I am sympathetic towards your view that Trump would likely be the more pro-market candidate, but I am very surprised you didn't mention the elephant in the room, his plan to enact a 10% tariff on ALL imported goods. In my opinion, this would have disastrous effects, far worse than rent or grocery price controls. Do you believe this is just partisan rhetoric that will be walked back??
Yeah, I think whether he would be good or catastrophic for the economy mostly comes down to this (either he does basically nothing, does all the tariffs, or does a corrupt version where half the importers get tariffs and the other half overpay for shares of Trump media inc).
My understanding is even if he means it, he can't do this without an act of Congress, which he probably won't get. He can only use EOs to enact narrower tariffs that have some demonstrable national security purpose (like the tariffs on China in his first term).
I also suspect it might be an "Art of the Deal" negotiating ploy. Though who knows? And the fact that no one knows with Trump is what makes it a pretty good negotiating ploy (being perceived as crazy is of considerable value in the game of Chicken).
A major problem with madman theory is that, like any sustained lie, sometimes you start believing your own BS, and unfortunately "madman" is not a very good role to inhibit unironically.
Famously, Kissinger started hiding the nuclear football from Nixon whenever the latter got drunk.
As for whether it worked, I don't know, my sense was that it may have played some role in Linebacker II's success, if we want to call Linebacker II a success. And I understand if we don't.
I would also argue it's more plausible that Trump is a "madman" in this sense than it was for Nixon. Which is to say, not really a "madman", but also not a chessmaster. Merely a pighead acting out of pigheadedness.
I would. Moving to first raise tariffs seems like it would upset 99% of republicans and democrats. He won’t have the political capital needed to do it.
For the record, I ended up voting for Kamala in the end. The stupidity was just too much to bear. The only tariffs he has actually put in place so far are the ones on China. It remains to be seen if he will actually follow through on the ones on Mexico, Canada, Europe, etc…
I’ll concede that it was wrong to think that there would be pushback from republicans about the tariffs. They all seem fine to go along with it. I was hoping for a split government but that didn’t happen.
He doesn't actually need any political capital to impose tariffs; Congress has already delegated full authority to the office of the president. Granted that doing so unilaterally and over the objections of his party (assuming anyone actually dares state those objections -- the GOP has very much become a cult of personality) would cost him ability to get other things done in Congress (e.g. rescinding income taxes) but Trump is perfectly capable of blindly bulling forward with the thing he can do on his own, then blasting Congress for failing to follow through on the rest of his "plan".
I’m not going to pretend he isn’t capable of moving unilaterally. He definitely could. He’s probably more capable than Kamala of dropping a nuke too. I just don’t think he will. It also seems that Republicans won’t win the house this election, which I think will make him less likely to strong arm Congress into doing whatever he wants.
Both candidates are competing for dumbest economic platform. Tariffs are bad policy but it seems like they're easier to walk back from than creating the expectation that your Student Loans will eventually be forgiven or $25k for First Time homebuyers to combat skyrocketing real estate costs. These policies would just waste money fueling demand in segments that aren't demand constrained. More importantly, both would be a permanent expectation of anyone taking out a student loan or buying a home in the coming decades long after every economist concludes they're awful.
It would be not so different than a European VAT, only easy to collect. Tariffs are not ideal, but clearly the Federal government needs more revenue. I would rather see an increase in the capital gains long-term rate, but I cannot see Republicans doing that. The last fiscally conservative Republican president was Richard Nixon, and he was not exactly a model example.
Besides, I think a big part of these tariffs are to promote near-shoring, with exemptions for Mexico and similar close-by allies. Having an "in" network will likely be necessary given the changes in foreign policy we have seen from the Beijing-Moscow Axis. In a time of war, sometimes bad economics is better than war. We need to force the separation of supply chains away from China, ideally with more done closer to home. We no longer have a navy that can patrol the globe. Free trade was nice, but China chose to break it. They are going to invade neighbors, and they are going to try to break us. Their leader sees himself as the next Mao, and he could care less about economic growth. Right now they have too much control of essential supply chains. We must break that by any means necessary before they start invading neighbors.
Next, we should probably stop patrolling the Red Sea and East Africa. That is no longer our concern. Let the Chinese handle it. The impact of shutting that down will help show Europeans that they cannot continue to expect Pax Americana. We never should have opened up to China without political concessions. Now we must bear the cost. Remember, if they really hit us hard, we would be forced into a nuclear conflict that none of us wants.
This is not about economics. It is about security.
You are too negative about China. They have like 18 times the growth of the Eurozone, just look at the incredible development in Xinjiang. Taiwan might get invaded, though it is incredibly defensible territory and I think they are smarter than that. I think they realized war is so costly these days, soft power is better. Entangle Taiwan in commercial agreements, eventually an EU-like setup and so on. That is what a smarter Putin would have done to Ukraine. Just buy em off. Others will not get invaded. Historically China is not a conquering culture but an establish tributary states kind of culture.
China could have done this with Taiwan decades ago. They chose not to. I hope China is intelligent enough to not invade, but the last ten years have displayed an increasingly delusional Chinese leadership. They could have easily seduced Taiwan in with slots at elite Chinese universities, business incentives, ..., but instead they play tough guy. You can see the same thing in the South China Sea. The Obama administration brokered a deal where the PRC and Philippines would both withdraw from a contested area (right off the coasts of the Philippines and a thousand miles from CHina), but the Chinese reneged and humiliated Obama. They do that kind of thing all the time, but it has gotten worse under Xi.
Xi is the reason why I worry. The US must put forth a strong face and garauntee involvement or the PRC will invade, if not for any other reason than to get CHinese people's minds off horrific economic mismanagement. China could have done far better when Xi took over, but he repeatedly promoted the Party over the Country. He promoted a senselessly aggressive foreign policy that does not make sense unless he is planning for territorial expansion, and not just Taiwan. The PLA is currently occupying Bhutan and frequently tries to do the same in India. There is a great book I highly recommend by Kevin Rudd that is a solid display of Xi's neo-Maoist world view. Xi is more than happy to sacrifice economic growth for Party control and personal power.
CHina should still be growing faster, but it does not because Xi has chosen to change the rules of the game. Foreign investment has been driven away and domestic investment beaten and threatened into submission. Thousands of wealthy Chinese emigrate every year. When the doors closed to Canada they went to Australia. When that got hard they went to Thailand and Singapore. I have been shocked to learn that there are thousands of wealthy Chinese nationals with Caribbean passports who reside in the English-speaking world while they try to get passport number 3. I know families in this group, and they all say the exact same thing. They are afraid of instability. China feels unstable now, and it has been getting ever worse for a decade. Family wealth is being smuggled overseas, not reinvested at home. China got a taste of this when they attempted to open up their investment and currency regime. They slammed the door less than six months later after they experienced a net $1t USD outflow.
Other signs that scare me are China's relentless buying of gold (just like Russian before the invasion of Ukraine), China's blank check to Russia, and most of all the silly return of Mao-speak and internal party-building. The country has restarted Mao-era neighborhood snitch committees, workplace Han militias in minority areas, and all other kinds of other destabilizing, fascistic policies that only make sense in a time of war.
Your reference to Xinjiang is another creepy tale. Much like Tibet, China has raped and pillaged, and is now building over the original cities to create Han spaces. There was no reason to imprison so many and oppress Islam, but they did it anyway. Bhutan and Taiwan are next, and it would be worse than the Holocaust. Xinjiang is an example of Chinese fascism at its worst. The Germans got their economy humming in the 1930's, but that was not a good sign.
It would be great if Xi died and China returned to a growth and development focus, but there is no sign of that. The only way to prevent a war would be to make it crystal clear that the US and its allies would stand with Taiwan. China could easily woo Taiwan in, but I do not think such a strategy is possible under Xi's mismanagement. Furthermore, they were well aware of such a strategy decades ago, and they repeatedly made it clear that they would do no such thing (I lived in Taiwan, and nothing turned a Taiwanese into a Patriot as much as working on the mainland). I hope China does not start WW3, but the US and its allies need to be ready. If China starts anything, it must end in China's unconditional surrender.
It would be funny if it ended like that, because I could see Taiwan joining a democratic China, but no one would ever want to voluntarily live under Chinese communist rule. Lee Kuan Yew wrote a great article like twenty years ago writing about how Taiwan needs to play their hand right. It was hilarious because he repeatedly mocked the Chinese Communist Party and belittled the leader of China at that time. It was a hugely influential article at that time. China's heavy-handed, and pointless mismanagement of Hong Kong has only made Taiwanese that much more committed to independence. China could not easily take the island, but they could not prevent American involvement either. It would be a total war with millions of lives lost. I hope the Chinese do not start it, but I fear they will. If there is any risk of democratic revolution, Xi will roll the dice on Taiwan because he knows his own people will roll his head off his shoulders if he must ever account for his rule.
Thank you, this is a great analysis, you clearly know the region better than me. Is there a risk of democratic revolution, though? I don't think they have that kind of culture. But I guess while Russia had only a very brief democratic period in 1917, it did not help the Tzar that eventually there was a Red Tzar. There might be a revolution in China led by simply a different autocrat.
Nixon was a fiscal conservative when he ran in 1960. But after seeing the Democrats ignore deficits while gold reserves fell. A surtax was passed in 1968 which gave a surplus in 1969 and a bump up in the gold reserve. Nixon let it expire and deficits were back with a vengeance in 1970. In 1971 he abandoned fiscal conservatism altogether, declaring himself a Keynesian, ending gold convertibility and implemented prices controls to keep a lid on inflation until the beginning of 1973 to help with his reelection campaign.
Reagan was also a Keynesian, renamed "supply side economics", but it was basically a bolder version of the Democrats 1964 "Keynesian" tax cut. Under Reagan, deficit spending became a new Republican art form until Trump blew him out of the water. Biden has also adopted Trump's budget busting ways.
Regan, Bush 2 and Trump were worse in every imaginable way. All of them pushed for massive government deficits that would put Nixon to shame. Only the first Bush had any sense of getting the country's financial sense in order. Regan and Bush 2 were the worst, but Trump was still bad.
I am not a fan of Keynsian interference, but be careful with your comparisons. Regan and Bush 2 were far worse than Clinton. Modern Republicans talk a good game, but whenever they have control, the national debt as well as the size of the deficit increase dramatically. I am not saying the Democrats are great, but Bill Clinton got the country the closest to a sustainable system that we have ever seen. He also did not waste time with senseless social policy garbage that is unbearable, and now dominates the left and the right.
In addition, be careful when anybody writes about the gold standard. There is no better marker of an economically illiterate person than belief that yellow metal has "inherent value." It is the "pimping" school of economics that never got off the street corner. The man you linked to clearly does not understand economics as a field. I would STRONGLY recommend that you read anything he writes on the subject with a ton of salt. The gold standard is one of those nut case subjects like protecting domestic industry behind tariffs or economic self-sufficiency that only economic illiterates find reasonable.
The gold standard was a terrible monetary system. The only economist who ever liked it was Keynes. It simply did not work. Gold is popular now because Russia, China and other thuggish countries want to use to to avoid current and potential future sanctions.
That paper you linked to is a perfect example of an intelligent man writing about subjects he clearly does not understand.
I didn't say anything about Clinton. Why would I, he gave us a surplus. I talked about Biden who continued to run Trumpian deficits. Clinton basically fixed the fiscal problems Reagan-Bush had created and what did he get for it? Dubya who undid everything he accomplished.
You apparently do not understand how a gold standard works. Gold has no "inherent value" nor does it "back the currency". That's nutty. The *flow* of gold serves as an indicator. Today the Fed studies a slew of economic data in place of this indicator. Back in the day bankers did not have access to this sort of data so there used a rule of thumb. If gold is leaving your vault its means depositors would prefer to hold gold than dollars that earn interest. Why would they wish to do that. Presumably because they believed their gold would earn a higher annual return (through price increase) than the interest rate offered. When this happens the bank would raise the interest to paid on deposits and then the gold outflow would stop and may even reverse.
In other words, inflation was controlled by changes in interest rates, just like today. The advantage of a gold standard is a fiscal conservative administration could establish a tradition of publicizing the size of the gold reserve at regular intervals and implant the idea that draining the reserve was bad. Then when a fiscally irresponsible administration got elected, the opposition could run ads pointing the "torrents" of gold leaving our shores with hair on fire warnings about the dire inflationary consequences when its runs out.
One could use gold as an easy-to-understand consequence of running deficits. Also gold codes Right, yet right wingers are the most fiscally irresponsible politicians. Connecting deficits generated by tax cuts to falling gold reserves gets their own base up in arms against tax-cutting Republicans. They are very sensitive to tantrums from their base.
Gold tends towards having inherent value because it is chemically scarce and pretty. The gold standard didn’t “work” because it didn’t enable infinite spending in the way paper money and loans do.
More precisely, metallic standards don't work as well as fiat money because they don't allow the money supply to expand and contract with the needs of the economy. When the economy is booming, more money is needed to facilitate the greater volume of exchange and the greater value of goods being produced. If the money supply can't expand one of two things happens, either economic growth is blocked or the currency increases in value (deflation). Deflation is terrible for anyone holding debt and tends to cause economic collapse, i.e. depression. With fiat money, the money supply can easily expand or contract as required, enabling growth and softening the impact of recession.
Thanks for complicating my assumptions here — I think that when I hear “big tariffs”, my mind jumps to “oh crap the Hawley-Smoot tariff is what sunk us into the Great Depression”. Is there anything you can point to to help us see that Trump’s proposed tariffs are closer to the historical tariffs that you’re referencing than they would be to Hawley-Smoot?
Thanks! I did know that Smoot-Hadley (which I reversed the names of, bah) didn’t cause the Great Depression; I have heard historians and economists claim that it exacerbated what would likely have been a small, regional depression. (Obviously, historical counterfactuals are impossible, and I’m a random science teacher on the internet, so exercise all proper skepticism.)
Economies were much less interdependent then. In those days a blacksmith could bang out a machine part in his shop. Now it's "our entire system runs on these chips that are only made at one factory in Taiwan which require this one mineral only found in Mozambique to make".
As you say, the parties aren't split on a pro vs. anti freedom axis. It's also clear that structural features of our system ensure that for the foreseeable future there will continue to be two parties that each have turns in power. Fantasies of permanent political victory by one side or the other are delusional, as you wrote previously. Therefore it is important to support each party being the best (i.e., most pro-freedom) version of itself, it you want to steer the country in the direction of greater freedom.
I would interpret a Harris administration as being about average on that measure for a Democrat administration. She has said some worrying things, especially in her abortive 2020 campaign, but seems to be mostly blowing with the political winds like a typical politician. There were some ugly winds in 2020 but they've died down now and I would expect a Harris administration to be mostly a continuation of the Biden administration, which has been basically fair-to-middling for a Democrat regime.
