I agree, there is more policy based evidence making (or interpreting) than evidence based policy making.
But I'd also argue that this problem (policies are similar no matter what party rues) is not one of the trivial ones.
It's one of the hard ones, because it is sometimes true (especially in dual party systems like the US). And in other - very important - cases, it's suddenly not true.
In other words, the limits of politics are mostly very narrow, but sometimes frighteningly wide. Covid is a prime example.
We (society, citizens, politicians, scientists) need to do a better job understanding the state transitions from narrow to wide; but it's a hard question because there are so incredibly many factors and very small N (few observations, cannot easily transfer insights from one leader to another due to biography, for example).
On Covid, I suspect that partisan differences have been quite small, at least among mainstream parties! But of course, politics matters desperately in some circumstances. For example, the 2019 UK election and 2020 US election were extremely consequential, reflecting the issues at stake and profile of some of the candidates.
I'd agree with the idea of the article and I would extend this to say that both elections were inconsequential, as they usually are. It's just that we are too close to them in time to see this. Assuming that the areas that matter are not tribal politics, then give it decade or 3 and we will see that Biden and Trump were not so different in the areas that matter.
Now, theres a good argument to make that tribal politics is ALL that matters..... which we see demonstrated all the time on social media and in these comments.... but political scientists should know better!
I don’t know how Covid vaccines became political. The mainstream Republican leaders all the way up to Trump and most Senators and governors are trying to convince people to get vaccinated.
A lot of right wing media commentators have decided the engagement and the cash come from leaning the other way, even when they've all been vaccinated according to their outlet's internal vaccine mandate policy.
Many mainstream Republicans did jump on the "don't listen to the medical profession" bandwagon for various reasons, and it's not that easy to get everybody else off it, especially not if their shouting about the evils of vaccine mandates (out of genuine principle or not) is still louder than their insistence that vaccines are actually good. The irony is I think a lot of the shouting down the medical establishment came when they were trying to convince people that the worst effects of COVID could easily be prevented when it couldn't, and now the whole thing's flipped over...
Within some countries, partisan differences may have been small. But across countries, there is a wide range of measures implemented (or not). Some countries starting with fairly similar political systems and traditions ended up with very different covid regimes.
So I'd count that as an indicator of the potential variation.
What a waste of [my] time! This type of articles shall be labeled very visibly [US applicable only], so the rest of the world could safely move onto reading some more relevant HN news.
It is much more applicable to countries with the first-past-the-post election system though, typically Great Britain and its former colonies. This is because that system tends to converge to very few, very large parties (really only two in the US), which then need to stay relatively close to each other so they can still compete for the "middle" voters. Stray too much and you will lose that middle group, so the big parties must stay relatively close together.
In countries where this system is not in place, you tend to get many more parties with a much wider spectrum of political ideologies. For example, in the Netherlands there is currently a party (with only 1 seat atm) in our equivalent to Congress that exclusively focuses on the interests of farmers (a group consisting of <2% of the labor force). Also while all parties have some opinion about immigration, there are also more single-issue parties both for and against the topic.
I'm not saying either system is better than the other (multiparty systems tend to have a much more difficult time forming governing coalitions than FPTP systems for example), but it is not an issue relevant to all countries.
Whilst the electoral programmes of parties in proportional systems tend to be more different, differences are often bargained away during coalition negotiations. Also, proportional systems tend to have more institutional checks and balances than majoritarian systems. Indeed, Schmidt (1996) argues that partisan differences are less pronounced in proportional systems.
It's a waste of time for sure, but it's clearly written by a British author about British and European politics, so that label wouldn't be quite applicable either.
> Perhaps we should be glad that politicians and the media do not emphasize the limits of politics. This could be counterproductive, fuelling disengagement and populism.
Why is engagement or "populism" still an end in itself, if it makes little effective difference? I can imagine its not "engagement" per se, that is desired, it is discipline. (Edit) Isn't this precisely what failed on January 6th? People (for mostly delusional reasons) were angry at a break down of politics itself, in their mind.
The sports analogy makes sense, but there are economic interests there, on the part of the owners of the teams and the league, engagement by people to an arbritray cause translates to more tickets to the games, ad revenue for the broadcasts. There is maybe a distinction there, at least.
