First of all, your AI picture made me laugh out loud.
"Going abroad and dying for Ukraine would indicate physical courage, broad horizons, and a generosity of spirit."
So, uh, you're enlisting, right? ;)
I'm sympathetic to Ukraine over Russia as well, but I don't think you're going to get Americans to give them much more. People tend to get 'war fatigue' after a while, which you saw with many of our other wars--WW1, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq II. Of course there are exceptions--the Civil War was in our backyard, and Hitler was a more convincingly dangerous threat than Putin. Seriously, I think the country's developed a serious exhaustion with war. A lot of blue-collar people watched their kids go off to war and come back dead or with nasty injuries, including a lot of brain injuries that made them seriously messed up behaviorally. (There's some new evidence this is a result of brain damage from heavy ordnance explosions rather than any weakness of character.) I don't think you're going to get anyone to send their kids over, least of all with a draft. I get the 'external enemies remove a lot of the internal fighting' bit, but I don't think that's an option for the USA here. War isn't going to be useful as a uniting factor unless the USA is genuinely threatened, and we haven't seen Putin invade Poland, much less Pennsylvania.
Since Trump can be bought, he was bought. And it is clear that the autocratic side of the equation is not above buying. "If he loved Ukraine" would work about as well as "if he wanted to ban TikTok", which held right up until a suspicious meeting with a billionaire with Chinese ties.
Oh that I agree on; if he wanted to support South Sudan we'd hear all the MAGA people talking about how great they are. But does that mean we should really be sending *troops* there, as 'Americans should die for Ukraine' seems to imply?
I agree war can eliminate a lot of internal divisions. But I think we'd get further worrying about Chinese spying, say, rather than Ukraine. The war over there's been going on for a while, the Ukrainians are starting to lose, and I doubt you are going to get any kind of uniting behind them (unless as you say Trump gets involved, which seems less likely).
(Honestly my biggest worry there is the effect on Chinese-Americans, whose conduct, apart from a small handful of spies, has generally been exemplary.)
Also, if you're any kind of a libertarian, 'war is the health of the state'--war tends to be used as an excuse for cracking down on free speech and civil liberties (most prominently the draft in prior years). I could easily see some future Democratic administration using 'Russian disinformation' as an excuse to go after people they don't like.
People also signed up, though in rather smaller per capita numbers, for WW1. One of my grandfathers** among them in July 1917, although there is nobody left to ask what his stated rationale might have been.
** other grandfather was career, first signed up 1913.
The US didn't join WW2 because Hitler seemed like a more convincing threat than Putin, it joined because it was directly attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor, and Germany then declared war against it. The US joined because it was forced to join.
Up until that point, it was not unlike with Ukraine today. There was some elite political consensus in favour of supporting the Allies with military aid, and putting diplomatic sanctions on the Axis, but a populist opposition to getting too deeply entangled in another European war, even well into Germany's take over of it's neighbors. There were even contemperanious versions of Tucker Carlson like Charles Lindbergh who tried to convince the public that not only was getting involved bad, but if anything they should be trying to side wittb Hitler.
There were widespread conspiracy theories (which still persist to an extent) that Pearl Harbour was an inside job by FDR to drum up support for entering the war. Without question, if Russia or China attacked the US preemptively today we would see the same.
I think you underestimate the cost to America of the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq. The destruction and chaos brought to those countries and their neighbors was immense. We are still suffering the political and economic fallout of those wars, as well as, of course, the loss of our own soldiers lives. Those wars caused a lot of the shame and self doubt underlying both the isolationism and wokeism in our politics today. They also provided a major opening for China to push its model of non-interventionism.
The "costs" of Iraq and Afghanistan were almost entirely self-inflicted. The pro-hereditarian paleocons were right about a number of things the Bushies refused to accept, but a mostly stable situation in both countries was attained by the time of the end of 43, all at extremely minor troop casualties to our all-volunteer military.
Obama deliberately chose to sabotage this for the sake of improved relations with both Russia and especially Iran, and continued the policy with Biden, much the same as Nixon did with his surrender to Red Vietnam and Red China. Obama was rewarded the same way Nixon was:
Are the Middle East and the US better off after the Iraq War? Does Iran have more or less influence than it did before the war? Is Iraq more stable?
Are Afghanistan and the US better off after that war? Sure, we eliminated Bin Laden, but we stuck around for almost 20 years and ended up arming the same group we had kicked out in the beginning and doing that after expending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. All our calculus, in my opinion, needs to include not just American lives but those of our allies, neutrals and those who otherwise might not have been our enemies had we not been in their country.
As for China, do you think that our years and trillions spent fighting small enemies strengthened our position vis-a-vis China and strengthened or weakened the pro-Western elements inside China?
I ain't no Einstein but to me your well-taken point referencing the truly costly if under-appraised Daddy Warbucks debacles to US treasure (not much cost to Canada or Mexico our continental partners in crime) can be nearly as elegantly formulated as BFTM (Bringing Fentanyl to Masses) = Iran-Contra War + Afghanistan Poppie Syrup + Iraqi Oil Supply lanes + Sackler Big Pharma Opioid Distribution Logistics Partner McKinsey squared + Nugan Hand Bank....
Only the Fentanyl is new. The rest was chronicled well by an undersung even mainstream journalist named Jonathan Kwitny in his muck-raking masterpiece The Crimes of Patriots:
It seems as though Richard Hanania as well as the neoliberals have jumped the shark. There are simply too many ridiculous statements in this post to even call them out.
To just touch on one which is really the crux of the argument is that the given "4 part syllogism" which is not then a syllogism, but a deductive line of reasoning including either two major or 2 minor premises wherein #2 is either blatantly false or at the very least, unprovable.
Concomitantly, #3 and #4 are also not true and the entire base for the argument is null.
Secondly, while I am no Trump loyalist, nobody can with a straight face deny that the "deep state" (really a term for the neoliberal consensus of both major parties since Reagan) are out to get Trump by any means necessary.
If that were true, then he would have been impeached (and convicted), and he wouldn't be running.
The idea that elites find Trump threatening and want him to lose is obvious. He is threatening, and if given his druthers, would have overthrown an election he lost.
It blows my mind when people are like "the media and elite establishment is biased against Trump!' No shit. They should be. It would be crazy for them not to be. He's that dumb, impulsive, and doesn't believe in fair election results. However, pretending there is some 'plot' to get him is dumb. If there was, he'd be out.
The system didn’t see much of a problem in having an elderly dementia patient occupying the White House for 4 years, and the media had no issue gaslighting the public into ignoring what their lying eyes were telling them. Surely having a man who often gets confused as to where he is as the commander in chief of the most powerful military in human history is similarly concerning?
Also you are simply making an unfounded assertion that if there was some plot against Trump, it would have been guaranteed to succeed. The burden of proof is on you to show why that is.
No, the burden is on the one suggesting the plot. Jesus, is this your first day thinking? The mere fact he suggests a plot without proof (and despite proof to the contrary, such as two failed impeachments) is dumb enough.