Trump and his cult of personality, on the other hand, are clearly the worst version of the Republicans we have seen in our lifetime. For the reasons you mention, plus the dumb economic ideas you didn't mention (tariffs, tax/spending priorities that look highly inflationary). Not to mention the simple corruption. And the affection for dictators in foreign policy, which is likely to decrease political freedom elsewhere. Even if you don't care about foreigners' freedom at all, the U.S. is part of the world and lower overall world freedom does affect us.
I'm planning not to vote even though I voted in every previous election - I just can't stand voting for either side, or even any third party candidate. This is the most persuasive argument for voting Harris I've seen, it definitely nudges me in that direction. Well done.
I’m not at all a fan of Trump but Bush with his Christian stances on bioethics and his costly and destructive invasion of Iraq (costly for US, and while great for the Kurds, really helped Iran and also led to a power vacuum for ISIS) was arguably worse.
Bush Sr. was also very bad for Iraq. Specifically by giving the Iraqi government the impression that they could conquer Kuwait without a US military response afterwards and then by encouraging the Iraqi people to rebel against Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War was over only to subsequently have the US refuse to help them out. His defenders argue that he never promised the Iraqi people that he would actually help them overthrow Saddam, but it still resulted in an extraordinarily massive number of Iraqi Shi'ites getting slaughtered.
In 2003, Bush was simply correcting his daddy's previous mistake.
Great point. The Median Voter Theorem is highly underrated, and I think your reasoning makes a ton of sense. A vote for Trump in 2016, in the end, was arguably less about Trump's policies, and more of a vote for the sort of politicians and discourse you want to see in the United States. And the people got what they voted for.
There is another factor here. Hanania's reasons for being unconcerned about Jan 6 seem very unpersuasive. Hanania writes:
"Another major issue with voting Republican is that Trump did try to steal the election. It’s unlikely he’ll be able to once again try to pull off any kind of serious fake electors scheme or another January 6, especially now that he’s not in the White House and Kamala rather than Pence will be presiding over certification."
It's true that Trump will struggle to pull off a coup in *2024*. The question is whether he can do it in *2028*, after 4 years of controlling the federal apparatus -- including who is VP. His previous attempt, in 2020, was improvised and haphazard. Multiple statements he has made in interviews (Christians "won't have to vote again", he'll be a dictator "only on day 1") suggest that shenanigans are likely in 2028. They will probably be better planned and executed than the 2020 shenanigans -- he knows the federal apparatus better and, knowing Trump, he won't want to fail a second time. The existence of Project 2024 suggests an overall much higher level of planning and preparedness in a 2nd Trump admin. If Trump installs Trump Jr in 2028, or "delays" the next election, or something of that sort, no one will be able to say they didn't see it coming. Furthermore -- as far as I can tell, the protections against Trump doing this are, sadly, rather weak. I don't think there are any real laws that prevent him from firing all the generals and replacing them with loyalists, for example.
So I read this and nod along, my thinking is very similar, but I have a very different conclusion. I'm in complete agreement that Capitalism is more fragile than democracy, and that pushes me right. But unfortunately I have personal history with Trump, i know his character beyond his public persona, and I can't ever vote for him.
My solution, the remainder of this equation, is to vote Kamala for pres, but vote otherwise down the ticket republican, avoiding anyone too crazy or corrupt. Kamala can't do anything and the republicans can finally get over their cult of personality, hopefully Kamala is the last Dem I ever vote for. Trump is high variance, and the chance of a truly bad outcome is too high, the chance of a good outcome is low because in the end Donald is dumb, surrounded by sycophants, out of touch with reality, and focused on settling petty grievances.
The only way I'll vote for a the red team president is if they drop Trump. I'd vote Vance over Kamala in a heartbeat. Trump is old, maybe we get lucky.
Yeah it's lonely in the pro-market camp these days. Like I'm fine with a social safety net. Fine with progressive taxation. Honestly either party could win my vote. But it's price controls or tarrifs. Fuck me right!
But it is interesting that smarter countries with a moderate or less amount of economic freedom often tend to do better than duller countries with a huge amount of economic freedom. I suspect that average IQ is a better predictor for national wealth rather than economic freedom, though obviously it has an effect in chronic cases such as Venezuela and North Korea.
Chile and Uruguay have a huge amount of economic freedom but can't transform themselves into first-world countries because they don't have the human capital for it. Meanwhile, the moderate amount of economic freedom in Poland, Romania, and China has not prevented their massive economic rise.
Uruguay is a first-world country. It has the same GDP/capita as Greece, just a bit lower than Spain and Portugal. Unlike these European countries it does not have the massive advantage of having a ton of rich countries to trade with and accept tourists from. I don't think Uruguay has a low IQ or low human capital. It is 85-90% white. Uruguay's PISA scores are terrible but I suspect this is more about the educational culture in Latin America, and there is some effect going on where if you correct for effort people put into a useless test you find that the g value is much higher than what you get from the PISA. Definitely there's a strong effect like that for Israel and probably also for countries like Romania and Uruguay.
In other words, Americans are more willing to move to another US state to get a better job than Europeans are to move to another EU state or Canadians/Australians are to move to another province in their own country.
Chile also is quite arguably a first-world country. It's in the OECD and has 3/4 the GDP/capita of Uruguay and Greece. Definitely Chile has less human capital than Uruguay and South Europe (unlike them it has much more Amerindian admixture) but they have a lot of copper and have had capitalism thanks to Pinochet.
Anyway, being in Latin America is a big disadvantage. If Portugal was an island off the coast of Brazil it would probably be much poorer. Same for Spain or Greece.
Thanks! I do find it interesting that on the Index of Economic Freedom, there are some countries that are decent to live in, albeit not as nice as the Anglosphere/Germanic countries, that have less economic freedom relative to the Anglosphere/Germanic countries. Specifically the countries in Western Europe, Southern Europe, Central Europe, and Eastern Europe, as well as Japan. France, Italy, Czechia, and Japan aren’t as good to live in as, say, Germany or Canada or the US, but they’re still quite pleasant places to live in by global standards.
Anyway, I also have a question: If leftism (not the full-throated Communist or even Venezuelan kind, but even the much more moderate varieties) is so horrible, then why is it so popular in US cities? US cities generally don’t have Republican mayors (especially large US cities) and even US suburbs have been trending strongly Democratic over the last 20 years.
FWIW, my own view on politics is that the Democrats being the more pro-immigration party along with the EHC party certainly increases my own desire to support them.
"But it is interesting that smarter countries with a moderate or less amount of economic freedom often tend to do better than duller countries with a huge amount of economic freedom"
Yes but *within* a geography with similar demographics, the more pro-market countries are typically better off. Switzerland in Europe, Singapore in Asia, (historically) Chile in South America, USA in North America.
Also, you shouldn't really put too much weight in these "indexes". At the end of the day they are compiled by academics who are putting arbitrary weights on different factors. The political-science led indexes are especially bad (Hanania has written about this) as they are just based on "things left-liberals like".
The US appears to be as much pro-free market as Canada is, no?
And Singapore’s, Estonia’s (in a relative sense—Communism is still holding it back a bit, I suspect), and Switzerland’s success isn’t solely due to markets—or at least it might not be. They also have high human capital levels, extraordinarily high in Singapore’s case:
Granted, Communism would wreck them, as it did Estonia, but French-style governance? I’m unsure. Unless this will also cause them to import loads of working-class Muslims and Africans!
What makes you think that EHC wants to make the proles angry through huge economic disruptions? EHC should be smart enough to realize that the proles will blame the Democrats for this, no?
EHC likes making proles and peasants mad because they don’t like the peasants and want them out of the picture. They also believe that the proles are powerless and will be overridden through mass propaganda and immigration. Jan 6 would be in favor of this idea because it showed that a bunch of angry proles storming the capitol accomplished nothing.
TBH, I suspect that you’re thinking that EHC is much more Machievallian than it actually is. January 6 and what happened before that was a real risk for our democracy. I don’t think that EHC would have preferred to gamble with it if it could have, even if it did arguably benefit by making the proles who participated in this look both stupid and unsuccessful—and also menacing as well!
The whole story of the Biden admin has been that Obama-style economists like Summers, Furman and Goolsbee have been sidelined in favor of populist Warrenites. Harris seems to be continuing this tradition.
Since 2012, IDpol populists have taken over the Democratic party. They always win. Look at the case study of urbanists vs. pro-crime types in Democratic cities. One side says cars are dangerous and we shouldn't let people drive like maniacs. The other side says punishing people for crime is bad and discriminatory. Which side wins?
Well, disparate impact is a retarded policy, but without debunking the Woke hypothesis through race realism as Nathan Cofnas advocates, I’m unsure that there would be another effective way to counter Wokism. I suppose that one can adopt Richard Hanania-style public agnosticism and say that it doesn’t matter that racial gaps exist, but that closing them shouldn’t take precedence over issues of urgent importance, such as making our streets, roads, and cities safe, but would that actually be a winning approach?
Wow, sounds like we need both candidates to outline how they will use the office of the presidency to influence New York Office of Court Administration policies related to calculating bail and release policies for suspects in the state of New York!
Don't be so obtuse. The bigger point is that a large portion of Dems agree with the behavior of the judge. Biden may have been a moderate, and Kamala a bit to his left, but the median young Democratic staffer is several standard deviations to the left of the median American.
Freeing criminals who savagely beat someone is indeed terrible. During his presidency Trump relaced the rule of engagement for airstrikes, which killed a large number of civilians, probably hundreds more than if he hadn't relaxed them. Are you arguing that killing innocent people is less bad than beating them up?
I don't know...hypothetically I'd be willing to pay substantially higher tax if more criminals were kept in jail. QOL improvements in American cities would justify lower income. Imagine going to a store and not having to call a staffer over to get a bottle of face wash. Or even better, riding a bike to your local restaurant and not having to secure it like it's the nuclear briefcase. The festering quality of life decreases from progressive pro-crime policy are substantial.
The impression that I got is that liberals 100+ years ago weren't as big into the noble savage idea. Back then, opposing lynchings was seen as progressive. Coddling black criminals like we do nowdays? 1920s liberals would have probably been horrified by this!
Liberals have gotten more liberal over time. Moldbug writes extensively on this. Liberals are also very sensitive to any attempts to go backwards to earlier liberalism. Even hannia here is browbeating conservatives for being low iq and supporting liberal policies from 50 years ago.
Would you including “losing Republicans the election” as something Trump might do? A better candidate who is not a narcissistic moron maybe would easily crush Kamala.
This is hateful and unprestigious in the eyes of Elite Human Capital 💯, and triggering to this queer Woke freak.
Anyhow, I'm not even sure I buy the economics arguments. Price controls on groceries are obviously cynical populism that is never going to happen, whereas 10% tariffs on all imports (not just China) and the President getting a say on interest rates is unlikely, but not unimaginable.
First of all, when it comes to the effects of Republican judges on future elections, Hanania might be a bit unduly rosy. Yes, Republican judges (unlike Republican politicians) refused to help Trump overturn the 2020 election, but if more election deniers will become judges in the next several decades, including on SCOTUS, then there is no guarantee that Republican judges will behave similarly in a future US presidential election where a candidate will behave similarly to Trump. Of course, that could subsequently trigger a revolution in the US, but would Hanania really want that?
Secondly, Yes, in addition to EHC being solidly against Trump, there is also the issue that the GOP is only perceived as being pro-liberty if one only looks at the interests of natives. If one also looks at the interests of foreigners, then the Democrats likely become the pro-liberty party since they are more willing to allow more foreigners to escape lifetimes of poverty, misery, and/or oppression by allowing them to immigrate to the US. That's quite considerable when we're talking about years or decades, when millions or even tens of millions of people could have their lives be fundamentally transformed in such a way. This is why Ilya Somin, a libertarian law professor, supports the Democrats against Trump. Well, that along with Trump's general election denialism and wannabe authoritarianism.
So, basically, Richard has to argue that slightly more pro-market policies are an acceptable price to pay for condemning millions of additional people to lifetimes of poverty, misery, and/or oppression. And I don't think that he can do that, unless he wants to completely discount the well-being of foreigners, which strikes me as being unethical. We're not talking about turning the US into Zimbabwe here, after all.
It's not like the US economy even performs poorly under Democratic US Presidents:
Democratic US Presidents actually tend to do pretty well economy-wise, probably in part because they have more potential for economic growth, job creation, et cetera, since they're more likely to come into office when the economy is doing poorly. But it does appear to show that the policies that they pursue don't appear to be chronically hurtful to the US economy.
And even for the most dynamic US economic areas right now, the suburbs, they appear to be heavily trending blue right now and indeed over the last 20 years.
As someone who works in finance, the private and (especially) public capital markets have been totally frozen since Biden has been in power. Billions of dollars in value destroyed.
And Shiba Inu dogcoin was worth 10x as much in late 2021 as it is now. AlI the scams collapsed after the end of COVID era easy money, which had nothing to do with Biden per se.
> And although I don’t believe Trump would try to stay for a third term in 2028, I don’t think the possibility can be completely discounted given the degree to which the Republicans have now become a cult of personality.
If Don Jr. is the nominee for 2028, and loses the election by a narrow margin in states where MAGA election monitors are in place to blow smoke, how likely do you think it is that Trump tries to do another coup attempt?
Mature democracies don't generally become dictatorships, agreed, but they don't become dictatorships because people in stable democracies think, "Democracy is cool and works;" in somewhere like Weimar Germany, lots of people were still basically monarchists and generally full of anti-democratic seething. The modern GOP is at the point of happily chanting about locking up political opponents, making Trump dictator "for a day," overturning the Constitution, overturning election results... Trump faces no backlash whatsoever for his promise to pardon violent insurrectionists who beat the shit out of cops in an attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.
I really think you're underestimating the downside risk - the failure of American democracy would also destroy American capitalism and be an enormous blow to democracy, peace, liberty, and economic growth across the globe.
It's far-fetched to assume that Trump could simply crown his son as his successor when this son has never generated much interest or admiration among the base. I understand that Trump supporters may seem completely foolish, but even in the most barbaric countries, dictators struggle to establish a royal dynasty.
It's far fetched to assume that the Republican Party base would continue to support Trump after he attempted a coup, was almost convicted in the Senate for it, had every Republican influencer denouncing him, and lost an election. And yet.
He *was* impeached for it, actually. The US Senate simply failed to remove him for it because removal requires a 2/3rds majority, not just a simply majority.
And Yes, it really is quite shocking just how many GOP politicians were willing to jump on the election denial train in 2020.
You mean after the 2020 election? If so, then Yeah, when Trump began saying these lies, the rest of the GOP felt compelled to repeat them, and the ones who resisted Trump, such as by voting for his second impeachment, were subsequently targets of GOP primary campaigns, mostly successful ones. Trump used January 6 to conduct his own little purge of the GOP.
I get going along with him at the time, politicians are fundamentally by nature venal cowards about elections. After January 6, many temporarily found their spines; only to then lose them again.
The 2028 GOP nominee doesn't need to be Don Jr. It can be anyone else endorsed by Trump as well, such as JD Vance. If JD Vance is narrowly losing but can create enough fake deniability about the election results to get GOP state legislatures to appoint their own slates of electors, then you don't see JD Vance trying to utilize the powers of the US Vice Presidency to try crowning himself as the next US President?