> The secret is this; whichever party is in power, policies tend to be similar. In other words, government ideology has little effect in areas such as taxation, welfare and foreign policy.
There may be some areas of government that see relatively few differences, especially in the machinery of the bureaucracy. But in other areas the article's thesis couldn't be more wrong.
Taxes, guns, COVID lockdowns, abortion, and many other issues have laws directly attributable to what party is in power.
Taxes are famously beyond partisan influences; lots of studies demonstrate this (see Imbeau et al for a review). It's a bit early to say on Covid lockdowns, but this also seems to be the case. On abortion/guns, Democrats may have very different positions than Republicans, but what degree of policy change have they secured?
I don't think the Democrats are actually that miffed by the constitution limiting their ability to implement change. If they were really wishing they could do more, they wouldn't pretend they couldn't do anything when they actually do have the ability.
Taxes aren't beyond partisan influences though. The UK's Conservative Party cut top rate income tax whilst the budget was in deficit. Clearly, the Labour Party would not have done this. Similarly, the Democrats would not have passed Trump's tax cuts, and the Republicans would not have hiked the top rate
Sure, they are constrained by the art of the possible: massive top-rate rises and cuts are extremely appealing to left/right bases respectively but are constrained by the fact that (i) the median voter they need to woo doesn't like extreme change and (ii) extreme changes usually won't actually have the positive impact on the economy which left/right ideology claims they will. So tax changes usually aren't drastic, and don't show up well in panel data studies. But there's still plenty of changes at the margin and especially to tax incidence which are the result of one party being elected over another.
Looking at a global level, there doesn't seem to be much variance between the politics of a country and the coronavirus response in that place.
But for the other items on the list. It all depends on what you, and we as people, would consider to be important changes. For example major global events like a war in the middle east was started by the left in the UK, and the right in the US, it could have been swapped around and indeed was swapped around a few times but the policies, the war and damage continued.
Are the changes tribal politics or real politics, is what the article is asking. The author is attacking tribal politics and by extension those invested in cultural war type issues.
Arguably an open secret at this point. The duopoly is increasingly organized around hyperventilating that the other will destroy civilization, then upon taking power the GOP passes its standard corporate tax cuts, Dems get a middling infrastructure bill, and both largely do the same thing on COVID and foreign policy.
Except this time around new Jim Crow laws were supported in almost all the Red states setting us back nearly 6 decades on fair voting for minorities. New laws have been passed in Red states to overthrow the will of the state if the state legislature doesn't like the results and will use an transparent "legal" means to tell their electors to vote for rather than who the populace voted for. 2024 could very well be the end of American democracy, yet people here on HN are talking about "both parties are the same"
This is probably more of an indictment of electoral politics and the function of the state in general. Leftists (in their various strands of thought) have, for centuries, known and publicized the view that governments exist to dominate and to protect the interests of capital -- it's no secret. So yes, it's a football game, but one intended to distract us from attaining our material interests.
This takes us in the opposite direction from his conclusion for activists (essentially, give up because it doesn't matter) toward a more productive one that asks, if left/right party politics does not produce meaningful change, then what kind of politics can?
There's also a clever load-bearing phrase buried in here that sweeps the explanation for real variation in policy under the rug: "these governments followed the spirit of the age." Now, what is the spirit of the age but the movement of politics?
Of course, the author's motivations are clearer if you look at the other trash that they've written: an article about not being ideological (recently litigated on hacker news [1]), dozens of posts ragging about "the left," and a few articles about how much they hate trans people.
US politics is increasingly tribal because of the realities described. The irony is the political landscape is controlled by the DNC & the RNC, who are effectively the political equivalent of Mastercard and Visa. No other parties can get on a debate stage or any airtime. The two political machines are partnered with huge corporate media companies to manipulate popular opinion, instill fear and rage and to destroy any coherent opposition, including within those two manufactured and manipulated tribes
An important fact that has gone completely under the radar is the radically changing demographics of the media (both sides).
The media used to be much more decentralized with a much greater diversity of views (rich and poor).
Now with increasing technology and centralization of distribution, the demographics of people in the media is largely that of the elites. Journalists working for CNN, Fox or MSNBC are paid very high wages, come from the best schools and according to all conventional markers are in the top 10% of society.
