Re: We are all Slave now.
 

The most notable and odious characteristic of "libertarianism" is that its really just an excuse for navel gazing while the world burns. Opposition to doing anything. The Berners are really good at this, too, but based on a different set of beliefs. Long and short, don't work on improving healthcare because (a) waiting for the market to do it is better, screw the dead people; or (b) waiting for the state to do it or set up a single payor to do it is better, screw the dead people.

And if anyone goes and tries to, say, improve healthcare, well, they're just going to cause more harm than good because democracy / capitalism / the system / the establishment / your navel sucks.

While the above post is just too damn long and wandering to read all of, it's a good illustration of the whole problem.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Another great case in point these days is the teacher rebellion.

The endless desire to genuflect to lower taxes means advocating people get paid shitty wages. In a world where you don't have an economy without education, the Red States have been killing themselves for the last couple of generations because of their fealty to the anti-tax religion.

I don't care what someone's ideology or religion is, in the 21st century, if you can't run a school system, balance its budget, and attract decent talent to teach, you shouldn't be anywhere near government, anywhere in the world.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

The motivation is racism. Once you realize that, who cares about the reasoning?

(Hi, Ty!)

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

It's not a science, it's religion!

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

A balance has to be struck as to the amount of intervention people do. Too much creates distortions, which compel later interventions, which create further distortions.

Overfinancialization led to 2008. We cured that by plowing massive amounts of money into the system, which did not trickle down to those most harmed. And the consequence was populism, which led to Trump, who hints at authoritarianism.

You have to burn the forest every now and again to save it. If the system never "clears," the system grows more and more fragile, and when it runs into its next crisis, the result is cataclysmic.

Do I think we should follow the lead of Andrew Mellon in 1929? No. There are smart, limited things to be done to fix a problem. You don't let the world burn entirely. But when you fix the problem, you allow enough creative destruction to take place to wipe out most of the big players who caused the crisis, and allow smaller, more deserving and more innovative players to take their place.

Libertarianism stands for many bad things. But it stands for many good things. And one of those good things is allowing a stagnant system that has pretty much devolved into rentier/crony capitalism and financial engineering to collapse to the extent it should, and allow a better group of actors to take the place of the past regime. What's so bad about that? Oh, I know what's bad about that... Many of us, here, have our bread buttered by that rentier/crony capitalist system. It pays for our tony lifestyles which allow us to come here and complain about its unfairness, and advocate fixes at its margins, but never of a sort which would directly impact us. I believe the old term for this, worth dusting off, is "limousine liberal."

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

The market is not all-knowing and perfect. And its greatest imperfection is rewarding the undeserving such as us, brokers, finance people, salesmen, etc. (the half parasitic, minimal value-add sectors of the work force) and depressing the wages of the deserving (GPs, teachers, first responders, etc.).

But how does one upend a system that values people like us at many multiples of a teacher's salary? How is that perverted situation remedied?

Well, you have to have a severe enough crisis to shock the system so badly that people begin to ask why a lawyer, or a broker, or some hedge fund analyst, makes so much money. You need a situation where either the market, or society, depresses the wages of the undeserving in favor of raising the wages of the deserving, such as teachers.

Supporting interventions that protect the current system is never going to do this. Never. Ever. Barring a crisis that all but reconfigures our society, we will never see a situation in which a teacher or a firefighter is paid like a decent analyst or lawyer.

Supporting intervention to protect a system that keeps your retirement safe is siding with unfairness. The class system, the false barriers to entry, and the wage protectionism for the affluent and connected in this country is turning us into an English class system. You and I are part of that. Sure, we're willing to fix things at the margins. We're willing to give a few thousand here or there, vote for the right candidate, perhaps donate our time. But when the next crisis hits, we will both demand that our national Handicapper General step in and protect us from the economic forces that should wipe out a system as fragile as ours. It's crazy to do otherwise, of course, as self-preservation comes first. But those crazy Libertarians? They're willing to live through the natural selection and evolution that moves a society forward. They are, in fact, progressives in this regard. And you and me? We're conservatives, trying save our stuff... saving our asses.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

This is too retarded for comment.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

It's your hymn I'm singing: Econ 101. Economies run in cycles, no? And so what happens when you defy the cycle? Defy the "reset" mechanism?

