It's about life as human being, people or even generations are progressive if they have a world to win. Once they have what they need, they will have a world to lose and become conservative. The majority of people in the west are risk adverse often in extremo and becoming more and more conservative. Funny is that they will lose a lot due to this behavior, and the cycle start will all over.
How does poverty cycle back to liberalism? Empirically and historically it does the opposite.
Institutions are much easier to destroy than to build, and some institutions can only be built on a sufficiently solid foundation. Let's hope your cycle hypothesis is wrong.
But there's a different pseudo-saying out there that works on a generation level which has been feeling more and more relevant lately. It's the one that goes:
If the republicans were smart, which they mostly aren’t, they would let Thiel be their nominee for president next time around. I would vote for him over nearly anyone the dems are going to throw out there.
Proudly declaring "I have a great solution that no one has ever thought of before," without putting in the due diligence to understand feasibility and consequences, is close to the literal definition of the reactionary mindset.
More concisely, it is hubris plus gumption minus diligence.
The "hubris plus gumption minus diligence" mindset can be frequently found among adherents of all sorts of ideologies. If anything, reactionaries are likely to shy away from solutions that no one has ever thought of before in favor of solutions that they think have worked before.
“They think” is the key word here. It’s usually informed by woefully misinformed understandings of history and science. That’s what makes it “gumption-based” rather than “evidence-based.” This is what differentiates the reactionary from the conservative.
To some extent I agree with you, which is why I wrote "they think". Most people's ideologies are based on misinformed understandings of history and science. Reactionaries are probably more likely to be misinformed than conservatives and, in general, other kinds of moderates are. But I doubt they are more likely to be misinformed than progressives are. I think maybe in general, moderates are more likely to be well-informed than extremists. Gumption-based approaches are common among progressives and reactionaries alike. Maybe even more common among progressives, although I wouldn't put money on it.
Is a concept like 'feeding babies is better (i.e. cheaper and healthier) than jailing adults' progressive and so probably based on misinformed understandings of history and science, or is it not progressive?
I'm losing track of how this works, of late. Canadian-born Ted Cruz was able to run for president, with at least one state ruling that he was eligible[1]. Of course there were the made-up controversies about Barack Obama, which I think can be dismissed. John McCain, meanwhile, seemed to get some kind of clearance from Congress to be able to run, as we was born in the Panama Canal zone[2].
The key words are "natural born citizen" aka you are an American citizen the moment you are born. All babies born on American soil automatically qualify, as well as babies born abroad to a US citizen. Ted Cruz and John McCain both fall in the latter category.
Interestingly this definition is commonly agreed upon but not written down in the constitution, and the Supreme Court has never taken up this challenge.
Is that actually smart though? I think such a strategy would rely a lot on inertia of existing voters (he is kind of Christian but how many republicans would vote in a gay man?) as well as finding new voters (hoping for masses of new voters after a big ideology shift sounds like a good route to failure, though trump had success with it). And obviously he would need to run and win the primaries, both of which seem unlikely to me.
Honestly I think the republicans will have to stick with trump for a while yet after having tied themselves to him in the last four years. Unlike Thiel, Trump can definitely win a lot of votes. He managed to come a very close second in what, after four years of trump and half a cocked up pandemic, ought to have been an easy win for the dems.
Reading this type of stuff becomes more difficult once you understand Modern Monetary Theory.
All this libertarian nonsense about what effect crypto might have on currencies and what crypto is just reads like posts on a flat earth Facebook group.
I'm not saying that this article is a poor analysis, but that it's analysing a fundamentally illogical and broken ideology (libertarianism) as if it were something other than a collection of insane and contradictory ramblings that all boil down to "the role of the state is to protect me from my slaves".
Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, all have ridiculous broken understandings of economics and it shows in their political leanings and ideologies.
Bill Gates is far closer to understanding how things actually function, and you can see it from how he speaks about the world.
Mainstream economics reads like a flat earth Facebook group when you see how many times it's failed to predict booms and busts despite being considered acceptable as such.
Yes the difference being that MMT is verifiable in much the same way as the curvature of the earth’s surface. If you analyse fiscal and monetary operations from officially published sources you can map it to an MMT description of currency.
There is no consensus economic theory. That's why it's called "the dismal science." It's extremely unfortunate, though, personally, I'm hoping to see more anthropology influences; a bit of an outsider's perspective might help here.
The descriptive parts of MMT are mainstream economics, though not aspects that mainstream economists tend to trumpet.