If the so-called deep state is out to get him by "any means necessary", and they are so powerful, why is he a coin-toss away from being president again? Why hasn't he been jailed, barred from running for office again, locked out of the Republican party, or killed? As Trump supporters tell it, the system is so corrupt and lacking in any scruples that these should all have been easy to do, and yet none of them have. The most they've managed to do as far as I can tell is open some legal cases against him which were never going to resolve before the election, attempt to take him off the ballot in one entirely uncompetitive state, and if you want to get really kooky, send a deranged teenager with a shaky aim to shoot at him.
Instead, pretty substantial portions of the membership of our political institutions (politicians, courts, media, donors, activists etc.) are not only NOT trying to stop Trump, but are actively supporting him.
>Maybe it needs to expand into Syria after defeating the Palestinians to avoid decadence, as it’s not like the government there has any legitimacy or good reason to exist. One problem at a time.
is this like a tic where you have to put one at least one completely outrageous take in your posts to boost engagement? it certainly worked on me right now.
They do. Historically "statists" and "communists" have been their enemy. This was more powerful during the Cold War, of course, when communists were a real threat.
I know libertarians frame those groups as the enemy - but why doesn’t it work? Hanania seems to think libertarians remain marginal due to an insufficient enemy.
In a democratic society like ours, politicians are elected by voters, so you must blame the voters for electing politicians who pursue bad policies, and they pursue such policies because they're popular with so many voters. Pursue a political campaign denouncing the majority of voters, and you will probably lose.
It doesn't work as well today mostly because of the nature of the enemy, which is an important consideration Hanania could touch on more. Historic libertarian enemies aren't as powerful or clear or embodied. The Marvel story doesn't map quite as easily on today's realities. We no longer live in a world defined by communism versus the free world.
Probably because it completely overlooks how fundamental social interdependence is to the human condition. We can sympathize at least in theory with communism, because the idea that all of humanity is one tribe, and we all protect and provide for one another is very appealing. The idea that we can form any type of society where nobody has any type of unbreakable social responsibility to each other is farcical.
Humans can and have often lived in tribes that were loosely communist. It breaks down after you get to a group of more than a few dozen, but it can at least be done. Humans have never, ever, successfully built a society of even a few dozen people who had strictly libertarian relationships.
That's why women are so repelled by libertarianism. A pregnant woman cannot live in the middle of the wilderness by herself, and obviously the bond between her and a totally helpless child cannot by financialized.
From my reading, a big issue with governance is incompetence, not outright evil.
A villain has to in some sense be competent. In reality the public sector faces a lot of constraints that the private sector does not. It doesn’t make for a great villain.
I think YIMBYS, Tech-right, traditional liberals can easily paint incompetent and stupid bureaucrats and academics as the enemy, it isn't as good as a foreign leader but they are identifiable to most people, visible and obviously bad.
Because most countries have the government do *something* for the people. This isn't the Middle Ages where it all went into the lord's palace and armoring the knights. All the European countries and East Asia have larger and more effective welfare states, which are popular. Programs like Medicare, Social Security, and now Obamacare are popular because they spread risk over the inhabitants of the whole country instead of requiring each person to accumulate enough assets to defend against any possible risk, which most people can't do. I'm...kind of at the point where I could, and that was with an IQ in the 140s, spending my twenties and most of my thirties working long hours at a career I don't like that much, and giving up on family formation. Most people are nowhere near that.
The closest you get to libertarianism in a country of any size probably is the USA, where you can own guns and make Nazi salutes or wear a hammer and sickle shirt without going to jail. Even the wokies can make you lose your job, but they can't actually put you in jail for being racist, unlike say the UK. But more than that's difficult--they tried to get rid of Obamacare and everyone complained and Trump backed off.
Seriously, there's no earthly paradise. Sweden is about as close to an ideal social democracy as you're going to get, and the USA is about as close to a libertopia as you're going to get; any more libertarian and you start running into stuff like crooked financial dealings causing recessions a la 2008 and people getting angry because they can't afford healthcare and voting accordingly. It's like the efficiency frontier in investing--you can get more reward by taking on more risk, or decrease risk at the expense of reward, but low-risk, high-reward investments are very rare.
tl;dr: they have, and this is about as far as they are going to get.
Yes, not only this, but 15% of the US workforce works for the government. Everyone has govt workers in their family, as friends, or neighbors. Every teacher, postal worker, police, military, etc. How exactly are you going to make those people the "enemy" when everyone can see with their own eyes that they are good people, often living in their household?
I think most everyone who isn't delusional understands that in a country as big and complex as ours, the whole thing would collapse into total chaos without government. Good luck traveling without the FAA or airports or interstate highways, or doing business without enforceable contracts (which requires a governmental enforcement mechanism), or having water or electricity, without govt. Even the hard-core libertarians themselves mostly know this, and if they act like they don't, they're just playing around in fantasy land with no threat of it actually happening. Either that or they actively hope for total collapse bc it seems fun and exciting to them.
Because making someone into an enemy requires portraying them as actively malevolent and incompatible with yourself and the things you want to achieve. Whatever negative opinions your might have about them, government and bureaucrats are generally regular people who are trying to do what they think will help others, and it doesn't help to think of them as enemies.
When someone is an enemy, they're bad to the point that killing them starts to become justifiable. Their goals are so evil and they are so impossible to reason with that there is no way to co-exist happily. It's not good for people to think that killing the members of their local parks department or their city council members is going to be an effective way to solve their problems.
My enemy is the thought police. I hate those guys. I am against anybody who tries to tell me what I can't read/say/discuss/watch/contemplate. I hate Nazis. I hate commies. I hate religious zealots. I hate wokesters. I hate anybody who thinks there is such a thing as an unclean book unfit for human reading. I hate their guts, and I will read their books anyway.
“Wokeness is a Marxist plot by anti-humans who want to remove all traces of merit and excellence in order to destroy Western Civilization.”
I think the criticisms of your book that you ignore the degree to which the law is downstream from culture (in this case, left-wing [and sometimes Marxist] PC ideas) that led to the anti-discrimination laws and the mission creep that followed, are valid.
I certainly think Nathan Cofnas got it more right than Richard Hanania. Though in many ways, I go further to Kyle W. Orton's point of view. Wokeness is not a repudiation of liberalism, but its final stage. Liberalism was anti-hereditarian from birth, as seen with Locke's rejection of innate ideas. If there are indeed no innate ideas, then Man's ability to be perfected thru social conditioning should be unilimited, and there should be no natural difference between the Ashkenazi and the Levantine Arab in temperment nor in average ability. Therefore every difference which does exist is socially constructed, and there must be a constructor at fault for any disparity.
These are hardly substantial leaps in logic. Many are just held back from making the next steps by their own humanity.
It's easy to come up with a just-so story about how some innocuous part of liberalism inevitably metastasized into wokeness. It's an appealing idea because it allows you to score extra points by portraying moderates as dangerous enablers of extremism. However, I don't think I buy it.
For one thing, there are a great many far leftists who are just as critical of wokism as the right. They believe in innate equality the same way wokeness does, but disagree significantly about how to achieve it.
Secondly, even if you believe that inequality is socially constructed, it does not follow from that that it is easy to change, that it was constructed by malicious agents, or that the specific strategies wokists prefer (language policing and public shaming) are the most efficient ways to achieve it. You could easily believe in innate equality, but conclude the opposite. Maybe changing social construction is very hard, maybe social constructions form through unplanned cultural evolution, maybe language policing is mostly useless.
