There are a couple of problems with being too free-market (I'm not going to argue for a complete command economy, that won't work and we're more likely to wind up as Russia or Mexico than China lacking their long history of centralized state control).
1. Completely free markets create all sorts of negative externalities. I'd encourage you to read up on the Gilded Age. Even if a lot more good things like the USA becoming an industrial super power happened in that time period than people want to admit, you still had companies selling tainted meat and dangerous consumer products and kids working 12-hour shifts and not going to school (back when they actually learned something there). A similar thing may be happening now with social media and porn making the kids stop dating, though obviously the harms are much less. You need to understand why the transition from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era occurred, even if you think it was ultimately a bad thing. People were reacting to something.
2. Completely free markets also create massive inequality. Even if the country is better off in the aggregate, you generate a lot of desperate poor people. Even if you can do some sort of calculation they're better off in consumer products, if they have to work twice as long and can't start families they are going to be upset. Humans are also social animals and very sensitive to status, so the inequality pisses them off even if the poor are better off in an absolute sense (which given increasing work hours and housing and healthcare prices I am not sure they are).
3. Related to 1., deregulation of the financial industry produced a huge recession that lasted for years (financial crashes tend to do that). You can see why young people might be wary of letting the businessmen do what they want. To do the American history example thing again, a similar thing caused the Great Depression, and only government intervention kept it from getting much worse (though whether it would have been as bad as the Depression is anyone's guess).
4. Healthcare in particular is super expensive and not so great at the low and middle ends (the rich do pretty well) at least in part because it's free market in addition to being regulated. All the European and East Asian markets have more regulation, often with the government being the single provider or payer, and lower costs--our system is insanely expensive.
So for all these reasons I think a shift away from free markets is inevitable and probably necessary. I'm not saying we should turn into China, and I'm not even saying we should go all the way to Sweden--we don't have the homogeneity for that, as you are one of the few pundits able to understand. But going back to, say, the 1950s in terms of regulation level might be a goal. Plus single payer. If you can get that done costs will fall considerably.
Regarding 1, I've read that Upton Sinclair (one of those who spearheaded the push for regulations during the Gilded Age) exaggerated or outright fabricated a lot of the stuff about how companies were operating and treating their employees. That said, if something is clearly known to be a bad thing (selling adulterated food) or against the public interest (children going un-nurtured and uneducated), there should be no controversy about banning these. I don't think that would violate "free market principles". But where there is ambiguity (e.g., social media in today's world, which has harms but also has benefits), it's unclear what exactly we should be doing. Because the costs of prohibiting things that have even a small chance of advancing innovation are very high to society (and sometimes to humanity as a whole).
Regarding comparisons to other countries: my view is that you need at least one country to encourage freewheeling, risk-taking behavior under somewhat "free market" conditions. Experimentation produces innovation. All other countries can then piggyback on this. Which is what is happening. Countries that live nicely, like Sweden, can afford to do so because they don't need to innovate; the US is doing that, and small countries can organize themselves in optimal ways so that they can absorb the benefits of those innovations while shielding themselves from the risks. But I suspect the same template cannot be followed by big countries like India or China, which need to be more like the US to prosper.
IKEA, Bofors, Saab, Volvo, Gripen, iScala don't count as innovations... it's eight million people. Like NY. So discount every innovation outside NY such as the Silicon Valley and compare.
Your point in 2 about not being able to start families doesn't make a lot of sense. Desperately poor people have children all the time. I doubt even the poorest people in the USA are poorer than medieval peasants, who had tons of kids.
What stops people from having starting family is conformity to standards, not level of wealth. The solution isn't increased equality, it's telling people it's okay to have kids even if your income is below average for your society.
People aren't having kids for cultural reasons. Big families are frowned upon and treated with contempt (but only for the middle and upper classes). People would rather spend money on traveling and consumerism than having children. You have climate alarmists spreading fear and panic that lead to a sense of despair that keeps people from having children. Public places have become child un-friendly. I had a woman tell me the other day that children don't belong in airplanes. The reality is our culture has become anti-child. Not aggressively so but there's definitely a hostility to small children and certainly large families.