The part that is controversial is normative, starting with the call to honesty (“since spending of a nation in its own fiat is not, in fact, limited by the ‘fiscal’ constraint of revenue + borrowing but only by monetary constraints, we should stop treating fiscal ‘constraints’ as real and instead analyze what has traditionally been described with the misleading metaphor of the fisc through a monetary lens”), and proceeding to concrete policy recommendations which are derived from actually following the call to honesty.
If you discover that a machine works differently from the way those operating the machine have been telling you, then asking them to accurately describe the operation and justify their actions in that context is quite rightly described as a call to honesty.
It would only be begging the question if we were assuming MMT correctly describes how currency works, but that’s a provable from officially published sources; a fact rather than an assumption.
If MMT is "provable" then MMT theorists will speedily win their debates with dissenting economists. Until then, it's just one theory among many and calling it "a call to honesty" is begging the question.
Well I would say it’s very hard to win a debate against ideology and ignorance ... ever tried debating someone on a street corner about the veracity of the bible?
For example I think this is one of the best debates and even though plenty of Austrian economics fans have seen it, they think Murphy “wins”. What do you think?
Also most of my work has been on verifying MMT in an Australian context, this is one of the best videos I produced about the reality of Australian federal finances: an interview with an investment manager:
Monetary constraints are just as binding as fiscal ones. MMT is just a somewhat obscure refactoring of what mainstream economics calls the "fiscal theory of the price level". It mostly comes up with reference to settings like Weimar Germany, or late-2000s Zimbabwe.
> MMT describes how currency works, and always has worked.
So you agree with my parent comment? My reference to Weimar Germany and late-2000s Zimbabwe was intended to point out the broadly-acknowledged normative implications of the descriptive content that's shared by MMT and the FTPL.
I don’t know what FTPL is but I certainly don’t agree that an MMT understanding of economics implies that one will create a hyper inflationary economy. Quite the opposite.
> Monetary constraints are just as binding as fiscal ones
Even if that were the case (and its not; in the metaphor of the fisc, there is a hard advance limit—money must come into the fisc by tax or borrowing to be spent, wasn’t hasn’t come in cannot be spent—whereas monetary constraints are more of the “you can do it, but there will be consequences” type), the key thing is that the (real) monetary constraints are different than the (illusory, stemming from a bad metaphor) fiscal ones.
> in the metaphor of the fisc, there is a hard advance limit
Not so. A government that's able to borrow can issue debt and roll it over indefinitely under some conditions (viz. so long as economic growth is higher than the return being paid on that debt). It amounts to the exact same thing.
> > in the metaphor of the fisc, there is a hard advance limit
> Not so. A government that's able to borrow can issue debt and roll it over indefinitely under some conditions
The hard limit is “the amount of debt borrowers are willing to purchase” (plus current revenue plus reserves.) In MMT “spending” is equivalent to money creation and “borrowing”, like “revenue” is money destruction (but, in the case of borrowing, with a promise to create more and use it in a particular way in the future.) And there is no necessary quantitative tie between creation and destruction; a fiscal imbalance need not be bridged by borrowing (requiring a borrower) or additional revenues or additional reserves.
Yes the difference is that MMT is verifiable through accounting analysis and official publications whereas “orthodox” macro is actually a flawed aggregation of micro and austro-libertarianism is a bizarre mix of fantasy, philosophy and historical revision.
> Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, all have ridiculous broken understandings of economics
No, they don’t. They all have a sufficient grasp of economics to understand what serves their narrow preferences for relative power.
They promote ridiculous, broken understandings of economics, because it's the only way to get masses of people not in a position to be served by advancing the narrow interests of a small elite to get behind doing the things necessary to advance those interests.
I thought it was incredibly even-handed. At least, I know I wouldn't be able to write such a dispassionate post about someone like Thiel (a baddie in my opinion, for the record).
I think we spend too much time trying to ascribe an internal consistency to famous people. Finding internal consistency with somebody doesn't change the destructive trajectory of their politics.
There is a common progression, though, from certain 'outsider' ideologies when one is an outsider to a particular form of conservatism when one gets power.
I mean, this is pretty obvious, right? Power-hungry people only hate it when other people have it.
Indeed, any sufficiently mature ideology can be rendered self consistent, either on its own or by applying layers of apologetic obfuscation. Yet innumerable self consistent ideologies are mutually irreconcilable. Self consistency is the lowest of low bars for any ideology to surmount.
Peter Thiel is the most disappointing persona of the Trump era. I had respect for his out-of-the-box thoughts for the longest time. Not anymore. As far as I'm concerned, he's now part of the white supremacist, nationalist, anti globalist, anti free market movement. Completely anti-libertarian.
What white supremacist movement? Trump denounced white supremacy on camera something like seventeen separate times.