The Holocaust would have also seemed pretty far-fetched to Germans in 1925, and yet it happened within the next 20 years. And Stalinist levels of famines, gulags, and mass murders would have also seemed absurd to Russians in early 1917 who believed that the Tsar's regime is the worst that it can possibly get in Russia and that any leftist regime change in Russia would subsequently be a huge improvement for Russia. They definitely didn't anticipate that the kind of leftist regime that would ultimately emerge in Russia would make the Tsarist regime look like a saint in comparison to it!
I don’t even think it has to be Don Jr. Trump complains about election fraud in every election, even if he’s not on the ballot. If he likes his Republican successor and his successor loses, he will once again cry fraud and try to use his office to change the election results.
I'm sorry, I live in the real world. Donald Trump attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to Joe Biden, by pressuring Mike Pence to throw out the electors of seven states. When Mike Pence took his oath to the constitution more seriously than personal loyalty to Trump, Trump sent a violent mob to the Capital Building to pressure him and Republican legislators into giving in to his plot to end a streak of five generations of peaceful transfer of power, going back to the ACW.
I was, of course, speaking to Richard here, as Richard has enough brain power to correctly recognize what Trump did. I don't care if you want to live in some delusional land where it's only a coup if it takes place on a Saturday.
I dunno, who egged them on? I believe Trump egged them on because I've listened to his speech the day of, read his Tweets the day of, and am familiar with the plan to prevent Joe Biden to become President by illegally throwing out the electoral votes of seven states.
How exactly would it have been a transfer of power, when it would have been Trump before and Trump after? It seems much more like it would have been an autocoup:
From himself to himself already happens when a president is reelected. A coup doesn’t require military force, but it usually reflects poorly on the system if it lets a coup go through without any resistance.
Well, had Trump’s 2020 attempt to overturn the election succeeded, I certainly wouldn’t have been surprised to see him and Pence subsequently meet the fate of Yanukovych and Azarov in Ukraine.
"The sudden overthrow of a government by a usually small group of persons in or previously in positions of authority. "
I just typed "define coup d'etat" into duckduckgo and seems like a perfectly adequate description of the President attempting to keep himself in power by using paper-thin justifications given to him by "crackpot lawyers" (to quote Mike Pence) and violent mob. I have seen cons capable of capitalizing words and using proper punctuation try to defend this, there is no defense other than conspiracy brained nonsense like the Ray Epps shit or blaming Nancy Pelosi, "he failed so it's okay" (I wouldn't trust my child with such a paper-thin defense, much less my country), "it wouldn't have worked anyway so it's okay," or just not knowing anything about Jan 6. Begone moron.
You are deeply stupid. "It's not a coup! It's just an attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power by using violent force! I've redefined the word coup so that this thing that is obviously a coup isn't! Owned, libtard!"
"How about instead of discussing Jan 6, we discuss Russiagate instead!" So you do know that Jan 6 is indefensible, deep down inside, and thus you have to play whataboutism. It's okay. Just embrace Richard's position: democracy is less important than capitalism. It's okay that Trump broke a 150 year streak of peaceful transfers of power, because he failed. There's no need to engage in insane delusions that he didn't send a violent mob to the capital, in full defiance of all video and documentary evidence of exactly that happening.
What armored division did Putin or Xi Jinping use to end elections in their countries? Is your only knowledge of coup attempts from Marvel movies where the bad guys wage an all out war against the good guys and duke it out?
Did God reveal himself in a dream to Putin and Xi Jinping one day and tell them "Now you're magically blessed with the full support of your country's military might and institutions," or do you think they orchestrated a variety of incremental policy changes, like assassinating political opponents, disappearing CEOs of companies, shutting down unfavorable media organizations, installing loyalists in positions of power, falsifying vote counts, instigating violence against their opponents, to get to where they are today?
He did none of those things. He also didn't come out with the Avengers and announce "Avengers, go and coup the government!" so I guess you can ignore all the other antidemocratic examples I included in that list, as well as Trump's previous antidemocratic actions like falsifying electoral votes and directing his supporters to march on the Capitol to pressure Pence to certify the election in his favor.
It's not at all clear that Trump would support Ukraine. He's made many questionable statements on this matter and many of the loudest and voices in his party (ones that seem capable of persuading him, eg. Tucker) are Putinophiles. We all know what an ascendent Russia could (likely would) do to European stability, global markets, or to China's resolve to make moves against Taiwan.
I think it's true that Republicans are still marginally better at economic policy than the Democrats, but this gap has been narrowing as both parties have been moving towards economic populism. Either way, a Republican victory would be seen as validation of this economically populist turn, and would likely mean the party continues to move in this direction, maybe even doubles down on it, in the coming cycles.
IMO we should all worry less about this cycle and be instead talking about how to change course over the long term. Neither candidate this cycle passes the bar for an acceptable head of state for the "leader of the free world".
I do wonder if the infusion of EHC, especially from suburban areas, into the Democratic Party over the past 20 years could make the Democrats more pro-free markets than they were before. It does seem possible, don't you think? Especially in the future?
Wow. "Stupid, intellectually lazy, conspiratorial, bigoted, anti-democracy, and have awful views on abortion and euthanasia...motivated by ugly instincts."
I will be withdrawing my support. Regardless of your philosophical beliefs and political leanings, you automatically (in my mind) lose all credibility when you go all crazy ad homenan attack. You have completely dismantled your own positions by failing to be reasonable and rational. Which is very "Democrat" of you.
How are we to engage in an exchange of ideas when you fail to acknowledge the humanity of the very people you would like, I assume, to sway?
How are we to "bridge the gap" and heal the wounds of our society when you (by which I mean "your side") go for the jugular and view your opponents as less than human? It's distinctly un-American and completely un-rational.
If we are to save our country, we must be willing to discuss our differences with the humility and kindness.
I've been a supporter of his channel, so I'm familiar with his views. Persuasion is completely dismantled by ad homenen attacks, which is the lowest form of argumentation. Guess I've had too much training in logic to put up with sloppy, emotional tripe.
I don't think it is Ad Hominem. He explains very clearly in other posts why he thinks these things are true. He's not just insulting people. These facts matter to whether a political party is worth supporting.
It's not a matter of truth. It's a matter of using personal attacks via degradation of character to shut down the discussion and to make yourself feel superior. If calling your opponent "stupid" isn't an attempt to paint your opponent as "less than" you and your tribe, I don't know what is. Using that kind of attack does nothing to advance dialog and everything to do with your ego.
On the whole, liberals always believe they are smarter and better, yet they have no supporting evidence. It's just a feeling, which is no way to make a judgment.
In the end, calling people names, no matter how correct you believe those names to be, creates conflict rather than dialog.
Calling republicans (on a cohort level) “stupid” is just facts, as Richard has laid out before (and which you’ve apparently read). How is that a “personal” attack?
Also, if ur gonna leave, just leave. I always find these “look at me” declarations amusing, and frankly, stupid.
from the side that believes men can be women, gay sex is normal sex and that we are all like interchangeable lego bricks aka, no differences in culture or people?
The stopid label is projecting.
And if Hanania feels embarassed by normal people's beliefs, he might try befriending those elites he admires so much.
But he will have to renege on his views about african-americans.
> "How are we to engage in an exchange of ideas when you fail to acknowledge the humanity of the very people you would like, I assume, to sway?... If we are to save our country, we must be willing to discuss our differences with the humility and kindness.
As late as 2023, 40% of Republican supporters believed Biden was a completely illegitimate president (i.e. stole the election) and 30% more had suspicions that was the case. This is an unhinged position to have. There are no two sides about this. People who believe this are intellectually lazy, use motivated reasoning, and/or just don't care about the truth.
Fox News had to pay the highest defamation lawsuit in history ($700 million) for knowingly lying about eleciton fraud. Keyword: knowingly. They knew what they were doing. Various text messages confirm this. If there was any proof of election fraud, their fact finding team would have found it. Instead, they lied, because they were losing audience to NewsMax – which was also lying.
Republicans even more than liberals have a reflexive distrust of mainstream media, despite it having fact checks, and actually doing investigative journalism. Who do they trust instead? Surely people that engage in extensive research? No. People that, without an ounce of evidence, believe in election fraud lies, believe in all sorts of conspiracy theories any one else can immediately see is blatantly false. The worst part? Calling people who don't believe those conspiracies sheep, while they all parrot the exact same conspiracy talking points.
Are liberals always smart? No. Absolutely not. Especially progressives, they have many very bad beliefs. But they are certainly smarter than conservatives, on average.
It's not a matter of moral judgement. At least not entirely. Not all unhinged people are morons, though it does correlate with lower IQ.
The cognitive deficit between Democrats and Republicans, though exacerbated under Trump, well predates him. This is true regardless of whether it is or is not brought up, as an insult or otherwise. Smart people are not becoming Republicans. They neither buy their ideas, nor are enchanted with their major figures, and this is the case even after generations of mainstream-Dem-sanctioned active persecition of our highest-IQ demographics.
Anyone who remotely wants a healthy Republican Party should care about this and see it fixed, but this is a lost cause for as long as it's the party of Trump, as he's neither willing to, nor capable of, appealing to the high-Q set.
A healthy political party has a release valve for internal policy debate, rather than fear of stepping out of line. To create a healthy GOP, the boil must first be lanced and flush out the shrill paranoia.
Offering both sound economic policy and a warmer embrace of the future might be one small step to creating some mature voices in the GOP rather than the current juvenescent blubbering..
"Ad hominem". Latin for "to the person". Which is only an issue when you're using it as a means of attacking your opponents character as a way of getting out of having to debate their argument on its merits. It is, in fact, not ad hominem at all to point out that one of the parties is on average filled with stupider members, and more attractive to stupid voters, than the other. It's an entirely valid topic of discussion, and certainly far more important than most of the bullshit we pretend matters during election season.
What Hanania did there is the polar opposite of an ad hominem attack. "Ad hominem" is not a synonym for "insult." Ad hominem is a logical fallacy where you assume or say that someone must be wrong because of some personal characteristic, rather than the merits of their argument or position. Hanania is arguing that Republicans are right about who to vote for, despite their negative personal characteristics.
I understand your argument. But for me, Russia’s imperial war in Ukraine trumps our navel gazing about domestic issues in this election. Our country is generally too divided to make lasting changes to domestic policies, yet Russia’s war raises the critical issue of whether we will allow dictators to rattle the nuclear sabre to conquer territory. If the US gives Russia any semblance of a “win” in Ukraine, it endangers us all perpetually into the future. Furthermore, since the President has the biggest influence on foreign policy, I’m most focused on this.
So what would you tell someone who is a single-issue voter as to who be better for Ukraine in the long run? You argue that Trump is likely to support Ukraine. But I would estimate that there is a non-negligible possibility (10-15% chance) that Trump forces Ukraine into a disastrous “peace” agreement that is highly advantageous to Russia. I also acknowledge there is a small possibility (5-10% chance) that Trump ramps up support for Ukraine far beyond Biden’s “escalation management” approach. Otherwise, I’m expecting more of the same.
As for Kamala, I don’t think there’s a real possibility that she would completely cut Ukraine loose. I also think there is also a small possibility (10-15% chance) that Kamala slightly increases our support because her foreign policy advisors are bigger hawks on Russia.
In expected value terms, it seems like Kamala would be the safer bet. I think even with the relatively minimal support we are providing that Ukraine will eventually wear out the Russian army. Secondary sanctions are beginning to finally bite Russia, too, because there are signs China is being forced to step away from coyly supplying Russia’s war machine.
Am I wrong about the underlying probability estimates?
Ukraine is the largest country in Europe by area, but its fertility rate is very low. The idea that it should lose large numbers of something it lacks—high-quality young people—for something it has in abundance—land—seems absurd to me.
And if the issue is about upholding international norms regarding the territorial integrity of a peaceful country, then the entire world benefits from these norms. They should come fight for the Ukrainians, rather than fight until the last Ukrainian.
That’s right. I think the US should ramp up aid to Ukraine and also push for a peace deal. Try to end the war on the most favorable terms so Ukraine can get back to rebuilding and American taxpayers aren’t stuck funding a forever war.
I think that ship has already sailed. The US (and Europeans) looked the other way in 2014 during the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea, then allowed the same with Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizha with *minimal* consequences. Yes, the second time they partially armed Ukraine, but with all sorts of restrictions on how the weapons could be used and delivering the aid via drip feed. In the end, the Budapest memorandum was not even worth the paper it was written on. As it stands, short of a direct intervention (which won't happen regardless of who wins in November), Russia will eventually 1. walk away with some parts of Ukraine 2. the new borders will be internationally recognized and will stay part of Russia indefinitely. Such an outcome would be seen as overall worth it (if suboptimal) by the Russian elite, even if Russia needs to burn through many times more manpower and resources than it already has. Money and people are temporary and replenishable, borders of a nuclear state are basically eternal.
On top of it all, the possibility of not responding to NATO Article 5 has been floated by the Republicans, for now conditional on a member not contributing enough, but this could easily become unconditional in a few more years. Similarly, Trump has already started making excuses for not protecting Taiwan citing lack of economic incentives. I don't think it's a stretch to assume that all US security guarantees will turn out to be just as worthless as the Budapest memorandum.
The only saving grace is that Russia has also been exposed as both an unreliable partner (see Armenia) and a paper tiger, while China hasn't yet established itself as a better alternative to the US in terms of military guarantees. Even so, if you are being threatened by China, the smart move seems to be bending the knee to China rather than sticking with the US.
Every year they hold out is another year that leaves open the possibility of domestic turmoil in Russia that forces a truce. I agree they can't win on the battlefield in the long run, but many wars are not won that way. Domestic discontent, or a coup against the leadership, has been the downfall of a large list of nations at war who never would have lost otherwise. This is Ukraines main hope as I see it.
Russia expected they could parachute men in and race in with convoys of armored vehicles and organized resistance would end in a week. Instead, they've already lost way more men than in their entire Afghan war. If this is winning, Putin would hate to see losing.
How exactly was Russia losing in 1917? Russia was actually winning against both Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans by 1917 and was only "losing" against Germany, and even then, not by that much, since the Germans weren't penetrating Russian territory any further between 1915 and 1917.
Does the Vietnam war or Soviet war in Afghanistan count? Who foresaw the collapse and break-up of the Soviet Union in 1989 anyway? Most dictatorships look extremely stable until they suddenly aren't. Also, winning is stretching things a bit. Yes, Russia has taken land and is (very) slowly taking more, but it's currently a stalemate and Russia is burning through both volunteers and materiel faster than it can replace them. Also, there are possible wild cards like a potential direct intervention by Poland or France if Russia did somehow manage to end the stalemate or things got desperate otherwise (eg. MAGA cutting off all aid). Putin is also reluctant to use conscripts, even against the recent Kursk incursion and probably for good reason. The failure to win the war quickly and completely as everyone initially expected also doesn't help the legitimacy of the regime in the eyes of Russians (I expect). I am not saying Russia cannot win or that it won't get a peace treaty that will "justify" its investment, but the outcome of the war is still very far from being settled.