And this is reflected in the content they put out which is to generate controversy, keep the plebs squabbling amongst themselves and divert attention way from wealthy elites.
We also live in an era of career politicians. Previously proven business and societal success was leveraged politically in campaigns by candidates becoming politicians.
Today we only have choices of mckinsey/academic/media/think tank generic empty suits to vote for. This is true all over the western world.
Example: DNC's chosen one Buttigieg cargo culting being a politician:
I've been reading 'Brave New World revisited' by Huxley..:
'Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.'
Could you link to the articles about how much they hate trans people? I would see that as a strong indicator of hidden, ideological, partisanship — but I couldn’t find them.
You almost had it when you said “electoral politics”. But then you missed the mark. The entire federal system in the US is built to favor rural areas. From the 2 Senators/state where CA only has the same number of Senators as the least populous states in US, the Electoral College method of presidential voting where twice since 2000 the person with the most popular votes lost the election, and gerrymandering where the party in congress doesn’t represent the popular vote in nearly the same proportion.
I think you've lost the thread. Rural vs. urban is just one facet of how our system pits the many against each other while the few benefit. Have you been to rural parts of the country? Most urbanites wouldn't consider the average boonie to be any better than their neighborhood in a city. You know which places are really doing better, certainly better than they actually need? Those with huge average salaries relative to CoL, like Potomac or the Hamptons.
> The entire federal system in the US is built to favor rural areas
That’s because those who choose not to live in filthy crime ridden cities shouldn’t have to suffer from the lowest common denominator laws and high taxes said cities “require” to not fall apart since people aren’t meant to live that close together.
Yet snd still it’s rural America that’s subsidized by those “filthy cities” where all of the economic activity is taking place.
I’m not going to even mention the opioid epidemic in rural America is killing far more people than in the inner city.
But why should the minority get to dictate policies if the majority? Is rural America willing to get rid of all of the farm subsidies? The unneeded military bases that the military is trying to close but politicians don’t let them?
Most rural Americans would be willing to get rid of subsidies if the government was also willing to control inflation, pass right to repair so that equipment costs for farmers weren’t so high, and if government didn’t put quotas on the production of other crops. This before getting into monopolies that exist in the agricultural sector who lobby to keep the government from changing things and in many cases those companies have engaged in regulatory capture.
People love to be pro-whatever but unless you’ve lived among the farmers and heard the crap they put up with you shouldn’t really be mouthing off on the topic. It’s complex with good and bad from corporate interest and government. This isn’t a matter of more or less government involvement, or of more or less market freedom… it’s fundamentally about a need for all of these interests to actually take the time to see the struggles farmers face before taking more action. The right to repair is a great example of this working well, where people did listen and John Deere may get a good come-uppance.
One last thing, the way you worded that first part of your comment makes you sound like someone prejudiced against the rural poor. Nice and classist style. That is precisely why the majority of rural Americans hate urban Americans so much.
No, they wouldn't be. I don't think you understand the full extent of subsidies that rural areas receive. Even with right to repair, and perpetual 2% inflation, the entire agricultural lifestyle in the US would crumble.
There are no production quotas in the US, except on sugar. There are limits to subsidies, however.
I know how the life of farmers goes, and not just in the US. You just have no idea what it looks like when what you're asking for happens. There is a reason that no major economy doesn't have agricultural subsidies.
If those went away, US exports of agricultural products would essentially go to zero.
But agricultural subsidies are far from the only, and perhaps not even the largest, type of subsidy that farmers receive.
Indeed, farms in the US are greatly under-taxed. Despite the median farm household income being much higher than the overall median household income, farming households on average pay around 14% in income taxes, around 4900$ in property taxes.
This is is much lower than the tax load of the average US household, and much lower still than the tax load of the average US household of the same income.
Thus, if you wanted to actually end the support that farms are getting, you would also need to raise taxes on farms significantly, and cut subsidies. Then you'd also have the fact that the average farmer requires much costlier infrastructure than the average city dweller in per-capita equivalents.