Surely a lack of housing is due to there being too much demand for the available supply. To suggest that only the supply side is the problem and that demand, partly or largely from both legal and illegal immigrants, has nothing to do with rising housing prices is an odd way of depicting things.
Immigration raises housing costs in the same way that women having babies causes crime or avoiding nuclear war causes economic depression because it allows us to have an economy in the first place. Technically true but it’s a broadly anti-human argument, implying that people shouldn’t exist because it’s too much trouble. I can’t imagine any good reason to ever bring it up, which makes it a stupid and demagogic argument.
It's not anti-human to oppose mass immigration or even unfettered population growth for that matter. If it were, we'd be praising Mali and Pakistan as great places to live, instead of Switzerland or South Korea. In fact, wanting optimal conditions for any population often requires living around fewer people. You just have to compare the average quality of life for an American suburbanite to that of an urban dweller. Quality is often at odds with quantity.
As for building more houses, this argument works for places in spacious, flat regions, where only NIMBY supporters and environmental organizations can get in the way of expanding residential areas. However, in many of the most sought after destinations, such as San Francisco and Toronto, geography is the limiting factor. There isn't much land to build more houses on and there are only so many people who want to live in high-rises for 2 or 3K per month.
Also, with anti-immigration arguments, there are seldom implications that people shouldn't exist. Other than refugees, they can all exist in their countries of origin just fine.
Finally, if the masses are largely stupid, why do you want more in the US? Your love of Elite Human Capital and disdain for the masses seems very much at odds with your support of largely non-EHC immigration.
This is just the one area where libertarians and economists DO have a clear and irrational bias: they always prefer more growth, and will always choose quantity over quality of it makes GDP go up. I've found them to be impervious to obvious facts and human values, such as those you note here, on this particular topic. It's quite obvious that all the best places in the world have low or steady population growth, and all the worst places are like those you stated. They just love it when the line goes up and to the right, too much. Perhaps if there was an easier way to quantify quality of life and human joy and flourishing, such that they could track it on a graph as easy as GDP, it might help them with this particular bias.
I can't speak for Richard, but there are a number of good arguments for liking a country with more people in it, regardless of whether they are low or high Human Capital.
1. Most people are good and decent in their normal lives, regardless of how much HC they have. Low human capital people are, for the most part, hardworking people who contribute to the country and the culture. It is only when they try to think about politics that they go a little mad and need EHC to restrain their darker impulses.
2. Division of labor. There are a lot of jobs that need to be done, but do not require elite levels of human capital to perform. Having low human capital people around to do those jobs frees up EHC to do work that is more aligned with their talents. This increases achievement and productivity.
In regards to your other point, many people enjoy living in cities and find them more stimulating than the suburbs. There are some bad neighborhoods in cities to which suburban life is vastly preferable, but there are other areas that are great to live in. I suspect that in areas like San Francisco, if enough high rises were built to drastically decrease the rent, the people who prefer houses would compromise.
I would have understood your point better had you said, 'Immigration raises housing costs in the same way that women having lots of babies does.' As it was your analogy went over my head. But if I understand you, you are suggesting that the number of people in a country should dictate how many houses get built, regardless of who those people are and how they got here. Therefore if a million people arrive illegally each year in the USA, enough housing should be built to accommodate both them and the domestic need. Of course, some people might say if we didn't let illegals in then we wouldn't need so much housing and housing costs would go down. But for some reason I still don't understand, you don't think this way of looking at things is a good reflection of reality, whereas well intentioned but clumsy state intervention that restricts house building is.
The well-intentioned state intervention has bad effects. You can just assume that Richard opposes any regulations beyond the truly trivial, the fact that he thinks that they derive from the honest democratic will of the people doesn't change that. (If anything, it helps explain his relatively pro-dictatorship position here.)
Yes, I'm sure you're right. And I agree with him that 'well-meaning interventions at the state and local level have prevented enough housing from being built, driving up prices'.
What I don't get is why the idea that elites have let in too many illegal immigrants who compete with Americans, thus increasing demand for housing and raising house prices is not an equally 'realistic' point of view. After all, the two views are hardly mutually exclusive.
Because housing price is a consequence of both supply and demand. If construction was not artificially constricted, then increasing population would lead to increasing supply. Significantly less than 10% of the American workforce is employed in the construction industry, so we could easily build more houses if our population goes up and there is no throttling of construction.
10% strikes me as quite a lot to work in a single one industry. If the population of the US is 330 million and over 50% of those are of working age than that's 17 million Americans working in construction.
But I think we are talking at cross purposes. I'm sure without state intervention America could build a lot more houses, enough for anyone who was already here plus those who managed to cross the border illegally. But why build houses for people you don't want here in the first place? I don't know, stop them from entering and bingo, state restriction on house building becomes much less of a problem. That is my point. Hanania stated that this latter view is not as 'realistic' as the 'state restricting housing' view and I asked why. Either I didn't understand his answer or he didn't answer it.
Honestly, the biggest argument against immigration in my mind these days is it pisses off the natives enough they elect populist demagogues like Trump. That's not based in economic theory, that's based in empirical observations of the last decade or so in American politics. And I would add the effects of mass Muslim immigration to Europe--mass cultural change pisses people off. People don't like having too many people in the country who don't look like them and don't act like them. It's sort of a limitation based in human nature--we'd all love to be able to fly, too, but gravity's a thing and we don't have wings. You build the country with the humans you have, not the ones you wish you had. You can try to import the best ones from abroad, but see above.
FWIW I see the whole immigration thing as just part of a cycle in American history, kind of like the Chinese dynastic cycle (though much less bloody). Immigration goes up, natives get upset, restrict immigration, immigration goes down, immigrants assimilate, country is ready for more immigrants in a generation or so.
'People don't like having too many people in the country who don't look like them and don't act like them.'
Agreed. So they vote for the one person who just might limit immigration. Sounds quite sensible to me. Why would they vote in a candidate who has no interest in restricting immigration or stopping illegal immigration?
Yes, you build the country with the humans you have. Japan builds Japan with the people it has (no illegals). USA builds the country with Americans plus illegal immigrants. I'm not sure what your point is.
Immigration restriction is a part of your cycle theory. You therefore concede that it is entirely feasible to restrict immigration. So wanting to live among your own people is both understandable and possible. Wanting to fly is neither.
I think you are making the same mistake as the neoliberals did, by weighing the risks of this strategy far too lightly. Even in the case of (relative) success undermining these regimes without colossal losses of American life & capital, imagine the level of human tragedy possible if the Chinese government were to collapse. You only have to look at the Chinese civil war in the early 20th century and the Taiping Heavenly kingdom 100 years prior to see that we could be talking about creating the greatest moral calamity of the 21st century here. At least the neoliberals were not trying to fry such big fish! This doesn’t mean the USA shouldn’t stand up to these regimes and pressure them to change, even militarily if necessary (the support for Ukraine has been a big winner). But elites should be clear eyed and cautious about the risks they are posing to the lives of those on whose behalf they seek to intervene. At present, I don’t think they really are.
What the hell is that? I thought you were an atheist.