You get things like Trump. That's what happens. And he's just the cherry on the sundae. It's the populism, class warfare, and general distrust of all systems (political, commerce, etc.) underneath where the really rich and flavorful stuff is lurking.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

No wonder your political narratives are all so silly.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Do you know any history at all? The last forest fire did not lead to rainbows and unicorns. It lead to populism, warfare and genocide. It's almost like the goal is to try to avoid forest fires or something.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Please think about what you're saying. The issue you're trying to put your finger on is a necessary attribute of government, not a peculiar aspect of democracy. Government is a tool to, among other things, impose a social order and redistribute. Throughout history, most governments have redistributed from the bottom to the top. In other words, exploitation. Rich people tend not to see any problem with this. When poor people want to have an equal say, rich people conjure up just-so stories, like you are now, to explain that it won't work. Crucially, these just-so stories mask the redistributive piece, and make things sound like a mechanical problem that just exists in nature. "if you create a system where people vote themselves benefits, they'll do so until the system collapses." Really? Where has that happened? The system collapsing, I mean. Just to take a popular counterexample, look at the Nordic countries, where the people have voted for social benefits much richer than you see in this country. Denmark, for example, hasn't collapsed.

Seriously, WTF are you talking about?

It's freakishly odd to me that you can sound off here *all the time* about how the political system doesn't serve ordinary people, causing them to lose jobs and vote for Trump and all sorts of other horribles, and then give this explanation of how giving ordinary people more political power can't work. Dude, it's almost like the noblesse oblige approach that you are advocating right now doesn't actually work. News flash: Affluent suburbs have well-paved roads and good schools, and poor suburbs don't. But you keep worrying about how democracy will collapse if we trying to treat people more equally.

Right. I understand that you agree on a fundamental level that libertarianism is profoundly misguided, but because you are rolling out the libertarian claptrap and there is no one else here to defend it, I'm letting you have it. Thanks for playing.

What were Rockefeller Republicans are today's affluent Democrats, and when they vote for higher taxes -- which they often do -- they are in fact hurting their bottom line. You're getting the Stupid Talking Point (tm) wrong -- the hypocrisy charge against them is not that they won't vote against economic self-interest, which they do, it's that they are somehow not to be taken seriously because they don't give up all their wealth like St Francis of Assisi.

They do, about themselves. It's selfishness with a conceit of some principle to mask it.

You can use words however you like, but if you want to use them to communicate with other people then it helps to use meanings that other people use too. This version of "authoritarian" that you've hatched has little or nothing to do with the way that other people understand the word, and also is so broad as to be meaningless. Anyone who has every worked in a government, or a company with more than one employee, or a non-profit, or who has been a part of organized religion, or youth sports -- they're all "authoritarians" in your book. If that's how you're writing your book, I don't think I want to read it.

If you have hair or a pulse, you're on a continuum with Trump. When everyone is on a slippery slope, it's probably not all that slippery or sloping.

More interesting question here, but I think that self-interest trumps a desire to control other people's behavior as a relative explanation for most political behavior -- but for various reasons, people want to justify their positions based on abstract principles, not self-interest, so they often dress up the former as the latter.

Do you have a good example of someone acting in politics out of a desire to control other people's behavior that is not also motivated by self-interest?

You fetishize the creative destruction of a recession all the time without ever explaining why it would be good for everyone to see more bankruptcies and monetary loss. The system clears out dead weight all the time. What happens in a financial crisis is that good stuff gets burned down too. How does a recession give a little guy a chance?

I understand where the populism comes from. It would have been worse if we'd had a big recession. See, e.g., the 1930s.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I think populism was caused much more by the elite's failures in
- failing to protect the country from Al Qaida on 9/11
- leading us into a war in Iraq to protect us from non-existent WMD, a war we have never stopped fighting
- the financial crisis

You're pointing your finger at an inadequate solution, not at the real problem(s). Note that other countries are struggling with similar issues, e.g., Brexit.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

One of us here is living the libertarian's wet dream, and it's me. Just so we're clear on that.