Would it really be possible for US farms to make a living if their taxes were almost doubled, if all subsidies were ended, and if prices were allowed to fluctuate? The answer is, definitely, absolutely, not at all.
> Yet snd still it’s rural America that’s subsidized by those “filthy cities” where all of the economic activity is taking place.
If you don't think rural America would trade those subsidies in the blink of an eye for the dissolution of those cities into their own separate union or something, you really don't know rural America.
> But why should the minority get to dictate policies if the majority?
Because a few pinprick-sized geographical locations overflowing with millions of people who think that's how everyone should live / does live (it's not) shouldn't get to dictate the policies of the entire rest of the country that is living in relative peace and comfort away from such overpopulated, crime-ridden areas with extremely high costs of living and an overall terrible QoL. Look at any US-wide election map, by county; see how few areas are truly blue. The homogeneous state of southern California should not get to decide how the rest of us live/suffer.
Whatever they would do is irrelevant. If those things did happen, farmers would go into bankruptcy en masse and be utterly financially ruined. Whether they know this or not isn't relevant.
There has never been a "rural" empire. You're basically advocating a return to serfdom. Breaking the links between cities and rural areas will just strand people in rural areas.
Cities will get fed, they have the people and the might. The current system is way more beneficial to rural people then any alternative.
Rural America gets far more from the federal government than their taxes pay for. Heck the only reason rural America has internet or before that phone lines is because of government mandates and taxes added on to phone bills Z
The problem is that people for some reason are living in cities for thousands of years and this helped in progres of science/technology/art. It's a symbiotic, not parasitic relationship.
Perhaps state/federal assistance, benefits, and investment should also be proportional to tax revenue as well.
Don't want to pay taxes? Fine, you're on your own. Rural areas receive all kinds of investment and subsidies that far exceed their contribution in taxes. Fortunately for everybody, things don't work that way.
Consider California, who's GDP would rank it among most countries. Most of the economic activity in the state is concentrated in the large, coastal cities. This generates massive amounts of state and federal taxes that rural areas ultimately benefit from.
Cities pay for your rural lifestyle. You're welcome. No need to thank us, we're all in this together.
If you really want to see it in a zero sum way, which I disagree with, you need to realize that those living in suburbia or in rural areas are the lowest common denominators. Paying for their lifestyle is why taxes in cities are so high and why laws in cities are so harsh.
It is logistically impossible for the people that live outside cities to have anywhere near the quality of life they currently enjoy without the existence of people living in cities.
Indeed, without subsidies paid for by city folk, agricultural prices would plummet and become unstable, which would greatly hamper the prosperity of anyone related to the agricultural sector.
Without cities, it would also be impossible to pay for the infrastructure enjoyed by suburbia and rural areas. The amount and quality of roads would have to decrease drastically, and suburbs would have to pay multiple times more for running water, electricity infrastructure, wastewater management (you would have to move to a septic tank with all of the costs those entail). This would have knock-on effects increasing the prices of all goods and it would make transportation either very expensive or impossible.
This would lead to a complete collapse of rural and suburban life in North America.
If you want to know what that would look like, you can envision life in rural China, or somewhat worse even.
Urbanisation is absolutely necessary for the quality of life you enjoy. In the relationship, despite it being mutually beneficial, those who live in rural areas are the ones who are moreso compensated. As for suburbia, it's not clear that it is beneficial at all to those who live in cities.
I ask the following to hopefully promote discussion, I don't necessarily espouse the opinion.
With most of the US critically thinking about the electoral / senatorial systems, and how the scales do tip towards rural states..
What concessions, if any, should rural states / areas be entitled to, given that they are the food producers for our country? On paper, that could provide leverage / a "bargaining chip" in this discussion.
The flip-side to this coin is that the more urban states / areas are the economic drivers of the country, which is clearly a source of leverage as well.
I feel like most people don't think about it in these terms, and I'm curious how it would impact their opinions when adding the dimension of leverage / "social value" to population.
Perhaps these should have no weight on a discussion of representation?
None. One person. One vote. Rural America wouldn’t survive without farm subsidies and protectionist trade policies. If they had to sell at cost without subsidies, it would be cheaper to import food. How much are farm subsidies just for corn?