I found this a good distillation of what seem to be emerging fissures in the Republican party, thanks. Maybe the story is, if the existing donor class of a party can't hold its nose and instead bows out, it creates a vacuum, an opportunity for someone else to make a play for that slot. Which becomes mostly a return to business as usual, where donors check the excesses of the voting members, in exchange for some sector-specific concessions or broader tax breaks.
The three main (somewhat at odds) camps identified on the right in The Right Nation by Micklethwait and Wooldridge were God, money, and security. You could see Trumpism is a simplifying scalar across all of these. God means conservative justices then we're done. Security means border security then we're done.
Money is the most unsettled. Ryan got tax simplification, but Trump seemed agnostic on tax structure beyond preferring his were lower. Trump was specifically pro steel, maybe because that plays well on the stump, maybe because of money from Zekelman. (That made him anti-steel-product-manufacturers of course. But in general steel recognized the vacuum and took advantage of it.) Trump's money pillar will be less libertarian, and more protectionist pro-business, maybe primarily for those who donate. For the working class, maybe he's targeting the non-union middle class service worker. Appeals to service workers (outside of Nevada primaries) are weirdly missing from the US relative to appeals to manufacturing workers when you look at the size of sectors:
One of the things that was telling in AOC's recent discussion of the logistics of switching candidates is how she let slip how critical it was to secure early union endorsement for the system to function at all. Probably something well known but not talked about is how distortative union concessions are to the democratic process, despite a significant majority of workers in the US being non-union.
The tech right could take some novel populist stabs here... like outlawing GDPR compliance for websites viewed in the US, which might fracture the internet, but maybe for the better, setting limits on extraterritorial jurisdiction of the EU, which mostly finds ways to hobble and punitively tax the US tech sector because it can't compete.
I think your tweet on the wealth of US workers relative to Europe raises a good point. Though the correlational coefficient with state earnings adjusted for regional cost of living and Republican governors and for right-to-work status are both slightly negative. The correlational coefficient of percent union affiliation and earnings is moderately positive. I don't think this is causation, but it's the fact US states are dominated by different conditions unrelated to policy.
This is a bit like when Krugman dedicated a couple articles to how Kansas had ruined its economy with tax cuts then illustrated this by comparing Kansas to the sister state of... California. If you want to tell a story about economic prosperity in America you have all these non-economic lotteries some states won, like New York and Connecticut having finance, Texas and California and some northern rural states having energy, or California having Hollywood and tech. Having access to a coast and not being in the South seem like big factors unrelated to policy (for policies after 1865 anyway).
All parties have a donor class and a rank and file, and they all have natural tensions and disagreements. Your rank and file are going to be a combo of low information voters and some overzealous extremist fringe no matter which party you're in. I'm moderately bullish for the outcomes of a tech donor class playing the role of designated driver for either party, relative to the alternatives, despite the sometimes zany policy positions. But mainly because there aren't good high-intelligence alternatives to guide/filter policy on either side. Absent some strict and explicit meritocracy for policymakers, this seems like the closest we get to inching that direction.
An alternative take on Vance's less than warm embrace of free-markets: it's less of an anti market stance than a anti Big Tech stance, against the sworn enemies of the Tech Right, the Tech Left most representative of which is Google and Microsoft and Facebook (observe Zuckerberg's "trump fist bump is pretty based" on BB as pre-emptive PR maneuver to swerve out of the cross-hairs). And then again, it's maybe less about economics and monopoly power, and more about shutting down some of the key allies of the old regime, especially wrt to FB and Google, who control the national communications aka. propaganda infrastructure. I think this is the real motivation for what you are calling "anti-free market" stance. And perhaps you also underestimate the political saavy of tech bros here, especially one that is affiliated with Thiel and Yarvin. This is a pure political play to secure power for the new Regime. Which, based
Honestly it depends, there is the libertarian argument that monopolies are created most of the time due to regulations. And if the monopoly is created purely due to market-related reasons, it is because the product sold is good and cheap compared to the competition. And if the situation changes, then some competition will start to exist.
