If your gamble on immigration proves incorrect, then we will be stuck with a massive third world population in the country. They will use their political power to extract wealth of disfavored minorities and turn every public and private sector job into a racial spoils system.
We might not have sufficient data on this because few countries have tried the suicidal experiment america seems poised to embark on (1. Inviting third worlders indiscriminately 2. With a sizable welfare state, racial preferences and third wordlist as the ascendant elite ideology).
But all the data that we do have on how these people conduct themselves in their own countries, and their views of whites, tells us that your immigration gamble is not worth it.
Richard will be fine personally, so he does not care. It's clear that he feels no allegiance to any particular tribe, whether that be race, nation, religion, whatever. If America commits suicide, that simply means the nation failed in the global free market of ideas/policy. Oh well!
To be honest, part of me is sympathetic to that attitude. To quote the Joker, we get what we effing deserve.
You are missing the ocean effect. To get here one has to cross large oceans. The exception to this are immigrants from Latin America. But outside of central America, the rest of the Latin America's fertility has fallen to replacement levels or below. The excess population they exported to America is drying up.
The largest subset of Latin America immigrants are Mexicans. The stereotype about them is they are hard workers because everywhere you look you see construction gangs dominated by Hispanics. and everyone knows agricultural work is done by Hispanics. Not only that but Latins are Western in both language and religion. They will fit in as other white ethnics (which is what they are) did before.
As for the others, they necessarily have get up and go, since they got up and left. Conservatives have feared that the great unwashed would use their electoral power to appropriate the wealth of their betters for 250 years. Hasn't happened yet--top 1% income share is back to near all-time high levels.
“Hasn't happened yet--top 1% income share is back to near all-time high levels.”
Also your fixation on the 1%—a hoary old left concern with zero relevance—distorts your perception.
In corrupt third world regimes it is the middle class and upper middle class that gets shafted by horrific government services and taxes.
The uber rich can usually through connections or loopholes find a way to protect their wealth from expropriation. Leftism (which today is just third worldism) involves an alliance between a subsection of a nation’s elites and underclass clients who provide votes and who terrorize the middle class.
The Left is gone. There are two elite factions, the Mandarins, and the Capitalist Elite. Since the Mandarins are newer, they are labeled as Left and while the Capitalists have been around since the start of the country (as the Federalists).
Since the Right were originally the supporters of the King, the old Establishment, both parties are technically on the Right, while the Left has gone extinct.
I don't think European and American political parties can be compared. It comes down to what the 19th century European leftists called the American exception. We have regional/cultural issues *within* our country that do not have a parallel in Europe.
For example, still extant in the American South is a Borderland culture inherited from England in the 17th century that disappeared there centuries ago.
David Shor and others argue convincingly that the real political fault line is education, and that it's a global phenomenon. Educated people are becoming more liberal, and undereducated are getting more conservative, not just in America, but across the entire West.
This is very tiresome. All of your arguments have been addressed by critics of our insane immigration regime countless times over.
Selection effects exist, but the quality of immigrant from the third world is still bottom of the barrel, and selection effects will be undermined as you begin to admit more migrants from any particular country.
And we have not had mass immigration in a scenario with a massive welfare state and widespread racial preferences.
There is no defending the third world immigration regime and its dire consequences (ie the decline of first world living standards)
—the existence of a massive welfare state (and one which accommodates groups who are net drains on the public fisc. Depending on the group doesnt change with second third etc generation (eg somalis)
—widespread racial preferences and an elite culture that supports same, and promotes racial animus towards whites
—many Italians and others who couldnt hack it during the ellis island wave went back (creating a positive selection effect). Not so today, in large part due to welfare state
—the third world migrants today are lower Iq than the southern/eastern euro migrants of previous waves, and they are even more culturally distant from the anglo founding core.
In that case, would you be in favor of unrestricted immigration from people from wealthy nations (per capita GDP > $20k or any individual who can prove they are wealthy enough to not require state assistance... Say, above the asset poverty threshold?)
That would still be a major increase in legal immigration.
Exclusively importing 130IQ people will create a new ruling order within a few years. It would be a better policy to prioritize how fast someone can get citizenship based on standardized testing.
So a person who scores 1 standard deviation above the average american while having no history of crime gets fast tracked to citizenship, Naturalization based on standardized testing will automatically create a self fulfilling prophecy where Higher IQ people would go out of their way to immigrate to USA as they would get preference as compared to undergraduates of a certain degree USA is prioritizing because of lobbying.
The thing about just importing just the gifted immigrants would create an insane class divide as Highly intelligent people from poor places would flood the United States and create a ruling class extremely diverse ruling over a bunch of white proles leading to high ethnic tension, Compared to having a community of 500K thai people living in california who score on average 107 IQ because they were prioritized by standardized testing.
Surely that depends on the nature of the experiment. A few million of highly skilled immigrants who will likely wind up with above average incomes seem unlikely to me to have the kind of political effects you foresee.
1. Richard doesnt advocate limiting immigration to high skilled
2. Even among high iq immigrants, they generally harbor racial animus towards whites and left wing political preferences. For instance, they have political incentives to loosen immigration laws so as to enable their coethnics (smart or not), to enter. See indians
US Leftists vote to "extract wealth of disfavored minorities and turn every public and private sector job into a racial spoils system." Should they be deported? But you dont mention them because you are an anti-independent mind nationalist. You hate anti-independent mind Leftists. Note the similarity that you evade. Make the individual great again.
Too many confounders bro. We can't predict anything bro. RH is the kind of guy who will tell you that if your neighbours start a meth lab in their basement and set up selling it to diseased junkies on their front lawn, then ePISTEMIC hUMILITY means you have no way of predicting the likely consequences. Maybe it will economically invigorate your neighbourhood! Anyone's guess is as good as anyone else's. After this is literally the free market in action.
Yeah he is really just a malevolent force at this point.
We know average iq of each demographic. We know political preferences are sticky.
We know that humans generally take the path of least resistance, which for turd worlders will be latching onto the already-pervasive anti-white ideology and demanding spoils instead of for some inexplicable reason joining forces with western culture’s version of Emmanuel Goldstein.
We have data on immigrant use of welfare etc.
Questioning hannania’s motives at this point is wholly justified, especially as he refuses to respond to these basic arguments fatal to his theories
I used to read VDare on a daily basis, so I know where you guys are coming from. But immigration patriotism/white majoritarianism is a last ditch effort for people who've given up on ending the racial spoils system and just want to minimize its damage. What draws me to Hanania is that he actually has a ideas for defeating this thing. Why fight to make America white again when we could more easily sell our fellow Americans on overturning Griggs?
This is pretty basic stuff. We already face an uphill battle overturning griggs, and it will only become harder with demo change, and more of the voting population comprised of low performing groups who benefit from disparate impact. Im basically repeating the same thing ad infinitum, but the criticism of the anti immigration position is so unbelievably weak
Epistemic humility is simply distinguishing what you know from what you don’t. Probability also comes into play. No one would assert that the outcome of having a meth lab for a neighbor is completely unknowable. The exact way the shit show would go down might be unclear, but not exactly unpredictable that there would be some disaster. I disagree with this author on many things but I think epistemic humility is vital. The covid episode shows what happens when experts get out over their skis and know things they don’t in fact know. Worse is not knowing that you don’t know because that’s the road to blithely harming others without remorse. “Who coulda node” then becomes the cry that arises from the ignorant who were too arrogant to admit in the first place what they couldn’t have known.
What RH is saying is that we literally can't know anything about the likely effects of the single most important thing about a country, namely which people live in it, and we shouldn't even try to think about it. We should actively ignore all data and analogies past and present, in favour of lETTING tHE mARKET dECIDE. This is precisely equivalent to saying you that the influence of your neighbour's meth lab is unknowable. If anything it is stupider. This is quite literally the most insane and reckless position anyone can hold about anything.
The single most important thing about a country is individual rights, which nationalists oppose. Mans independent mind is your hidden enemy. Immigrants bring the renewal of that value rejected by US Leftists and Rightists.
The misuse of drugs is from the hatred of intellectual independence in schools.
The people who support mass immigration don't suffer from the policies they support, so they won't care. Residential segregation via assortative mating and assortative association results in elites living our other elites. They also have more options when things go south, such as moving to another country. Hanania gets cheaper nannies, pool boys, and gardeners, but none of the downsides. Why wouldn't he be for mass immigration? Most people support what's best for them, at least in the short-term.
Democracy is unlimited majority rule. Capitalism is individual rights. You evade the basic difference. If you want to live, intellectual pride is a moral virtue.
Your definition is implicitly mine except that you evade explicitly identifying the unlimited power of your elections. Democracy has no limit to govt power or policy except, as the ancient Greeks warned, mindlessly changing votes guided by power-lusting demagogues.
Capitalism is individual rights protected by GOVT. Its an ideological rejection of the anarchy resulting from democracy and leading to tyranny.
One quibble: "... most of the time industrial policy ends up being captured by special interests or based on a generic desire to do something that sounds good." It is more likely the case that it is EVERY time, but since it is impossible to actually know every case, then "virtually every" may be better. And certainly the incentive structure to use government interventions to serve the interests of private actors and the administrators themselves is, even theoretically, insurmountable over time and for most participants. An excellent book on this is Prophets of Regulation by Thomas K. McCraw. He is not especially opposed to government regulation. Nonetheless, his depiction of the founding era, in the late 19th Century, shows a belief that it was widely believed that well educated, public spirited men, could reliably make decisions for the good of the community, for example by regulating railway freight rates. It turned out that those kinds of problems are a lot harder and more complicated than they anticipated. Nonetheless, people want to believe in the idea, maybe because it is hard to understand impersonal market forces and easy to imagine a wise and good person or group making things come out the way people want. A young friend who is religiously devout was telling me that capitalist greed had ruined family life and communities, so we needed government regulation to revive these things through industrial policy. With Hayek very much in mind, I told him that a Five Year Plan would work just as badly if the commissars had crucifixes on the walls of their offices instead of portraits of Lenin and Stalin. The point was not the motives of the managers but the literal impossibility of the task. Thomas Sowell said that socialism sounds so good that people keep supporting, in defiance of an unending stream of evidence about what it actually does, and how much harm it causes. The advocacy of a regulated economy for supposedly conservative cultural ends is a subset of that attractive, perennial delusion, but with less excuse, because we now have well over a century of evidence to look at.
The myth of the good bureaucrat is still with us and I’m curious why. I suspect this has more to do with psychology than reason. But it’s perhaps the literal impossibility of central planning that needs to be emphasized.
Its the result of the free will choice to evade reason. Psychology is the effect of the free will choice to reason or evade reason. There are no innate ideas.
I don't find the rebuttal of the historical argument convincing. It's not just East Asia, nearly every major developed country, including Britain and the US used to have industrial policy in the form of tariffs on foreign goods or outright support of certain industries.
It's of course possible to argue that without such policies they would have grown even faster but it seems unlikely since we don't have any examples of such laissez faire development (almost).