If Biden had treated the Russians the way Trump treated those Wagnerites in Syria, Putin would've already surrendered before last Christmas. Russia is a shithole failed state; with a worthless army rapists, slaves, and rape victims; good for nothing but robbing anywhere they're stationed, dying in accidents, and getting shot; respected by neither their people nor their leaders, and you multipolar dicksucks pretended for decades this was still a real military power.
Only the supreme cuckoldry of our own leaders has seen this sad conflict dragged out in so Korea-esque a fashion. Even if they win, they're still losing. They'll be a White North Korea with more alcohol, fewer babies, and somehow even more rape and PTSD.
"Foreigners are icky" strikes me as the low IQ way of saying human capital is important. The foreigners that aren't found to be "icky" are generally the ones lower in human capital, it isn't aimed at engineers or doctors. The people saying it are stupid so the message is fairly incoherent.
In practice though Trump's policies made immigration harder mostly on the elite human capital legal immigrants, not refugees and asylum seekers. Maybe he'd change his approach this time, but I don't know why we'd think he would.
I think it is all a bit of a farce, only something like 1% of visas are linked to high skills (more are linked to education), it is a ridiculous system that doesn't really positively select at all. The general "foreigners are ick" vibe contains a bit of protest against the system through with lots of xenophobia and protectionism thrown in.
Due to pure chance the American immigration system has been fairly positively selecting for human capital though. America is one of the few countries where PISA scores of first gen immigrants are above natives. Even Canada can't say that.
I was told that "kids in cages" was the worst thing to happen since Hitler. If that's not hard, what is? And the border did legitimately implode when Biden became President.
I think there's reason to believe the Trump Admin gained knowledge about how to deal with the border in a politically and legally acceptable manner as time went on, but it was an arms race as immigrants gained more sophisticated knowledge about how to manipulate the US system to gain admittance.
The problem the Democrats have is none of their staff really want to control the border. They only do it begrudgingly, acting on orders from above, which in turn are also half-hearted, a mere product of their desire to win elections. On the Republican side, there is real passion for the issue.
What do you make of the David French argument that Trump needs to be resoundingly defeated *in order to save the Republican party*? Seems like that could plausibly lead to more pro-market policies in the longer term, even if you think Dems are worse in the short term.
US elections and policy will inevitably vacillate between the two parties over time. The most important long-term effect of any given election may be less about which side wins, and more about how the result shapes the two parties going forward.
Actually, if SCOTUS will be so thoroughly infested with Trumpism by then, then they could use the unconstitutional constitutional amendment doctrine to strike down the 22nd Amendment, thus allowing Trump to run again for a third term in 2028 even if he wins in 2024:
This doctrine actually was used by courts in some other countries in the past, sometimes in order to defend democracy. But the problem is that this doctrine in the wrong hands can also be used to subvert democracy.
I want to go back to Eisenhower and caring about the public interest. We need that Republican Party back. The Democrats are too far gone to care any more.
Well, the evidence is overwhelming that the Rosenbergs deserved to die. There was no alternative. Modern spies should get the same treatment. Furthermore, demographics are a claim that has never born out. I was taught that Latinos would vote like African-Americans by now, but they do not.
Also, Eisenhower never blacklisted anyone. There was a Congressional committee, but honestly, it is no worst than the idiocy we see today thrown at people for not being sufficiently woke. There were 3500 member of the CPUSA (I have read more stupid books about those few people than you can imagine). They were not too many, and they took positions like promoting Adolph Hitler's invasion of Poland. They were by their own words some nasty people who paid a price for their political view, the same way racists do today. If anything, I think the over-kill from false accusations during Me-Too were far worse, and they definitely impacted more people.
The CPUSA was tiny. They never were larger than current white power movements today. Do you feel bad when white power movement members are discriminated against? They are really not different than communists. They simply hate different people, but they both favor the same kind of "participatory democracy." I strongly recommend you read "Towards a Soviet America" by William Z. Foster and tell me how bad you feel for those fascists who prefer Marxism to National Socialism. Same basic hate with different target groups. I have no sympathy.
If you do, what are you doing to help those who are blacklisted today? Today's blacklists are far larger, and they are more strongly enforced (If you want data, I have a set somewhere with what these guys did after getting blacklisted, ALL of them found work,, just not in Hollywood). Most of all, that was Congress, not Eisenhower.
Similarly, I see no problems with immigration enforcement at that time. Remember, that term is translated from what people in the Southwest called those who illegally entered the country. The people enforcing those laws had Spanish names. There was no racism there. People were deported who were supposed to be deported. The Chinese Exclusion Act was bad. Operation Wetback was the enforcement of US law at the request of locals along the border who were 50% of Spanish ancestry. Be very careful about these shallow, silly attempts at history books that are published today. They make up lies that are easy to disprove. Anyone who thinks the Rosenbergs were innocent is literally going out of their way to not see the obvious.
If you are interested in the CPUSA, read books from the Yale Annals of Communism series. Harvy Klehr and John Earl Hanes are great guys. Hanes was at the LOC until he retired a while back. He is a great guy. He was willing to go above and beyond helping me with other stuff at the Library, but I read everything with his name on it just because he was an exceptional individual, and just a nice guy. Some people at the LOC can be jerks, and I get it given what pricks Congressional staffers can be, but he was the best guy there in my opinion. I kept in touch with him years later. I think we are still connected in facebook.
But in general, once the Commintern and CPUSA archives were open in 1991, the truth came out, and it is so much worse than anyone imagined. You will never read any of this in a typical university history class because the Boomers like the false narrative of the poor Communists who only sold the US out and promoted Hitler until he turned on Stalin. I mean who thought Hitler was a bad guy in 1940? Such great people.
Forms membership in the CPUSA was smaller than sympathetic parties. Civil rights group and the weather underground freaks include the sympathetic parties. Now that they are firmly and unambiguously in power, you’ll never get another Eisenhower.
Couldn't the difference be split by voting for Kamala for president but Republicans in congress? If it were to happen then a whole lot of *nothing* will be done, unless a bill has a veto-proof majority.
You favor open immigration, but do you believe immigrants and their descendants will embrace capitalism in the long run? Their home countries aren't known for supporting capitalism strongly.
Don’t forget Venezuelans fleeing socialism. Republicans are just prejudiced against foreigners and arguments about the way they vote is just an excuse, plus a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I don't think that comparison is as strong. Venezuelans are coming from a country that voted (back when their elections were legitimate) for hard socialism. Hong Kong on the other hand is one of the most pro-market places in the world!
In case of Venezuela, you *could* argue that there is a Cuba effect and those fleeing are selectively more pro-market, but that's not a response to the original post from Tamritz.
That's one of my points here: Overall, the GOP is less pro-liberty once one takes the welfare of foreigners into account as well, since it's not very pro-liberty to condemn foreigners to lifetimes of poverty, misery, and/or oppression by preventing them from immigrating to the US in greater numbers.
Is that supposed to be a slight? If maximizing liberty means giving significant priority to the welfare of foreigners, that makes liberty similarly odious as Marxism.
And what about polling that shows Hispanics in the US are more economically left-wing and populist than white Americans? Do you really think the average Venezuelan crossing the border is intelligent enough to correct their fiscal instincts that caused them to vote their way into this mess?
We should have. Within a month of the USSR's dissolution, Marines should have been hitting the beaches. Given the disparity of military power and the infeasibility of external supply of an insurgency on an island, it would have been all over in a week, and Cuba would have been a much richer, happier place for the last 30 years.
In the long run yes I think so. I also don’t think that’s a great argument. The USSR wasn’t known for capitalism to put it mildly but Russian-Israelis are capitalist.
197 countries in the world, more than 190 are capitalist.
As an American, you believe all the immigrants to your country are coming from a tiny number of countries? 🤣 And you think that small number of people will overthrow America's rock solid economic system? Perhaps wanting to live in America for that very purpose. 🤣
It's because of the vibes the parties give off, not to mention occasionally actual policy positions. The Republicans express anti-foreigner sentiments pretty much constantly, if not on ethnic grounds then on religious grounds. If you make somebody feel like they are unwelcome in your country or that they are there only on your sufferance, those people (first or second generation immigrants, not so much third and beyond) are going to find reasons to vote against you even if their views and ideology align with you on all other issues.
We live in a multi-cultural democracy where human capital by ethnic group differs. A hypothetical party that had a policy of pure meritocracy (similar to PAP in Singapore) would be seen as racist towards the ethnic groups that have lower human capital. Only explicitly favoring less-well of ethnic groups is seen as acceptable.
Yes, but poll them on their policy and social views and you'll see why they vote Democrat. 1st gen Latinos tend to be economically left, while 2nd gen are both economically and socially left.
"More" in this case is not a majority. And my guess is that (as I mentioned above), the Hispanic votes Trump is getting are from well-established communities, not recent migrants or their descendants.
But I'm happy to be proven wrong on this if there's data for it.
Immigrants and the immigration issue can be quite complicated. I once read about an Irish immigrant named Denis Kearney who faced anti-immigrant discrimination on the East Coast (something like a Gangs of New York scenario), but later moved to the California coast and himself spearheaded an anti-immigration movement against Chinese (both on economic and cultural grounds). My sense is that that the move to the west made him accepted as a white man rather than being discriminated against as a Catholic Irishman. So his political position changed accordingly. Something like this can happen to other kinds of immigrants too, like Hispanics today.
Trump’s promise to impose a 10-20% tariff on all imported goods would be way more disastrous to the economy than anything that Harris has talked about. The scary thing here is that Trump can enact tariffs with executive authority alone. Trump could then take bribes from companies to grant special exceptions to these tariffs for “national security” reasons or whatever. Trump is such a corrupt and unscrupulous person that could totally do this purely to enrich himself. This would set our free market system back massively and makes the Dems the party to support if you care about market freedom and economic liberty.
Noah Smith writes about how Harris has backed away from price controls. I think this shows (as you've mentioned before) that there is a feedback loop of smart people (aka elite human capital) for Dems but not for Republicans
I think it's less about whether or not they would do it (honesty), than the responsiveness (demonstrated by the backing away from the position) esp. because it would seem like a popular policy to someone without knowledge of basic economics (which covers a large swath of the electorate I assume).
I also think the whole NATO expansion line of thought to explain why Russia invaded Ukraine falls apart under scrutiny. Both Sweden and Finland joined NATO after Russia escalated into a full-blown invasion of Ukraine. Are experts like John Mearsheimer arguing that we should have blocked them from joining because of the threat to Russia?
No, the real reason is found in Putin’s own treatise, “On the Historical Unity of the Ukrainian and Russian Peoples.” Russia’s war in Ukraine is genocidal. Putin doesn’t believe Ukrainians exist. But he does believe that Swedes, Finns, and others do.
Well, Yeah, in that article of his, Putin said that Ukraine's Ukrainianization policies are the equivalent of using a weapon of mass destruction against Ukraine's Russian population. If he genuinely believes that, and also genuinely believes in his own rhetoric calling the pre-2022 situation in the Donbass a genocide, then he lives in a very interesting fantasy world.
They have many more better heroes now as a result of the current war.
As for Ukrainian being similar to Russian, well, Dutch is also similar to German. Should Hitler have annexed it instead of Poland in 1939, at least if he wasn’t a genocidal maniac?
I am sympathetic towards your view that Trump would likely be the more pro-market candidate, but I am very surprised you didn't mention the elephant in the room, his plan to enact a 10% tariff on ALL imported goods. In my opinion, this would have disastrous effects, far worse than rent or grocery price controls. Do you believe this is just partisan rhetoric that will be walked back??
Yeah, I think whether he would be good or catastrophic for the economy mostly comes down to this (either he does basically nothing, does all the tariffs, or does a corrupt version where half the importers get tariffs and the other half overpay for shares of Trump media inc).
My understanding is even if he means it, he can't do this without an act of Congress, which he probably won't get. He can only use EOs to enact narrower tariffs that have some demonstrable national security purpose (like the tariffs on China in his first term).
I also suspect it might be an "Art of the Deal" negotiating ploy. Though who knows? And the fact that no one knows with Trump is what makes it a pretty good negotiating ploy (being perceived as crazy is of considerable value in the game of Chicken).
Nixon tried this ("madman theory"). It didn't really work.
A major problem with madman theory is that, like any sustained lie, sometimes you start believing your own BS, and unfortunately "madman" is not a very good role to inhibit unironically.
Famously, Kissinger started hiding the nuclear football from Nixon whenever the latter got drunk.
Thank you, the proper term escaped me.
As for whether it worked, I don't know, my sense was that it may have played some role in Linebacker II's success, if we want to call Linebacker II a success. And I understand if we don't.
I would also argue it's more plausible that Trump is a "madman" in this sense than it was for Nixon. Which is to say, not really a "madman", but also not a chessmaster. Merely a pighead acting out of pigheadedness.
a comment that aged like milk
The legality of his tariffs haven't been tested in court yet. The plain language of the law says they're clearly and obviously illegal.
"illegal" doesn't mean much in a world where the appeals process takes 4 years
Yglesias has a great article detailing what a terrible idea these tariffs are. https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-tariffs-mean-big-opportunities?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
I don’t believe he will do it. He’s said the tariffs will replace the income tax. I strongly doubt he will be able to repeal and replace them.
You're assuming he will be disciplined enough to wait to impose tariffs until he has repealed the income tax. I wouldn't bet on that.
I would. Moving to first raise tariffs seems like it would upset 99% of republicans and democrats. He won’t have the political capital needed to do it.
Welp, turns out he did exactly that
Damn I was really, really wrong about this. He’s completely retarded. This is basically the worst case scenario.
For the record, I ended up voting for Kamala in the end. The stupidity was just too much to bear. The only tariffs he has actually put in place so far are the ones on China. It remains to be seen if he will actually follow through on the ones on Mexico, Canada, Europe, etc…
I’ll concede that it was wrong to think that there would be pushback from republicans about the tariffs. They all seem fine to go along with it. I was hoping for a split government but that didn’t happen.
Well, things have certainly escalated from here!
He doesn't actually need any political capital to impose tariffs; Congress has already delegated full authority to the office of the president. Granted that doing so unilaterally and over the objections of his party (assuming anyone actually dares state those objections -- the GOP has very much become a cult of personality) would cost him ability to get other things done in Congress (e.g. rescinding income taxes) but Trump is perfectly capable of blindly bulling forward with the thing he can do on his own, then blasting Congress for failing to follow through on the rest of his "plan".
I’m not going to pretend he isn’t capable of moving unilaterally. He definitely could. He’s probably more capable than Kamala of dropping a nuke too. I just don’t think he will. It also seems that Republicans won’t win the house this election, which I think will make him less likely to strong arm Congress into doing whatever he wants.