Big players in certain industries also try to influence politics in order to get MORE retarded regulations in order to kill the « small fry » competition before it can grow.
Yes, that is the libertarian argument, but it’s not plausible in the general case. What makes monopolies possible is barriers to entry, and of course gov’t regulation can cause barriers to entry, but in the real world there are many sources of friction that cause barriers to entry that have nothing to do with gov’t regulation.
In the case of the big tech companies, many of them produce products that naturally benefit from the barrier to entry caused by network effects: since the usefulness of social apps is connected to the size of their user-base,
it’s really hard to get over the hump of being useless because nobody uses you, and for those few companies that manage it, it’s easy for the incumbents to buy them out. The monopolies are structural. The libertarian just-so story that we can blame government for everything is cope, nothing more.
I think Vance has a more sophisticated view of regulations and government intervention than just your average dude who falls for populist anti-market propaganda. For example, Vance stated that he is for minimum hourly wage at 20$. A libertarian should hate him for that. But Vance said it is good because McDonald’s workers are going to be replaced by machine. I think it is an interesting « pro-tech » point of view. There might be hope that whatever government regulations he decides to do, those would be on average better implemented than your average democrat.
On the issue of taxation, I honestly think if anyone wants to handle the issue of government budget and debt that increasing tax is mandatory. The myth of pro-market republicans that reducing tax rates would improve your economy and somehow indirectly would solve the budget issue is really just a myth.
I’m all for the Tech Right if it’s organic. Despite knowing that democracy is fake, I genuinely like Vance and feel like Trump is the best choice for President. My concern is the center-right cowards who have now joined MAGA turning the Tech Right into an exclusive and boring dinner party that is no different from the banality of San Francisco liberalism.
I’m also not so sure that MAGA populists will be happy with their grassroots movement being taken over by these creeps. I do not mean people like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen who understand the wider picture and are genuinely looking to grow American Technology, but pampered scolds who simply go with the flow and seek to take the energy out of anything and everything bold. I do not trust them.
> While intellectuals have made names for themselves over the last several years by telling us that “free market fundamentalism” has failed, the wealth gap between the US and Europe has continued to widen,
And China is catching up with both Europe and the US so communism is the best option.
> and in America, red states have for decades massively outgrown blue states, both in terms of GDP and individuals voting with their feet.
And yet the Democratic states in the US are still richer. Also decades is clearly not correct here although it might be true very recently.
Richard remains a weak thinker - believing exactly what he’s expected to believe at this moment in time.
"I was quite impressed with Democrats’ ability to act in concert towards a common goal under really difficult conditions, which is yet another sign of them being the party of Elite Human Capital."
The level of coordination over the last few weeks was only necessary to escape a situation that had no shortage of reasonable off-ramps that all were avoided by the same people who were forced to pull a rabbit out of their hat to oust an obvious dementia patient. Elite Human Capital is one way to put it, but I'd put it more like a shadowy cabal run by people whose cynicism would make Frank Underwood blush.
Maybe I'm not cynical enough but "managed to bully an old senile man out of running at the last possible moment" does not strike me as particulary impressive, more Veep than House of Cards.
Excellent thoughts. You confined your essay to Vance and the economy. Please touch on Vance and the Republicans on social policy. Republicans used to mind their own business until the the religious right came in to direct things their way. So if god saved Trump, what did Mr. Comperatore do to piss off god? Abortion and gay rights are openly on the chopping block and J.D. is a long way from libertarian on these issues.
Exactly. The religious right arose in response to the hedonism of the left.
The problem is progressives treat everything as a moral issue. Politics is give and take and laws changing over time in response to changing cultural attitudes, religiosity and events that create backlash. See abortion rights. As if killing an unborn child is a right. It's a policy choice. So is gay "marriage."
Part of the rise of the religious right was motivated by hostility to the Left's agenda. Part of it was because people honestly believed in talking snakes and crap like that.
Believing men can transform into women is rationale but believing in talking snakes is crap. Yeah OK!
I'll take the religious right every single day of the week. At least they're honest about what they want. The radical left just dissimulates and outright lies.