So how does industrial policy (a govt gun stuck in the faces of productive people) cause production? Virtually all lived in grinding poverty for 300K years of mans existence prior to 300 years of radically increasing capitalist production. Economic statistics are relative to ideas about the cause of production. Statistics identified, selected, organized and interpreted by false ideas are not science. Even AI-guided statistics would be (very precisely) invalid relative to mans independent mind protected by individual rights. The basic cause of production is reason. Force contradicts reason. Of course, reason requires the risk of knowledge. And thats the sticking point. Industrial policy allegedly substitutes for mans independent, focused mind. Industrial policy is the economics of the unfocused mind.
I dunno, how did Nazi Germany pioneer rocket research, and how did NASA adopt said rocket researchers to produce the moon landing? How did the USSR beat us with Sputnik 1? There's nothing magic about capitalism or reason. They're both great things to have because they're motivators for men to take material from the earth and create novel and efficient innovations. But a man with a gun can be a great motivator too.
The Russians making Sputnik really disproves the theory. Granted they couldn’t make food, hammers, beds and anything else without a vast amount of Gulag slave labor...but you know...it’s just the same.
The same slave labor supported an empire that would create duopolar world in conflict with the USA for half a century despite bearing the heaviest losses in achieving victory during WW2. Any analysis of USA vs USSR economic capabilities that ignores the fact that the USA has enjoyed the greatest natural defenses in the world since its creation is an unfair one. Obviously free markets are generally superior, but they generally don't defend nations or win new territory/resources/citizens.
> The same slave labor supported an empire that would create duopolar world in conflict with the USA for half a century despite bearing the heaviest losses in achieving victory during WW2.
Soviet Marxist science was dependent on the West. Slavery is the lowest form of production. The West aided and traded w/the SU. Thats the source of their economy. But even that could not stop socialist stagnation. Free markets produce the superior tech that defend them. They are for trade, not conquest. You are immoral.
You take facts out of context, like looking at small zigzags in the movement of stock prices. Dictatorship is a short-range , anti-independent mind politics in which it is parasitic upon the independent minds in nations which respect the mind and rights. The West does not benefit from dictatorships. They benefit from it. Force contradicts mind. The Enlightenment culture of rational individualism is the second basic source of the Wests tech and prosperity. The first is Aristotles discovery of scientific method when Greece had intellectual and some political freedom. You look at little zigzags of history. Your anti-ideological Pragmatism explains no long-range trends. Capitalism and reason are values for living. Guns cause terror in which the mind cant function. The mind needs freedom. For 300K years, the gun ruled and virtually all were dirt-poor. Then came the Enlightenment and the Industrial Rev. And 300 years of increasing prosperity. Man is a rational animal, not a Rightist brute or Leftist angel. Modern culture is an attack on man.
Surely those examples prove the point? Part of why Hitler lost WW2 is that he sunk absurd levels of resources into the V2 programme, which had it been a company would been massively in the red. Even with slave labor the cost of building and firing the rockets was wildly disproportionate to the relatively limited effect they were having on Britain, and diverted resources away from more prosaic things that could have had more impact. At least that seems to be the historical consensus on the topic.
The entire world was becoming nationalized under WW2. FDR's brand of corporate statism was quite far from a free market system as well. The point regarding rockets was to refute the pseudo-religious argument that force inherently negates reason. Certainly many of the Nazis were not the smartest (it's worth remembering that the one with the highest IQ was the globalist liberal Hjalmar Schacht who was sidelined during the war) and could have used a command hierarchy to make better decisions, especially with the power of retrospection. It just so happens that FDR and Stalin probably understood power better, and certainly had far superior resources at their disposal.
>the pseudo-religious argument that force inherently negates reason.
How can a gun stuck in your face cause you to produce if the gun-holder has no knowledge of production? How, w/o his mind, would he know what orders to give you? Mindlessness is impractical. Mans life basically requires the free will choice to focus and reason. And the freedom to act. Your religious faith in force is noted.
Hitler was explicit in basing racism on intuition. And explicit in hating reason. He was influenced, indirectly, by German philosophical irrationalism. The leading
German philosopher, Kant, "denied knowledge...in order to make room for faith." Look at the German art of the 1920s and 1930s. Heidegger babbled about dread approaching and receding. Freud dismissed reason as under the control of sex. Mann flirted with death in _Magic Mountain_. It was the first modern culture. 1960s US was the second.
Great Britain for most of the 19th century was very close to the achievement of industrialization without industrial policy. I measure success by the welfare of the citizens, and the successes of Nazi Germany and the USSR were purchased at a pretty terrible price.
What successes?! Germany, too, had relative freedom from the Enlightenment. The Nazis stole and perverted German prosperity. Even Russia had some capitalism in the late 19th century. And the USSR economically collapsed in 1921, a mere four years after the Marxist Coup. The West and Japan provided aid and trade that ended the collapse. That was Lenin's New Economic Policy. And,much later, Nixon gave wheat to starving Russians, starving despite the most fertile land on the planet in Ukraine.
My point was that nearly all *industrialising* countries had industrial policy. Great Britain of course already was the #1 industrial country at the turn of 19th century.
In fact, the 19th century when they switched to free trade for the most part was not such a splendid time for the British industry as they were eventually eclipsed by the US and Germany in many important industries. I don't want to argue that this happened because of Britain not having industrial policy but still.
No, Britain maintained GDP/pp with USA right up until the end of WW2 (with a dip that recovered during WW1). Britain didn't fall behind the USA in economic power until the Labor post-war governments came in and implemented highly restrictive socialism and planned economies via massive nationalization programmes. It then fell further and further behind, eventually needing an IMF bailout. Thatcher dragged the economy back to somewhere roughly in the middle of European economies (in terms of freedom) but by then the US had built up an unconquerable lead. The post 2008 failure to grow then compounded it.
You may be right, in any case my original argument was about industrialising countries rather than industrialised ones. It's perfectly possible that free trade broadly construed is a good idea for the latter.
> nearly all *industrialising* countries had industrial policy.
Coincidence!!!!! Production is basically caused by your main enemy,mans independent mind. Nationalism and socialism are attacks on mans independent mind.
You are intellectually lost, conceptually disintegrated, in a world of coincidences without causes, careening from one arbitrarily selected statistic to another. It is a fact of common human experience, requiring no specialized knowledge, that man must focus his mind and reason to create material values. The fact that virtually all people in history have compromised on this, and sometimes reason and sometimes evade reason, is not justification for claiming, with statistics, that the unfocused mind produces food, shelter and clothing. And thus that mans life requires a "balance" of knowledge and ignorance, a balance known only to the properly "educated" philosopher-kings. Japanese and South Korean prosperity are the products of individual rights. Industrial policy is coincidental to production. Again, 300,000 years of industrial policy provided only grinding poverty, relieved only by the Capitalist Revolution created by the 18th century Enlightenment of rational individualism. Force is not potent to create positive values. Religion is wrong. Evil is not practical or powerful for mans life. Evil is evil because it is essentially destructive. Man must accept the risk of knowledge. The alternative is death.
Industrial policy is fine if you starting from nothing and want to get something (i.e., a manufacturing and industrial base). In an already developed industrial economy, it just acts as a brake to economic growth. Which, ironically, may be exactly what the cultural conservatives want, as it will slow down cultural change and also act as an inhibitor for immigrants
> Industrial policy is fine if you starting from nothing and want to get something (i.e., a manufacturing and industrial base).
Man is man in ALL contexts. He always needs to reason to produce and that always requires the freedom to guide action w/ones own mind. How do you "get something from nothing" with ignorant govt thugs instead of rationally productive people? Seances? Tea leaves? Its impossible. It has never happened. Why were virtually all people dirt-poor for 300K years prior to the Capitalist Rev of the last, maybe, 300 years?
The mind is the key to mans life. For the alternative, see Russia now. Two thug thieves fighting for power and wealth. Mans mind needs freedom from thugs.
The reality though is that the choice does not exist on an absolute scale but rather on a relative one. It doesn’t matter if country A has a perfectly free economic policy and country B has an absolutely totalitarian one. Country A just needs to have a relatively more free system than Country B in order to win out.
Agreed. Every industrial nation in the world has an industrial policy. The mix of planning with free market incentives seems to be the best solution. America was not going to become a hub of micro chip manufacturing without government intervention. The reason has nothing to do with efficiency, it just has a really high starting cost which creates a lot of risk for financial investment in that sector. Trust me, you are better off with more chip manufacturing jobs than berry picking jobs, I think that's pretty obvious.
It’s a matter of degree. Squeezing the balloon in a few places won’t make it pop but squeezing all over might. The USSR case in point and perhaps China, because they had to modify their system. It seems clear that centrally planned economies are objectively worse than emergent systems. But emergent systems like nature seem chaotic and in the midst of change produce winners and losers. It is this that the central planners seek to defeat. Even if it means less prosperity for all.
Epistemic Humility and the logic of comparative advantage make sense in a world that is dominated by external factors. It's the economy of farming tomatoes in Spain because the sun shines a lot, and trading them for fur from Novgorod.
In the Anthropocene, where general purpose technology is driving economics comparative advantage becomes less important, and human agency much more so. The computer is a Turing machine, that is to say a machine that simulates other machines. Geography or environment don't matter, they're abstracted away.
The goal of modern industrial policy is rarely micromanagement but bringing the foundations of general purpose technologies, like semiconductors back home. It's to invest into human and technological capital rather than succumbing to determinism.
Britain is so much poorer than its peers not because of industrial policy, it never had one, but because it let the market drive its economy towards financialization, just like Hong Kong. South Korea is set to overtake Japan in GDP per capita, the latter deindustrialized with the rest of Asia and the US gobbling up its supply chains. If the market is driving you away from deep human and technological capital you are not epistemically humble, you're merely giving up control, sovereignty and development because you've given up.
It makes sense *for now* to exploit those advantages. But both HK and UK or rather the City of London are pure rentier economies. Specializing in skimming some money off the top of international finance because you have great lawyers, bankers and common law is great until you lose that advantage. Which in HK for example is happening due to its political situation. And what do you do then? Name a HK company founded in the last 30 years, it's not easy. all the STEM graduates move to the mainland.
Markets and comparative advantages are like evolution, they're blind. They will run you into a local maximum without hesitation. Markets will reduce Italy into a country full of cafes, restaurants and ancient ruins that Americans can come visit. Is that great in five years, sure. In 50? Not so much if you care about being an actual country.
It's especially dangerous in a world that is turning more adversarial every year. In peaceful cooperative times specializing can make you rich. Being the best at global finance is great as long as finance stays global. What when that breaks down due to economic warfare? You have a nation full of lawyers with very little lawyering to do.
In the early 19th century the US's comparative advantage was in producing agricultural products, which it could then sell to Britain in exchange for manufactured goods. This of course was the South's economic model, which is why it preferred low tariffs. However of course the US government actually imposed high tariffs helping the US to become an industrial giant.
I.e., you can change 'what makes economic sense' via deliberate policy. Of course this does not always work (see Argentina) but in US history it seemed to. China is another example, as a result of blocking US internet companies it now has a completely homegrown tech sector. Compare with Europe which is completely dependent on the US in this sector. And focusing on comparative advantage here doesn't seem to have helped Europe (luxury handbags?) - the economic gap between the US and Europe continues to grow.