Both candidates are competing for dumbest economic platform. Tariffs are bad policy but it seems like they're easier to walk back from than creating the expectation that your Student Loans will eventually be forgiven or $25k for First Time homebuyers to combat skyrocketing real estate costs. These policies would just waste money fueling demand in segments that aren't demand constrained. More importantly, both would be a permanent expectation of anyone taking out a student loan or buying a home in the coming decades long after every economist concludes they're awful.
It would be not so different than a European VAT, only easy to collect. Tariffs are not ideal, but clearly the Federal government needs more revenue. I would rather see an increase in the capital gains long-term rate, but I cannot see Republicans doing that. The last fiscally conservative Republican president was Richard Nixon, and he was not exactly a model example.
Besides, I think a big part of these tariffs are to promote near-shoring, with exemptions for Mexico and similar close-by allies. Having an "in" network will likely be necessary given the changes in foreign policy we have seen from the Beijing-Moscow Axis. In a time of war, sometimes bad economics is better than war. We need to force the separation of supply chains away from China, ideally with more done closer to home. We no longer have a navy that can patrol the globe. Free trade was nice, but China chose to break it. They are going to invade neighbors, and they are going to try to break us. Their leader sees himself as the next Mao, and he could care less about economic growth. Right now they have too much control of essential supply chains. We must break that by any means necessary before they start invading neighbors.
Next, we should probably stop patrolling the Red Sea and East Africa. That is no longer our concern. Let the Chinese handle it. The impact of shutting that down will help show Europeans that they cannot continue to expect Pax Americana. We never should have opened up to China without political concessions. Now we must bear the cost. Remember, if they really hit us hard, we would be forced into a nuclear conflict that none of us wants.
This is not about economics. It is about security.
You are too negative about China. They have like 18 times the growth of the Eurozone, just look at the incredible development in Xinjiang. Taiwan might get invaded, though it is incredibly defensible territory and I think they are smarter than that. I think they realized war is so costly these days, soft power is better. Entangle Taiwan in commercial agreements, eventually an EU-like setup and so on. That is what a smarter Putin would have done to Ukraine. Just buy em off. Others will not get invaded. Historically China is not a conquering culture but an establish tributary states kind of culture.
China could have done this with Taiwan decades ago. They chose not to. I hope China is intelligent enough to not invade, but the last ten years have displayed an increasingly delusional Chinese leadership. They could have easily seduced Taiwan in with slots at elite Chinese universities, business incentives, ..., but instead they play tough guy. You can see the same thing in the South China Sea. The Obama administration brokered a deal where the PRC and Philippines would both withdraw from a contested area (right off the coasts of the Philippines and a thousand miles from CHina), but the Chinese reneged and humiliated Obama. They do that kind of thing all the time, but it has gotten worse under Xi.
Xi is the reason why I worry. The US must put forth a strong face and garauntee involvement or the PRC will invade, if not for any other reason than to get CHinese people's minds off horrific economic mismanagement. China could have done far better when Xi took over, but he repeatedly promoted the Party over the Country. He promoted a senselessly aggressive foreign policy that does not make sense unless he is planning for territorial expansion, and not just Taiwan. The PLA is currently occupying Bhutan and frequently tries to do the same in India. There is a great book I highly recommend by Kevin Rudd that is a solid display of Xi's neo-Maoist world view. Xi is more than happy to sacrifice economic growth for Party control and personal power.
CHina should still be growing faster, but it does not because Xi has chosen to change the rules of the game. Foreign investment has been driven away and domestic investment beaten and threatened into submission. Thousands of wealthy Chinese emigrate every year. When the doors closed to Canada they went to Australia. When that got hard they went to Thailand and Singapore. I have been shocked to learn that there are thousands of wealthy Chinese nationals with Caribbean passports who reside in the English-speaking world while they try to get passport number 3. I know families in this group, and they all say the exact same thing. They are afraid of instability. China feels unstable now, and it has been getting ever worse for a decade. Family wealth is being smuggled overseas, not reinvested at home. China got a taste of this when they attempted to open up their investment and currency regime. They slammed the door less than six months later after they experienced a net $1t USD outflow.
Other signs that scare me are China's relentless buying of gold (just like Russian before the invasion of Ukraine), China's blank check to Russia, and most of all the silly return of Mao-speak and internal party-building. The country has restarted Mao-era neighborhood snitch committees, workplace Han militias in minority areas, and all other kinds of other destabilizing, fascistic policies that only make sense in a time of war.
Your reference to Xinjiang is another creepy tale. Much like Tibet, China has raped and pillaged, and is now building over the original cities to create Han spaces. There was no reason to imprison so many and oppress Islam, but they did it anyway. Bhutan and Taiwan are next, and it would be worse than the Holocaust. Xinjiang is an example of Chinese fascism at its worst. The Germans got their economy humming in the 1930's, but that was not a good sign.
It would be great if Xi died and China returned to a growth and development focus, but there is no sign of that. The only way to prevent a war would be to make it crystal clear that the US and its allies would stand with Taiwan. China could easily woo Taiwan in, but I do not think such a strategy is possible under Xi's mismanagement. Furthermore, they were well aware of such a strategy decades ago, and they repeatedly made it clear that they would do no such thing (I lived in Taiwan, and nothing turned a Taiwanese into a Patriot as much as working on the mainland). I hope China does not start WW3, but the US and its allies need to be ready. If China starts anything, it must end in China's unconditional surrender.
It would be funny if it ended like that, because I could see Taiwan joining a democratic China, but no one would ever want to voluntarily live under Chinese communist rule. Lee Kuan Yew wrote a great article like twenty years ago writing about how Taiwan needs to play their hand right. It was hilarious because he repeatedly mocked the Chinese Communist Party and belittled the leader of China at that time. It was a hugely influential article at that time. China's heavy-handed, and pointless mismanagement of Hong Kong has only made Taiwanese that much more committed to independence. China could not easily take the island, but they could not prevent American involvement either. It would be a total war with millions of lives lost. I hope the Chinese do not start it, but I fear they will. If there is any risk of democratic revolution, Xi will roll the dice on Taiwan because he knows his own people will roll his head off his shoulders if he must ever account for his rule.
Thank you, this is a great analysis, you clearly know the region better than me. Is there a risk of democratic revolution, though? I don't think they have that kind of culture. But I guess while Russia had only a very brief democratic period in 1917, it did not help the Tzar that eventually there was a Red Tzar. There might be a revolution in China led by simply a different autocrat.
You are projecting sound logic onto the Chinese Communist Party, which operates on a completely different logical basis.
Nixon was a fiscal conservative when he ran in 1960. But after seeing the Democrats ignore deficits while gold reserves fell. A surtax was passed in 1968 which gave a surplus in 1969 and a bump up in the gold reserve. Nixon let it expire and deficits were back with a vengeance in 1970. In 1971 he abandoned fiscal conservatism altogether, declaring himself a Keynesian, ending gold convertibility and implemented prices controls to keep a lid on inflation until the beginning of 1973 to help with his reelection campaign.
Reagan was also a Keynesian, renamed "supply side economics", but it was basically a bolder version of the Democrats 1964 "Keynesian" tax cut. Under Reagan, deficit spending became a new Republican art form until Trump blew him out of the water. Biden has also adopted Trump's budget busting ways.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-the-new-deal-order-fell
Regan, Bush 2 and Trump were worse in every imaginable way. All of them pushed for massive government deficits that would put Nixon to shame. Only the first Bush had any sense of getting the country's financial sense in order. Regan and Bush 2 were the worst, but Trump was still bad.
I am not a fan of Keynsian interference, but be careful with your comparisons. Regan and Bush 2 were far worse than Clinton. Modern Republicans talk a good game, but whenever they have control, the national debt as well as the size of the deficit increase dramatically. I am not saying the Democrats are great, but Bill Clinton got the country the closest to a sustainable system that we have ever seen. He also did not waste time with senseless social policy garbage that is unbearable, and now dominates the left and the right.
In addition, be careful when anybody writes about the gold standard. There is no better marker of an economically illiterate person than belief that yellow metal has "inherent value." It is the "pimping" school of economics that never got off the street corner. The man you linked to clearly does not understand economics as a field. I would STRONGLY recommend that you read anything he writes on the subject with a ton of salt. The gold standard is one of those nut case subjects like protecting domestic industry behind tariffs or economic self-sufficiency that only economic illiterates find reasonable.
The gold standard was a terrible monetary system. The only economist who ever liked it was Keynes. It simply did not work. Gold is popular now because Russia, China and other thuggish countries want to use to to avoid current and potential future sanctions.
That paper you linked to is a perfect example of an intelligent man writing about subjects he clearly does not understand.
I didn't say anything about Clinton. Why would I, he gave us a surplus. I talked about Biden who continued to run Trumpian deficits. Clinton basically fixed the fiscal problems Reagan-Bush had created and what did he get for it? Dubya who undid everything he accomplished.
You apparently do not understand how a gold standard works. Gold has no "inherent value" nor does it "back the currency". That's nutty. The *flow* of gold serves as an indicator. Today the Fed studies a slew of economic data in place of this indicator. Back in the day bankers did not have access to this sort of data so there used a rule of thumb. If gold is leaving your vault its means depositors would prefer to hold gold than dollars that earn interest. Why would they wish to do that. Presumably because they believed their gold would earn a higher annual return (through price increase) than the interest rate offered. When this happens the bank would raise the interest to paid on deposits and then the gold outflow would stop and may even reverse.
In other words, inflation was controlled by changes in interest rates, just like today. The advantage of a gold standard is a fiscal conservative administration could establish a tradition of publicizing the size of the gold reserve at regular intervals and implant the idea that draining the reserve was bad. Then when a fiscally irresponsible administration got elected, the opposition could run ads pointing the "torrents" of gold leaving our shores with hair on fire warnings about the dire inflationary consequences when its runs out.
One could use gold as an easy-to-understand consequence of running deficits. Also gold codes Right, yet right wingers are the most fiscally irresponsible politicians. Connecting deficits generated by tax cuts to falling gold reserves gets their own base up in arms against tax-cutting Republicans. They are very sensitive to tantrums from their base.
Gold tends towards having inherent value because it is chemically scarce and pretty. The gold standard didn’t “work” because it didn’t enable infinite spending in the way paper money and loans do.
More precisely, metallic standards don't work as well as fiat money because they don't allow the money supply to expand and contract with the needs of the economy. When the economy is booming, more money is needed to facilitate the greater volume of exchange and the greater value of goods being produced. If the money supply can't expand one of two things happens, either economic growth is blocked or the currency increases in value (deflation). Deflation is terrible for anyone holding debt and tends to cause economic collapse, i.e. depression. With fiat money, the money supply can easily expand or contract as required, enabling growth and softening the impact of recession.
The cause of economic collapse is not primarily deflation, but banks being allowed to loan out more money than they can hold.
Thanks for complicating my assumptions here — I think that when I hear “big tariffs”, my mind jumps to “oh crap the Hawley-Smoot tariff is what sunk us into the Great Depression”. Is there anything you can point to to help us see that Trump’s proposed tariffs are closer to the historical tariffs that you’re referencing than they would be to Hawley-Smoot?
Thanks! I did know that Smoot-Hadley (which I reversed the names of, bah) didn’t cause the Great Depression; I have heard historians and economists claim that it exacerbated what would likely have been a small, regional depression. (Obviously, historical counterfactuals are impossible, and I’m a random science teacher on the internet, so exercise all proper skepticism.)
Economies were much less interdependent then. In those days a blacksmith could bang out a machine part in his shop. Now it's "our entire system runs on these chips that are only made at one factory in Taiwan which require this one mineral only found in Mozambique to make".
As you say, the parties aren't split on a pro vs. anti freedom axis. It's also clear that structural features of our system ensure that for the foreseeable future there will continue to be two parties that each have turns in power. Fantasies of permanent political victory by one side or the other are delusional, as you wrote previously. Therefore it is important to support each party being the best (i.e., most pro-freedom) version of itself, it you want to steer the country in the direction of greater freedom.
I would interpret a Harris administration as being about average on that measure for a Democrat administration. She has said some worrying things, especially in her abortive 2020 campaign, but seems to be mostly blowing with the political winds like a typical politician. There were some ugly winds in 2020 but they've died down now and I would expect a Harris administration to be mostly a continuation of the Biden administration, which has been basically fair-to-middling for a Democrat regime.
Trump and his cult of personality, on the other hand, are clearly the worst version of the Republicans we have seen in our lifetime. For the reasons you mention, plus the dumb economic ideas you didn't mention (tariffs, tax/spending priorities that look highly inflationary). Not to mention the simple corruption. And the affection for dictators in foreign policy, which is likely to decrease political freedom elsewhere. Even if you don't care about foreigners' freedom at all, the U.S. is part of the world and lower overall world freedom does affect us.
I'm planning not to vote even though I voted in every previous election - I just can't stand voting for either side, or even any third party candidate. This is the most persuasive argument for voting Harris I've seen, it definitely nudges me in that direction. Well done.
I’m not at all a fan of Trump but Bush with his Christian stances on bioethics and his costly and destructive invasion of Iraq (costly for US, and while great for the Kurds, really helped Iran and also led to a power vacuum for ISIS) was arguably worse.
Bush Sr. was also very bad for Iraq. Specifically by giving the Iraqi government the impression that they could conquer Kuwait without a US military response afterwards and then by encouraging the Iraqi people to rebel against Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War was over only to subsequently have the US refuse to help them out. His defenders argue that he never promised the Iraqi people that he would actually help them overthrow Saddam, but it still resulted in an extraordinarily massive number of Iraqi Shi'ites getting slaughtered.
In 2003, Bush was simply correcting his daddy's previous mistake.
Great point. The Median Voter Theorem is highly underrated, and I think your reasoning makes a ton of sense. A vote for Trump in 2016, in the end, was arguably less about Trump's policies, and more of a vote for the sort of politicians and discourse you want to see in the United States. And the people got what they voted for.
There is another factor here. Hanania's reasons for being unconcerned about Jan 6 seem very unpersuasive. Hanania writes:
"Another major issue with voting Republican is that Trump did try to steal the election. It’s unlikely he’ll be able to once again try to pull off any kind of serious fake electors scheme or another January 6, especially now that he’s not in the White House and Kamala rather than Pence will be presiding over certification."
It's true that Trump will struggle to pull off a coup in *2024*. The question is whether he can do it in *2028*, after 4 years of controlling the federal apparatus -- including who is VP. His previous attempt, in 2020, was improvised and haphazard. Multiple statements he has made in interviews (Christians "won't have to vote again", he'll be a dictator "only on day 1") suggest that shenanigans are likely in 2028. They will probably be better planned and executed than the 2020 shenanigans -- he knows the federal apparatus better and, knowing Trump, he won't want to fail a second time. The existence of Project 2024 suggests an overall much higher level of planning and preparedness in a 2nd Trump admin. If Trump installs Trump Jr in 2028, or "delays" the next election, or something of that sort, no one will be able to say they didn't see it coming. Furthermore -- as far as I can tell, the protections against Trump doing this are, sadly, rather weak. I don't think there are any real laws that prevent him from firing all the generals and replacing them with loyalists, for example.