Why _don't_ you want US becoming a social democracy like Sweden? Surely not just due to higher GDP (which is confounded in so many ways as to be functionally useless for the comparison)? (And, since entitlements are not just about elderly, it can't be due to Critical Age Theory.)
Sincere belief that letting the markets hash it out is better? Have you SEEN US healthcare or US tipping culture?
Every different group here wants something different. There are tensions between welfare, workers, retirees, and elite. There are tensions between races, sexes, sexual preferences, religions. We don't have a common culture. It didn't work out that way. We just have a bunch of opposing groups. We have states rights, federal rights, legal or illegal. Who would the doctors be? Merited or equity based? Who gets to see who? Who pays for it all? Is someone getting better care? Messy.
As an outsider, I can say US has quite a level of common culture, akshually. For instance, you have gun control supporters and gun control opposers, but both sides agree that it is something of high importance, that this is a salient issue that needs to be brought up over and over again. This is just not true of most Western countries, where, while some gun control legislation exists, it is nowhere near as prominent and salient in issue. To a lesser extent, but same with abortion - the only European countries where abortion is a salient issue are countries with huge _Catholic_ contingent (Malta, Poland, Hungary, Italy), while in US it is an elevated topic with no Catholics in sight. And so on and so forth.
The only reason we have these discussions at all is because we adhere (to the chagrin of the intelligentsia and the low IQ individuals) to the Founding Documents of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Truly
“Trump seems to have changed attitudes among elites to the extent that now the Heritage Foundation seems inclined to see trade in zero-sum terms.”
As usual, in an otherwise very good, thoughtful piece, Richard manages to include overblown extreme statements.
The Heritage link cited in no way shows Heritage as seeing trade in zero-sum terms.
First, it is a Heritage person interviewing the former Trump trade rep. Suggesting that ALL of Heritage / the official Heritage position is now that trade is a zero-sum game because they publish one such piece is absurd. Richard wouldn’t hold the MSM - or himself! - to that same standard.
Second, while I am with Richard and disagree with Lightizer’s framing of some of the trade issues, for sure, the idea of getting “better trade deals” - and caring about same - is NOT. AT. ALL. the same as viewing trade as zero-sum. Freer trade is positive sum, as Richard and all of us who understand economics know well, and using *threats* (of tarrifs, of whatever) to maximize the chance of a better trade deal is also NOT evidence of zero-sum thinking, especially when the person making those threats can do so credibly.
Finally, while in areas like foreign policy - or most of the rest of politics, for that matter - Richard understands that talk and positioning is not the same as policy, for some reason when it comes to Trump and trade, he reverts to only taking Trump literally, not seriously. This is a mistake, and it’s also unfair.
As I believe a Richard himself has noted multiple times, including in this piece, Trump talks like a populist, and pretty much governed as a traditional pro-market Republican. So while I found this overall piece on Vance thought-provoking and fair, his shot at Heritage, based on having this single interview of Trump’s trade rep, is anything but.
P.S. to leave no doubt, I think that Lightizer, the trade rep, is wrong about many many things. The most absurd being the idea that we should have no trade deficits with anyone, let alone we should have no trade deficit in aggregate. And as a political actor, he talks focused on trade benefits for workers, ignoring consumers (back to the concentrated benefits to a minority, dispersed harms to consumers issue). But his/Trump’s claim that China in particular is an adversary, and that we need to take that into account in how we handle trade with the Chinese, is at minimum a fair point.
There are a couple of problems with being too free-market (I'm not going to argue for a complete command economy, that won't work and we're more likely to wind up as Russia or Mexico than China lacking their long history of centralized state control).
1. Completely free markets create all sorts of negative externalities. I'd encourage you to read up on the Gilded Age. Even if a lot more good things like the USA becoming an industrial super power happened in that time period than people want to admit, you still had companies selling tainted meat and dangerous consumer products and kids working 12-hour shifts and not going to school (back when they actually learned something there). A similar thing may be happening now with social media and porn making the kids stop dating, though obviously the harms are much less. You need to understand why the transition from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era occurred, even if you think it was ultimately a bad thing. People were reacting to something.