"Indeed, there’s no way that elites could get us into another Iraq today."
They did destroy Libya, and support "moderate" rebels in Syria who turned out to be part of al Qaeda, but fortunately not at the cost of many America (rather than middle eastern) lives. Given that "Hayek doesn't stop at the water's edge" we should expect them to make more such mistakes, and not face consequences for them (Bush was re-elected by larger margins in 2004, confirming your suspicion of public opinion).
"Americans wouldn’t go off and die by the thousands in Iraq today because they don’t think anything is worth fighting for or believing in."
One of the things we (western civilization + Japan) learned from the mistakes of the world wars is not to be so willing to die for a country. Experience is a hard teacher, but some men will have no other. You appear to believe that Palestinians need to learn that lesson as well. America learning this against weaker enemies than Germany means lower costs, but also lower gains from the pointlessness of such wars. If Putin's Russia was actually able to invade a functional country like the US, that would make things much worse, but instead he's weak enough he can only do so to a country like Ukraine, which was corrupt and dysfunctional enough to get left behind by other post-Soviet states like Poland and remain near Russian levels of economic dynamism.
"For some context, land use reform alone could add perhaps $1 trillion a year to American GDP."
Do you think being more willing to fight such wars will help us achieve land reform? The UK followed up WW2 by replacing Churchill with a Labour government and making themselves the sick man of Europe.
"Americans wanting to democratize the Middle East seems innocent and quaint compared to our current political culture."
Killing enormous numbers of people doesn't seem quite so "innocent and quaint" to me, even if those people are mostly Iraqis.
"There’s a reason conspiracy theories never involve elites secretly doing great things for the world."
Why would that need to be secret?
Here's a way what you might call "Elite Human Capital" has proposed heroically making a better country: seasteading. Any mistakes made (and we should expect there will be many of those) will bear down directly on the seastead and people who choose to live there, along with the successes. As seasteads discover better ways to govern and attract more inhabitants the remaining governments can either learn from those laboratories or decay (which many will likely do), while people who want to improve their lives can do so via exit rather than futile "folk politics" that don't scale well beyond the hunter-gatherer bands of our evolved intuitions.
> Some will argue that it was mistakes like Iraq and Afghanistan, and also NAFTA and other elite projects, that gave us all of our contemporary stupidity. This is a tenet of faith among populists, who always need to make the broad public look sane and reasonable. I just start from a place of fundamental disagreement regarding how much rationality you can expect from the masses. The rise of the internet and the fall of gatekeepers seem sufficient to explain the changes we’ve seen.
While it's true that stupid people don't need help, the anti-interventionist turn in public sentiment is absolutely a result of the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan. These were long, costly, ultimately futile wars, and everybody's brainbroken by them. Every reference to "forever wars" about Ukraine are just pattern-matching Ukraine to Iraq and Afghanistan.
No they weren't. The objectives were achieved with minimal casualties to our all-volunteer military. At considerable financial expense, but that's the price that was allegedly demanded by the "concerned citizens" during our prior wars that they sided witwith the enemy on. Our choice to throw away victory was not a matter of rational calculation, but an ideologically-rooted attempt to curry favor with hostile powers. Especially that of Iran, to which Barack Obama has always been nauseatingly soft over:
Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire from our founding until 1991 with a brief independence in the chaos of the First World War’s denouement. Taiwan was never independent until 1949. America’s thriving, not to mention survival, is not dependent on them.
It’s not worth American children growing up without fathers and mothers so that children over there can grow up without Russian and Chinese passports.
How many times do we have to repeat that Ukrainians are not asking us to die for them? What is it about the Trump cult that makes people allergic to easily verifiable facts?
They are only asking for our hand me down weapons that are sitting in the desert and would eventually need to be disposed of anyway. The ammunitions are produced in the US and employ Americans in high paying jobs. There has never been a more cost effective foreign policy decision in US history to arm and supply Ukraine.
Wrong. Zelensky just lobbied to draw all of NATO into the war thus turning it into WWIII. I feel bad for the guy in the sense that he's the monster we created, but his demands go far beyond weapons alone.
I think the way you talk about Israel and its neighbors is quite tasteless, and way more befitting the “old Hanania” if you will, then the new, liberal one. I am waiting for your “International law is good and useful”-article..
Yes, Israel is more sophisticated and liberal than it neighbors. That does not give it carte blanche to treat them however they please. An invasion of Syria would lead to countless lives lost, expulsion and/or the kind of oppression and second-hand citizenship we see on the West Bank. Yes, I know their current government is bad, but that does not justify an expansionist war.
What makes liberal values so effective is their universalism: everyone could in principle accept them. No exceptions. We don’t say: “Human rights for everyone, except the Syrians!” or “You should respect sovereign borders, except if you’re Israel, cause gosh you are cool”. How could a Syrian ever read what you write and think “Oh, that’s reasonable”? Or any Arab for that matter… And by extension, you will alienate Western liberals, which is a shame and unnecessary, but the whole way you talk about the issue really leaves an unpleasant taste in your mouth…
Another thing that makes it difficult to understand: you are so prone to critique stupid right wingers, and rightfully so, but fail to acknowledge that Israel has been partially taken over by theocrats and the lunatic right..
Anyway, I place 50% on you significantly updating your view on Israel in the next 3 years
So true, Richard. Furthermore I think that our gracious and intelligent elites should lead the charge just as they did in the First World War. Our superiors should show us the meaning of true courage and vitality, by signing up for the Ukraine war in droves and showing the rest of us cowardly dullards what for.
Wow. I wish I had written this, as it completely aligns with my worldview. I agree with you wholeheartedly.
I ran into a MAGA/Israel flag waving man on vacation recently and asked him what Trump’s plan for Ukraine was. He responded something to the effect that Trump will cut one last check for food stamps to Ukraine and then tell Ukraine to “surrender.” It’s sad that both Democrats and Republicans cannot see that Israel and Ukraine are in the same fight against authoritarian, genocidal dictatorships.
First of all, your AI picture made me laugh out loud.
"Going abroad and dying for Ukraine would indicate physical courage, broad horizons, and a generosity of spirit."
So, uh, you're enlisting, right? ;)
I'm sympathetic to Ukraine over Russia as well, but I don't think you're going to get Americans to give them much more. People tend to get 'war fatigue' after a while, which you saw with many of our other wars--WW1, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq II. Of course there are exceptions--the Civil War was in our backyard, and Hitler was a more convincingly dangerous threat than Putin. Seriously, I think the country's developed a serious exhaustion with war. A lot of blue-collar people watched their kids go off to war and come back dead or with nasty injuries, including a lot of brain injuries that made them seriously messed up behaviorally. (There's some new evidence this is a result of brain damage from heavy ordnance explosions rather than any weakness of character.) I don't think you're going to get anyone to send their kids over, least of all with a draft. I get the 'external enemies remove a lot of the internal fighting' bit, but I don't think that's an option for the USA here. War isn't going to be useful as a uniting factor unless the USA is genuinely threatened, and we haven't seen Putin invade Poland, much less Pennsylvania.
It's all just contingent on Trump. If he loved Ukraine instead of Putin we'd have a bipartisan consensus to support Ukraine indefinitely.