> China is another example, as a result of blocking US internet companies it now has a completely homegrown tech sector.
it produces less wealth than what would have happened w/free trade. Only the CCP benefited and, even then, only politically. Free trade is win-win. Protectionism is lose-lose. See Bastiat.
Probably true, but what if China is ultimately able to deliver similar(if inferior) economic results while also eliminating the boom/bust cycle through aggressive market control? Beyond a certain point I think it's better to not be poor than to be rich.
What if you limited your thinking to realistic possibilities? Frogs cannot sing opera.
>the boom/bust cycle
is the product of panicy govt careening back and forth between excessive and deficient counterfeiting of money and credit. The Feds own web site shows many recessions since it was created to end the 1907 recession (that govt created).
China has had the fastest growing economy for a while now. It is not in the least bit absurd to think that it will continue to grow until per-capita income is close to Europe. It may not of course, but you think it is completely impossible? That's a strong position to take.
The idea that every recession is the product of bad fed policy is just plain dumb, the fed doesn't have that much power or authority over the market. If it had the power and authority to create every recession through bad policy, then all we would need to do is get better at fed decision making and we would never have a recession again.
Show me an example of a capitalist economy that doesn't experience the boom/bust cycle? Your economic philosophy is built on a fantasy world, not reality.
Chinas economy has already slowed because of its increased statism. Production is from mans independent mind, not armed , ignorant thugs.
Agreed, recessions (or depressions) can also result from other govt controls. Eg, the 1907 Depression, to which statists responded by creating the Fed, was caused by state (ie, not federal) banking controls. This is virtually unknown to most economists but, with patience, you can trace it back thru online comments.
There is no such possible fact as good Fed policy except to decrease its activities to zero and abolish it. How can counterfeiting money and credit be good? Money and credit are the effects of production, not politics. Gold, copper, cows, etc. were so valuable on the market that they became used as methods of trade. This has been known since Menger in the late 19th century. Counterfeiting, private or govt, is theft from production. Thats why govts, properly, ban private counterfeiting. Also, Price rises are not the most destructive effect of govt counterfeiting! Counterfeiting disintegrates the markets integration of production by hiding real prices and/or encouraging business to recklessly expand merely to take advantage of a temporary "money" increase. Its virtually impossible to know when govt will stop counterfeiting. Further, counterfeiting hides the real short-range/long range market structure by hiding the real production/consumption structure. It encourages excessive production or consumption. See the two chapters on credit in Mises', _Human Action_. Also, before Alan Greenspan prostituted economics to support statism, he recognized that the Fed supports the welfare state by its indirect, hidden tax of counterfeiting.
All economies are mixed, thus boom/bust exists w/increasing long-term production. Business has learned, within a temporary limit, to work around govt economic controls. Thus,eg, increased tech increases wealth despite stagnating wages. But economists dont clearly know how to measure,eg, how smartphones, online buying,etc., and the increased longevity of cars , indirectly increase wages. Cars 50 years ago lasted 100K miles. Now its 200K and up. Exactly how does that indirectly increase wages. Mainstream public voices are ignorant of this, allowing, eg, Trump,to say the US economy is "broken."
If Antitrust was abolished and the market, not the Rightist-Leftist hatred of individual achievement , guided business combinations, how much more productive, inc/new business creation, would the economy be. Congressional conservatives ,using Marxs claim that economics is politics (see the Congressional Record), created the Fed.
Capitalism-Ayn Rand
Economics In One Easy Lesson-Henry Hazlitt; ie, the indirect, long-run
If you understood economics, you would distinguish the economics from politics. But the hidden influence of Marx, even on anti-Marixsts is too strong.
How are you so certain of that? Social trade and material trade are two very different things. When America has a gadget company and China has a competitor, they both can increase their physical labor, their extraction of the earth, their improvement of earth into gadgets, and create a win-win scenario for all players involved. When eBay is the dominant auction-house for second-hand gadget sales, when business success is a direct function of social network size, and when social network size is more-or-less zero sum (Facebook killed MySpace killed LiveJournal), it means that xiBay doesn't have a chance.
Google owns a quasi-monopoly over the control of common access to information and websites because the cost of using multiple search engines exceeds the real but marginal benefit of slightly better/more-complete search results. By China creating their own networks they can still serve the same number of customers the same information, but keep it within their own domain.
My certainty is based on mans independent focused mind, protected by individual rights. Economics is a moral science, not physics. Smith and Bastiat refuted protectionism. Each individual (or nation) should produce what it is COMPARATIVELY better at producing, ie, cost-effectively. Bastiat ridiculed protectionist effort-worship by noting that banning machines would increase (low-productivity) jobs. Nations are not a rational standard of economics. Only individuals are. You merely rationalize nationalist altruism. Sacrifice is immoral. Man has a selfish moral right to his own life.
Strictly speaking, no monopolies. only temporary market leadership constantly threatened by POTENTIAL and actual competition. Thus Alcoa kept its prices low to preserve its market leadership. This did not stop the Antitrust altruists. When Standard Oil's market share dropped from 90% to 40% because of competition, Antitrust disintegrated its business. From Christianity to Marx to todays scientific frauds, money has been regarded as supernatural, bestowing infinite economic wisdom on the wealthy. Bill Gates, zooming past IBM fools, would beg to differ. Capitalism is constant experimentation, a source of terror and immorality for end-of-history stability of Christians and Marx. The early Marxs attack on capitalism is virtually identical to that of the religious conservatives of his time. Marx even praised knw-your-own-place feudalism. And what is communism but a rationalization of the Sermon On The Mount and the Garden Of Eden?
See the essays on monopoly in Rand's, _Capitalism_.
_Abolition Of Antitrust_-Gary Hull; philosophy and economics
Agreed, I definitely generalized too much. They aren't inherently zero-sum, as a certain infamous Paul Krugman quote can remind us, but they aren't the easiest to overthrow either. What I was trying to get at is that social networks will naturally form wherever they are allowed, and that they tend to be self-sustaining above a certain threshold. China banning Google wasn't detrimental to Baidu's ability to innovate, merely the free exchange of information between the West and China.
Facebook became bigger because it came around at the same time the iPhone brought millions/billions of normies onto the internet. We can expect all massive social networks/internet companies wane with enough time, but the cause usually seems to be an underlying change in the businesses such networks serve, as opposed to out-performance and replacement. The story of Amazon is one company that expanded its focus until it eclipsed everything; not a bad thing when it means garbage (e.g. Newegg) disappears, but they don't leave much room for Amazon 2.
What we see here is that GDP kept growing for both countries at roughly equal rates up until 1878-1880 at which point US GDP explodes to go from far behind the UK to ahead of it, in the span of just two years. Does that sound plausible to you?
As for the 20th century, the USA had higher GDP/pp by 1900 but only by a small amount (they were matched up until that point)
Then a small gap opened but was small and stable until WW1 happened. British growth flatlined for obvious reasons and the gap widened further during the roaring 20s, but it was only an illusion - the Depression came, the US economy collapsed and was as rich as Britain again. That continued until the widespread destruction of WW2 and subsequent socialism of the Atlee government.
So at least the GDP/pp graph doesn't obviously follow your story of tariffs and protectionism here. It seems more like a story of (maybe) a change in how GDP data was collected by the USA, combined with two world wars and then (most damagingly) the wholesale adoption of socialist economics by the UK after the war.
I thought the British Empire was a free trade zone, more or less? Were there internal tariffs at that time, or do you mean tariffs for trade with other empires?
What's TikTok then? That's beating the American social media companies at their own game. China started out by making knock-offs of US companies like Baidu and Weibo (enabled by the govt blocking US equivalents), then started innovating for the domestic market (wechat), and now with TikTok is making something that is internationally competitive.
Saying that the Chinese have shown no ability to master the harder, more technical stuff seems a bit much. Yes they have not yes mastered advanced semiconductors. But there's no reason to believe they never can. They are rapidly moving up the value chain in cars for example and are poised to dominate the EV future.
And yes it's true that the US did have comparative advantages in industry, industrial policy can't just magic a successful industry out of nowhere. It needs to identify areas that could become competitive, but might need some protection to get them there.
The thing about right-populism is that it can win elections. Buckley’s fusionism may have worked for the Cold War era, but the old libertarian + social conservative alliance isn’t popular enough to win big anymore. Republicans have lost 7 out of the last 8 popular votes.
There are far more socially conservative/fiscally liberal voters than the reverse. What American Compass is trying to do is to have Republicans swap out libertarians for populists, which would lead to a surge of voters. https://echeloninsights.com/in-the-news/june-22-omnibus-quad-2/
As Brian Caplan said, the left is anti-market, and the right is anti-left. The average Republican voter does not care about markets. Liberals read and conservatives watch TV. It’s getting harder for the GOP to win on an economically libertarian platform. If they can’t win, they can’t change things.
Working-class White voters in dying manufacturing towns in the Rust Belt do not care about markets. Trump got a lot of their votes while professional-class Whites shifted towards Hillary and Biden.
The reason why the Right currently worships free markets so much is because of the Cold War. Because the other side was communist, being a capitalist was the most patriotic thing to do.
And I don't deny that immigration (besides Cuban and Vietnamese anticommunist refugees) has caused a lot of that shift. Yet it's too late to reverse the trend. You could deport every single illegal immigrant (who can't even vote) and their children, and still not be able to reverse the numbers. You could abolish birthright citizenship and still not reverse the trend. The GOP must adapt or die. And I'm saying this as someone sympathetic to markets.
The data support your position that the hispanic and and black vote skews democrat. But I question the immigration restriction premise as a solution.
First, not all immigrants are of these groups. For example, I know many soviet immigrants who have little regard for leftist politics. And what of the various asian immigrants?
Second, regarding hispanic and black communities, doesn't it seem that the GOP could make inroads if they were a better with their outreach and message? Virtually every poverty-stricken urban area in which blacks and hispanics reside has been controlled by Democrats for decades. Moreover, Democrats consistently stymie minority efforts to expand charter schools in these areas. Shouldn't the GOP be able to make headway with such a state of affairs?
I don’t see how this is possible. Deportations of U.S. citizens almost never happen, the only time this can happen is if a naturalized citizen is found to be a terrorist or something. It’s impossible to deport a U.S. Citizen unless they are a young child with 2 parents here illegally.
And apart from Cubans and Venezuelans that fled communism, polling shows that most Latinos in America will vote for redistributive policies. This is the hard fact the GOP must face to avoid losing future elections. If the GOP backs off extreme market libertarianism in favor of a more centrist economic policy, they can appeal to the socially conservative views of most immigrant populations.
And yes, many immigrants don’t care about immigration restriction. In fact, some of the most anti-illegal-immigration people I know are legal immigrants that spent years getting their citizenship just to hear that illegal immigrants might cut the line. The GOP can draw a clear distinction between legal and illegal immigrants and play to the anti-illegal sentiment of legal immigrants.
> As someone with a background in the social sciences, I find the idea that one can not only plan an economy, but also predict the cultural impacts of an economic policy to be absurd.
This is a bit of a non-sequitur to put it mildly! Social sciences seems utterly dominated by the casual assumption that literally anyone one might imagine can be planned by teams of 2-8 academics armed with R and a $20k grant. The worldview presented here is what Sowell calls the constrained vision and is anathema to academia. After all, if you can't plan society of what use are social scientists?