2. Completely free markets also create massive inequality. Even if the country is better off in the aggregate, you generate a lot of desperate poor people. Even if you can do some sort of calculation they're better off in consumer products, if they have to work twice as long and can't start families they are going to be upset. Humans are also social animals and very sensitive to status, so the inequality pisses them off even if the poor are better off in an absolute sense (which given increasing work hours and housing and healthcare prices I am not sure they are).
3. Related to 1., deregulation of the financial industry produced a huge recession that lasted for years (financial crashes tend to do that). You can see why young people might be wary of letting the businessmen do what they want. To do the American history example thing again, a similar thing caused the Great Depression, and only government intervention kept it from getting much worse (though whether it would have been as bad as the Depression is anyone's guess).
4. Healthcare in particular is super expensive and not so great at the low and middle ends (the rich do pretty well) at least in part because it's free market in addition to being regulated. All the European and East Asian markets have more regulation, often with the government being the single provider or payer, and lower costs--our system is insanely expensive.
So for all these reasons I think a shift away from free markets is inevitable and probably necessary. I'm not saying we should turn into China, and I'm not even saying we should go all the way to Sweden--we don't have the homogeneity for that, as you are one of the few pundits able to understand. But going back to, say, the 1950s in terms of regulation level might be a goal. Plus single payer. If you can get that done costs will fall considerably.
Regarding 1, I've read that Upton Sinclair (one of those who spearheaded the push for regulations during the Gilded Age) exaggerated or outright fabricated a lot of the stuff about how companies were operating and treating their employees. That said, if something is clearly known to be a bad thing (selling adulterated food) or against the public interest (children going un-nurtured and uneducated), there should be no controversy about banning these. I don't think that would violate "free market principles". But where there is ambiguity (e.g., social media in today's world, which has harms but also has benefits), it's unclear what exactly we should be doing. Because the costs of prohibiting things that have even a small chance of advancing innovation are very high to society (and sometimes to humanity as a whole).
Regarding comparisons to other countries: my view is that you need at least one country to encourage freewheeling, risk-taking behavior under somewhat "free market" conditions. Experimentation produces innovation. All other countries can then piggyback on this. Which is what is happening. Countries that live nicely, like Sweden, can afford to do so because they don't need to innovate; the US is doing that, and small countries can organize themselves in optimal ways so that they can absorb the benefits of those innovations while shielding themselves from the risks. But I suspect the same template cannot be followed by big countries like India or China, which need to be more like the US to prosper.
IKEA, Bofors, Saab, Volvo, Gripen, iScala don't count as innovations... it's eight million people. Like NY. So discount every innovation outside NY such as the Silicon Valley and compare.
Yeah they don’t. Seriously??
Your point in 2 about not being able to start families doesn't make a lot of sense. Desperately poor people have children all the time. I doubt even the poorest people in the USA are poorer than medieval peasants, who had tons of kids.
What stops people from having starting family is conformity to standards, not level of wealth. The solution isn't increased equality, it's telling people it's okay to have kids even if your income is below average for your society.
People aren't having kids for cultural reasons. Big families are frowned upon and treated with contempt (but only for the middle and upper classes). People would rather spend money on traveling and consumerism than having children. You have climate alarmists spreading fear and panic that lead to a sense of despair that keeps people from having children. Public places have become child un-friendly. I had a woman tell me the other day that children don't belong in airplanes. The reality is our culture has become anti-child. Not aggressively so but there's definitely a hostility to small children and certainly large families.
Can't do that without changing the entire culture of parenting from quality-oriented to quantity-oriented.
Our current culture is oriented towards neither. Intensive helicopter parenting doesn't produce high-quality children, it produces neurotic messes.
The definition of free market is not "anything that is not a government employee".
I found this a good distillation of what seem to be emerging fissures in the Republican party, thanks. Maybe the story is, if the existing donor class of a party can't hold its nose and instead bows out, it creates a vacuum, an opportunity for someone else to make a play for that slot. Which becomes mostly a return to business as usual, where donors check the excesses of the voting members, in exchange for some sector-specific concessions or broader tax breaks.