I think we effectively do in terms of material support, if not sending troops.
Since Trump can be bought, he was bought. And it is clear that the autocratic side of the equation is not above buying. "If he loved Ukraine" would work about as well as "if he wanted to ban TikTok", which held right up until a suspicious meeting with a billionaire with Chinese ties.
You mentioned in another post that you think Trump would actually be tough on Russia. So which is it?
It’ll be like his first term, when he loved Putin and said nice things about him but let the hawks make policy.
Oh that I agree on; if he wanted to support South Sudan we'd hear all the MAGA people talking about how great they are. But does that mean we should really be sending *troops* there, as 'Americans should die for Ukraine' seems to imply?
I agree war can eliminate a lot of internal divisions. But I think we'd get further worrying about Chinese spying, say, rather than Ukraine. The war over there's been going on for a while, the Ukrainians are starting to lose, and I doubt you are going to get any kind of uniting behind them (unless as you say Trump gets involved, which seems less likely).
(Honestly my biggest worry there is the effect on Chinese-Americans, whose conduct, apart from a small handful of spies, has generally been exemplary.)
Also, if you're any kind of a libertarian, 'war is the health of the state'--war tends to be used as an excuse for cracking down on free speech and civil liberties (most prominently the draft in prior years). I could easily see some future Democratic administration using 'Russian disinformation' as an excuse to go after people they don't like.
Sorry, zero tolerance for Trump cultism. Admitting the man’s flaws is the price of admission.
Is censorship really necessary? These comments can be ignored.
Replace the word "love" with "favorably disposed to" and it becomes inarguable.
There is not “war fatigue”. You’re not tired of the war. You’re tired of watching about the war on tv and want to change the channel.
Ukrainians are the ones fighting and dying. All they ask from us is our hand-me-downs. Stop whining and give it to them.
People signed up to fight in WW2 after Pearl Harbor, a dastardly sneak attack without declaring war. That made us mad.
People also signed up, though in rather smaller per capita numbers, for WW1. One of my grandfathers** among them in July 1917, although there is nobody left to ask what his stated rationale might have been.
** other grandfather was career, first signed up 1913.
The US didn't join WW2 because Hitler seemed like a more convincing threat than Putin, it joined because it was directly attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor, and Germany then declared war against it. The US joined because it was forced to join.
Up until that point, it was not unlike with Ukraine today. There was some elite political consensus in favour of supporting the Allies with military aid, and putting diplomatic sanctions on the Axis, but a populist opposition to getting too deeply entangled in another European war, even well into Germany's take over of it's neighbors. There were even contemperanious versions of Tucker Carlson like Charles Lindbergh who tried to convince the public that not only was getting involved bad, but if anything they should be trying to side wittb Hitler.
There were widespread conspiracy theories (which still persist to an extent) that Pearl Harbour was an inside job by FDR to drum up support for entering the war. Without question, if Russia or China attacked the US preemptively today we would see the same.
I think you underestimate the cost to America of the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq. The destruction and chaos brought to those countries and their neighbors was immense. We are still suffering the political and economic fallout of those wars, as well as, of course, the loss of our own soldiers lives. Those wars caused a lot of the shame and self doubt underlying both the isolationism and wokeism in our politics today. They also provided a major opening for China to push its model of non-interventionism.
The "costs" of Iraq and Afghanistan were almost entirely self-inflicted. The pro-hereditarian paleocons were right about a number of things the Bushies refused to accept, but a mostly stable situation in both countries was attained by the time of the end of 43, all at extremely minor troop casualties to our all-volunteer military.
Obama deliberately chose to sabotage this for the sake of improved relations with both Russia and especially Iran, and continued the policy with Biden, much the same as Nixon did with his surrender to Red Vietnam and Red China. Obama was rewarded the same way Nixon was:
https://kyleorton.co.uk/2015/01/25/americas-silent-partnership-with-iran-and-the-contest-for-middle-eastern-order-part-one/
Are the Middle East and the US better off after the Iraq War? Does Iran have more or less influence than it did before the war? Is Iraq more stable?
Are Afghanistan and the US better off after that war? Sure, we eliminated Bin Laden, but we stuck around for almost 20 years and ended up arming the same group we had kicked out in the beginning and doing that after expending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. All our calculus, in my opinion, needs to include not just American lives but those of our allies, neutrals and those who otherwise might not have been our enemies had we not been in their country.
As for China, do you think that our years and trillions spent fighting small enemies strengthened our position vis-a-vis China and strengthened or weakened the pro-Western elements inside China?
I ain't no Einstein but to me your well-taken point referencing the truly costly if under-appraised Daddy Warbucks debacles to US treasure (not much cost to Canada or Mexico our continental partners in crime) can be nearly as elegantly formulated as BFTM (Bringing Fentanyl to Masses) = Iran-Contra War + Afghanistan Poppie Syrup + Iraqi Oil Supply lanes + Sackler Big Pharma Opioid Distribution Logistics Partner McKinsey squared + Nugan Hand Bank....
Only the Fentanyl is new. The rest was chronicled well by an undersung even mainstream journalist named Jonathan Kwitny in his muck-raking masterpiece The Crimes of Patriots:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?123866-1/the-crimes-patriots
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters, Code Shifters, PsalmSong Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of Atonement Seekers)
Media Discussion List\Looksee
It seems as though Richard Hanania as well as the neoliberals have jumped the shark. There are simply too many ridiculous statements in this post to even call them out.
To just touch on one which is really the crux of the argument is that the given "4 part syllogism" which is not then a syllogism, but a deductive line of reasoning including either two major or 2 minor premises wherein #2 is either blatantly false or at the very least, unprovable.
Concomitantly, #3 and #4 are also not true and the entire base for the argument is null.
Secondly, while I am no Trump loyalist, nobody can with a straight face deny that the "deep state" (really a term for the neoliberal consensus of both major parties since Reagan) are out to get Trump by any means necessary.
If that were true, then he would have been impeached (and convicted), and he wouldn't be running.
The idea that elites find Trump threatening and want him to lose is obvious. He is threatening, and if given his druthers, would have overthrown an election he lost.
It blows my mind when people are like "the media and elite establishment is biased against Trump!' No shit. They should be. It would be crazy for them not to be. He's that dumb, impulsive, and doesn't believe in fair election results. However, pretending there is some 'plot' to get him is dumb. If there was, he'd be out.
The system didn’t see much of a problem in having an elderly dementia patient occupying the White House for 4 years, and the media had no issue gaslighting the public into ignoring what their lying eyes were telling them. Surely having a man who often gets confused as to where he is as the commander in chief of the most powerful military in human history is similarly concerning?
Also you are simply making an unfounded assertion that if there was some plot against Trump, it would have been guaranteed to succeed. The burden of proof is on you to show why that is.
"Gaslight" - Get back on Tik Tok.
No, the burden is on the one suggesting the plot. Jesus, is this your first day thinking? The mere fact he suggests a plot without proof (and despite proof to the contrary, such as two failed impeachments) is dumb enough.
By any means necessary would include killing him, and it's not the deep state trying to do that.