The academia of the 1700s doesn't much resemble the academia of the 21st century, does it? And I don't quite know what you mean by not having a grant. He was grant funded by a wealthy aristocrat, iirc.
This is just a reflection of the fact people's incentives are to advertise values not actually pick the best policy.
People want to signal who they care for and who they want to help. A free market solution obscures this information (maybe your doing it because you think it's best for workers but maybe you just like cheap Chinese goods or whatever). Even if other people know it's a bad policy you still manage to signal what groups you want to prioritize and damn.
So don't bother making consequentialist arguments here...it's not really relevant to why people have the view. If you told them they'd personally get to make the choice for the country you'd suddenly see different behavior.
Consumers know what they want and businesses are more able than government to figure out how to make it efficiently.
Still, Keynesian stimulus works. There are plenty of instances where aggregate demand is insufficient to support full employment, eg the great depression and most recessions. Unfettered capitalism results in horrible concentrations of wealth that lead to bad outcomes for most workers.
Government has a place in managing the macro economy, it should ensure robust demand and full employment and a reasonably egalitarian distribution of wealth, but it should not decide which goods people consume or how to make them.
you also need a degree of redistribution or else wealth will cluster at the top and there will be asset bubbles and ridiculous effort given over to luxury products
Yes. And maybe equally important, starting from an "inefficient" set of policies, redistribution can help buy assent to more efficient policies.
I also make a distention between "situational" redistribution (from the well to the sick/employed to te unemployed) from life prospects redistribution (Donald Trump/Warren Buffet to low income folks via an EITC). I favor both, but the have different policy implications
If markets and individuals are the most efficient possible way to allocate resources then why is insurance a multi billion dollar industry? Why would anyone (or any corporation) pay car insurance or any other kind of insurance when they could simply save up the money themselves? Would we be better off if the insurance industry were banned? After all, they are profiting from the lack of an individuals ability to act responsibly and understand risk. Sounds extremely inefficient to me.
Social security is no different than an insurance policy. It helps people because without it they DON'T save for retirement. We aren't programmed to be very good at determining long term risk or at planning very far into the future, something that has been demonstrated conclusively by social psychology. Ignoring our genetic programming when it comes to retirement savings is no different than how the communists willfully ignored the impact of financial incentives on individual actions. They thought that they could just tell people to work purely for the good of society and people would do it. You think if we just tell them to save money for their future selves then they will do it. Psychologists have shown that when we think of our future selves we use the same part of our brain that we use for thinking about strangers. People who are good at things like saving for retirement or working out at the gym tend to be people who structure things to make them automatic. Ways to eliminate their own personal choice because they know that the choices we will make in the moment are sub-optimal. It's why I take classes to learn things instead of just going to the library every day. I choose to restrict my own liberty because I know it will lead to a better outcome.
I don't want the government making every choice for me of course, my point is simply that you have to account for how people actually respond in the real world or your political philosophy is meaningless. People will always respond to financial incentives, which is why the free market is the most efficient way to run an economy. And people will always be bad at planning for the future which is why insurance companies and social security make people's lives more secure, which increases human happiness.
If car insurance wasn't mandatory, I wouldn't buy it. However, if I owned a Ferrari, I probably would get a lot of insurance coverage. Insurance is more about the value of the thing being insured than risk(at least for the purchaser). Sometimes insurance is a smart thing to get, and sometimes not. Forcing everyone to do the same thing to prepare for the future will guarantee that some people will not do the best thing for themselves. Any sort of mandatory insurance is, in effect, a tax on some people to subsidize everyone else. I get that you can't always escape that, but I would prefer much less of it.
What Von Mises (not Hayek - lol cringe) showed is that central planning cannot work because it cannot replace the price system. This is absolutely true. However, this is does not mean we cannot predict anything using ordinary tools of analysis. If a company discovers oil in a nature reserve and wants to start drilling, then we don't say we don't know what impact this will have on local flora and fauna and we just have to wait till the free market finds out for us. We know what impact it will have, and we also know that this impact is not included in the inputs into the price system. We have to decide whether we are going to let that happen or not and that is inevitably based on our subjective and unquantifiable subjective preference.
To take another example, we know that DDT leads to higher yields, and better quality, cheaper produce for consumers. On a free market, every farmer would use DDT or go out of business. We also know DDT is a highly dangerous poison. In theory, we could come up with some very elaborate way of plugging that information into the price system on the model of Cap and Trade, but we all know that this is not really possible so we do the obvious sane thing, and we ban it. We also recognise that someone who tried to argue for the legalisation of DDT by pointing out that central planning is impossible and appealing to ePISTEMIC hUMILITY would be, at best, a clown. When one considers for a few seconds all the externalities involved when the economic product you want to legalise the import of is a sentient human being, it is hard to have anything other than simple disgust for those who want to 'trust the market'.
The market isn’t just a price system. A farmer could easily choose not to use DDT by deciding the money he’d receive was less valuable than his health. But epistemic humility means you admit you don’t know all the externalities. In a free society you can learn and react to new information. In a centralized system, bureaucrats can’t admit there’s anything they don’t know. At this point errors compound.
We don't need to have perfect knowledge to know that the negative externalities of DDT are sufficiently great that it should be banned. Similarly, we don't need perfect knowledge to know that the externalities of importing Mexicans are sufficiently great that it should be banned.
Most systems show something like increasing costs or decreasing returns etc. So if administration were costless, one would tax rather than ban. a few low skill immigrants may be a good think and DDT may have some niche uses so that zero is not the optimum number/amount.
Oil drilling isn't all that impactful on flora/fauna, no? You need access roads and pipes but that's about it, the actual wells are very small and animals+plants can get right up to them once they're drilled and active. The market based solution would be something like, run the nature reserve as a tourist attraction and then let the owners decide how much it would impact visitor revenue to have oil wells in the park vs what can be done for nature based on concession fees. My guess is that most analysis would be strongly pro-drilling in that case, as the revenues you'd get from the oil would wildly outstrip any minor loss of visitor revenue (visitors don't really care if there are some occasional small areas surrounded by fences and pipes), and that money could then be used to buy up more land and construct more nature reserve.
No. There is no market-based solution to situations like this, Von Mises is very explicit about this. All you can do is a attach a monetary value to the damage caused and see if those who want to drill are willing to pay it. No-one can tell you your subjective valuation of a first-order good is too high or too low based on economic arguments; all they can down is get down into the nitty gritty and argue with you based on subjective reasoning. Trying to use the price system to arbitrate disputes of this nature is cargo cult stuff.
"If you believe that you have 20 extra IQ points on proponents of industrial policy, but it would take a superhuman AI to even have the possibility of doing central planning well, is that arrogance or humility?"
I'll take it a step further and posit that even a superhuman AI would not be a successful central planner. Theoretically, given the necessary information, the AI may be able to do the massively complex calculation to allocate resources that humans can't ever hope to, but the AI first must have access to the information. The most important pieces of information for planning an economy are the preferences stored within each individual's head.
You may say "We'll just ask people what their preferences are and then feed that data into the AI."
The problem is when you ask someone how much of this scarce resource they want, many will simply say "All of it."
Absent a mind-reading AI, free individuals setting prices and making decisions will remain the best way to run an economy.
Russ Roberts of Econtalk always likes to quote Hayek—"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."
This argument, which is great, is very reminiscent of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose. Ideology is the enemy of epistemic humility. We should be radically agnostic about the best way for each person to attempt to serve their self interest, and the best way to let them pursue that goal themselves is through free markets.
The umbrage I take with it is believing it compatible with democratic processes. When you give people this freedom, and some fail, by what justification can you prevent them from merely voting for “gibs?” What stops those who, in their economic freedom, decide to live large and not save for retirement simply voting to reacquisition retirement funds from others?
As Friedman says in his accompanying video on equality: “If freedom led to wider inequality, I would prefer that to a world in which I got artificial equality at the expense of freedom. My objective, my god... is freedom of individuals to pursue their own values.”
This is simply not reconcilable with allowing the losers of such a system to infringe upon others.
Your argument makes no sense. If free markets and individual choice create the best incomes, then the number of people who have no money at retirement will always be a minority. In order for them to reach a majority on redistribution they need the votes of people who were responsible and who are willing to shoulder the burden. The idea that the minority can steal something from the majority in a democracy makes no sense.
Also, there's no way to have a free market without democracy. A tyrant will always try to control everything, that control is the source of their power and they won't hold on to it very long if they allow the free market to align wealth and power to those who are most competent. They would inevitably become the biggest threats to power, which is why Xi went after Jack Ma and humiliated him. If you want to maximize individual liberty then democracy is the only show in town.
Agree with 90% of the article, but using "number of start ups" to diss Japan is kind of goofy when their rate of self-employed is close to double and their business exit rate is close to half of that of the USA (to say nothing of the technohackery that "start ups" often possess). While it is true that America still leads most of the most-important sectors, much of that is predicated on the protectionism of intellectual property law. Thankfully, China takes a freer position there.
Japan has a poorer economy if you're a GDP/nominal wealth autist, but that's because they don't have inflated rents and profiteering middlemen driving up the costs of business. Only in Japan can the popular meme anime of the season result in a rapid boom of theme cafes, orchestral tours, genre crossovers, etc, just to disappear and be replaced with the next one. Their and urban China's consumer lifestyles puts ours to shame, with thriving malls full of customers and new products/franchises/businesses, while ours are hollowed out by criminals and operated by an increasingly small number of mega-corps.
While free markets of employment have many advantages, as you've pointed out before, an ethnically homogeneous population is also the most tolerant of discrimination (a virtue for any living thinking creature). In much of Japan they don't even possess public accommodation laws, laws which contributed to the death of the Midwest in the 1960s, let alone worry about seven-figure lawsuits over employees allegedly using ethnic slurs. Japan doesn't need to hire as many janitors or security officers or insurance adjusters or DEI administrators to operate a business, and as a result you can walk into nearly any store and find valuable goods out in the open, vs America where you have to worry about being defamed or sued for keeping a close eye when a man in a hoodie walks into your business.
Their greatest inefficiency is their subsidized elder worship combined with a naturally long-lived people. Put that aside and I don't see any evidence that they are, for practical purposes, a poorer people than us.
If your gamble on immigration proves incorrect, then we will be stuck with a massive third world population in the country. They will use their political power to extract wealth of disfavored minorities and turn every public and private sector job into a racial spoils system.
We might not have sufficient data on this because few countries have tried the suicidal experiment america seems poised to embark on (1. Inviting third worlders indiscriminately 2. With a sizable welfare state, racial preferences and third wordlist as the ascendant elite ideology).
But all the data that we do have on how these people conduct themselves in their own countries, and their views of whites, tells us that your immigration gamble is not worth it.
Richard will be fine personally, so he does not care. It's clear that he feels no allegiance to any particular tribe, whether that be race, nation, religion, whatever. If America commits suicide, that simply means the nation failed in the global free market of ideas/policy. Oh well!
To be honest, part of me is sympathetic to that attitude. To quote the Joker, we get what we effing deserve.
You are missing the ocean effect. To get here one has to cross large oceans. The exception to this are immigrants from Latin America. But outside of central America, the rest of the Latin America's fertility has fallen to replacement levels or below. The excess population they exported to America is drying up.
