be once their backs are actually up against the wall. People will leap into action if there's no other choice.

My read is that this is just standard leftist wealth envy/hatred. You're upset that people exist who are not satisfying "from each according to his abilities". Thus, you have to find a way, any way, to force them to "contribute" to "society" according to their abilities. There are humans out there who are not doing the specific thing you want them to do, so you will simply tweak society to engineer conditions that force them to do your will.

If this doesn't work, or X and Y fail to complete your goals, perhaps some still manage to mooch and others just feel some additional hardship, then we must go further. Perhaps we'll need to turn up the screws and wreck the economy further. Perhaps we'll need to conscript folks to work on farms/factories. Maybe just confiscate any wealth that might be sufficient to allow someone to buy leisure (or their family to buy it for them). The details of whether they're state-owned or not or what specific means are to be used are mostly irrelevant. It's the same impulse with the same lack of a limiting principle, and very likely very similar sort of just destroying the economy, and making everything worse for everyone, just to get at some perceived freeloaders.

I think the most common response is, "I don't care if some wealthy people are lazy." Yes, this includes people who have part of their "wealth" in family connections, no different from the hatred for "generational wealth". Instead, if they or their family generated wealth (which, by the usual means of market economies created value for others), it is sort of irrelevant if they use it to buy leisure for themselves or those close to them. They created the value and the wealth; they are free to use it as they please.

I would like to note that I think there are plenty of other grounds on which to dislike significant immigration. There are probably even other grounds on which to like tariffs (even if I generally don't find them persuasive). All I'm saying is that this is my read of this particular line of reasoning.

My read is that this is just standard leftist wealth envy/hatred.

I'm not wealthy wealthy, but I am significantly wealthier than the median American. I could drop to zero net income and live off my current wealth for years without having to work a day. And I feel no moral guilt about this whatsoever. So no, I have no envy/hatred of wealth.

You're upset that people exist who are not satisfying "from each according to his abilities".

I'm upset that our vital and necessary work is being done by immigrants and illegals instead of native-born American citizens.

If we get back to the point where the work of maintaining American society is again being done by Americans, and there's still enough surplus to go around to enable some people to live as NEETs, then fine by me. Bully for them. Being a NEET is great! I've done my share of NEETing in the past. I empathize fully with why people want to do that and I have no criticisms of them from a moral perspective.

There are humans out there who are not doing the specific thing you want them to do, so you will simply tweak society to engineer conditions that force them to do your will.

There is no politics unless someone is being forced to conform to something. There is no civilization unless someone is being forced to conform to something.

Obviously some civilizations are much more totalitarian than others. But even the most libertarian among us will still usually support some minimal state order for the purposes of punishing violent crime, enforcing property rights, etc.

If this doesn't work, or X and Y fail to complete your goals, perhaps some still manage to mooch and others just feel some additional hardship, then we must go further.

Incorrect, see above.

I could drop to zero net income and live off my current wealth for years without having to work a day

Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful?

Does anyone else find this morally despicable? "It's ok for me to be able to never have to work another day, but wouldn't it wonderful if we make the country so much poorer that everyone else has to spend the rest of their lives doing manual labor?"

No, it's "I worked hard and produced enough money/value that I have the option of no longer working if I wanted it. Wouldn't it be good if the chronically idle were forced to do the same, given that their idleness is making them bloated and unhappy?"

The rich tend to be much more clear-eyed about the downsides of having enough money that they no longer need anything, in the same way celebrities are clear-eyed about mass fame not actually feeling that good.

Personally my feelings are mixed. I want a good long holiday to really get into all the hobbies that I never had time for; at the same time, whenever I'm left without external whips for too long I sink into a morass and get less done. I suspect the optimal amount of non-chosen labour in someone's life is greater than 0 but less than 8 hours a day. In an ideal world I would be interested to see a 4-hour-day work program.

EDIT:

If we get back to the point where the work of maintaining American society is again being done by Americans, and there's still enough surplus to go around to enable some people to live as NEETs, then fine by me. Bully for them. Being a NEET is great! I've done my share of NEETing in the past. I empathize fully with why people want to do that and I have no criticisms of them from a moral perspective.

I might have been projecting in my analysis of @Primaprimaprima's motives. Although I can see an argument that maintaining America on the manual labour of Chinese/Guatemalans is not morally better than maintaining it on Americans.

I'm not wealthy wealthy, but I am significantly wealthier than the median American. I could drop to zero net income and live off my current wealth for years without having to work a day. And I feel no moral guilt about this whatsoever. So no, I have no envy/hatred of wealth.

I'm sure every Party member in good standing could use a similar defense. They don't hate luxuries; they have them! (They certainly earned them, unlike those other freeloaders...) It's just when those other people have their luxuries and aren't contributing "according to their abilities" that there's a problem.

I'm upset that our vital and necessary work is being done by immigrants and illegals instead of native-born American citizens.