If the so-called deep state is out to get him by "any means necessary", and they are so powerful, why is he a coin-toss away from being president again? Why hasn't he been jailed, barred from running for office again, locked out of the Republican party, or killed? As Trump supporters tell it, the system is so corrupt and lacking in any scruples that these should all have been easy to do, and yet none of them have. The most they've managed to do as far as I can tell is open some legal cases against him which were never going to resolve before the election, attempt to take him off the ballot in one entirely uncompetitive state, and if you want to get really kooky, send a deranged teenager with a shaky aim to shoot at him.
Instead, pretty substantial portions of the membership of our political institutions (politicians, courts, media, donors, activists etc.) are not only NOT trying to stop Trump, but are actively supporting him.
>Maybe it needs to expand into Syria after defeating the Palestinians to avoid decadence, as it’s not like the government there has any legitimacy or good reason to exist. One problem at a time.
is this like a tic where you have to put one at least one completely outrageous take in your posts to boost engagement? it certainly worked on me right now.
"as it’s not like the government there has any legitimacy or good reason to exist"
The fact that he says this in such a casual manner is sickening.
Why can’t libertarians sell the government/bureaucrats/authoritarians as their enemy?
They do. Historically "statists" and "communists" have been their enemy. This was more powerful during the Cold War, of course, when communists were a real threat.
Right.
A lot of MAGA right-wing discourse centers around the Deep State and the government doing things they don't like.
The problem is the government does a lot of things people like, like Social Security and Medicare. People don't want to give that up.
I know libertarians frame those groups as the enemy - but why doesn’t it work? Hanania seems to think libertarians remain marginal due to an insufficient enemy.
In a democratic society like ours, politicians are elected by voters, so you must blame the voters for electing politicians who pursue bad policies, and they pursue such policies because they're popular with so many voters. Pursue a political campaign denouncing the majority of voters, and you will probably lose.
It doesn't work as well today mostly because of the nature of the enemy, which is an important consideration Hanania could touch on more. Historic libertarian enemies aren't as powerful or clear or embodied. The Marvel story doesn't map quite as easily on today's realities. We no longer live in a world defined by communism versus the free world.
Probably because it completely overlooks how fundamental social interdependence is to the human condition. We can sympathize at least in theory with communism, because the idea that all of humanity is one tribe, and we all protect and provide for one another is very appealing. The idea that we can form any type of society where nobody has any type of unbreakable social responsibility to each other is farcical.
Humans can and have often lived in tribes that were loosely communist. It breaks down after you get to a group of more than a few dozen, but it can at least be done. Humans have never, ever, successfully built a society of even a few dozen people who had strictly libertarian relationships.
That's why women are so repelled by libertarianism. A pregnant woman cannot live in the middle of the wilderness by herself, and obviously the bond between her and a totally helpless child cannot by financialized.
From my reading, a big issue with governance is incompetence, not outright evil.
A villain has to in some sense be competent. In reality the public sector faces a lot of constraints that the private sector does not. It doesn’t make for a great villain.
I think YIMBYS, Tech-right, traditional liberals can easily paint incompetent and stupid bureaucrats and academics as the enemy, it isn't as good as a foreign leader but they are identifiable to most people, visible and obviously bad.
Sure
Because most countries have the government do *something* for the people. This isn't the Middle Ages where it all went into the lord's palace and armoring the knights. All the European countries and East Asia have larger and more effective welfare states, which are popular. Programs like Medicare, Social Security, and now Obamacare are popular because they spread risk over the inhabitants of the whole country instead of requiring each person to accumulate enough assets to defend against any possible risk, which most people can't do. I'm...kind of at the point where I could, and that was with an IQ in the 140s, spending my twenties and most of my thirties working long hours at a career I don't like that much, and giving up on family formation. Most people are nowhere near that.
The closest you get to libertarianism in a country of any size probably is the USA, where you can own guns and make Nazi salutes or wear a hammer and sickle shirt without going to jail. Even the wokies can make you lose your job, but they can't actually put you in jail for being racist, unlike say the UK. But more than that's difficult--they tried to get rid of Obamacare and everyone complained and Trump backed off.
Seriously, there's no earthly paradise. Sweden is about as close to an ideal social democracy as you're going to get, and the USA is about as close to a libertopia as you're going to get; any more libertarian and you start running into stuff like crooked financial dealings causing recessions a la 2008 and people getting angry because they can't afford healthcare and voting accordingly. It's like the efficiency frontier in investing--you can get more reward by taking on more risk, or decrease risk at the expense of reward, but low-risk, high-reward investments are very rare.
tl;dr: they have, and this is about as far as they are going to get.
Yes, not only this, but 15% of the US workforce works for the government. Everyone has govt workers in their family, as friends, or neighbors. Every teacher, postal worker, police, military, etc. How exactly are you going to make those people the "enemy" when everyone can see with their own eyes that they are good people, often living in their household?
I think most everyone who isn't delusional understands that in a country as big and complex as ours, the whole thing would collapse into total chaos without government. Good luck traveling without the FAA or airports or interstate highways, or doing business without enforceable contracts (which requires a governmental enforcement mechanism), or having water or electricity, without govt. Even the hard-core libertarians themselves mostly know this, and if they act like they don't, they're just playing around in fantasy land with no threat of it actually happening. Either that or they actively hope for total collapse bc it seems fun and exciting to them.
Because making someone into an enemy requires portraying them as actively malevolent and incompatible with yourself and the things you want to achieve. Whatever negative opinions your might have about them, government and bureaucrats are generally regular people who are trying to do what they think will help others, and it doesn't help to think of them as enemies.
When someone is an enemy, they're bad to the point that killing them starts to become justifiable. Their goals are so evil and they are so impossible to reason with that there is no way to co-exist happily. It's not good for people to think that killing the members of their local parks department or their city council members is going to be an effective way to solve their problems.
My enemy is the thought police. I hate those guys. I am against anybody who tries to tell me what I can't read/say/discuss/watch/contemplate. I hate Nazis. I hate commies. I hate religious zealots. I hate wokesters. I hate anybody who thinks there is such a thing as an unclean book unfit for human reading. I hate their guts, and I will read their books anyway.
“Wokeness is a Marxist plot by anti-humans who want to remove all traces of merit and excellence in order to destroy Western Civilization.”
I think the criticisms of your book that you ignore the degree to which the law is downstream from culture (in this case, left-wing [and sometimes Marxist] PC ideas) that led to the anti-discrimination laws and the mission creep that followed, are valid.
I certainly think Nathan Cofnas got it more right than Richard Hanania. Though in many ways, I go further to Kyle W. Orton's point of view. Wokeness is not a repudiation of liberalism, but its final stage. Liberalism was anti-hereditarian from birth, as seen with Locke's rejection of innate ideas. If there are indeed no innate ideas, then Man's ability to be perfected thru social conditioning should be unilimited, and there should be no natural difference between the Ashkenazi and the Levantine Arab in temperment nor in average ability. Therefore every difference which does exist is socially constructed, and there must be a constructor at fault for any disparity.
These are hardly substantial leaps in logic. Many are just held back from making the next steps by their own humanity.
It's easy to come up with a just-so story about how some innocuous part of liberalism inevitably metastasized into wokeness. It's an appealing idea because it allows you to score extra points by portraying moderates as dangerous enablers of extremism. However, I don't think I buy it.