The largest subset of Latin America immigrants are Mexicans. The stereotype about them is they are hard workers because everywhere you look you see construction gangs dominated by Hispanics. and everyone knows agricultural work is done by Hispanics. Not only that but Latins are Western in both language and religion. They will fit in as other white ethnics (which is what they are) did before.
As for the others, they necessarily have get up and go, since they got up and left. Conservatives have feared that the great unwashed would use their electoral power to appropriate the wealth of their betters for 250 years. Hasn't happened yet--top 1% income share is back to near all-time high levels.
And the last election saw a massive swing towards Republicans in minority demos.
“Hasn't happened yet--top 1% income share is back to near all-time high levels.”
Also your fixation on the 1%—a hoary old left concern with zero relevance—distorts your perception.
In corrupt third world regimes it is the middle class and upper middle class that gets shafted by horrific government services and taxes.
The uber rich can usually through connections or loopholes find a way to protect their wealth from expropriation. Leftism (which today is just third worldism) involves an alliance between a subsection of a nation’s elites and underclass clients who provide votes and who terrorize the middle class.
The Left is gone. There are two elite factions, the Mandarins, and the Capitalist Elite. Since the Mandarins are newer, they are labeled as Left and while the Capitalists have been around since the start of the country (as the Federalists).
Since the Right were originally the supporters of the King, the old Establishment, both parties are technically on the Right, while the Left has gone extinct.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-mandarins-and-capitalists
The American Democratic Party platform is identical to the center-left party platforms in Europe, except for its openness to immigration.
I don't think European and American political parties can be compared. It comes down to what the 19th century European leftists called the American exception. We have regional/cultural issues *within* our country that do not have a parallel in Europe.
For example, still extant in the American South is a Borderland culture inherited from England in the 17th century that disappeared there centuries ago.
David Shor and others argue convincingly that the real political fault line is education, and that it's a global phenomenon. Educated people are becoming more liberal, and undereducated are getting more conservative, not just in America, but across the entire West.
This is very tiresome. All of your arguments have been addressed by critics of our insane immigration regime countless times over.
Selection effects exist, but the quality of immigrant from the third world is still bottom of the barrel, and selection effects will be undermined as you begin to admit more migrants from any particular country.
And we have not had mass immigration in a scenario with a massive welfare state and widespread racial preferences.
There is no defending the third world immigration regime and its dire consequences (ie the decline of first world living standards)
The same sort of arguments were made about earlier waves of immigration. They weren't valid then, so what is different today?
Plenty is different today.
For starters:
—the existence of a massive welfare state (and one which accommodates groups who are net drains on the public fisc. Depending on the group doesnt change with second third etc generation (eg somalis)
—widespread racial preferences and an elite culture that supports same, and promotes racial animus towards whites
—many Italians and others who couldnt hack it during the ellis island wave went back (creating a positive selection effect). Not so today, in large part due to welfare state
—the third world migrants today are lower Iq than the southern/eastern euro migrants of previous waves, and they are even more culturally distant from the anglo founding core.
In that case, would you be in favor of unrestricted immigration from people from wealthy nations (per capita GDP > $20k or any individual who can prove they are wealthy enough to not require state assistance... Say, above the asset poverty threshold?)
That would still be a major increase in legal immigration.
Exclusively importing 130IQ people will create a new ruling order within a few years. It would be a better policy to prioritize how fast someone can get citizenship based on standardized testing.
So a person who scores 1 standard deviation above the average american while having no history of crime gets fast tracked to citizenship, Naturalization based on standardized testing will automatically create a self fulfilling prophecy where Higher IQ people would go out of their way to immigrate to USA as they would get preference as compared to undergraduates of a certain degree USA is prioritizing because of lobbying.
The thing about just importing just the gifted immigrants would create an insane class divide as Highly intelligent people from poor places would flood the United States and create a ruling class extremely diverse ruling over a bunch of white proles leading to high ethnic tension, Compared to having a community of 500K thai people living in california who score on average 107 IQ because they were prioritized by standardized testing.
Surely that depends on the nature of the experiment. A few million of highly skilled immigrants who will likely wind up with above average incomes seem unlikely to me to have the kind of political effects you foresee.
1. Richard doesnt advocate limiting immigration to high skilled
2. Even among high iq immigrants, they generally harbor racial animus towards whites and left wing political preferences. For instance, they have political incentives to loosen immigration laws so as to enable their coethnics (smart or not), to enter. See indians
US Leftists vote to "extract wealth of disfavored minorities and turn every public and private sector job into a racial spoils system." Should they be deported? But you dont mention them because you are an anti-independent mind nationalist. You hate anti-independent mind Leftists. Note the similarity that you evade. Make the individual great again.
Too many confounders bro. We can't predict anything bro. RH is the kind of guy who will tell you that if your neighbours start a meth lab in their basement and set up selling it to diseased junkies on their front lawn, then ePISTEMIC hUMILITY means you have no way of predicting the likely consequences. Maybe it will economically invigorate your neighbourhood! Anyone's guess is as good as anyone else's. After this is literally the free market in action.
Yeah he is really just a malevolent force at this point.
We know average iq of each demographic. We know political preferences are sticky.
We know that humans generally take the path of least resistance, which for turd worlders will be latching onto the already-pervasive anti-white ideology and demanding spoils instead of for some inexplicable reason joining forces with western culture’s version of Emmanuel Goldstein.
We have data on immigrant use of welfare etc.
Questioning hannania’s motives at this point is wholly justified, especially as he refuses to respond to these basic arguments fatal to his theories
I used to read VDare on a daily basis, so I know where you guys are coming from. But immigration patriotism/white majoritarianism is a last ditch effort for people who've given up on ending the racial spoils system and just want to minimize its damage. What draws me to Hanania is that he actually has a ideas for defeating this thing. Why fight to make America white again when we could more easily sell our fellow Americans on overturning Griggs?
This is pretty basic stuff. We already face an uphill battle overturning griggs, and it will only become harder with demo change, and more of the voting population comprised of low performing groups who benefit from disparate impact. Im basically repeating the same thing ad infinitum, but the criticism of the anti immigration position is so unbelievably weak
Epistemic humility is simply distinguishing what you know from what you don’t. Probability also comes into play. No one would assert that the outcome of having a meth lab for a neighbor is completely unknowable. The exact way the shit show would go down might be unclear, but not exactly unpredictable that there would be some disaster. I disagree with this author on many things but I think epistemic humility is vital. The covid episode shows what happens when experts get out over their skis and know things they don’t in fact know. Worse is not knowing that you don’t know because that’s the road to blithely harming others without remorse. “Who coulda node” then becomes the cry that arises from the ignorant who were too arrogant to admit in the first place what they couldn’t have known.
What RH is saying is that we literally can't know anything about the likely effects of the single most important thing about a country, namely which people live in it, and we shouldn't even try to think about it. We should actively ignore all data and analogies past and present, in favour of lETTING tHE mARKET dECIDE. This is precisely equivalent to saying you that the influence of your neighbour's meth lab is unknowable. If anything it is stupider. This is quite literally the most insane and reckless position anyone can hold about anything.
The single most important thing about a country is individual rights, which nationalists oppose. Mans independent mind is your hidden enemy. Immigrants bring the renewal of that value rejected by US Leftists and Rightists.
The misuse of drugs is from the hatred of intellectual independence in schools.
Nationalists do not oppose individual rights. That is asinine.
The people who support mass immigration don't suffer from the policies they support, so they won't care. Residential segregation via assortative mating and assortative association results in elites living our other elites. They also have more options when things go south, such as moving to another country. Hanania gets cheaper nannies, pool boys, and gardeners, but none of the downsides. Why wouldn't he be for mass immigration? Most people support what's best for them, at least in the short-term.
Democracy is unlimited majority rule. Capitalism is individual rights. You evade the basic difference. If you want to live, intellectual pride is a moral virtue.
Your definition is implicitly mine except that you evade explicitly identifying the unlimited power of your elections. Democracy has no limit to govt power or policy except, as the ancient Greeks warned, mindlessly changing votes guided by power-lusting demagogues.
Capitalism is individual rights protected by GOVT. Its an ideological rejection of the anarchy resulting from democracy and leading to tyranny.
Atlas Shrugged -Ayn Rand
Capitalism-Ayn Rand
Your post is so wildly out of context that I dont know if you agree or disagree w/me.
Immigrants have been forbidden to collect welfare since Pres. Clinton. You are a welfare conservative.
Mans independent mind is his basic means of survival. Sacrificing mind to emotions or society is self-destructive.
Excellent post.
One quibble: "... most of the time industrial policy ends up being captured by special interests or based on a generic desire to do something that sounds good." It is more likely the case that it is EVERY time, but since it is impossible to actually know every case, then "virtually every" may be better. And certainly the incentive structure to use government interventions to serve the interests of private actors and the administrators themselves is, even theoretically, insurmountable over time and for most participants. An excellent book on this is Prophets of Regulation by Thomas K. McCraw. He is not especially opposed to government regulation. Nonetheless, his depiction of the founding era, in the late 19th Century, shows a belief that it was widely believed that well educated, public spirited men, could reliably make decisions for the good of the community, for example by regulating railway freight rates. It turned out that those kinds of problems are a lot harder and more complicated than they anticipated. Nonetheless, people want to believe in the idea, maybe because it is hard to understand impersonal market forces and easy to imagine a wise and good person or group making things come out the way people want. A young friend who is religiously devout was telling me that capitalist greed had ruined family life and communities, so we needed government regulation to revive these things through industrial policy. With Hayek very much in mind, I told him that a Five Year Plan would work just as badly if the commissars had crucifixes on the walls of their offices instead of portraits of Lenin and Stalin. The point was not the motives of the managers but the literal impossibility of the task. Thomas Sowell said that socialism sounds so good that people keep supporting, in defiance of an unending stream of evidence about what it actually does, and how much harm it causes. The advocacy of a regulated economy for supposedly conservative cultural ends is a subset of that attractive, perennial delusion, but with less excuse, because we now have well over a century of evidence to look at.
The myth of the good bureaucrat is still with us and I’m curious why. I suspect this has more to do with psychology than reason. But it’s perhaps the literal impossibility of central planning that needs to be emphasized.
Its the result of the free will choice to evade reason. Psychology is the effect of the free will choice to reason or evade reason. There are no innate ideas.
I don't find the rebuttal of the historical argument convincing. It's not just East Asia, nearly every major developed country, including Britain and the US used to have industrial policy in the form of tariffs on foreign goods or outright support of certain industries.
It's of course possible to argue that without such policies they would have grown even faster but it seems unlikely since we don't have any examples of such laissez faire development (almost).
So how does industrial policy (a govt gun stuck in the faces of productive people) cause production? Virtually all lived in grinding poverty for 300K years of mans existence prior to 300 years of radically increasing capitalist production. Economic statistics are relative to ideas about the cause of production. Statistics identified, selected, organized and interpreted by false ideas are not science. Even AI-guided statistics would be (very precisely) invalid relative to mans independent mind protected by individual rights. The basic cause of production is reason. Force contradicts reason. Of course, reason requires the risk of knowledge. And thats the sticking point. Industrial policy allegedly substitutes for mans independent, focused mind. Industrial policy is the economics of the unfocused mind.