Quadfecta!
 

The skills that lawyers, brokers and hedge-fund analysts have makes them more valuable in a market economy than teachers. The only crisis I can think of that has been severe enough to cause people to rethink that was when the Khmer Rouge took over in Cambodia, which was certainly a shock to the system but actually didn't turn out all that well for pretty much anybody. And in Cambodia today, I will wager that lawyers are paid more than teachers.

I know many of my kids' teachers. I like many of them. I am pretty sure that I could do what they do passably well. I am pretty sure that they could not do what I do. I am sympathetic with your notion that what they do is, on some level, more important. I do what I do partly in order to be able to pay to live in a nice neighborhood with good schools and better teachers. If I didn't have them to support, maybe I'd quit my job and write a novel.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Legal questions from today's headlines: A contract that requires someone to lie under oath has got to be void against public policy, yes? Shouldn't a lawyer who drafts such a contract face ethical charges for suborning perjury?

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

9/11 caused the country to rally together.
Iraq only split those smart enough to realize it was predicated on lies from the rest (it's still a niche gripe).
The financial crisis and its cure (which further galvanized class divisions) destroyed trust at almost all levels and stoked the class envy that led to Trump.

Brexit was xenophobia-driven.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Of course, and yes.

An (only somewhat) tougher question: on what grounds would you disbar the attorneys who agreed to represent Bill O'Reilly on sexual harassment matters as part of a settlement for a client suing Bill O'Reilly and Fox News?

Re: Quadfecta!
 

This is a neat way of writing the obvious. But my comment was a response to GGG's post in which he criticized low teacher pay. "Low" is relative, gauged against "high," and the high pay crowd includes, as you note, people like lawyers. So when a lawyer says, "It's greedy people who starve teachers," he's referring in part to himself. Teachers are paid what they can extract from the system, and the system - which benefits the lawyers here (and many other places) - has enormous leverage over teachers, and so pays them shit. If you really want to pay teachers well, you have to remedy the market structure that allows us to pay them so little. That would involve goring the oxe of people like, lawyers.

And I'm not talking about merely taxing lawyers more to pay teachers more. That would only drive up lawyer salaries even more. I mean reevaluating what's important, and paying people more based on actual societal value.

Salary disparities like those between teachers and merchant class professionals result from policy choices, not pure market dynamics. We could pay teachers a ton and lawyers like shit. The average teacher could go to law school and do what we do. We've decided to set up a license leveraging system (Milton Friedman's term for law and other non-hard science/non-physical-trade professions requiring licensure) that has caused the value of lawyers to rise much higher than that of teachers. That could be cured.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

If the filing is right, he gets disbarred. If Morelli is correct, not sure there's an issue.

Re: Quadfecta!
 

Oh, bullshit. Has GGG ever, to your knowledge, voted against higher pay for teachers, or for the sorts of things (Prop Two and a Half in Massachusetts) that squeeze the governments paying them?

I think this, too, is bullshit. Teachers get paid very little because the entry barriers are low and because the benefits of good teaching are hard to measure, diffuse, and a common good.

Explain this notion you have of transitioning from capitalism to paying people more based on actual society value. I'm all ears.

On the margin, maybe, but as you look back through history I do not think you will ever find a time and place where teachers were paid more than lawyers, and there might be reasons for that other than policy choices.

Re: Quadfecta!
 

You written plenty of fiction here, although mostly pretty transparent.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I think all government has authoritarian tendencies within it. For this reason, I think it's healthy to always distrust it. And be thoroughly suspicious of those who seek to work in politics.

On point two, we are not Norway. Or Denmark, or Sweden.

Again, it's a balancing act. You can only give the people so much power. It has to be checked or men will simply vote for policies that aid themselves until the thing craters. Tragedy of the Commons at the voting booth. Applies to the rich, the poor, the middle... literally everyone. Equally.

I'm highlighting the good and bad of the ideology.