If you have to import food to feed your people, you are not an independent nation. You are a vassal state of whoever is feeding you. That's why countries protect their agricultural sector. It's why when you cross over into Canada from the US, the landscape quickly changes to agricultural as what's often considered marginal to poor farmland in the US is considered prime ag land in Canada since they want to grow as much of their own food as possible. Agriculture is what makes civilization possible, not the other way around. Farmers can exist just fine if cities disappeared. Cities cannot say the inverse.
How well will farmers survive without the infrastructure that is provided by modern cities? Hospitals? The years when they have poor yields?
How is the quality of life of more agrarian societies compared to more industrial nations?
When a worldwide pandemic happens, how is rural America going to do? How are poorer more agrarian countries now doing in the midst of Covid compared to the industries countries?
If I can’t find a job in my state based on my skillset, I can move to anywhere in the US. Heck, my company is on the opposite coast and I WFH. Knowledge workers have a lot more mobility and much less capital tied up in their labor.
In other words, if my state went to shit because CA is not subsidizing it, it wouldn’t affect me.
>It's why when you cross over into Canada from the US, the landscape quickly changes to agricultural as what's often considered marginal to poor farmland in the US is considered prime ag land in Canada since they want to grow as much of their own food as possible.
Source? I inspected various parts of the canada-us border using google maps and can't find an example of this.
The system wasn’t built to favor rural areas, it was built to favor the sovereignty of the States, which are independent territories with their own systems of government, who specifically agreed to join the US in exchange for the representation they received in Congress and the Electoral process. Trying to walk back that compromise to let high population states dominate national politics is a violation of the social contract.
That’s why the States are referred to as experiments in democracy. It’s a decentralized form of government (With guardrails, written into the US Constitution). It doesn’t matter that there are millions of people in Los Angeles, their voice shouldn’t have a disproportionate say in how farmers in say, Iowa, run their government. The needs, economies, and demographics of different states are completely different and a using decentralized system of government is much more intuitive than trying to manage it from the top down.
So in that case, shouldn’t voters in CA be able to refuse to subsidize rural states? We should have lower federal taxes and let each state fend for itself.
The people who want less taxes don’t want to cut spending, they increase deficits and they are damn sure not going yo cut subsidies to rural America. The people in CA have less voting power in the Senate than all of the states they are subsidizing.
The people in CA vote for one party, which is the party of redistribution on the national level. Would that party not bulge if it were punished by CA voters?
Both parties are the parties of redistribution. Republicans “redistribute” via farm subsidies, oil and gas subsidies, unneeded military bases to create jobs (bases that the military wants to close), “disability insurance” for people in rural America that are not disabled but don’t have the right kind of training to work the in demand jobs. Heck and lately unemployment insurance for people who lost their jobs because they refuse to get vaccinated.
But, the point is that people in CA can only elect two Senators while five or six states whose population doesn’t equal CA can elect 10 or 12.
California decided itself it wants be in a union with other states and accepted the conditions which enabled that union. I think it should be their right to secede from such a union if it is not in their interest anymore. I think you are also forgetting CA is also huge in agriculture and will certainly subsidize its farms even if it gets independent.
Remove states and all levels of local government? Just single voting area for entirely country where from pool of candidates those with most votes are elected? Just single federal level?
This is impossible in the USA without another civil war. The notion of states is a central part of our democratic republic, which was a compromise from the beginning. No matter how much anyone dislikes that opinion it is basically inarguable that states aren't going anywhere unless you plan on revolting and starting a new country.
Decrease federal taxes and spending to only the military and international affairs, cut out subsidies to states and let each state fend for themselves. Get rid of social security on the federal level and each state has their own pension that is transferable between states.
We will then find out how much red states truly miss “socialism” then.
It just seems like that since the rich currently use that to keep the status quo.
I'm reminded of the fact that whatever house of congress the republicans own all of a sudden become the most important legislative body. When the Dems had the house and the Reps had the senate, the house was an afterthought. When reversed, the house were the arbiters of final word on legislation (at least it was based on CNN's characterization for the last 20-odd years).
The state of gerrymandering also reflects this, to reduce the political power of democratic strength in populous cities.
If the rich had their power via cities, then districting would enforce this and the house would be the most powerful.