Whence tarrifs? (The proposed point of the OP.) They have nothing to do with immigrants or illegals. Like I alluded to, there are plenty of other (I think potentially good) reasons to go after immigration/illegals. Those motivations are different. I maintain that the ones you presented are just standard leftist wealth envy/hatred. (...at least, any wealth that you perceive wasn't as 'deserved' as your own.)

My read is that this is just standard leftist wealth envy/hatred. You're upset that people exist who are not satisfying "from each according to his abilities". Thus, you have to find a way, any way, to force them to "contribute" to "society" according to their abilities.

The funny thing is there IS a way to force (most) people to "contribute", one agreed upon between such disparate figures as Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Lenin. Lenin got his version from the Bible, good atheist that he was: "He who does not work shall not eat"; this was incorporated into the Soviet Constitution. Kipling's version was one of the Copybook Headings, "If you don't work you die." But this is one thing that less-than-tankie leftists (including social democrats of all sorts) will absolutely not agree with.

It’s so interesting seeing the justifications change in real time at such breakneck as speeds. I’m no political strategist, but “make ourselves poorer because we’re simply so rich and prosperous that it’s made us soft and lazy” does not seem like an argument that will resonate with anyone outside the true believers.

I think there is a sort of religious-revival component to Trump 2. Now, that sounds lazy and snide, I admit, but I don't mean for that to be the case. I've stated before that the new direction from the administration, the current motivation, seems to be from the values-aesthetics angle. The package offered by MAGA does indeed seem to be "America has grown soft and complacent, we must make it great again by reaffirming our values and rejecting the soft-power view of American greatness."

uppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for?

I recall a lot about inflation, crime, and illegal immigration. I don't recall any complaints about fat obese people not working. Think people are projecting their own ideology onto the Trump campaign.

I don't recall any complaints about fat obese people not working.

There's been an undercurrent of it. Even the lyrics of "Rich Men North of Richmond" mention it:

Well, God, if you're five-foot-three and you're three-hundred pounds Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of Fudge Rounds

Maybe not in the Hanania/Moldbug/etc online intellectual right. The thing is, that's a vanishingly small percentage of the population/voter base, they're just overemphasized because they write all the blog posts/legitimizing arguments, so they always get pointed to when discussion happens. America's hinterlands are filled with people who are proud of working and think other people should work too.

This is a confusing post because as of the end of the Biden administration, the unemployment rate was very low and prime age labor force participation rate was very high.

Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?

I absolutely agree! I'm tired of people acting as if we don't have a labor force. We clearly do, we have just decided to let them not work and survive on handouts and other people's largesse. It's high time the situation is remedied.

Ending the handouts seems like a better way of dealing with that then wrecking the economy.

Not only that, but I think we have a lot of over-education in America where people are choosing college as a path of least resistance who really don’t have the talent or inclination to succeed in academia. I think if given a viable alternative— trades, culinary, or general labor — a lot of people would choose that instead.

Most college educated unsuccessful people will not succeed in the trades because there is something wrong with them. That’s assuming they’re willing to take a blue collar job to begin with, and society increasingly sees a college degree as the price of admittance to the class of people who shouldn’t have to work for a living.

I’m assuming that they went to college assuming they were that good of students that such a path was open to them. For the vast majority, that was never true, and if we had a university that could only extract loan payments for those who successfully graduated and got good jobs afterwards, the university would not have admitted them. There are students in university paying 100K over 4 years and who need remedial math, reading, and writing courses. We’re letting them basically LARP for the government backed loans; they have absolutely no business going to university, and a sane education system would have told them no probably long before they got onto the college bound track in the first place.

If the students in question are not capable of college level work, then they need to get over it and look for other options more in line with their actual intellectual capacity. I’ve always been firmly convinced that schools should track kids (with periodic reassessment) so that we don’t create the glut of overeducated “failsons” that are too good to work with their hands, yet too unaccomplished to get jobs doing mental work. If you aren’t suited to the work you’ve been trained to do, it’s the education system exploiting you by dangling dreams in front of you.

Oh absolutely. I think its the #1 reason the academy has fallen apart over the last few decades. 50% of people should not be going into academia. At most it should be 15-20%, and even that is quite high imo.

If you make something less selective, it becomes much much harder to police for good behavior.

To which my response is, very well! Then we shall all go without roofs. Now of course, people are capable of far more than you expect them to be once their backs are actually up against the wall. People will leap into action if there's no other choice. But, supposing he's right and it does turn out that no one answers the call, then we shall simply go without. A nation, a culture, a race that does not provide for itself, should go without.

Does your wife agree with this "go without roofs" thing? When the water's coming into your house, remind yourself of that core ethical commitment.

The wife probably expects him to be a "roof fixer of last resort" (or at least this would be the case in a traditional marriage). Maybe not as pretty as a professional job, maybe it doesn't last as long, but good enough to get through the next rain storm.

I would expect most men, with a couple hours of watching youtube, and a day off for the project could fix a leaky roof.

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