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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

That's not what I mean at all. I mean, if you create a system where people vote themselves benefits, they'll do so until the system collapses. We're seeing a variant of that right now in the 1-10%'s capture of the system. People will take until there's nothing left to take. True democracy doesn't empower the aggregate underclasses. It allows more people to vote themselves wealth transfers in smaller increments.

Rich, poor, middle - you can't allow people to grab economic benefits at the ballot box without causing dysfunctions and warped allocations.

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.

True democracy is a universal disaster. No exceptions.

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.

Do I think smarter redistribution would lift more boats over the long term than this short term rentier/crony/financial engineering economy we have right now? Yes. That's why I'm not a serious libertarian. I think universal income is a solid economic/society-preserving idea. Libertarians who'd rather see us turn into Brazil demonstrate the limits of the ideology.

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.

As opposed to the affluent Democrat ideal of redistributing so long as it doesn't hurt their bottom line? Say what you will of Rockefeller Republicans; they never felt the need to plead charitable bona fides while protecting their revenue streams.

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.

And Libertarians, of course, just don't give a fuck.

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

If you're telling someone what you believe they should do, and trying to pass rules to make him do it, for any reason, you've authoritarian tendencies.

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.

And that's on a continuum with Trump.

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.

Sure there are. This place is littered with them. I even fall into it. Are you serious?

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?

I'd trade it all to see true creative destruction of the kind we prevented in 2008. And I mean that with every fiber of my being. The stretch from 2008 through 2010, when it was seriously hairy, was the most fascinating set of events. That's how the system is supposed to clear out the dead weight. That should have been a reset that gave the little guys a chance. Instead, we allowed it to more aggressively entrench a very fragile and cynical system no one trusts anymore. Hence, populism.

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.