I dunno, how did Nazi Germany pioneer rocket research, and how did NASA adopt said rocket researchers to produce the moon landing? How did the USSR beat us with Sputnik 1? There's nothing magic about capitalism or reason. They're both great things to have because they're motivators for men to take material from the earth and create novel and efficient innovations. But a man with a gun can be a great motivator too.
The Russians making Sputnik really disproves the theory. Granted they couldn’t make food, hammers, beds and anything else without a vast amount of Gulag slave labor...but you know...it’s just the same.
The same slave labor supported an empire that would create duopolar world in conflict with the USA for half a century despite bearing the heaviest losses in achieving victory during WW2. Any analysis of USA vs USSR economic capabilities that ignores the fact that the USA has enjoyed the greatest natural defenses in the world since its creation is an unfair one. Obviously free markets are generally superior, but they generally don't defend nations or win new territory/resources/citizens.
> The same slave labor supported an empire that would create duopolar world in conflict with the USA for half a century despite bearing the heaviest losses in achieving victory during WW2.
Soviet Marxist science was dependent on the West. Slavery is the lowest form of production. The West aided and traded w/the SU. Thats the source of their economy. But even that could not stop socialist stagnation. Free markets produce the superior tech that defend them. They are for trade, not conquest. You are immoral.
You take facts out of context, like looking at small zigzags in the movement of stock prices. Dictatorship is a short-range , anti-independent mind politics in which it is parasitic upon the independent minds in nations which respect the mind and rights. The West does not benefit from dictatorships. They benefit from it. Force contradicts mind. The Enlightenment culture of rational individualism is the second basic source of the Wests tech and prosperity. The first is Aristotles discovery of scientific method when Greece had intellectual and some political freedom. You look at little zigzags of history. Your anti-ideological Pragmatism explains no long-range trends. Capitalism and reason are values for living. Guns cause terror in which the mind cant function. The mind needs freedom. For 300K years, the gun ruled and virtually all were dirt-poor. Then came the Enlightenment and the Industrial Rev. And 300 years of increasing prosperity. Man is a rational animal, not a Rightist brute or Leftist angel. Modern culture is an attack on man.
Surely those examples prove the point? Part of why Hitler lost WW2 is that he sunk absurd levels of resources into the V2 programme, which had it been a company would been massively in the red. Even with slave labor the cost of building and firing the rockets was wildly disproportionate to the relatively limited effect they were having on Britain, and diverted resources away from more prosaic things that could have had more impact. At least that seems to be the historical consensus on the topic.
The entire world was becoming nationalized under WW2. FDR's brand of corporate statism was quite far from a free market system as well. The point regarding rockets was to refute the pseudo-religious argument that force inherently negates reason. Certainly many of the Nazis were not the smartest (it's worth remembering that the one with the highest IQ was the globalist liberal Hjalmar Schacht who was sidelined during the war) and could have used a command hierarchy to make better decisions, especially with the power of retrospection. It just so happens that FDR and Stalin probably understood power better, and certainly had far superior resources at their disposal.
>the pseudo-religious argument that force inherently negates reason.
How can a gun stuck in your face cause you to produce if the gun-holder has no knowledge of production? How, w/o his mind, would he know what orders to give you? Mindlessness is impractical. Mans life basically requires the free will choice to focus and reason. And the freedom to act. Your religious faith in force is noted.
Hitler was explicit in basing racism on intuition. And explicit in hating reason. He was influenced, indirectly, by German philosophical irrationalism. The leading
German philosopher, Kant, "denied knowledge...in order to make room for faith." Look at the German art of the 1920s and 1930s. Heidegger babbled about dread approaching and receding. Freud dismissed reason as under the control of sex. Mann flirted with death in _Magic Mountain_. It was the first modern culture. 1960s US was the second.
Great Britain for most of the 19th century was very close to the achievement of industrialization without industrial policy. I measure success by the welfare of the citizens, and the successes of Nazi Germany and the USSR were purchased at a pretty terrible price.
What successes?! Germany, too, had relative freedom from the Enlightenment. The Nazis stole and perverted German prosperity. Even Russia had some capitalism in the late 19th century. And the USSR economically collapsed in 1921, a mere four years after the Marxist Coup. The West and Japan provided aid and trade that ended the collapse. That was Lenin's New Economic Policy. And,much later, Nixon gave wheat to starving Russians, starving despite the most fertile land on the planet in Ukraine.
And how do you measure welfare?
My point was that nearly all *industrialising* countries had industrial policy. Great Britain of course already was the #1 industrial country at the turn of 19th century.
In fact, the 19th century when they switched to free trade for the most part was not such a splendid time for the British industry as they were eventually eclipsed by the US and Germany in many important industries. I don't want to argue that this happened because of Britain not having industrial policy but still.
No, Britain maintained GDP/pp with USA right up until the end of WW2 (with a dip that recovered during WW1). Britain didn't fall behind the USA in economic power until the Labor post-war governments came in and implemented highly restrictive socialism and planned economies via massive nationalization programmes. It then fell further and further behind, eventually needing an IMF bailout. Thatcher dragged the economy back to somewhere roughly in the middle of European economies (in terms of freedom) but by then the US had built up an unconquerable lead. The post 2008 failure to grow then compounded it.
You may be right, in any case my original argument was about industrialising countries rather than industrialised ones. It's perfectly possible that free trade broadly construed is a good idea for the latter.
> nearly all *industrialising* countries had industrial policy.
Coincidence!!!!! Production is basically caused by your main enemy,mans independent mind. Nationalism and socialism are attacks on mans independent mind.
You are intellectually lost, conceptually disintegrated, in a world of coincidences without causes, careening from one arbitrarily selected statistic to another. It is a fact of common human experience, requiring no specialized knowledge, that man must focus his mind and reason to create material values. The fact that virtually all people in history have compromised on this, and sometimes reason and sometimes evade reason, is not justification for claiming, with statistics, that the unfocused mind produces food, shelter and clothing. And thus that mans life requires a "balance" of knowledge and ignorance, a balance known only to the properly "educated" philosopher-kings. Japanese and South Korean prosperity are the products of individual rights. Industrial policy is coincidental to production. Again, 300,000 years of industrial policy provided only grinding poverty, relieved only by the Capitalist Revolution created by the 18th century Enlightenment of rational individualism. Force is not potent to create positive values. Religion is wrong. Evil is not practical or powerful for mans life. Evil is evil because it is essentially destructive. Man must accept the risk of knowledge. The alternative is death.
Industrial policy is fine if you starting from nothing and want to get something (i.e., a manufacturing and industrial base). In an already developed industrial economy, it just acts as a brake to economic growth. Which, ironically, may be exactly what the cultural conservatives want, as it will slow down cultural change and also act as an inhibitor for immigrants
> Industrial policy is fine if you starting from nothing and want to get something (i.e., a manufacturing and industrial base).
Man is man in ALL contexts. He always needs to reason to produce and that always requires the freedom to guide action w/ones own mind. How do you "get something from nothing" with ignorant govt thugs instead of rationally productive people? Seances? Tea leaves? Its impossible. It has never happened. Why were virtually all people dirt-poor for 300K years prior to the Capitalist Rev of the last, maybe, 300 years?
The mind is the key to mans life. For the alternative, see Russia now. Two thug thieves fighting for power and wealth. Mans mind needs freedom from thugs.
The reality though is that the choice does not exist on an absolute scale but rather on a relative one. It doesn’t matter if country A has a perfectly free economic policy and country B has an absolutely totalitarian one. Country A just needs to have a relatively more free system than Country B in order to win out.
Agreed. Every industrial nation in the world has an industrial policy. The mix of planning with free market incentives seems to be the best solution. America was not going to become a hub of micro chip manufacturing without government intervention. The reason has nothing to do with efficiency, it just has a really high starting cost which creates a lot of risk for financial investment in that sector. Trust me, you are better off with more chip manufacturing jobs than berry picking jobs, I think that's pretty obvious.
It’s a matter of degree. Squeezing the balloon in a few places won’t make it pop but squeezing all over might. The USSR case in point and perhaps China, because they had to modify their system. It seems clear that centrally planned economies are objectively worse than emergent systems. But emergent systems like nature seem chaotic and in the midst of change produce winners and losers. It is this that the central planners seek to defeat. Even if it means less prosperity for all.
Epistemic Humility and the logic of comparative advantage make sense in a world that is dominated by external factors. It's the economy of farming tomatoes in Spain because the sun shines a lot, and trading them for fur from Novgorod.
In the Anthropocene, where general purpose technology is driving economics comparative advantage becomes less important, and human agency much more so. The computer is a Turing machine, that is to say a machine that simulates other machines. Geography or environment don't matter, they're abstracted away.
The goal of modern industrial policy is rarely micromanagement but bringing the foundations of general purpose technologies, like semiconductors back home. It's to invest into human and technological capital rather than succumbing to determinism.
Britain is so much poorer than its peers not because of industrial policy, it never had one, but because it let the market drive its economy towards financialization, just like Hong Kong. South Korea is set to overtake Japan in GDP per capita, the latter deindustrialized with the rest of Asia and the US gobbling up its supply chains. If the market is driving you away from deep human and technological capital you are not epistemically humble, you're merely giving up control, sovereignty and development because you've given up.
Incredible comment. Hope the author replies to this, hopefully a little more concretely than “we cannot know, so anything goes”.
It makes sense *for now* to exploit those advantages. But both HK and UK or rather the City of London are pure rentier economies. Specializing in skimming some money off the top of international finance because you have great lawyers, bankers and common law is great until you lose that advantage. Which in HK for example is happening due to its political situation. And what do you do then? Name a HK company founded in the last 30 years, it's not easy. all the STEM graduates move to the mainland.
Markets and comparative advantages are like evolution, they're blind. They will run you into a local maximum without hesitation. Markets will reduce Italy into a country full of cafes, restaurants and ancient ruins that Americans can come visit. Is that great in five years, sure. In 50? Not so much if you care about being an actual country.
It's especially dangerous in a world that is turning more adversarial every year. In peaceful cooperative times specializing can make you rich. Being the best at global finance is great as long as finance stays global. What when that breaks down due to economic warfare? You have a nation full of lawyers with very little lawyering to do.
In the early 19th century the US's comparative advantage was in producing agricultural products, which it could then sell to Britain in exchange for manufactured goods. This of course was the South's economic model, which is why it preferred low tariffs. However of course the US government actually imposed high tariffs helping the US to become an industrial giant.
I.e., you can change 'what makes economic sense' via deliberate policy. Of course this does not always work (see Argentina) but in US history it seemed to. China is another example, as a result of blocking US internet companies it now has a completely homegrown tech sector. Compare with Europe which is completely dependent on the US in this sector. And focusing on comparative advantage here doesn't seem to have helped Europe (luxury handbags?) - the economic gap between the US and Europe continues to grow.
> China is another example, as a result of blocking US internet companies it now has a completely homegrown tech sector.
it produces less wealth than what would have happened w/free trade. Only the CCP benefited and, even then, only politically. Free trade is win-win. Protectionism is lose-lose. See Bastiat.