I'd say half of the people I know are affluent Democrats, or Republican Hillary voters (there are a lot of those). They didn't vote against self-interest. They voted, and generally vote, for continuity and predictability. They vote for what they think will keep the stock market rolling. They're as selfish as the GOP voters. These people long ago calculated that stock markets tend to do better in Democratic administrations (they do), and that whatever little increase they see in taxes will be eclipsed by gains.

If you're prosthelytizing, you've got some authoritarian stuff going on upstairs.

In this basket, one will find more limousine liberals and conservative republicans than any other stripe of voter.

Ralph Nader.

He can compete. He's not blown out by larger competitors before he can even get a start. The smart little guy who bet on the collapse and avoided exposure to the risks does even better. He gets asymmetrical returns picking up assets at next to nothing.

Again, it's a balancing act. We balanced nothing. Now we have populism.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

http://www.thepovertyline.net/united-states-of-america

http://www.thepovertyline.net/norway

Maybe it's Chicken/egg, but comparing us to Nordic countries is either stupid or contrived. Our poverty level is twice theirs, and we are way more spread out.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

(1) Sebby says democracies collapse. The Nordics haven't. So either he is just plain wrong, or a Nordic-style democracy is not sufficiently democratic to induce collapse, in which case it's an academic point not worth discussing.

(2) Maybe our poverty level is higher because our system of government doesn't sufficiently represent the needs of the poorer and do more to elevate their condition.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

OK, whatever. Libertarians, of course, are in favor of government, just one that uses authoritarian methods (courts, police) to protect their rights (property, tort, contract).

See my response to Hank. When you said that democracies collapse, you sounded like you were making some kind of point about democracy as a system of government, rather than a point about how the American poor in particular can't be trusted with self-governance, as compared to poor people in other countries. Make up your mind.

This would be a more interesting point if you weren't saying it to urge that only people with more money be given the power to vote for policies that aid themselves, which means exploitation of those who aren't voting. Actually, check that -- it's not an interesting point at all. No one ever said the point of government is altruism.

I'm still waiting for the good part, unless you're saying that letting rich people exploit poor people is per se good.

If I'm prosthelytizing? I like it when you make up new words instead of repurposing existing words with new meanings.

You missed my point. Try again, or don't bother.

When Ralph Nader ran in 2000, he clearly was trying to inflate his own importance rather than to control anyone's anything. The earlier Nader is an example of what I said with environmentalists -- someone who sees serious harm in the world, in his case externalities caused by companies which didn't have to bear the costs of their businesses rather than pollution. Because you are unsympathetic to his view of the harms, you dismiss what he's doing as an exercise in trying to control people, rather than a good-faith effort to stop a harm in the world.

It's odd for you to point to Nader as an authoritarian, even with your idiosyncratic definition, since he has never (to my knowledge) held political office.

No he can't, because he doesn't have money. And in a recession, he can't borrow, because the whole point of the recession is funding dries up. Your "little guy who bet on the collapse" is a rich person who uses everyone else's poverty to get richer because he has liquidity when others don't -- not an example of anyone making the actual economy function better by creative anything.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Or, so you're saying maybe is's a chicken/egg thing?

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I suspect causation goes both ways.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Whifferooooski

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Sorry, my ESP must have been on the fritz.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I SAID "MAYBE IT'S A CHICKEN/EGG THING" IN MY O.P. you think you invented the thought? We already have a Paigow.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Thou art an egg.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

He has me on ignore, but read my post? Whoa?

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I thought you were suggesting and I was agreeing. Geesh.

Re: Quadfecta!
 

And because the people who want to teach see non-financial remuneration in it too.

Re: Quadfecta!
 

And because it was a socially acceptable way, for years, for women to work outside the house and was essentially subsidized by the other limitations on women's work.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Neither one has an uber military that protects the world much less 300 million people.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Exactly, adults like us get that, but not people like Ty or Adder. It's like comparing my daughter's spending when I'm paying her rent to my spending. The worst implication to America from this thread is that a "well-educated" person, like Ty, could post it. Sad.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Well educated today is increasingly similar to well ridden.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

"Protects."

Our post-Cold War redistribution of wealth toward shareholders of defense contractors is arguably our biggest policy mistake, playing a large role in facilitating the comparably smaller blunder of endless war.