So I read this and nod along, my thinking is very similar, but I have a very different conclusion. I'm in complete agreement that Capitalism is more fragile than democracy, and that pushes me right. But unfortunately I have personal history with Trump, i know his character beyond his public persona, and I can't ever vote for him.
My solution, the remainder of this equation, is to vote Kamala for pres, but vote otherwise down the ticket republican, avoiding anyone too crazy or corrupt. Kamala can't do anything and the republicans can finally get over their cult of personality, hopefully Kamala is the last Dem I ever vote for. Trump is high variance, and the chance of a truly bad outcome is too high, the chance of a good outcome is low because in the end Donald is dumb, surrounded by sycophants, out of touch with reality, and focused on settling petty grievances.
The only way I'll vote for a the red team president is if they drop Trump. I'd vote Vance over Kamala in a heartbeat. Trump is old, maybe we get lucky.
This is where I’m leaning and I’m a leftist. Or I was anyway - pro-market leftism seems to be right-coded now.
Yeah it's lonely in the pro-market camp these days. Like I'm fine with a social safety net. Fine with progressive taxation. Honestly either party could win my vote. But it's price controls or tarrifs. Fuck me right!
Unless you live in a swing state, you can vote for Chase Oliver to uphold your principles without wasting your vote any more than it was anyway.
If trying to steal an election isn’t a red line, what is?
I mean he clearly laid it out, Jeff. Making the country poorer in perpetuity by reflexively opposing markets is the red line.
On the net, the US still appears to have a lot of economic freedom under Biden:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom
But it is interesting that smarter countries with a moderate or less amount of economic freedom often tend to do better than duller countries with a huge amount of economic freedom. I suspect that average IQ is a better predictor for national wealth rather than economic freedom, though obviously it has an effect in chronic cases such as Venezuela and North Korea.
Chile and Uruguay have a huge amount of economic freedom but can't transform themselves into first-world countries because they don't have the human capital for it. Meanwhile, the moderate amount of economic freedom in Poland, Romania, and China has not prevented their massive economic rise.
Uruguay is a first-world country. It has the same GDP/capita as Greece, just a bit lower than Spain and Portugal. Unlike these European countries it does not have the massive advantage of having a ton of rich countries to trade with and accept tourists from. I don't think Uruguay has a low IQ or low human capital. It is 85-90% white. Uruguay's PISA scores are terrible but I suspect this is more about the educational culture in Latin America, and there is some effect going on where if you correct for effort people put into a useless test you find that the g value is much higher than what you get from the PISA. Definitely there's a strong effect like that for Israel and probably also for countries like Romania and Uruguay.
Thanks!
BTW, in regards to the US, Anatoly Karlin previously suggested that the US’s high labor mobility might be a part of the reason for its prosperity:
https://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/290-width/images/print-edition/20120428_FNC084_0.png
In other words, Americans are more willing to move to another US state to get a better job than Europeans are to move to another EU state or Canadians/Australians are to move to another province in their own country.
US labor mobility has been declining while US GDP and consumption per capita advantage over other countries has been increasing.
Chile also is quite arguably a first-world country. It's in the OECD and has 3/4 the GDP/capita of Uruguay and Greece. Definitely Chile has less human capital than Uruguay and South Europe (unlike them it has much more Amerindian admixture) but they have a lot of copper and have had capitalism thanks to Pinochet.
Anyway, being in Latin America is a big disadvantage. If Portugal was an island off the coast of Brazil it would probably be much poorer. Same for Spain or Greece.
Thanks! I do find it interesting that on the Index of Economic Freedom, there are some countries that are decent to live in, albeit not as nice as the Anglosphere/Germanic countries, that have less economic freedom relative to the Anglosphere/Germanic countries. Specifically the countries in Western Europe, Southern Europe, Central Europe, and Eastern Europe, as well as Japan. France, Italy, Czechia, and Japan aren’t as good to live in as, say, Germany or Canada or the US, but they’re still quite pleasant places to live in by global standards.
Anyway, I also have a question: If leftism (not the full-throated Communist or even Venezuelan kind, but even the much more moderate varieties) is so horrible, then why is it so popular in US cities? US cities generally don’t have Republican mayors (especially large US cities) and even US suburbs have been trending strongly Democratic over the last 20 years.
FWIW, my own view on politics is that the Democrats being the more pro-immigration party along with the EHC party certainly increases my own desire to support them.
"But it is interesting that smarter countries with a moderate or less amount of economic freedom often tend to do better than duller countries with a huge amount of economic freedom"
Yes but *within* a geography with similar demographics, the more pro-market countries are typically better off. Switzerland in Europe, Singapore in Asia, (historically) Chile in South America, USA in North America.
Also, you shouldn't really put too much weight in these "indexes". At the end of the day they are compiled by academics who are putting arbitrary weights on different factors. The political-science led indexes are especially bad (Hanania has written about this) as they are just based on "things left-liberals like".
The US appears to be as much pro-free market as Canada is, no?
And Singapore’s, Estonia’s (in a relative sense—Communism is still holding it back a bit, I suspect), and Switzerland’s success isn’t solely due to markets—or at least it might not be. They also have high human capital levels, extraordinarily high in Singapore’s case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment
Granted, Communism would wreck them, as it did Estonia, but French-style governance? I’m unsure. Unless this will also cause them to import loads of working-class Muslims and Africans!
What do you call "universal tariffs" as well as "ending fed independence"
Price controls for groceries. You need groceries to eat, but you can’t eat elections.
You're assuming that this plan of hers would actually get implemented and not be vetoed by elite human capital.
Elite human capital probably believes it would work. (Or they know it won’t but support it because they endorse chaos so they can float to the top)
What makes you think that EHC wants to make the proles angry through huge economic disruptions? EHC should be smart enough to realize that the proles will blame the Democrats for this, no?
EHC likes making proles and peasants mad because they don’t like the peasants and want them out of the picture. They also believe that the proles are powerless and will be overridden through mass propaganda and immigration. Jan 6 would be in favor of this idea because it showed that a bunch of angry proles storming the capitol accomplished nothing.
TBH, I suspect that you’re thinking that EHC is much more Machievallian than it actually is. January 6 and what happened before that was a real risk for our democracy. I don’t think that EHC would have preferred to gamble with it if it could have, even if it did arguably benefit by making the proles who participated in this look both stupid and unsuccessful—and also menacing as well!
The whole story of the Biden admin has been that Obama-style economists like Summers, Furman and Goolsbee have been sidelined in favor of populist Warrenites. Harris seems to be continuing this tradition.
Since 2012, IDpol populists have taken over the Democratic party. They always win. Look at the case study of urbanists vs. pro-crime types in Democratic cities. One side says cars are dangerous and we shouldn't let people drive like maniacs. The other side says punishing people for crime is bad and discriminatory. Which side wins?
https://sfstandard.com/2024/04/08/sfpd-traffic-enforcement-cost/
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2024/05/13/data-nypd-enforcement-now-in-decline-was-once-a-key-to-vision-zero-success
Well, disparate impact is a retarded policy, but without debunking the Woke hypothesis through race realism as Nathan Cofnas advocates, I’m unsure that there would be another effective way to counter Wokism. I suppose that one can adopt Richard Hanania-style public agnosticism and say that it doesn’t matter that racial gaps exist, but that closing them shouldn’t take precedence over issues of urgent importance, such as making our streets, roads, and cities safe, but would that actually be a winning approach?
This is worse than anything Trump has ever done or will ever do. And the fact that we don't agree means we live in different universes:
https://nypost.com/2024/08/19/us-news/vicious-duo-who-allegedly-pummeled-elderly-woman-on-nyc-street-freed-without-bail/
Wow, sounds like we need both candidates to outline how they will use the office of the presidency to influence New York Office of Court Administration policies related to calculating bail and release policies for suspects in the state of New York!
Don't be so obtuse. The bigger point is that a large portion of Dems agree with the behavior of the judge. Biden may have been a moderate, and Kamala a bit to his left, but the median young Democratic staffer is several standard deviations to the left of the median American.
https://x.com/JeffLonsdale/status/1825562348234678476
You cannot staff a Democrat-led government with moderates. Not enough exist!
The biggest irony is that the median Republican staffer is probably closer politically to Biden than the median Democratic staffer.
Freeing criminals who savagely beat someone is indeed terrible. During his presidency Trump relaced the rule of engagement for airstrikes, which killed a large number of civilians, probably hundreds more than if he hadn't relaxed them. Are you arguing that killing innocent people is less bad than beating them up?
This is awful but the 10% tariff seems far worse than letting criminals go in deep blue cities. I doubt Trump will actually do that though.
I don't know...hypothetically I'd be willing to pay substantially higher tax if more criminals were kept in jail. QOL improvements in American cities would justify lower income. Imagine going to a store and not having to call a staffer over to get a bottle of face wash. Or even better, riding a bike to your local restaurant and not having to secure it like it's the nuclear briefcase. The festering quality of life decreases from progressive pro-crime policy are substantial.
Get liberals to drop their noble savage admiration. Once you figure out how to do that, then we should have much less incidents such as this one.
If liberals didn’t have a noble savage admiration, they wouldn’t be liberals.
The impression that I got is that liberals 100+ years ago weren't as big into the noble savage idea. Back then, opposing lynchings was seen as progressive. Coddling black criminals like we do nowdays? 1920s liberals would have probably been horrified by this!
Liberals have gotten more liberal over time. Moldbug writes extensively on this. Liberals are also very sensitive to any attempts to go backwards to earlier liberalism. Even hannia here is browbeating conservatives for being low iq and supporting liberal policies from 50 years ago.
Would you including “losing Republicans the election” as something Trump might do? A better candidate who is not a narcissistic moron maybe would easily crush Kamala.
This is hateful and unprestigious in the eyes of Elite Human Capital 💯, and triggering to this queer Woke freak.
Anyhow, I'm not even sure I buy the economics arguments. Price controls on groceries are obviously cynical populism that is never going to happen, whereas 10% tariffs on all imports (not just China) and the President getting a say on interest rates is unlikely, but not unimaginable.
First of all, when it comes to the effects of Republican judges on future elections, Hanania might be a bit unduly rosy. Yes, Republican judges (unlike Republican politicians) refused to help Trump overturn the 2020 election, but if more election deniers will become judges in the next several decades, including on SCOTUS, then there is no guarantee that Republican judges will behave similarly in a future US presidential election where a candidate will behave similarly to Trump. Of course, that could subsequently trigger a revolution in the US, but would Hanania really want that?
Secondly, Yes, in addition to EHC being solidly against Trump, there is also the issue that the GOP is only perceived as being pro-liberty if one only looks at the interests of natives. If one also looks at the interests of foreigners, then the Democrats likely become the pro-liberty party since they are more willing to allow more foreigners to escape lifetimes of poverty, misery, and/or oppression by allowing them to immigrate to the US. That's quite considerable when we're talking about years or decades, when millions or even tens of millions of people could have their lives be fundamentally transformed in such a way. This is why Ilya Somin, a libertarian law professor, supports the Democrats against Trump. Well, that along with Trump's general election denialism and wannabe authoritarianism.
So, basically, Richard has to argue that slightly more pro-market policies are an acceptable price to pay for condemning millions of additional people to lifetimes of poverty, misery, and/or oppression. And I don't think that he can do that, unless he wants to completely discount the well-being of foreigners, which strikes me as being unethical. We're not talking about turning the US into Zimbabwe here, after all.
It's not like the US economy even performs poorly under Democratic US Presidents:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_presidential_party
Democratic US Presidents actually tend to do pretty well economy-wise, probably in part because they have more potential for economic growth, job creation, et cetera, since they're more likely to come into office when the economy is doing poorly. But it does appear to show that the policies that they pursue don't appear to be chronically hurtful to the US economy.
And even for the most dynamic US economic areas right now, the suburbs, they appear to be heavily trending blue right now and indeed over the last 20 years.
As someone who works in finance, the private and (especially) public capital markets have been totally frozen since Biden has been in power. Billions of dollars in value destroyed.
Yes, that's exactly what happens when SPX makes new ATHs, thanks for the alpha Mr. Wolf of Wall Street.
That's not what people mean when they say markets are "frozen" - they mean new deals aren't happening, whether private capital raises or new IPOs
https://carta.com/blog/ipo-market-2024/
And Shiba Inu dogcoin was worth 10x as much in late 2021 as it is now. AlI the scams collapsed after the end of COVID era easy money, which had nothing to do with Biden per se.
> And although I don’t believe Trump would try to stay for a third term in 2028, I don’t think the possibility can be completely discounted given the degree to which the Republicans have now become a cult of personality.
If Don Jr. is the nominee for 2028, and loses the election by a narrow margin in states where MAGA election monitors are in place to blow smoke, how likely do you think it is that Trump tries to do another coup attempt?
Mature democracies don't generally become dictatorships, agreed, but they don't become dictatorships because people in stable democracies think, "Democracy is cool and works;" in somewhere like Weimar Germany, lots of people were still basically monarchists and generally full of anti-democratic seething. The modern GOP is at the point of happily chanting about locking up political opponents, making Trump dictator "for a day," overturning the Constitution, overturning election results... Trump faces no backlash whatsoever for his promise to pardon violent insurrectionists who beat the shit out of cops in an attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.
I really think you're underestimating the downside risk - the failure of American democracy would also destroy American capitalism and be an enormous blow to democracy, peace, liberty, and economic growth across the globe.
It's far-fetched to assume that Trump could simply crown his son as his successor when this son has never generated much interest or admiration among the base. I understand that Trump supporters may seem completely foolish, but even in the most barbaric countries, dictators struggle to establish a royal dynasty.
It's far fetched to assume that the Republican Party base would continue to support Trump after he attempted a coup, was almost convicted in the Senate for it, had every Republican influencer denouncing him, and lost an election. And yet.
He *was* impeached for it, actually. The US Senate simply failed to remove him for it because removal requires a 2/3rds majority, not just a simply majority.
And Yes, it really is quite shocking just how many GOP politicians were willing to jump on the election denial train in 2020.
To me, the far more shocking thing is how many hopped onto it after 2020.
You mean after the 2020 election? If so, then Yeah, when Trump began saying these lies, the rest of the GOP felt compelled to repeat them, and the ones who resisted Trump, such as by voting for his second impeachment, were subsequently targets of GOP primary campaigns, mostly successful ones. Trump used January 6 to conduct his own little purge of the GOP.
I get going along with him at the time, politicians are fundamentally by nature venal cowards about elections. After January 6, many temporarily found their spines; only to then lose them again.
That's true
The 2028 GOP nominee doesn't need to be Don Jr. It can be anyone else endorsed by Trump as well, such as JD Vance. If JD Vance is narrowly losing but can create enough fake deniability about the election results to get GOP state legislatures to appoint their own slates of electors, then you don't see JD Vance trying to utilize the powers of the US Vice Presidency to try crowning himself as the next US President?