The three main (somewhat at odds) camps identified on the right in The Right Nation by Micklethwait and Wooldridge were God, money, and security. You could see Trumpism is a simplifying scalar across all of these. God means conservative justices then we're done. Security means border security then we're done.
Money is the most unsettled. Ryan got tax simplification, but Trump seemed agnostic on tax structure beyond preferring his were lower. Trump was specifically pro steel, maybe because that plays well on the stump, maybe because of money from Zekelman. (That made him anti-steel-product-manufacturers of course. But in general steel recognized the vacuum and took advantage of it.) Trump's money pillar will be less libertarian, and more protectionist pro-business, maybe primarily for those who donate. For the working class, maybe he's targeting the non-union middle class service worker. Appeals to service workers (outside of Nevada primaries) are weirdly missing from the US relative to appeals to manufacturing workers when you look at the size of sectors:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/employment-by-economic-sector
One of the things that was telling in AOC's recent discussion of the logistics of switching candidates is how she let slip how critical it was to secure early union endorsement for the system to function at all. Probably something well known but not talked about is how distortative union concessions are to the democratic process, despite a significant majority of workers in the US being non-union.
The tech right could take some novel populist stabs here... like outlawing GDPR compliance for websites viewed in the US, which might fracture the internet, but maybe for the better, setting limits on extraterritorial jurisdiction of the EU, which mostly finds ways to hobble and punitively tax the US tech sector because it can't compete.
I think your tweet on the wealth of US workers relative to Europe raises a good point. Though the correlational coefficient with state earnings adjusted for regional cost of living and Republican governors and for right-to-work status are both slightly negative. The correlational coefficient of percent union affiliation and earnings is moderately positive. I don't think this is causation, but it's the fact US states are dominated by different conditions unrelated to policy.
This is a bit like when Krugman dedicated a couple articles to how Kansas had ruined its economy with tax cuts then illustrated this by comparing Kansas to the sister state of... California. If you want to tell a story about economic prosperity in America you have all these non-economic lotteries some states won, like New York and Connecticut having finance, Texas and California and some northern rural states having energy, or California having Hollywood and tech. Having access to a coast and not being in the South seem like big factors unrelated to policy (for policies after 1865 anyway).
All parties have a donor class and a rank and file, and they all have natural tensions and disagreements. Your rank and file are going to be a combo of low information voters and some overzealous extremist fringe no matter which party you're in. I'm moderately bullish for the outcomes of a tech donor class playing the role of designated driver for either party, relative to the alternatives, despite the sometimes zany policy positions. But mainly because there aren't good high-intelligence alternatives to guide/filter policy on either side. Absent some strict and explicit meritocracy for policymakers, this seems like the closest we get to inching that direction.
The TradCath Compact Mag crowd is not a good influence, and JD nods to these elements.
An alternative take on Vance's less than warm embrace of free-markets: it's less of an anti market stance than a anti Big Tech stance, against the sworn enemies of the Tech Right, the Tech Left most representative of which is Google and Microsoft and Facebook (observe Zuckerberg's "trump fist bump is pretty based" on BB as pre-emptive PR maneuver to swerve out of the cross-hairs). And then again, it's maybe less about economics and monopoly power, and more about shutting down some of the key allies of the old regime, especially wrt to FB and Google, who control the national communications aka. propaganda infrastructure. I think this is the real motivation for what you are calling "anti-free market" stance. And perhaps you also underestimate the political saavy of tech bros here, especially one that is affiliated with Thiel and Yarvin. This is a pure political play to secure power for the new Regime. Which, based
Anti-trust = pro-market. Nothing destroys free markets faster than monopolies.
Honestly it depends, there is the libertarian argument that monopolies are created most of the time due to regulations. And if the monopoly is created purely due to market-related reasons, it is because the product sold is good and cheap compared to the competition. And if the situation changes, then some competition will start to exist.
Big players in certain industries also try to influence politics in order to get MORE retarded regulations in order to kill the « small fry » competition before it can grow.
Yes, that is the libertarian argument, but it’s not plausible in the general case. What makes monopolies possible is barriers to entry, and of course gov’t regulation can cause barriers to entry, but in the real world there are many sources of friction that cause barriers to entry that have nothing to do with gov’t regulation.