The federal government has inertia by design since the spoils system was removed. The rich have the means to influence this inertia over time.
Also, do you wonder why elections are so close? The rich pay only enough to form a coalition to maintain the status quo. They buy just enough to win some of the time, and even if they lose, they roadblock changes. They advance the agenda when they win, and resist when they don't.
Over time, that has resulted in the current state of wealth inequality.
It's telling that these pieces advocating political nihilism always come from the right. Probably because a politically disengaged populace puts more power in the hands of the elites.
What about axes other than economic and foreign policy? There are many government policies in effect that large parts of the right strenuously object to.
In fact, even on foreign policy, I'd be surprised if the forever wars in the middle east enjoy majority support among the right. Isn't isolationism also right-wing? If it's at all helpful to classify policies into 'left' and 'right'..
yes, but the "left-wing elites" aren't the ones pushing political nihilism. "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem" isn't something the left ever claims.
Anyone father left than "slightly more money for foodstamps" may be heard saying exactly that - with the caveat that they're talking about our government, not the idea of government generally.
Marxist here. Just like any libertarian, we acknowledge the capitalist state as a monopoly on violence, but we also acknowledge the capitalist state exists because capital maintains it. When you understand this, you quickly realize that fighting for something like a national universal healthcare program challenges the capitalist state more than anything libertarians want to do.
That's because we've seen where that brand of socialism (and anarchy) leads --> authoritarianism. It has never worked on anything bigger than the village level. You need abstract means of exchange (money) to get people on a large scale to cooperate. People in my village do not care about people two villages over who they only ever barely met let alone someone hundreds of miles away.
Yes. To be a wealthy left-winger, you have to condemn yourself. People sometimes get confused because they watch 24 hour news networks that think H. Clinton is a radical communist.
Our entire current wave is based in 90s tea party astroturfing by billionaires that got out of control when it encountered the militia movement.
That’s always going to be true. By definition elites are the people who have benefited most from things being the way they are. They may be socially somewhat liberal, if it makes them look good, but economically always conservative. Because being pro gay marriage doesn’t cost them anything. But universal health care would. Hence you people like Nancy pelosi who use socially progressive positions as a cover for deeply regressive and right wing economic and military policy. That’s also why you get the superficial lip service paid to Black Lives Matter, where they will paint a street or kneel in kente cloths while simultaneously doing nothing whatsoever to materially improve black peoples lives. One costs money, specifically costs the elites money, while the other is free.
given that the lead democrat, nancy pelosi, represents one of the wealthiest districts in america, this hardly seems believable at face value and rather falls in line with the article.
left vs right rather seems like a shell game to me where the dealer has the piece the whole time.
I'm very sceptical of non specific hate hustlers. Character-conditioned or rational variants are peddled by academic observers who don't appear to have ever been threatened with life threatening hatred.
In the western world claims of being 'hated' are often a desperate cry for visibility and relevance in society.
> if left/right party politics does not produce meaningful change, then what kind of politics can?
Try to raise awareness about issues that are roughly orthogonal to the main left-right divide. It's easy and can lead to major results and policy improvements over the status quo, precisely because very few people are interested in it.
you've already lost when you buy into "left-right" bullshit, which is solely a gambit to coalesce and otherize in a way that maximizes power for party leaders.
the eternal struggle is between the populace and power-grubbers, because a little government in good hands is a net-good, while a lot of government (i.e., centralized power) or government in bad hands, is net-negative.
americans have completely lost this simple, eternal narrative in favor of just about anything spewing from democrats/republicans and their media surrogates. that's all bullshit. look past it and apply your own brains to figure out what you believe and want to support. forget parties, and especially forget any dipshit dichotomy like 'left-right'.
Here in the US, there exists a Duopoly that collectively support each other in excluding any other views by focusing on a series of "wedge issues" that generate a lot of emotional heat, where reality demands thought and nuance and compromise, but the extremists can dissipate emotions and distract.
The RepubliCratic cancer needs to go, but I doubt it will.
Why? It actively votes against the will of the population, in service of the wealthy donors who fund their reelection campaigns.
What if this is reflective of common ideology? What if most people agree on most things somewhere near a center (with some fluctuation) and the wedge issues are the rare points of hard, uncompromising disagreement. Wouldn't that eventually lead to the duopoly we see? Wouldn't that be the best case scenario?