The Holocaust would have also seemed pretty far-fetched to Germans in 1925, and yet it happened within the next 20 years. And Stalinist levels of famines, gulags, and mass murders would have also seemed absurd to Russians in early 1917 who believed that the Tsar's regime is the worst that it can possibly get in Russia and that any leftist regime change in Russia would subsequently be a huge improvement for Russia. They definitely didn't anticipate that the kind of leftist regime that would ultimately emerge in Russia would make the Tsarist regime look like a saint in comparison to it!
I don’t even think it has to be Don Jr. Trump complains about election fraud in every election, even if he’s not on the ballot. If he likes his Republican successor and his successor loses, he will once again cry fraud and try to use his office to change the election results.
I'm sorry, I live in the real world. Donald Trump attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to Joe Biden, by pressuring Mike Pence to throw out the electors of seven states. When Mike Pence took his oath to the constitution more seriously than personal loyalty to Trump, Trump sent a violent mob to the Capital Building to pressure him and Republican legislators into giving in to his plot to end a streak of five generations of peaceful transfer of power, going back to the ACW.
I was, of course, speaking to Richard here, as Richard has enough brain power to correctly recognize what Trump did. I don't care if you want to live in some delusional land where it's only a coup if it takes place on a Saturday.
If trumps ‘coup’ attempt with the electors had went through, it would have been a peaceful transfer of power.
No, because he sent a violent mob to make it go through, and they beat the shit out of cops as he egged them on. Hope this helps.
Who would you blame for egging on the mob that attempted to attack the White House during the 2020 riots?
I dunno, who egged them on? I believe Trump egged them on because I've listened to his speech the day of, read his Tweets the day of, and am familiar with the plan to prevent Joe Biden to become President by illegally throwing out the electoral votes of seven states.
How exactly would it have been a transfer of power, when it would have been Trump before and Trump after? It seems much more like it would have been an autocoup:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup
I don't think that military force *must* be required for an autocoup, would it?
From himself to himself already happens when a president is reelected. A coup doesn’t require military force, but it usually reflects poorly on the system if it lets a coup go through without any resistance.
Well, had Trump’s 2020 attempt to overturn the election succeeded, I certainly wouldn’t have been surprised to see him and Pence subsequently meet the fate of Yanukovych and Azarov in Ukraine.
"I'm sorry, I live in the real world"
nah, you dont
an actual coup needs military power to back it up
"The sudden overthrow of a government by a usually small group of persons in or previously in positions of authority. "
I just typed "define coup d'etat" into duckduckgo and seems like a perfectly adequate description of the President attempting to keep himself in power by using paper-thin justifications given to him by "crackpot lawyers" (to quote Mike Pence) and violent mob. I have seen cons capable of capitalizing words and using proper punctuation try to defend this, there is no defense other than conspiracy brained nonsense like the Ray Epps shit or blaming Nancy Pelosi, "he failed so it's okay" (I wouldn't trust my child with such a paper-thin defense, much less my country), "it wouldn't have worked anyway so it's okay," or just not knowing anything about Jan 6. Begone moron.
ah yes duckduckgo will tell us what a coup d'etat is XD XD
Perhaps a thesaurus will help?
Meanwhile, in the REAL world, military power or support is needed to topple a government.
begone libturd.
You are deeply stupid. "It's not a coup! It's just an attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power by using violent force! I've redefined the word coup so that this thing that is obviously a coup isn't! Owned, libtard!"
Mhm, right, well, neither Richard nor I live in your delusional alternate universe, so have fun over there!
"How about instead of discussing Jan 6, we discuss Russiagate instead!" So you do know that Jan 6 is indefensible, deep down inside, and thus you have to play whataboutism. It's okay. Just embrace Richard's position: democracy is less important than capitalism. It's okay that Trump broke a 150 year streak of peaceful transfers of power, because he failed. There's no need to engage in insane delusions that he didn't send a violent mob to the capital, in full defiance of all video and documentary evidence of exactly that happening.
What armored division did Putin or Xi Jinping use to end elections in their countries? Is your only knowledge of coup attempts from Marvel movies where the bad guys wage an all out war against the good guys and duke it out?
Did God reveal himself in a dream to Putin and Xi Jinping one day and tell them "Now you're magically blessed with the full support of your country's military might and institutions," or do you think they orchestrated a variety of incremental policy changes, like assassinating political opponents, disappearing CEOs of companies, shutting down unfavorable media organizations, installing loyalists in positions of power, falsifying vote counts, instigating violence against their opponents, to get to where they are today?
He did none of those things. He also didn't come out with the Avengers and announce "Avengers, go and coup the government!" so I guess you can ignore all the other antidemocratic examples I included in that list, as well as Trump's previous antidemocratic actions like falsifying electoral votes and directing his supporters to march on the Capitol to pressure Pence to certify the election in his favor.
He tried doing it through the courts and through his VP Mike Pence.
It's not at all clear that Trump would support Ukraine. He's made many questionable statements on this matter and many of the loudest and voices in his party (ones that seem capable of persuading him, eg. Tucker) are Putinophiles. We all know what an ascendent Russia could (likely would) do to European stability, global markets, or to China's resolve to make moves against Taiwan.
I think it's true that Republicans are still marginally better at economic policy than the Democrats, but this gap has been narrowing as both parties have been moving towards economic populism. Either way, a Republican victory would be seen as validation of this economically populist turn, and would likely mean the party continues to move in this direction, maybe even doubles down on it, in the coming cycles.
IMO we should all worry less about this cycle and be instead talking about how to change course over the long term. Neither candidate this cycle passes the bar for an acceptable head of state for the "leader of the free world".
I do wonder if the infusion of EHC, especially from suburban areas, into the Democratic Party over the past 20 years could make the Democrats more pro-free markets than they were before. It does seem possible, don't you think? Especially in the future?
Wow. "Stupid, intellectually lazy, conspiratorial, bigoted, anti-democracy, and have awful views on abortion and euthanasia...motivated by ugly instincts."
I will be withdrawing my support. Regardless of your philosophical beliefs and political leanings, you automatically (in my mind) lose all credibility when you go all crazy ad homenan attack. You have completely dismantled your own positions by failing to be reasonable and rational. Which is very "Democrat" of you.
How are we to engage in an exchange of ideas when you fail to acknowledge the humanity of the very people you would like, I assume, to sway?
How are we to "bridge the gap" and heal the wounds of our society when you (by which I mean "your side") go for the jugular and view your opponents as less than human? It's distinctly un-American and completely un-rational.
If we are to save our country, we must be willing to discuss our differences with the humility and kindness.
I wish you and yours the best, but I'm out.
Maybe read his other posts where he describes how he comes to these views. I think you'd find them quite persuasive.
I've been a supporter of his channel, so I'm familiar with his views. Persuasion is completely dismantled by ad homenen attacks, which is the lowest form of argumentation. Guess I've had too much training in logic to put up with sloppy, emotional tripe.
I don't think it is Ad Hominem. He explains very clearly in other posts why he thinks these things are true. He's not just insulting people. These facts matter to whether a political party is worth supporting.
It's not a matter of truth. It's a matter of using personal attacks via degradation of character to shut down the discussion and to make yourself feel superior. If calling your opponent "stupid" isn't an attempt to paint your opponent as "less than" you and your tribe, I don't know what is. Using that kind of attack does nothing to advance dialog and everything to do with your ego.
On the whole, liberals always believe they are smarter and better, yet they have no supporting evidence. It's just a feeling, which is no way to make a judgment.
In the end, calling people names, no matter how correct you believe those names to be, creates conflict rather than dialog.
It's stupid!😂
Calling republicans (on a cohort level) “stupid” is just facts, as Richard has laid out before (and which you’ve apparently read). How is that a “personal” attack?
Also, if ur gonna leave, just leave. I always find these “look at me” declarations amusing, and frankly, stupid.
from the side that believes men can be women, gay sex is normal sex and that we are all like interchangeable lego bricks aka, no differences in culture or people?
The stopid label is projecting.
And if Hanania feels embarassed by normal people's beliefs, he might try befriending those elites he admires so much.
But he will have to renege on his views about african-americans.
No heretics allowed :) .
he just wants to be part of the "elite human capital" club a.k.a the Delusional Ones, but will never be accepted because of his views on blk people.
> "How are we to engage in an exchange of ideas when you fail to acknowledge the humanity of the very people you would like, I assume, to sway?... If we are to save our country, we must be willing to discuss our differences with the humility and kindness.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/03/politics/cnn-poll-republicans-think-2020-election-illegitimate/index.html
As late as 2023, 40% of Republican supporters believed Biden was a completely illegitimate president (i.e. stole the election) and 30% more had suspicions that was the case. This is an unhinged position to have. There are no two sides about this. People who believe this are intellectually lazy, use motivated reasoning, and/or just don't care about the truth.
Fox News had to pay the highest defamation lawsuit in history ($700 million) for knowingly lying about eleciton fraud. Keyword: knowingly. They knew what they were doing. Various text messages confirm this. If there was any proof of election fraud, their fact finding team would have found it. Instead, they lied, because they were losing audience to NewsMax – which was also lying.
Republicans even more than liberals have a reflexive distrust of mainstream media, despite it having fact checks, and actually doing investigative journalism. Who do they trust instead? Surely people that engage in extensive research? No. People that, without an ounce of evidence, believe in election fraud lies, believe in all sorts of conspiracy theories any one else can immediately see is blatantly false. The worst part? Calling people who don't believe those conspiracies sheep, while they all parrot the exact same conspiracy talking points.
Are liberals always smart? No. Absolutely not. Especially progressives, they have many very bad beliefs. But they are certainly smarter than conservatives, on average.
It's not a matter of moral judgement. At least not entirely. Not all unhinged people are morons, though it does correlate with lower IQ.
The cognitive deficit between Democrats and Republicans, though exacerbated under Trump, well predates him. This is true regardless of whether it is or is not brought up, as an insult or otherwise. Smart people are not becoming Republicans. They neither buy their ideas, nor are enchanted with their major figures, and this is the case even after generations of mainstream-Dem-sanctioned active persecition of our highest-IQ demographics.
Anyone who remotely wants a healthy Republican Party should care about this and see it fixed, but this is a lost cause for as long as it's the party of Trump, as he's neither willing to, nor capable of, appealing to the high-Q set.
All true.
A healthy political party has a release valve for internal policy debate, rather than fear of stepping out of line. To create a healthy GOP, the boil must first be lanced and flush out the shrill paranoia.
Offering both sound economic policy and a warmer embrace of the future might be one small step to creating some mature voices in the GOP rather than the current juvenescent blubbering..
"Ad hominem". Latin for "to the person". Which is only an issue when you're using it as a means of attacking your opponents character as a way of getting out of having to debate their argument on its merits. It is, in fact, not ad hominem at all to point out that one of the parties is on average filled with stupider members, and more attractive to stupid voters, than the other. It's an entirely valid topic of discussion, and certainly far more important than most of the bullshit we pretend matters during election season.
The language is over the top but these are real issues among the right-wing electorate.
What Hanania did there is the polar opposite of an ad hominem attack. "Ad hominem" is not a synonym for "insult." Ad hominem is a logical fallacy where you assume or say that someone must be wrong because of some personal characteristic, rather than the merits of their argument or position. Hanania is arguing that Republicans are right about who to vote for, despite their negative personal characteristics.
Great piece, Richard.
I understand your argument. But for me, Russia’s imperial war in Ukraine trumps our navel gazing about domestic issues in this election. Our country is generally too divided to make lasting changes to domestic policies, yet Russia’s war raises the critical issue of whether we will allow dictators to rattle the nuclear sabre to conquer territory. If the US gives Russia any semblance of a “win” in Ukraine, it endangers us all perpetually into the future. Furthermore, since the President has the biggest influence on foreign policy, I’m most focused on this.
So what would you tell someone who is a single-issue voter as to who be better for Ukraine in the long run? You argue that Trump is likely to support Ukraine. But I would estimate that there is a non-negligible possibility (10-15% chance) that Trump forces Ukraine into a disastrous “peace” agreement that is highly advantageous to Russia. I also acknowledge there is a small possibility (5-10% chance) that Trump ramps up support for Ukraine far beyond Biden’s “escalation management” approach. Otherwise, I’m expecting more of the same.
As for Kamala, I don’t think there’s a real possibility that she would completely cut Ukraine loose. I also think there is also a small possibility (10-15% chance) that Kamala slightly increases our support because her foreign policy advisors are bigger hawks on Russia.
In expected value terms, it seems like Kamala would be the safer bet. I think even with the relatively minimal support we are providing that Ukraine will eventually wear out the Russian army. Secondary sanctions are beginning to finally bite Russia, too, because there are signs China is being forced to step away from coyly supplying Russia’s war machine.
Am I wrong about the underlying probability estimates?
Ukraine is the largest country in Europe by area, but its fertility rate is very low. The idea that it should lose large numbers of something it lacks—high-quality young people—for something it has in abundance—land—seems absurd to me.
And if the issue is about upholding international norms regarding the territorial integrity of a peaceful country, then the entire world benefits from these norms. They should come fight for the Ukrainians, rather than fight until the last Ukrainian.
That’s right. I think the US should ramp up aid to Ukraine and also push for a peace deal. Try to end the war on the most favorable terms so Ukraine can get back to rebuilding and American taxpayers aren’t stuck funding a forever war.
I think that ship has already sailed. The US (and Europeans) looked the other way in 2014 during the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea, then allowed the same with Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizha with *minimal* consequences. Yes, the second time they partially armed Ukraine, but with all sorts of restrictions on how the weapons could be used and delivering the aid via drip feed. In the end, the Budapest memorandum was not even worth the paper it was written on. As it stands, short of a direct intervention (which won't happen regardless of who wins in November), Russia will eventually 1. walk away with some parts of Ukraine 2. the new borders will be internationally recognized and will stay part of Russia indefinitely. Such an outcome would be seen as overall worth it (if suboptimal) by the Russian elite, even if Russia needs to burn through many times more manpower and resources than it already has. Money and people are temporary and replenishable, borders of a nuclear state are basically eternal.
On top of it all, the possibility of not responding to NATO Article 5 has been floated by the Republicans, for now conditional on a member not contributing enough, but this could easily become unconditional in a few more years. Similarly, Trump has already started making excuses for not protecting Taiwan citing lack of economic incentives. I don't think it's a stretch to assume that all US security guarantees will turn out to be just as worthless as the Budapest memorandum.
The only saving grace is that Russia has also been exposed as both an unreliable partner (see Armenia) and a paper tiger, while China hasn't yet established itself as a better alternative to the US in terms of military guarantees. Even so, if you are being threatened by China, the smart move seems to be bending the knee to China rather than sticking with the US.
Every year they hold out is another year that leaves open the possibility of domestic turmoil in Russia that forces a truce. I agree they can't win on the battlefield in the long run, but many wars are not won that way. Domestic discontent, or a coup against the leadership, has been the downfall of a large list of nations at war who never would have lost otherwise. This is Ukraines main hope as I see it.
Russia expected they could parachute men in and race in with convoys of armored vehicles and organized resistance would end in a week. Instead, they've already lost way more men than in their entire Afghan war. If this is winning, Putin would hate to see losing.