Probably true, but what if China is ultimately able to deliver similar(if inferior) economic results while also eliminating the boom/bust cycle through aggressive market control? Beyond a certain point I think it's better to not be poor than to be rich.
>what if China
What if you limited your thinking to realistic possibilities? Frogs cannot sing opera.
>the boom/bust cycle
is the product of panicy govt careening back and forth between excessive and deficient counterfeiting of money and credit. The Feds own web site shows many recessions since it was created to end the 1907 recession (that govt created).
China has had the fastest growing economy for a while now. It is not in the least bit absurd to think that it will continue to grow until per-capita income is close to Europe. It may not of course, but you think it is completely impossible? That's a strong position to take.
The idea that every recession is the product of bad fed policy is just plain dumb, the fed doesn't have that much power or authority over the market. If it had the power and authority to create every recession through bad policy, then all we would need to do is get better at fed decision making and we would never have a recession again.
Show me an example of a capitalist economy that doesn't experience the boom/bust cycle? Your economic philosophy is built on a fantasy world, not reality.
Chinas economy has already slowed because of its increased statism. Production is from mans independent mind, not armed , ignorant thugs.
Agreed, recessions (or depressions) can also result from other govt controls. Eg, the 1907 Depression, to which statists responded by creating the Fed, was caused by state (ie, not federal) banking controls. This is virtually unknown to most economists but, with patience, you can trace it back thru online comments.
There is no such possible fact as good Fed policy except to decrease its activities to zero and abolish it. How can counterfeiting money and credit be good? Money and credit are the effects of production, not politics. Gold, copper, cows, etc. were so valuable on the market that they became used as methods of trade. This has been known since Menger in the late 19th century. Counterfeiting, private or govt, is theft from production. Thats why govts, properly, ban private counterfeiting. Also, Price rises are not the most destructive effect of govt counterfeiting! Counterfeiting disintegrates the markets integration of production by hiding real prices and/or encouraging business to recklessly expand merely to take advantage of a temporary "money" increase. Its virtually impossible to know when govt will stop counterfeiting. Further, counterfeiting hides the real short-range/long range market structure by hiding the real production/consumption structure. It encourages excessive production or consumption. See the two chapters on credit in Mises', _Human Action_. Also, before Alan Greenspan prostituted economics to support statism, he recognized that the Fed supports the welfare state by its indirect, hidden tax of counterfeiting.
All economies are mixed, thus boom/bust exists w/increasing long-term production. Business has learned, within a temporary limit, to work around govt economic controls. Thus,eg, increased tech increases wealth despite stagnating wages. But economists dont clearly know how to measure,eg, how smartphones, online buying,etc., and the increased longevity of cars , indirectly increase wages. Cars 50 years ago lasted 100K miles. Now its 200K and up. Exactly how does that indirectly increase wages. Mainstream public voices are ignorant of this, allowing, eg, Trump,to say the US economy is "broken."
If Antitrust was abolished and the market, not the Rightist-Leftist hatred of individual achievement , guided business combinations, how much more productive, inc/new business creation, would the economy be. Congressional conservatives ,using Marxs claim that economics is politics (see the Congressional Record), created the Fed.
Capitalism-Ayn Rand
Economics In One Easy Lesson-Henry Hazlitt; ie, the indirect, long-run
If you understood economics, you would distinguish the economics from politics. But the hidden influence of Marx, even on anti-Marixsts is too strong.
How are you so certain of that? Social trade and material trade are two very different things. When America has a gadget company and China has a competitor, they both can increase their physical labor, their extraction of the earth, their improvement of earth into gadgets, and create a win-win scenario for all players involved. When eBay is the dominant auction-house for second-hand gadget sales, when business success is a direct function of social network size, and when social network size is more-or-less zero sum (Facebook killed MySpace killed LiveJournal), it means that xiBay doesn't have a chance.
Google owns a quasi-monopoly over the control of common access to information and websites because the cost of using multiple search engines exceeds the real but marginal benefit of slightly better/more-complete search results. By China creating their own networks they can still serve the same number of customers the same information, but keep it within their own domain.
My certainty is based on mans independent focused mind, protected by individual rights. Economics is a moral science, not physics. Smith and Bastiat refuted protectionism. Each individual (or nation) should produce what it is COMPARATIVELY better at producing, ie, cost-effectively. Bastiat ridiculed protectionist effort-worship by noting that banning machines would increase (low-productivity) jobs. Nations are not a rational standard of economics. Only individuals are. You merely rationalize nationalist altruism. Sacrifice is immoral. Man has a selfish moral right to his own life.
> There are no permanent monopolies in business.
Strictly speaking, no monopolies. only temporary market leadership constantly threatened by POTENTIAL and actual competition. Thus Alcoa kept its prices low to preserve its market leadership. This did not stop the Antitrust altruists. When Standard Oil's market share dropped from 90% to 40% because of competition, Antitrust disintegrated its business. From Christianity to Marx to todays scientific frauds, money has been regarded as supernatural, bestowing infinite economic wisdom on the wealthy. Bill Gates, zooming past IBM fools, would beg to differ. Capitalism is constant experimentation, a source of terror and immorality for end-of-history stability of Christians and Marx. The early Marxs attack on capitalism is virtually identical to that of the religious conservatives of his time. Marx even praised knw-your-own-place feudalism. And what is communism but a rationalization of the Sermon On The Mount and the Garden Of Eden?
See the essays on monopoly in Rand's, _Capitalism_.
_Abolition Of Antitrust_-Gary Hull; philosophy and economics
Agreed, I definitely generalized too much. They aren't inherently zero-sum, as a certain infamous Paul Krugman quote can remind us, but they aren't the easiest to overthrow either. What I was trying to get at is that social networks will naturally form wherever they are allowed, and that they tend to be self-sustaining above a certain threshold. China banning Google wasn't detrimental to Baidu's ability to innovate, merely the free exchange of information between the West and China.
Facebook became bigger because it came around at the same time the iPhone brought millions/billions of normies onto the internet. We can expect all massive social networks/internet companies wane with enough time, but the cause usually seems to be an underlying change in the businesses such networks serve, as opposed to out-performance and replacement. The story of Amazon is one company that expanded its focus until it eclipsed everything; not a bad thing when it means garbage (e.g. Newegg) disappears, but they don't leave much room for Amazon 2.
Agreed. There are thousands of examples of industrial policy decisions leading to better economic outcomes. Richards position here seems pretty lazy.
Are you sure about that? Using OWID data, it looks more like maybe there was a methodology change in terms of how GDP was computed in the late 1800s.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2020?tab=chart&time=1803..1899&country=USA~GBR
What we see here is that GDP kept growing for both countries at roughly equal rates up until 1878-1880 at which point US GDP explodes to go from far behind the UK to ahead of it, in the span of just two years. Does that sound plausible to you?
As for the 20th century, the USA had higher GDP/pp by 1900 but only by a small amount (they were matched up until that point)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2020?tab=chart&time=1873..2018&country=USA~GBR
Then a small gap opened but was small and stable until WW1 happened. British growth flatlined for obvious reasons and the gap widened further during the roaring 20s, but it was only an illusion - the Depression came, the US economy collapsed and was as rich as Britain again. That continued until the widespread destruction of WW2 and subsequent socialism of the Atlee government.
So at least the GDP/pp graph doesn't obviously follow your story of tariffs and protectionism here. It seems more like a story of (maybe) a change in how GDP data was collected by the USA, combined with two world wars and then (most damagingly) the wholesale adoption of socialist economics by the UK after the war.
I thought the British Empire was a free trade zone, more or less? Were there internal tariffs at that time, or do you mean tariffs for trade with other empires?
What's TikTok then? That's beating the American social media companies at their own game. China started out by making knock-offs of US companies like Baidu and Weibo (enabled by the govt blocking US equivalents), then started innovating for the domestic market (wechat), and now with TikTok is making something that is internationally competitive.
Saying that the Chinese have shown no ability to master the harder, more technical stuff seems a bit much. Yes they have not yes mastered advanced semiconductors. But there's no reason to believe they never can. They are rapidly moving up the value chain in cars for example and are poised to dominate the EV future.
And yes it's true that the US did have comparative advantages in industry, industrial policy can't just magic a successful industry out of nowhere. It needs to identify areas that could become competitive, but might need some protection to get them there.
The thing about right-populism is that it can win elections. Buckley’s fusionism may have worked for the Cold War era, but the old libertarian + social conservative alliance isn’t popular enough to win big anymore. Republicans have lost 7 out of the last 8 popular votes.
There are far more socially conservative/fiscally liberal voters than the reverse. What American Compass is trying to do is to have Republicans swap out libertarians for populists, which would lead to a surge of voters. https://echeloninsights.com/in-the-news/june-22-omnibus-quad-2/
As Brian Caplan said, the left is anti-market, and the right is anti-left. The average Republican voter does not care about markets. Liberals read and conservatives watch TV. It’s getting harder for the GOP to win on an economically libertarian platform. If they can’t win, they can’t change things.
Working-class White voters in dying manufacturing towns in the Rust Belt do not care about markets. Trump got a lot of their votes while professional-class Whites shifted towards Hillary and Biden.
The reason why the Right currently worships free markets so much is because of the Cold War. Because the other side was communist, being a capitalist was the most patriotic thing to do.
And I don't deny that immigration (besides Cuban and Vietnamese anticommunist refugees) has caused a lot of that shift. Yet it's too late to reverse the trend. You could deport every single illegal immigrant (who can't even vote) and their children, and still not be able to reverse the numbers. You could abolish birthright citizenship and still not reverse the trend. The GOP must adapt or die. And I'm saying this as someone sympathetic to markets.
The data support your position that the hispanic and and black vote skews democrat. But I question the immigration restriction premise as a solution.
First, not all immigrants are of these groups. For example, I know many soviet immigrants who have little regard for leftist politics. And what of the various asian immigrants?
Second, regarding hispanic and black communities, doesn't it seem that the GOP could make inroads if they were a better with their outreach and message? Virtually every poverty-stricken urban area in which blacks and hispanics reside has been controlled by Democrats for decades. Moreover, Democrats consistently stymie minority efforts to expand charter schools in these areas. Shouldn't the GOP be able to make headway with such a state of affairs?
“Obviously we can deport anyone we want”.
I don’t see how this is possible. Deportations of U.S. citizens almost never happen, the only time this can happen is if a naturalized citizen is found to be a terrorist or something. It’s impossible to deport a U.S. Citizen unless they are a young child with 2 parents here illegally.
And apart from Cubans and Venezuelans that fled communism, polling shows that most Latinos in America will vote for redistributive policies. This is the hard fact the GOP must face to avoid losing future elections. If the GOP backs off extreme market libertarianism in favor of a more centrist economic policy, they can appeal to the socially conservative views of most immigrant populations.
And yes, many immigrants don’t care about immigration restriction. In fact, some of the most anti-illegal-immigration people I know are legal immigrants that spent years getting their citizenship just to hear that illegal immigrants might cut the line. The GOP can draw a clear distinction between legal and illegal immigrants and play to the anti-illegal sentiment of legal immigrants.