The only white supremacy is in the addlepated imaginations of America's journalists, academics, and the increasingly delusional Democrat Party, led by radicals like the Justice Democrats.
For those of us in the real world, thanks to the aforementioned delusional leaders, you're much more likely to encounter racism day in and day out being bandied about at work and online by neo-racists who have the absolute gall to call themselves and their movement Antiracist.
I know you edited your comment, but Lenin when he came in power did pretty much exactly what he said he would do. Stalin not so, but he wasn't really that much a politician before backstabbing his way into power.
You can be the biggest free market capitalist in the world but it would be foolish not to acknowledge that the American government-industrial-military complex has propped up this capitalist paradise for the better part of a century.
You can be bullish on a crypto future but it would be foolish not to acknowledge that at the moment the "decentralized" part is mostly a myth, and a few early whales + Chinese miners wield a disproportionate amount of power.
None of these views are contradictory or hypocritical. The problem is really that the boxes of possible viewpoints and philosophies keep getting smaller and further apart, and everyone is expected to neatly fit into one of them.
Peter Thiel, like everyone else, makes decisions in order to maximize his own benefit, not for the sake of presenting consistency of thought to the world. Not being libertarian when it suits you is perhaps the most libertarian thing of all.
It's pretty simple. Libertarians want to minimize a state's power over them. Some ways to do that are to shrink the state or somehow secede from the state.
Thiel has found a third way to be a Libertarian, albeit one that only one person can pursue at a time.
He can just own the state.
So whereas the Seasteading people have to worry about the US stepping in and invading their boat, Thiel's boat is America and he has to defend it from China.
If anyone is interested in Thiel's motivations and interests in politics, I recommend Geoff Shullenberger's discussions:
Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel’s French Connection: Broad discussion of Thiel's writing and actions pre-2016 (when the essay was written), along with his relationship to Strauss and particularly Girard.
If everything we know about a person, whether it be a Thiel, a Gates, a Soros, a Barak, a Trump, we learned through the media, and, we believe the media is biased, how much confidence should we have in our opinions of them?
I spend a lot of time working out why I believe what I believe about people I know strictly from 2nd or 3rd hand information, and for the most part, it stands on pretty soft foundations. Hence, I remain flexible in my opinions in such cases.
Meaning, I wouldn't write and publish articles that ascribe confidence in my conclusions.
Or here's a "hot take" he's not fucking stupid and knows something removing the USA's power without crippling China's means he's never going to get his libertarian utopia.
The USA needs to win every battle against China if he ever wants his dreams to come true is it really surprising he supports it so much???
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadInstitutions are much easier to destroy than to build, and some institutions can only be built on a sufficiently solid foundation. Let's hope your cycle hypothesis is wrong.
But there's a different pseudo-saying out there that works on a generation level which has been feeling more and more relevant lately. It's the one that goes:
Hard times create hard people,
hard people create good times.
Good times create weak people,
weak people create hard times.
Conservatism postures as strength, but it's actually based in fear.
More concisely, it is hubris plus gumption minus diligence.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz#Citizenship 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain#2008_presidential_...
Interestingly this definition is commonly agreed upon but not written down in the constitution, and the Supreme Court has never taken up this challenge.
Honestly I think the republicans will have to stick with trump for a while yet after having tied themselves to him in the last four years. Unlike Thiel, Trump can definitely win a lot of votes. He managed to come a very close second in what, after four years of trump and half a cocked up pandemic, ought to have been an easy win for the dems.
All this libertarian nonsense about what effect crypto might have on currencies and what crypto is just reads like posts on a flat earth Facebook group.
I'm not saying that this article is a poor analysis, but that it's analysing a fundamentally illogical and broken ideology (libertarianism) as if it were something other than a collection of insane and contradictory ramblings that all boil down to "the role of the state is to protect me from my slaves".
Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, all have ridiculous broken understandings of economics and it shows in their political leanings and ideologies.
Bill Gates is far closer to understanding how things actually function, and you can see it from how he speaks about the world.
The part that is controversial is normative, starting with the call to honesty (“since spending of a nation in its own fiat is not, in fact, limited by the ‘fiscal’ constraint of revenue + borrowing but only by monetary constraints, we should stop treating fiscal ‘constraints’ as real and instead analyze what has traditionally been described with the misleading metaphor of the fisc through a monetary lens”), and proceeding to concrete policy recommendations which are derived from actually following the call to honesty.
It would only be begging the question if we were assuming MMT correctly describes how currency works, but that’s a provable from officially published sources; a fact rather than an assumption.
