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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35665 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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Indeed, how do you stop the people who have, pretty much by definition, overwhelming firepower from using it to take your stuff? One way are the democratic institutions — things like the separation of powers, checks and balances, key positions being elected and therefore held at least somewhat accountable, and so on. All of that works to an extent, but these things are fragile and often not really sufficient.

every leadership, regime that has severely impugned on this right has failed or collapsed, so there is that. There is a balance.

Therefore, in order for the free world to exist it must be possible to change your country at will. It’s easy to see that nationalism runs contrary to this goal. If you only ever can be accepted in one country, if you can only be permitted to run important businesses or organisations in the country of your birth; and doomed to be an irrelevant outsider in all others — well, then your government has you by the balls — you have no real negotiating position with the state.

Not really. nationalism does not imply you cannot pick your stuff up and move elsewhere and even be accepted in your new country (like how Russian Jews assimilated well in the US)

every leadership, regime that has severely impugned on this right has failed or collapsed, so there is that. There is a balance.

The Soviet Union certainly did not respect people's right to property, including their own labor. But it did not collapse because of that. There are methods of governance that are correlated with disrespecting this right - no rule of law, military power as a domestic political force, and others. It's more likely that those others are why the nation collapses.

The Soviet Union certainly did not respect people's right to property, including their own labor. But it did not collapse because of that.

Of course it collapsed because of that.

Not respecting property caused the economy to tank. And that made it collapse.

What's your proof?

You're asking for proof for something that's really well known.

(And I can't help but wonder, if you really don't believe it, what you think caused the collapse of the Soviet Union instead. Or if you think nobody knows why it collapsed at all.)

Put simply, I think the Soviet Union failed for a variety of reasons, but one of the biggest, if not the primary reason, is that it ran on a command economy and the Soviet planners were certainly not smart enough to plan well enough. But consider the following from Scott:

Kantorovich was another Russian mathematician. He was studying linear optmization problems when he realized one of his results had important implications for running planned economies. He wrote the government a nice letter telling them that they were doing the economy all wrong and he could show them how to do it better.

Suppose Kantorovich was right and the USSR followed his equations. In that world, they've solved the economic problems while still not respecting the idea of property. What are we to say in that case?

If the argument being made is actually "regimes that historically didn't respect property rights also tend to have other problems which lead to their collapse", then I would tentatively agree. But the phrasing of "regimes that don't respect property collapse" implies that it is because they didn't respect property that they collapsed.

"Running on a command economy" is a subset of "didn't respect property".

You're ignoring the hypothetical I posed. If the Soviets had solved the economic planning problem but retained the resolve and ability to disrespect property, then their economy would not have tanked. Between "incapable of efficient allocation of resources" and "taking people's stuff without consent", I think it makes much more sense to attribute their failure to the first, not the second.

People are more motivated to take care with resources that they conventionally own than resources that they steal. And if they're bad at it anyway, they run out of resources and are forced to stop.

Stealing property is directly related to why they didn't allocate resources properly. Your hypothetical amounts to "what if they could take things, without the downside of taking things".

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Not directly, though. The Soviet central planners made worse decisions for the use of other people’s property than those people would have made for the use of their own property, so the economy hit limits to growth prematurely.

every leadership, regime that has severely impugned on this right has failed or collapsed, so there is that. There is a balance.

That’s correct, but it’s of little comfort to you personally, if you have no plausible option to walk away from it — which is exactly my point

Not really. nationalism does not imply you cannot pick your stuff up and move elsewhere and even be accepted in your new country (like how Russian Jews assimilated well in the US)

US is not an ethnostate, and ethnonationalism is a different thing compared to the US nationalism — in this post I’m arguing mostly against the former.

Then again, nationalism of any sort is antithetical to the paradigm of shopping for countries that offer the best terms for you and your businesses.

if you have no plausible option to walk away from it — which is exactly my point

That is only assessment of your worth given by the other countries.

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