No, it's the worst possible outcome, it is totally obstructive to the will of the people, and appears to be exclusively in service to the donor class who fund their reelection efforts.
from where does the donor class derive their wealth? they pay you a wage or collect rent, profiting either way. in all cases, they derive their wealth because they own the things that allow us to produce value. perhaps those things should be commonly owned instead. then these class distinctions would evaporate.
Centrally planned economies (what is commonly called communism) is not the only solution that fits the above description. Cooperative market economics does the same, so would a partial land decommodification or a land value tax combined to a steep progressive tax rate combined to considering collaterilization as a partial realization of gain, etc...
What? Wedge issues are what the people unfortunately want. It gets them jazzed up even though these are not the most impactful issues for most people's lives.
While blame should be placed on politicians who use such issues to drive votes instead of tackling bigger, more boring challenges, we also have to fault the populace for being easily distracted, emotive, etc.
Wedge issues are not what people want... they want to live their lives
Wedge issues are what make them angry, or scared enough to post on social media, etc. It collectively is a dark pattern that subverts our tendency to fix broken things by making us believe that everything is broken.
? People really care about abortion, for example, but it's really just a wedge issue.
Wedge issues are bad overall for society, but they are not anyone's "fault" except for society. What you're arguing connotes to me that people are victims of some kind, but the fact is the "dark pattern" works because people care about that stuff. I think they are logically incorrect for assigning these issues disproportionate weight, but like...they're free to lol, and it's not inherently invalid.
But then, take something like abortion. Some people really feel strongly about that issue (on both sides of the political spectrum). There are people who do vote based on that single issue alone. They are free voters who have constructed their moral/political rubric or w/e, and have elected to accord that single issue decisive importance in their political decisions. That would seem to me to be a feature, not a bug, of democracy.
What will is it obstructing? The will of the far left? Yeah. The will of the far right? Yeah. The will of the 90% that just want to live their life in peace? No. If you think the government should protect people and infrastructure so that they can exchange goods and services according to a common understanding of private property, then today's government likely isn't too far from what you'd like, and, therefore, the tension holding things over center is a blessing.
No. It will lead to a terrible Nash equilibrium as far towards the donor class's interests as possible while still giving the voters the illusion of choice and enough of a quorum to provide airs of legitimacy.
What's the alternative? Resources, in a very direct, physical, way afford one power. As soon as you allow unequal distribution of resources, you create unequal power. The fact that the 'donor class' are put on a leash to the degree that most demand be done means things are working well no?
It does reflect the common ideology of the people who donate to parties. The wedge issues are the ones that donors don't care about, except that they boost support for both major parties by threatening doom as a result of defection.
All this with the support of a media that almost exclusively covers wedge issues, and ignores bipartisan screwjobs.
> where reality demands thought and nuance and compromise, but the extremists can dissipate emotions and distract.
Extremists do indeed do this, and surely do it more than others...but I think we should always be very careful of the mind's tendency to convert positions on a spectrum into a binary representation.
A pattern that I propose can be observed on all social media including HN: if an article takes an abstract perspective upon politics (or any culture war topic), most people are pretty good at nuance and compromise....but if an article is discussing a specific, object level issue, it seems like the aggregate ability of commenters to discuss matters in a nuanced, non-biased manner massively decreases.
If for the sake of discussion we assume this theory to have a non-trivial amount of truth to it, it seems to me that it would be useful to come up with some theories of how this phenomenon could be detected and managed, or perhaps even reversed through collective effort (leveraging the innately unique differing perspective of members, combined with our ability to be self-aware and highly logical if that state of mind can be achieved (which I believe could be achieved through an explicit process/reminders/etc)).
Alternatively, humanity can continue doing exactly the same thing we are doing now, one aspect of which is using social media only for entertainment, suppressing discussion about using it to improve ourselves and the world, etc.
The policies put in place aren’t there because of the “wealthy donors”. The “wealthy donors” don’t care about the “War on Crime”, “War on Drugs”, “Pro-Life”/“Pro-Choice” debates, the lack of accountability for the corrupt justice system, “voter integrity” [sic], “protecting the borders”, etc. All of those issues have one thing in common, it’s about keeping “them” in their place.