> As someone with a background in the social sciences, I find the idea that one can not only plan an economy, but also predict the cultural impacts of an economic policy to be absurd.
This is a bit of a non-sequitur to put it mildly! Social sciences seems utterly dominated by the casual assumption that literally anyone one might imagine can be planned by teams of 2-8 academics armed with R and a $20k grant. The worldview presented here is what Sowell calls the constrained vision and is anathema to academia. After all, if you can't plan society of what use are social scientists?
Maybe help solve problems on the margin?
Adam Smith was an academic who wrote The Wealth of Nations all by himself, and without much data or a computer, much less a $20k grant. What hubris.
The academia of the 1700s doesn't much resemble the academia of the 21st century, does it? And I don't quite know what you mean by not having a grant. He was grant funded by a wealthy aristocrat, iirc.
This is just a reflection of the fact people's incentives are to advertise values not actually pick the best policy.
People want to signal who they care for and who they want to help. A free market solution obscures this information (maybe your doing it because you think it's best for workers but maybe you just like cheap Chinese goods or whatever). Even if other people know it's a bad policy you still manage to signal what groups you want to prioritize and damn.
So don't bother making consequentialist arguments here...it's not really relevant to why people have the view. If you told them they'd personally get to make the choice for the country you'd suddenly see different behavior.
Consumers know what they want and businesses are more able than government to figure out how to make it efficiently.
Still, Keynesian stimulus works. There are plenty of instances where aggregate demand is insufficient to support full employment, eg the great depression and most recessions. Unfettered capitalism results in horrible concentrations of wealth that lead to bad outcomes for most workers.
Government has a place in managing the macro economy, it should ensure robust demand and full employment and a reasonably egalitarian distribution of wealth, but it should not decide which goods people consume or how to make them.
I agree with he caveat that the _part_ of government that should manage the macroeconomy is the Fed, not the lumbering Congress/Executive
you also need a degree of redistribution or else wealth will cluster at the top and there will be asset bubbles and ridiculous effort given over to luxury products
Yes. And maybe equally important, starting from an "inefficient" set of policies, redistribution can help buy assent to more efficient policies.
I also make a distention between "situational" redistribution (from the well to the sick/employed to te unemployed) from life prospects redistribution (Donald Trump/Warren Buffet to low income folks via an EITC). I favor both, but the have different policy implications
Your Keynesian “solutions” cause the asset bubbles you speak of.
If markets and individuals are the most efficient possible way to allocate resources then why is insurance a multi billion dollar industry? Why would anyone (or any corporation) pay car insurance or any other kind of insurance when they could simply save up the money themselves? Would we be better off if the insurance industry were banned? After all, they are profiting from the lack of an individuals ability to act responsibly and understand risk. Sounds extremely inefficient to me.
Social security is no different than an insurance policy. It helps people because without it they DON'T save for retirement. We aren't programmed to be very good at determining long term risk or at planning very far into the future, something that has been demonstrated conclusively by social psychology. Ignoring our genetic programming when it comes to retirement savings is no different than how the communists willfully ignored the impact of financial incentives on individual actions. They thought that they could just tell people to work purely for the good of society and people would do it. You think if we just tell them to save money for their future selves then they will do it. Psychologists have shown that when we think of our future selves we use the same part of our brain that we use for thinking about strangers. People who are good at things like saving for retirement or working out at the gym tend to be people who structure things to make them automatic. Ways to eliminate their own personal choice because they know that the choices we will make in the moment are sub-optimal. It's why I take classes to learn things instead of just going to the library every day. I choose to restrict my own liberty because I know it will lead to a better outcome.
I don't want the government making every choice for me of course, my point is simply that you have to account for how people actually respond in the real world or your political philosophy is meaningless. People will always respond to financial incentives, which is why the free market is the most efficient way to run an economy. And people will always be bad at planning for the future which is why insurance companies and social security make people's lives more secure, which increases human happiness.
If car insurance wasn't mandatory, I wouldn't buy it. However, if I owned a Ferrari, I probably would get a lot of insurance coverage. Insurance is more about the value of the thing being insured than risk(at least for the purchaser). Sometimes insurance is a smart thing to get, and sometimes not. Forcing everyone to do the same thing to prepare for the future will guarantee that some people will not do the best thing for themselves. Any sort of mandatory insurance is, in effect, a tax on some people to subsidize everyone else. I get that you can't always escape that, but I would prefer much less of it.
This essay has the potential to humble most central planners that have some sensibleness left.
And if someone wants to humble themselves even more read Hayek’s essay [The Use of Knowledge in Society](https://fee.org/articles/the-use-of-knowledge-in-society/).
What Von Mises (not Hayek - lol cringe) showed is that central planning cannot work because it cannot replace the price system. This is absolutely true. However, this is does not mean we cannot predict anything using ordinary tools of analysis. If a company discovers oil in a nature reserve and wants to start drilling, then we don't say we don't know what impact this will have on local flora and fauna and we just have to wait till the free market finds out for us. We know what impact it will have, and we also know that this impact is not included in the inputs into the price system. We have to decide whether we are going to let that happen or not and that is inevitably based on our subjective and unquantifiable subjective preference.
To take another example, we know that DDT leads to higher yields, and better quality, cheaper produce for consumers. On a free market, every farmer would use DDT or go out of business. We also know DDT is a highly dangerous poison. In theory, we could come up with some very elaborate way of plugging that information into the price system on the model of Cap and Trade, but we all know that this is not really possible so we do the obvious sane thing, and we ban it. We also recognise that someone who tried to argue for the legalisation of DDT by pointing out that central planning is impossible and appealing to ePISTEMIC hUMILITY would be, at best, a clown. When one considers for a few seconds all the externalities involved when the economic product you want to legalise the import of is a sentient human being, it is hard to have anything other than simple disgust for those who want to 'trust the market'.
The market isn’t just a price system. A farmer could easily choose not to use DDT by deciding the money he’d receive was less valuable than his health. But epistemic humility means you admit you don’t know all the externalities. In a free society you can learn and react to new information. In a centralized system, bureaucrats can’t admit there’s anything they don’t know. At this point errors compound.
We don't need to have perfect knowledge to know that the negative externalities of DDT are sufficiently great that it should be banned. Similarly, we don't need perfect knowledge to know that the externalities of importing Mexicans are sufficiently great that it should be banned.
Most systems show something like increasing costs or decreasing returns etc. So if administration were costless, one would tax rather than ban. a few low skill immigrants may be a good think and DDT may have some niche uses so that zero is not the optimum number/amount.
Oil drilling isn't all that impactful on flora/fauna, no? You need access roads and pipes but that's about it, the actual wells are very small and animals+plants can get right up to them once they're drilled and active. The market based solution would be something like, run the nature reserve as a tourist attraction and then let the owners decide how much it would impact visitor revenue to have oil wells in the park vs what can be done for nature based on concession fees. My guess is that most analysis would be strongly pro-drilling in that case, as the revenues you'd get from the oil would wildly outstrip any minor loss of visitor revenue (visitors don't really care if there are some occasional small areas surrounded by fences and pipes), and that money could then be used to buy up more land and construct more nature reserve.
No. There is no market-based solution to situations like this, Von Mises is very explicit about this. All you can do is a attach a monetary value to the damage caused and see if those who want to drill are willing to pay it. No-one can tell you your subjective valuation of a first-order good is too high or too low based on economic arguments; all they can down is get down into the nitty gritty and argue with you based on subjective reasoning. Trying to use the price system to arbitrate disputes of this nature is cargo cult stuff.
"If you believe that you have 20 extra IQ points on proponents of industrial policy, but it would take a superhuman AI to even have the possibility of doing central planning well, is that arrogance or humility?"
I'll take it a step further and posit that even a superhuman AI would not be a successful central planner. Theoretically, given the necessary information, the AI may be able to do the massively complex calculation to allocate resources that humans can't ever hope to, but the AI first must have access to the information. The most important pieces of information for planning an economy are the preferences stored within each individual's head.
You may say "We'll just ask people what their preferences are and then feed that data into the AI."
The problem is when you ask someone how much of this scarce resource they want, many will simply say "All of it."
Absent a mind-reading AI, free individuals setting prices and making decisions will remain the best way to run an economy.
Emergent systems are much more efficient. Ask nature.
Russ Roberts of Econtalk always likes to quote Hayek—"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."
This argument, which is great, is very reminiscent of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose. Ideology is the enemy of epistemic humility. We should be radically agnostic about the best way for each person to attempt to serve their self interest, and the best way to let them pursue that goal themselves is through free markets.
The umbrage I take with it is believing it compatible with democratic processes. When you give people this freedom, and some fail, by what justification can you prevent them from merely voting for “gibs?” What stops those who, in their economic freedom, decide to live large and not save for retirement simply voting to reacquisition retirement funds from others?
As Friedman says in his accompanying video on equality: “If freedom led to wider inequality, I would prefer that to a world in which I got artificial equality at the expense of freedom. My objective, my god... is freedom of individuals to pursue their own values.”
This is simply not reconcilable with allowing the losers of such a system to infringe upon others.
Your argument makes no sense. If free markets and individual choice create the best incomes, then the number of people who have no money at retirement will always be a minority. In order for them to reach a majority on redistribution they need the votes of people who were responsible and who are willing to shoulder the burden. The idea that the minority can steal something from the majority in a democracy makes no sense.
Also, there's no way to have a free market without democracy. A tyrant will always try to control everything, that control is the source of their power and they won't hold on to it very long if they allow the free market to align wealth and power to those who are most competent. They would inevitably become the biggest threats to power, which is why Xi went after Jack Ma and humiliated him. If you want to maximize individual liberty then democracy is the only show in town.
Agree with 90% of the article, but using "number of start ups" to diss Japan is kind of goofy when their rate of self-employed is close to double and their business exit rate is close to half of that of the USA (to say nothing of the technohackery that "start ups" often possess). While it is true that America still leads most of the most-important sectors, much of that is predicated on the protectionism of intellectual property law. Thankfully, China takes a freer position there.
Japan has a poorer economy if you're a GDP/nominal wealth autist, but that's because they don't have inflated rents and profiteering middlemen driving up the costs of business. Only in Japan can the popular meme anime of the season result in a rapid boom of theme cafes, orchestral tours, genre crossovers, etc, just to disappear and be replaced with the next one. Their and urban China's consumer lifestyles puts ours to shame, with thriving malls full of customers and new products/franchises/businesses, while ours are hollowed out by criminals and operated by an increasingly small number of mega-corps.
While free markets of employment have many advantages, as you've pointed out before, an ethnically homogeneous population is also the most tolerant of discrimination (a virtue for any living thinking creature). In much of Japan they don't even possess public accommodation laws, laws which contributed to the death of the Midwest in the 1960s, let alone worry about seven-figure lawsuits over employees allegedly using ethnic slurs. Japan doesn't need to hire as many janitors or security officers or insurance adjusters or DEI administrators to operate a business, and as a result you can walk into nearly any store and find valuable goods out in the open, vs America where you have to worry about being defamed or sued for keeping a close eye when a man in a hoodie walks into your business.
Their greatest inefficiency is their subsidized elder worship combined with a naturally long-lived people. Put that aside and I don't see any evidence that they are, for practical purposes, a poorer people than us.