For one thing, there are a great many far leftists who are just as critical of wokism as the right. They believe in innate equality the same way wokeness does, but disagree significantly about how to achieve it.
Secondly, even if you believe that inequality is socially constructed, it does not follow from that that it is easy to change, that it was constructed by malicious agents, or that the specific strategies wokists prefer (language policing and public shaming) are the most efficient ways to achieve it. You could easily believe in innate equality, but conclude the opposite. Maybe changing social construction is very hard, maybe social constructions form through unplanned cultural evolution, maybe language policing is mostly useless.
But liberalism can be self-correcting regarding blank slatism and has been. It’s just that the Wokels have silenced or displaced the Jensenists.
I certainly hope so. We're in desperate need of reform.
Surely a lack of housing is due to there being too much demand for the available supply. To suggest that only the supply side is the problem and that demand, partly or largely from both legal and illegal immigrants, has nothing to do with rising housing prices is an odd way of depicting things.
Immigration raises housing costs in the same way that women having babies causes crime or avoiding nuclear war causes economic depression because it allows us to have an economy in the first place. Technically true but it’s a broadly anti-human argument, implying that people shouldn’t exist because it’s too much trouble. I can’t imagine any good reason to ever bring it up, which makes it a stupid and demagogic argument.
It's not anti-human to oppose mass immigration or even unfettered population growth for that matter. If it were, we'd be praising Mali and Pakistan as great places to live, instead of Switzerland or South Korea. In fact, wanting optimal conditions for any population often requires living around fewer people. You just have to compare the average quality of life for an American suburbanite to that of an urban dweller. Quality is often at odds with quantity.
As for building more houses, this argument works for places in spacious, flat regions, where only NIMBY supporters and environmental organizations can get in the way of expanding residential areas. However, in many of the most sought after destinations, such as San Francisco and Toronto, geography is the limiting factor. There isn't much land to build more houses on and there are only so many people who want to live in high-rises for 2 or 3K per month.
Also, with anti-immigration arguments, there are seldom implications that people shouldn't exist. Other than refugees, they can all exist in their countries of origin just fine.
Finally, if the masses are largely stupid, why do you want more in the US? Your love of Elite Human Capital and disdain for the masses seems very much at odds with your support of largely non-EHC immigration.
This is just the one area where libertarians and economists DO have a clear and irrational bias: they always prefer more growth, and will always choose quantity over quality of it makes GDP go up. I've found them to be impervious to obvious facts and human values, such as those you note here, on this particular topic. It's quite obvious that all the best places in the world have low or steady population growth, and all the worst places are like those you stated. They just love it when the line goes up and to the right, too much. Perhaps if there was an easier way to quantify quality of life and human joy and flourishing, such that they could track it on a graph as easy as GDP, it might help them with this particular bias.
I can't speak for Richard, but there are a number of good arguments for liking a country with more people in it, regardless of whether they are low or high Human Capital.
1. Most people are good and decent in their normal lives, regardless of how much HC they have. Low human capital people are, for the most part, hardworking people who contribute to the country and the culture. It is only when they try to think about politics that they go a little mad and need EHC to restrain their darker impulses.
2. Division of labor. There are a lot of jobs that need to be done, but do not require elite levels of human capital to perform. Having low human capital people around to do those jobs frees up EHC to do work that is more aligned with their talents. This increases achievement and productivity.
In regards to your other point, many people enjoy living in cities and find them more stimulating than the suburbs. There are some bad neighborhoods in cities to which suburban life is vastly preferable, but there are other areas that are great to live in. I suspect that in areas like San Francisco, if enough high rises were built to drastically decrease the rent, the people who prefer houses would compromise.
Having a nuclear war would cause economic depression.
I would have understood your point better had you said, 'Immigration raises housing costs in the same way that women having lots of babies does.' As it was your analogy went over my head. But if I understand you, you are suggesting that the number of people in a country should dictate how many houses get built, regardless of who those people are and how they got here. Therefore if a million people arrive illegally each year in the USA, enough housing should be built to accommodate both them and the domestic need. Of course, some people might say if we didn't let illegals in then we wouldn't need so much housing and housing costs would go down. But for some reason I still don't understand, you don't think this way of looking at things is a good reflection of reality, whereas well intentioned but clumsy state intervention that restricts house building is.
The well-intentioned state intervention has bad effects. You can just assume that Richard opposes any regulations beyond the truly trivial, the fact that he thinks that they derive from the honest democratic will of the people doesn't change that. (If anything, it helps explain his relatively pro-dictatorship position here.)
Yes, I'm sure you're right. And I agree with him that 'well-meaning interventions at the state and local level have prevented enough housing from being built, driving up prices'.
What I don't get is why the idea that elites have let in too many illegal immigrants who compete with Americans, thus increasing demand for housing and raising house prices is not an equally 'realistic' point of view. After all, the two views are hardly mutually exclusive.
Because housing price is a consequence of both supply and demand. If construction was not artificially constricted, then increasing population would lead to increasing supply. Significantly less than 10% of the American workforce is employed in the construction industry, so we could easily build more houses if our population goes up and there is no throttling of construction.
10% strikes me as quite a lot to work in a single one industry. If the population of the US is 330 million and over 50% of those are of working age than that's 17 million Americans working in construction.
But I think we are talking at cross purposes. I'm sure without state intervention America could build a lot more houses, enough for anyone who was already here plus those who managed to cross the border illegally. But why build houses for people you don't want here in the first place? I don't know, stop them from entering and bingo, state restriction on house building becomes much less of a problem. That is my point. Hanania stated that this latter view is not as 'realistic' as the 'state restricting housing' view and I asked why. Either I didn't understand his answer or he didn't answer it.
Honestly, the biggest argument against immigration in my mind these days is it pisses off the natives enough they elect populist demagogues like Trump. That's not based in economic theory, that's based in empirical observations of the last decade or so in American politics. And I would add the effects of mass Muslim immigration to Europe--mass cultural change pisses people off. People don't like having too many people in the country who don't look like them and don't act like them. It's sort of a limitation based in human nature--we'd all love to be able to fly, too, but gravity's a thing and we don't have wings. You build the country with the humans you have, not the ones you wish you had. You can try to import the best ones from abroad, but see above.
FWIW I see the whole immigration thing as just part of a cycle in American history, kind of like the Chinese dynastic cycle (though much less bloody). Immigration goes up, natives get upset, restrict immigration, immigration goes down, immigrants assimilate, country is ready for more immigrants in a generation or so.
'People don't like having too many people in the country who don't look like them and don't act like them.'
Agreed. So they vote for the one person who just might limit immigration. Sounds quite sensible to me. Why would they vote in a candidate who has no interest in restricting immigration or stopping illegal immigration?
Yes, you build the country with the humans you have. Japan builds Japan with the people it has (no illegals). USA builds the country with Americans plus illegal immigrants. I'm not sure what your point is.
Immigration restriction is a part of your cycle theory. You therefore concede that it is entirely feasible to restrict immigration. So wanting to live among your own people is both understandable and possible. Wanting to fly is neither.
I made an argument for immigration restriction (that I hoped would make sense to rationalist-adjacent types and libertarians). I agree with you.