In the case of the big tech companies, many of them produce products that naturally benefit from the barrier to entry caused by network effects: since the usefulness of social apps is connected to the size of their user-base,
it’s really hard to get over the hump of being useless because nobody uses you, and for those few companies that manage it, it’s easy for the incumbents to buy them out. The monopolies are structural. The libertarian just-so story that we can blame government for everything is cope, nothing more.
Examples?
And nobody hates competition more than any company that rises to the top in the so-called free market.
I think Vance has a more sophisticated view of regulations and government intervention than just your average dude who falls for populist anti-market propaganda. For example, Vance stated that he is for minimum hourly wage at 20$. A libertarian should hate him for that. But Vance said it is good because McDonald’s workers are going to be replaced by machine. I think it is an interesting « pro-tech » point of view. There might be hope that whatever government regulations he decides to do, those would be on average better implemented than your average democrat.
On the issue of taxation, I honestly think if anyone wants to handle the issue of government budget and debt that increasing tax is mandatory. The myth of pro-market republicans that reducing tax rates would improve your economy and somehow indirectly would solve the budget issue is really just a myth.
I’m all for the Tech Right if it’s organic. Despite knowing that democracy is fake, I genuinely like Vance and feel like Trump is the best choice for President. My concern is the center-right cowards who have now joined MAGA turning the Tech Right into an exclusive and boring dinner party that is no different from the banality of San Francisco liberalism.
I’m also not so sure that MAGA populists will be happy with their grassroots movement being taken over by these creeps. I do not mean people like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen who understand the wider picture and are genuinely looking to grow American Technology, but pampered scolds who simply go with the flow and seek to take the energy out of anything and everything bold. I do not trust them.
right wing statism please
"In trying to answer this question, one has to set aside immigration and trade."
Ah yes, let's set aside the absolute most salient issues for the Trump/Vance voting base. Surely this won't be electorally relevant.
"Free market policies simply work."
Yes, as long as profits are privatized and costs are socialized. That's the key to "free market" capitalism.
> While intellectuals have made names for themselves over the last several years by telling us that “free market fundamentalism” has failed, the wealth gap between the US and Europe has continued to widen,
And China is catching up with both Europe and the US so communism is the best option.
> and in America, red states have for decades massively outgrown blue states, both in terms of GDP and individuals voting with their feet.
And yet the Democratic states in the US are still richer. Also decades is clearly not correct here although it might be true very recently.
Richard remains a weak thinker - believing exactly what he’s expected to believe at this moment in time.
"I was quite impressed with Democrats’ ability to act in concert towards a common goal under really difficult conditions, which is yet another sign of them being the party of Elite Human Capital."
The level of coordination over the last few weeks was only necessary to escape a situation that had no shortage of reasonable off-ramps that all were avoided by the same people who were forced to pull a rabbit out of their hat to oust an obvious dementia patient. Elite Human Capital is one way to put it, but I'd put it more like a shadowy cabal run by people whose cynicism would make Frank Underwood blush.
Maybe I'm not cynical enough but "managed to bully an old senile man out of running at the last possible moment" does not strike me as particulary impressive, more Veep than House of Cards.
What a waste of time. Talk about his positions on immigration! It's irrelevant what his position on corporate tax rates is.
Excellent thoughts. You confined your essay to Vance and the economy. Please touch on Vance and the Republicans on social policy. Republicans used to mind their own business until the the religious right came in to direct things their way. So if god saved Trump, what did Mr. Comperatore do to piss off god? Abortion and gay rights are openly on the chopping block and J.D. is a long way from libertarian on these issues.
Exactly. The religious right arose in response to the hedonism of the left.
The problem is progressives treat everything as a moral issue. Politics is give and take and laws changing over time in response to changing cultural attitudes, religiosity and events that create backlash. See abortion rights. As if killing an unborn child is a right. It's a policy choice. So is gay "marriage."
Part of the rise of the religious right was motivated by hostility to the Left's agenda. Part of it was because people honestly believed in talking snakes and crap like that.