For example I think this is one of the best debates and even though plenty of Austrian economics fans have seen it, they think Murphy “wins”. What do you think?
https://youtu.be/cUTLCDBONok
Also most of my work has been on verifying MMT in an Australian context, this is one of the best videos I produced about the reality of Australian federal finances: an interview with an investment manager:
https://youtu.be/jq6QbMSPoxQ
Stephanie Kelton and Warren Mosler have been producing massive volumes of similar stuff for the US.
MMT economists regularly “win” debates based on facts, but the real game is winning hearts and minds and that takes longer.
So you agree with my parent comment? My reference to Weimar Germany and late-2000s Zimbabwe was intended to point out the broadly-acknowledged normative implications of the descriptive content that's shared by MMT and the FTPL.
Even if that were the case (and its not; in the metaphor of the fisc, there is a hard advance limit—money must come into the fisc by tax or borrowing to be spent, wasn’t hasn’t come in cannot be spent—whereas monetary constraints are more of the “you can do it, but there will be consequences” type), the key thing is that the (real) monetary constraints are different than the (illusory, stemming from a bad metaphor) fiscal ones.
Not so. A government that's able to borrow can issue debt and roll it over indefinitely under some conditions (viz. so long as economic growth is higher than the return being paid on that debt). It amounts to the exact same thing.
> Not so. A government that's able to borrow can issue debt and roll it over indefinitely under some conditions
The hard limit is “the amount of debt borrowers are willing to purchase” (plus current revenue plus reserves.) In MMT “spending” is equivalent to money creation and “borrowing”, like “revenue” is money destruction (but, in the case of borrowing, with a promise to create more and use it in a particular way in the future.) And there is no necessary quantitative tie between creation and destruction; a fiscal imbalance need not be bridged by borrowing (requiring a borrower) or additional revenues or additional reserves.
No, they don’t. They all have a sufficient grasp of economics to understand what serves their narrow preferences for relative power.
They promote ridiculous, broken understandings of economics, because it's the only way to get masses of people not in a position to be served by advancing the narrow interests of a small elite to get behind doing the things necessary to advance those interests.
3 paragraphs later and that turned out to be a big old lie.
Is that a good thing? It's unfortunate that we have lost the ability to evaluate ideas without constantly signaling our political positions.
I think this is a situation that will happen periodically, when there is more overall conflict around us.
I mean, this is pretty obvious, right? Power-hungry people only hate it when other people have it.
The only white supremacy is in the addlepated imaginations of America's journalists, academics, and the increasingly delusional Democrat Party, led by radicals like the Justice Democrats.
For those of us in the real world, thanks to the aforementioned delusional leaders, you're much more likely to encounter racism day in and day out being bandied about at work and online by neo-racists who have the absolute gall to call themselves and their movement Antiracist.
You can be the biggest free market capitalist in the world but it would be foolish not to acknowledge that the American government-industrial-military complex has propped up this capitalist paradise for the better part of a century.
You can be bullish on a crypto future but it would be foolish not to acknowledge that at the moment the "decentralized" part is mostly a myth, and a few early whales + Chinese miners wield a disproportionate amount of power.
None of these views are contradictory or hypocritical. The problem is really that the boxes of possible viewpoints and philosophies keep getting smaller and further apart, and everyone is expected to neatly fit into one of them.
Peter Thiel, like everyone else, makes decisions in order to maximize his own benefit, not for the sake of presenting consistency of thought to the world. Not being libertarian when it suits you is perhaps the most libertarian thing of all.
Thiel has found a third way to be a Libertarian, albeit one that only one person can pursue at a time.
He can just own the state.
So whereas the Seasteading people have to worry about the US stepping in and invading their boat, Thiel's boat is America and he has to defend it from China.
Thiel is a libertarian and America is his playground. There is nothing contradictory in protecting the country that his projects rely on.
Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel’s French Connection: Broad discussion of Thiel's writing and actions pre-2016 (when the essay was written), along with his relationship to Strauss and particularly Girard.
https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2016/08/13/mimesis-v...
Theorycels in Trumpworld: Published recently, and on the role of postmodernist-adjacent figures, including Thiel, in justifying the politics of Trump.
https://outsidertheory.com/theorycels-in-trumpworld/
Palmer Luckey started Anduril.
I'm waiting for a complete set of Lord of the Rings company that will "defend the West"
Surprised it hasn't been founded already.
I spend a lot of time working out why I believe what I believe about people I know strictly from 2nd or 3rd hand information, and for the most part, it stands on pretty soft foundations. Hence, I remain flexible in my opinions in such cases.
Meaning, I wouldn't write and publish articles that ascribe confidence in my conclusions.
The USA needs to win every battle against China if he ever wants his dreams to come true is it really surprising he supports it so much???