I think you are making the same mistake as the neoliberals did, by weighing the risks of this strategy far too lightly. Even in the case of (relative) success undermining these regimes without colossal losses of American life & capital, imagine the level of human tragedy possible if the Chinese government were to collapse. You only have to look at the Chinese civil war in the early 20th century and the Taiping Heavenly kingdom 100 years prior to see that we could be talking about creating the greatest moral calamity of the 21st century here. At least the neoliberals were not trying to fry such big fish! This doesn’t mean the USA shouldn’t stand up to these regimes and pressure them to change, even militarily if necessary (the support for Ukraine has been a big winner). But elites should be clear eyed and cautious about the risks they are posing to the lives of those on whose behalf they seek to intervene. At present, I don’t think they really are.
You go first.
"spiritual health"
What the hell is that? I thought you were an atheist.
"Indeed, there’s no way that elites could get us into another Iraq today."
They did destroy Libya, and support "moderate" rebels in Syria who turned out to be part of al Qaeda, but fortunately not at the cost of many America (rather than middle eastern) lives. Given that "Hayek doesn't stop at the water's edge" we should expect them to make more such mistakes, and not face consequences for them (Bush was re-elected by larger margins in 2004, confirming your suspicion of public opinion).
"Americans wouldn’t go off and die by the thousands in Iraq today because they don’t think anything is worth fighting for or believing in."
One of the things we (western civilization + Japan) learned from the mistakes of the world wars is not to be so willing to die for a country. Experience is a hard teacher, but some men will have no other. You appear to believe that Palestinians need to learn that lesson as well. America learning this against weaker enemies than Germany means lower costs, but also lower gains from the pointlessness of such wars. If Putin's Russia was actually able to invade a functional country like the US, that would make things much worse, but instead he's weak enough he can only do so to a country like Ukraine, which was corrupt and dysfunctional enough to get left behind by other post-Soviet states like Poland and remain near Russian levels of economic dynamism.
"For some context, land use reform alone could add perhaps $1 trillion a year to American GDP."
Do you think being more willing to fight such wars will help us achieve land reform? The UK followed up WW2 by replacing Churchill with a Labour government and making themselves the sick man of Europe.
"Americans wanting to democratize the Middle East seems innocent and quaint compared to our current political culture."
Killing enormous numbers of people doesn't seem quite so "innocent and quaint" to me, even if those people are mostly Iraqis.
"There’s a reason conspiracy theories never involve elites secretly doing great things for the world."
Why would that need to be secret?
Here's a way what you might call "Elite Human Capital" has proposed heroically making a better country: seasteading. Any mistakes made (and we should expect there will be many of those) will bear down directly on the seastead and people who choose to live there, along with the successes. As seasteads discover better ways to govern and attract more inhabitants the remaining governments can either learn from those laboratories or decay (which many will likely do), while people who want to improve their lives can do so via exit rather than futile "folk politics" that don't scale well beyond the hunter-gatherer bands of our evolved intuitions.
“Spiritual health” in terms of vitalism. But it all sounds a bit wordcel-y, doesn’t it?
> Some will argue that it was mistakes like Iraq and Afghanistan, and also NAFTA and other elite projects, that gave us all of our contemporary stupidity. This is a tenet of faith among populists, who always need to make the broad public look sane and reasonable. I just start from a place of fundamental disagreement regarding how much rationality you can expect from the masses. The rise of the internet and the fall of gatekeepers seem sufficient to explain the changes we’ve seen.
While it's true that stupid people don't need help, the anti-interventionist turn in public sentiment is absolutely a result of the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan. These were long, costly, ultimately futile wars, and everybody's brainbroken by them. Every reference to "forever wars" about Ukraine are just pattern-matching Ukraine to Iraq and Afghanistan.
No they weren't. The objectives were achieved with minimal casualties to our all-volunteer military. At considerable financial expense, but that's the price that was allegedly demanded by the "concerned citizens" during our prior wars that they sided witwith the enemy on. Our choice to throw away victory was not a matter of rational calculation, but an ideologically-rooted attempt to curry favor with hostile powers. Especially that of Iran, to which Barack Obama has always been nauseatingly soft over:
https://kyleorton.co.uk/2015/01/25/americas-silent-partnership-with-iran-and-the-contest-for-middle-eastern-order-part-one/
Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire from our founding until 1991 with a brief independence in the chaos of the First World War’s denouement. Taiwan was never independent until 1949. America’s thriving, not to mention survival, is not dependent on them.
It’s not worth American children growing up without fathers and mothers so that children over there can grow up without Russian and Chinese passports.
How many times do we have to repeat that Ukrainians are not asking us to die for them? What is it about the Trump cult that makes people allergic to easily verifiable facts?
They are only asking for our hand me down weapons that are sitting in the desert and would eventually need to be disposed of anyway. The ammunitions are produced in the US and employ Americans in high paying jobs. There has never been a more cost effective foreign policy decision in US history to arm and supply Ukraine.
Wrong. Zelensky just lobbied to draw all of NATO into the war thus turning it into WWIII. I feel bad for the guy in the sense that he's the monster we created, but his demands go far beyond weapons alone.
You can tell from the included AI-generated image which people he thinks should die for those ideas, too.
I wonder: What was the prompt he typed in to generate it?
I think the way you talk about Israel and its neighbors is quite tasteless, and way more befitting the “old Hanania” if you will, then the new, liberal one. I am waiting for your “International law is good and useful”-article..
Yes, Israel is more sophisticated and liberal than it neighbors. That does not give it carte blanche to treat them however they please. An invasion of Syria would lead to countless lives lost, expulsion and/or the kind of oppression and second-hand citizenship we see on the West Bank. Yes, I know their current government is bad, but that does not justify an expansionist war.
What makes liberal values so effective is their universalism: everyone could in principle accept them. No exceptions. We don’t say: “Human rights for everyone, except the Syrians!” or “You should respect sovereign borders, except if you’re Israel, cause gosh you are cool”. How could a Syrian ever read what you write and think “Oh, that’s reasonable”? Or any Arab for that matter… And by extension, you will alienate Western liberals, which is a shame and unnecessary, but the whole way you talk about the issue really leaves an unpleasant taste in your mouth…
Another thing that makes it difficult to understand: you are so prone to critique stupid right wingers, and rightfully so, but fail to acknowledge that Israel has been partially taken over by theocrats and the lunatic right..
Anyway, I place 50% on you significantly updating your view on Israel in the next 3 years
So true, Richard. Furthermore I think that our gracious and intelligent elites should lead the charge just as they did in the First World War. Our superiors should show us the meaning of true courage and vitality, by signing up for the Ukraine war in droves and showing the rest of us cowardly dullards what for.
Wow. I wish I had written this, as it completely aligns with my worldview. I agree with you wholeheartedly.
I ran into a MAGA/Israel flag waving man on vacation recently and asked him what Trump’s plan for Ukraine was. He responded something to the effect that Trump will cut one last check for food stamps to Ukraine and then tell Ukraine to “surrender.” It’s sad that both Democrats and Republicans cannot see that Israel and Ukraine are in the same fight against authoritarian, genocidal dictatorships.
Exactly