Believing men can transform into women is rationale but believing in talking snakes is crap. Yeah OK!
I'll take the religious right every single day of the week. At least they're honest about what they want. The radical left just dissimulates and outright lies.
"Believing men can transform into women is rationale but believing in talking snakes is crap. Yeah OK!"
It's possible to believe in neither of those things. You don't need to degrade yourself by believing in one dumb dogma because another one is worse.
Why _don't_ you want US becoming a social democracy like Sweden? Surely not just due to higher GDP (which is confounded in so many ways as to be functionally useless for the comparison)? (And, since entitlements are not just about elderly, it can't be due to Critical Age Theory.)
Sincere belief that letting the markets hash it out is better? Have you SEEN US healthcare or US tipping culture?
It's not about wanting. It's about the fact that diversity really doesn't allow for something like that here.
One, I am not sure Hanania would agree with that assessment. Two, how so?
Every different group here wants something different. There are tensions between welfare, workers, retirees, and elite. There are tensions between races, sexes, sexual preferences, religions. We don't have a common culture. It didn't work out that way. We just have a bunch of opposing groups. We have states rights, federal rights, legal or illegal. Who would the doctors be? Merited or equity based? Who gets to see who? Who pays for it all? Is someone getting better care? Messy.
As an outsider, I can say US has quite a level of common culture, akshually. For instance, you have gun control supporters and gun control opposers, but both sides agree that it is something of high importance, that this is a salient issue that needs to be brought up over and over again. This is just not true of most Western countries, where, while some gun control legislation exists, it is nowhere near as prominent and salient in issue. To a lesser extent, but same with abortion - the only European countries where abortion is a salient issue are countries with huge _Catholic_ contingent (Malta, Poland, Hungary, Italy), while in US it is an elevated topic with no Catholics in sight. And so on and so forth.
The only reason we have these discussions at all is because we adhere (to the chagrin of the intelligentsia and the low IQ individuals) to the Founding Documents of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Truly
I am not American and don't adhere to anything like that, but still find the discussions illuminating.
“Trump seems to have changed attitudes among elites to the extent that now the Heritage Foundation seems inclined to see trade in zero-sum terms.”
As usual, in an otherwise very good, thoughtful piece, Richard manages to include overblown extreme statements.
The Heritage link cited in no way shows Heritage as seeing trade in zero-sum terms.
First, it is a Heritage person interviewing the former Trump trade rep. Suggesting that ALL of Heritage / the official Heritage position is now that trade is a zero-sum game because they publish one such piece is absurd. Richard wouldn’t hold the MSM - or himself! - to that same standard.
Second, while I am with Richard and disagree with Lightizer’s framing of some of the trade issues, for sure, the idea of getting “better trade deals” - and caring about same - is NOT. AT. ALL. the same as viewing trade as zero-sum. Freer trade is positive sum, as Richard and all of us who understand economics know well, and using *threats* (of tarrifs, of whatever) to maximize the chance of a better trade deal is also NOT evidence of zero-sum thinking, especially when the person making those threats can do so credibly.
Finally, while in areas like foreign policy - or most of the rest of politics, for that matter - Richard understands that talk and positioning is not the same as policy, for some reason when it comes to Trump and trade, he reverts to only taking Trump literally, not seriously. This is a mistake, and it’s also unfair.
As I believe a Richard himself has noted multiple times, including in this piece, Trump talks like a populist, and pretty much governed as a traditional pro-market Republican. So while I found this overall piece on Vance thought-provoking and fair, his shot at Heritage, based on having this single interview of Trump’s trade rep, is anything but.
P.S. to leave no doubt, I think that Lightizer, the trade rep, is wrong about many many things. The most absurd being the idea that we should have no trade deficits with anyone, let alone we should have no trade deficit in aggregate. And as a political actor, he talks focused on trade benefits for workers, ignoring consumers (back to the concentrated benefits to a minority, dispersed harms to consumers issue). But his/Trump’s claim that China in particular is an adversary, and that we need to take that into account in how we handle trade with the Chinese, is at minimum a fair point.