How exactly was Russia losing in 1917? Russia was actually winning against both Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans by 1917 and was only "losing" against Germany, and even then, not by that much, since the Germans weren't penetrating Russian territory any further between 1915 and 1917.
Does the Vietnam war or Soviet war in Afghanistan count? Who foresaw the collapse and break-up of the Soviet Union in 1989 anyway? Most dictatorships look extremely stable until they suddenly aren't. Also, winning is stretching things a bit. Yes, Russia has taken land and is (very) slowly taking more, but it's currently a stalemate and Russia is burning through both volunteers and materiel faster than it can replace them. Also, there are possible wild cards like a potential direct intervention by Poland or France if Russia did somehow manage to end the stalemate or things got desperate otherwise (eg. MAGA cutting off all aid). Putin is also reluctant to use conscripts, even against the recent Kursk incursion and probably for good reason. The failure to win the war quickly and completely as everyone initially expected also doesn't help the legitimacy of the regime in the eyes of Russians (I expect). I am not saying Russia cannot win or that it won't get a peace treaty that will "justify" its investment, but the outcome of the war is still very far from being settled.
If Biden had treated the Russians the way Trump treated those Wagnerites in Syria, Putin would've already surrendered before last Christmas. Russia is a shithole failed state; with a worthless army rapists, slaves, and rape victims; good for nothing but robbing anywhere they're stationed, dying in accidents, and getting shot; respected by neither their people nor their leaders, and you multipolar dicksucks pretended for decades this was still a real military power.
Only the supreme cuckoldry of our own leaders has seen this sad conflict dragged out in so Korea-esque a fashion. Even if they win, they're still losing. They'll be a White North Korea with more alcohol, fewer babies, and somehow even more rape and PTSD.
"Foreigners are icky" strikes me as the low IQ way of saying human capital is important. The foreigners that aren't found to be "icky" are generally the ones lower in human capital, it isn't aimed at engineers or doctors. The people saying it are stupid so the message is fairly incoherent.
In practice though Trump's policies made immigration harder mostly on the elite human capital legal immigrants, not refugees and asylum seekers. Maybe he'd change his approach this time, but I don't know why we'd think he would.
I think it is all a bit of a farce, only something like 1% of visas are linked to high skills (more are linked to education), it is a ridiculous system that doesn't really positively select at all. The general "foreigners are ick" vibe contains a bit of protest against the system through with lots of xenophobia and protectionism thrown in.
Due to pure chance the American immigration system has been fairly positively selecting for human capital though. America is one of the few countries where PISA scores of first gen immigrants are above natives. Even Canada can't say that.
We could import many more global cognitive elites if we actually had the political will for this!
I was told that "kids in cages" was the worst thing to happen since Hitler. If that's not hard, what is? And the border did legitimately implode when Biden became President.
https://substack.com/@maximumtruth/p-141110323
I think there's reason to believe the Trump Admin gained knowledge about how to deal with the border in a politically and legally acceptable manner as time went on, but it was an arms race as immigrants gained more sophisticated knowledge about how to manipulate the US system to gain admittance.
The problem the Democrats have is none of their staff really want to control the border. They only do it begrudgingly, acting on orders from above, which in turn are also half-hearted, a mere product of their desire to win elections. On the Republican side, there is real passion for the issue.
"foreigners are icky" is a sentiment that gets applied even to high human capital foreigners.
It is hard to define, but I don't think engineers and scientists get it, I have never heard anyone complain about them.
Yep, such as by arguing that they should be kept out of the US Presidency!
What do you make of the David French argument that Trump needs to be resoundingly defeated *in order to save the Republican party*? Seems like that could plausibly lead to more pro-market policies in the longer term, even if you think Dems are worse in the short term.
US elections and policy will inevitably vacillate between the two parties over time. The most important long-term effect of any given election may be less about which side wins, and more about how the result shapes the two parties going forward.
I think almost the opposite. If Trump loses he’ll be the nominee in 2028. I don’t think the spell can be broken, only hope is he can’t run again.
By 2028, he's likely to be in prison or a non-extradition country, given the number and variety of legal cases against him.
Being in prison won't stop him from running. Debs ran from prison.
If Trump wins he will also be the nominee in 2028. Don't bring up the constitution, Trump doesn't care about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconstitutional_constitutional_amendment#:~:text=An%20unconstitutional%20constitutional%20amendment%20is,on%20substantive%20(as%20opposed%20to
He’ll be 82 in 2028, and he’s already declining now. I don’t think he’d run again unless he was doing so as some kind of AI-avatar.
Actually, if SCOTUS will be so thoroughly infested with Trumpism by then, then they could use the unconstitutional constitutional amendment doctrine to strike down the 22nd Amendment, thus allowing Trump to run again for a third term in 2028 even if he wins in 2024:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconstitutional_constitutional_amendment#:~:text=An%20unconstitutional%20constitutional%20amendment%20is,on%20substantive%20(as%20opposed%20to
This doctrine actually was used by courts in some other countries in the past, sometimes in order to defend democracy. But the problem is that this doctrine in the wrong hands can also be used to subvert democracy.
I want to go back to Eisenhower and caring about the public interest. We need that Republican Party back. The Democrats are too far gone to care any more.
Well, the evidence is overwhelming that the Rosenbergs deserved to die. There was no alternative. Modern spies should get the same treatment. Furthermore, demographics are a claim that has never born out. I was taught that Latinos would vote like African-Americans by now, but they do not.
Also, Eisenhower never blacklisted anyone. There was a Congressional committee, but honestly, it is no worst than the idiocy we see today thrown at people for not being sufficiently woke. There were 3500 member of the CPUSA (I have read more stupid books about those few people than you can imagine). They were not too many, and they took positions like promoting Adolph Hitler's invasion of Poland. They were by their own words some nasty people who paid a price for their political view, the same way racists do today. If anything, I think the over-kill from false accusations during Me-Too were far worse, and they definitely impacted more people.
The CPUSA was tiny. They never were larger than current white power movements today. Do you feel bad when white power movement members are discriminated against? They are really not different than communists. They simply hate different people, but they both favor the same kind of "participatory democracy." I strongly recommend you read "Towards a Soviet America" by William Z. Foster and tell me how bad you feel for those fascists who prefer Marxism to National Socialism. Same basic hate with different target groups. I have no sympathy.
If you do, what are you doing to help those who are blacklisted today? Today's blacklists are far larger, and they are more strongly enforced (If you want data, I have a set somewhere with what these guys did after getting blacklisted, ALL of them found work,, just not in Hollywood). Most of all, that was Congress, not Eisenhower.
Similarly, I see no problems with immigration enforcement at that time. Remember, that term is translated from what people in the Southwest called those who illegally entered the country. The people enforcing those laws had Spanish names. There was no racism there. People were deported who were supposed to be deported. The Chinese Exclusion Act was bad. Operation Wetback was the enforcement of US law at the request of locals along the border who were 50% of Spanish ancestry. Be very careful about these shallow, silly attempts at history books that are published today. They make up lies that are easy to disprove. Anyone who thinks the Rosenbergs were innocent is literally going out of their way to not see the obvious.
If you are interested in the CPUSA, read books from the Yale Annals of Communism series. Harvy Klehr and John Earl Hanes are great guys. Hanes was at the LOC until he retired a while back. He is a great guy. He was willing to go above and beyond helping me with other stuff at the Library, but I read everything with his name on it just because he was an exceptional individual, and just a nice guy. Some people at the LOC can be jerks, and I get it given what pricks Congressional staffers can be, but he was the best guy there in my opinion. I kept in touch with him years later. I think we are still connected in facebook.
But in general, once the Commintern and CPUSA archives were open in 1991, the truth came out, and it is so much worse than anyone imagined. You will never read any of this in a typical university history class because the Boomers like the false narrative of the poor Communists who only sold the US out and promoted Hitler until he turned on Stalin. I mean who thought Hitler was a bad guy in 1940? Such great people.
Forms membership in the CPUSA was smaller than sympathetic parties. Civil rights group and the weather underground freaks include the sympathetic parties. Now that they are firmly and unambiguously in power, you’ll never get another Eisenhower.
Couldn't the difference be split by voting for Kamala for president but Republicans in congress? If it were to happen then a whole lot of *nothing* will be done, unless a bill has a veto-proof majority.
You favor open immigration, but do you believe immigrants and their descendants will embrace capitalism in the long run? Their home countries aren't known for supporting capitalism strongly.
I would take this view more seriously if Republicans also weren't strongly against Hong Kong refugees when that crisis was happening.
Don’t forget Venezuelans fleeing socialism. Republicans are just prejudiced against foreigners and arguments about the way they vote is just an excuse, plus a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Also come on, Richard, you know that Hong Kong human capital is significantly higher than that of Venezuela.
I don't think that comparison is as strong. Venezuelans are coming from a country that voted (back when their elections were legitimate) for hard socialism. Hong Kong on the other hand is one of the most pro-market places in the world!
In case of Venezuela, you *could* argue that there is a Cuba effect and those fleeing are selectively more pro-market, but that's not a response to the original post from Tamritz.
That's one of my points here: Overall, the GOP is less pro-liberty once one takes the welfare of foreigners into account as well, since it's not very pro-liberty to condemn foreigners to lifetimes of poverty, misery, and/or oppression by preventing them from immigrating to the US in greater numbers.
Is that supposed to be a slight? If maximizing liberty means giving significant priority to the welfare of foreigners, that makes liberty similarly odious as Marxism.
It depends on what value you place on foreigners' well-being in comparison to that of your own countrymen.
BTW, Marxism wasn't very good for foreigners either.
Anything that places the well being of foreigners above or equal to countrymen is vile.
Marxism ended up being bad for foreigners but was earnestly believed and marketed as good. And there are still true believers for mugabe out there…
And what about polling that shows Hispanics in the US are more economically left-wing and populist than white Americans? Do you really think the average Venezuelan crossing the border is intelligent enough to correct their fiscal instincts that caused them to vote their way into this mess?
Also the most economically pro-market ethnic group in the US is probably Cuban-Americans.
It was an exodus of elites fleeing from Castro.
I'm sympathetic to your idea that the Cuba situation was a one-time thing that's not replicable. But still doesn't explain Hong Kong.
We should have. Within a month of the USSR's dissolution, Marines should have been hitting the beaches. Given the disparity of military power and the infeasibility of external supply of an insurgency on an island, it would have been all over in a week, and Cuba would have been a much richer, happier place for the last 30 years.
I'd have preferred to simply let the rest of Cuba's population flood into the US and for Cuba itself to become a depopulated shithole.
True. Sometimes the compromise between two policies is worse than either.
In the long run yes I think so. I also don’t think that’s a great argument. The USSR wasn’t known for capitalism to put it mildly but Russian-Israelis are capitalist.
I wonder if they're capitalist because they view Israel as a success story and associate its capitalism with this success?
197 countries in the world, more than 190 are capitalist.
As an American, you believe all the immigrants to your country are coming from a tiny number of countries? 🤣 And you think that small number of people will overthrow America's rock solid economic system? Perhaps wanting to live in America for that very purpose. 🤣
It's because of the vibes the parties give off, not to mention occasionally actual policy positions. The Republicans express anti-foreigner sentiments pretty much constantly, if not on ethnic grounds then on religious grounds. If you make somebody feel like they are unwelcome in your country or that they are there only on your sufferance, those people (first or second generation immigrants, not so much third and beyond) are going to find reasons to vote against you even if their views and ideology align with you on all other issues.
We live in a multi-cultural democracy where human capital by ethnic group differs. A hypothetical party that had a policy of pure meritocracy (similar to PAP in Singapore) would be seen as racist towards the ethnic groups that have lower human capital. Only explicitly favoring less-well of ethnic groups is seen as acceptable.
Yes, but poll them on their policy and social views and you'll see why they vote Democrat. 1st gen Latinos tend to be economically left, while 2nd gen are both economically and socially left.
For example: https://ibb.co/jHRmZRZ
"More" in this case is not a majority. And my guess is that (as I mentioned above), the Hispanic votes Trump is getting are from well-established communities, not recent migrants or their descendants.
But I'm happy to be proven wrong on this if there's data for it.
Immigrants and the immigration issue can be quite complicated. I once read about an Irish immigrant named Denis Kearney who faced anti-immigrant discrimination on the East Coast (something like a Gangs of New York scenario), but later moved to the California coast and himself spearheaded an anti-immigration movement against Chinese (both on economic and cultural grounds). My sense is that that the move to the west made him accepted as a white man rather than being discriminated against as a Catholic Irishman. So his political position changed accordingly. Something like this can happen to other kinds of immigrants too, like Hispanics today.
Trump’s promise to impose a 10-20% tariff on all imported goods would be way more disastrous to the economy than anything that Harris has talked about. The scary thing here is that Trump can enact tariffs with executive authority alone. Trump could then take bribes from companies to grant special exceptions to these tariffs for “national security” reasons or whatever. Trump is such a corrupt and unscrupulous person that could totally do this purely to enrich himself. This would set our free market system back massively and makes the Dems the party to support if you care about market freedom and economic liberty.
Ylgesias has a good article detail this danger. https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-tariffs-mean-big-opportunities?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
Noah Smith writes about how Harris has backed away from price controls. I think this shows (as you've mentioned before) that there is a feedback loop of smart people (aka elite human capital) for Dems but not for Republicans
I think it's less about whether or not they would do it (honesty), than the responsiveness (demonstrated by the backing away from the position) esp. because it would seem like a popular policy to someone without knowledge of basic economics (which covers a large swath of the electorate I assume).
I also think the whole NATO expansion line of thought to explain why Russia invaded Ukraine falls apart under scrutiny. Both Sweden and Finland joined NATO after Russia escalated into a full-blown invasion of Ukraine. Are experts like John Mearsheimer arguing that we should have blocked them from joining because of the threat to Russia?
No, the real reason is found in Putin’s own treatise, “On the Historical Unity of the Ukrainian and Russian Peoples.” Russia’s war in Ukraine is genocidal. Putin doesn’t believe Ukrainians exist. But he does believe that Swedes, Finns, and others do.
Well, Yeah, in that article of his, Putin said that Ukraine's Ukrainianization policies are the equivalent of using a weapon of mass destruction against Ukraine's Russian population. If he genuinely believes that, and also genuinely believes in his own rhetoric calling the pre-2022 situation in the Donbass a genocide, then he lives in a very interesting fantasy world.
Cultural genocide, not physical genocide.
They have many more better heroes now as a result of the current war.
As for Ukrainian being similar to Russian, well, Dutch is also similar to German. Should Hitler have annexed it instead of Poland in 1939, at least if he wasn’t a genocidal maniac?
They want to erase Ukrainian identity and replace it with Russian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abductions_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War#:~:text=During%20the%20Russo%2DUkrainian%20War,with%20their%20parents%20and%20homeland.
https://investigations.news-exchange.ebu.ch/russification-in-occupied-ukraine/index.html
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-erasing-mariupol-499dceae43ed77f2ebfe750ea99b9ad9