Yes I’m aware that the “War on Crime” and the “War on Drugs” was perpetrated by the Democratic and Republican Administrations in the 90s.
Political scientists are generally focused on national governments and/or international organizations. To paraphrase a well known economist and political commentator, modern governments are essentially insurance companies with their own militaries. Add on a wealth redistribution function, and it's easy to see why competent national governments mostly behave alike, regardless of the policy positions of the ruling party.
My feeling is that this changes dramatically when you look at local politics, which is where most of the interesting action is. There's not much that the French government can do that, when zoomed out, is fundamentally different from Germany or Spain. There's a lot more leeway when you compare Tokyo or Shanghai with Mexico City.
Maybe you'll like this better method then: Bayesian counterfactual time-series analysis [1]. In essence, it compares a "neutral" time series and another one affected by a natural experiment and produces bayesian point-estimates for the causal impact.
Super powerful, there's a great R package, and really easy to use.
I've been puzzled by people blaming "open borders" (Mexico vs United States) on President Biden. What changed? Did he fire the 20,000 border guards? If there is one thing that's driving this charge it's Mexican neighboorhoods popping up in many small towns across the South and West. Many "native" whites feel like it's an invasion.
Well, nothing changed. It's not the Democrats doing. It's industry bring in Mexicans for cheap labor. For example, in chicken processing factories. Americans don't want these jobs. But corporations don't want small town Americans to blame them for the foreign influx, so they blame Democrats in a constant drum beat on right wing media. "Democrats need new voters. They get them by bringing them here and putting them on welfare." When their people are in charge, they get them to claim they're building a wall and they're dealing with this influx that happened under Democrats.
Corporations and industry shift the blame away from themselves for any social problem caused by the influx of cheap labor, even though they are responsible for it. Nothing changes under either party in power, only the blame rhetoric gets changed. That's political science in America.
No, this has been studied. Americans think bending over in artichoke fields in California or working in chicken and pig slaughtering plants are jobs suitbale for immigrants, not them. They seemingly can't put two and two together that's that is why Mexicans are here, unless everyone is participating in this charade that Mexicans come here for welfare and to vote for Democrats
Sure, Americans also don't want to work at McDonald's or as sanitation workers, or any number of other undesirable jobs, but they'll do it if they're unskilled and need the money, as long as it pays enough.
You can work at McDonalds or in cleaning whilst living in or near your existing neighborhood, surrounded by family and friends, possible even in a house you own. Not so much moving to a different state to some isolated rural community to do unglamorous work, even if it pays more than McDonalds. cf Mexicans who think the move is part of the attraction (as well as obviously being more likely to be wowed by the salary offer and experienced in hard manual labour; there are seasonal farm work recruits who don't fit those two brackets though, like British university kids picking apples in New Zealand)
If you're looking for the subset of manual labourers willing to move to remote locations, you're competing with oil companies that really well, and people aren't queuing round the block for those jobs either. Labour intensive food production isn't particularly likely to be able to compete with oil on salary.
When the 'take our jobs' website first came up (immigrants offering citizens to take their jobs bending over artichoke fields and what not) I was one of the first to sign up. It turned out they didn't actually want people to take their jobs, and they never actually offered me a job even though I was 100% ready and wanting to take their job. These jobs are largely closed off to citizens through the old boy network of immigrants (I'm not impugning them for this, I'm very glad they're here working those jobs so I can eat). I ended up hitchhiking to North Dakota for one of the few labor jobs available, building housing for the oil rush.
That's hilarious that you actually thought they were serious. No, they've got Mexican-American field managers in California who are second or third generation running crews of recent immigrant Mexicans with green cards. The last thing they want is some Anglo coming in to start demanding rights.
At that time I was young and willing to do pretty much anything. The idea of living in a tent in a field sounded like a great way to save money. Even if the pay was $5 an hour, I figured I could save almost 100% just like the immigrants working these fields do, and then follow them back to Mexico where my money would last awhile. Hilariously I basically just wanted to join in on the same action.
I had the same idea but even if I spoke fluent Indian-Spanish dialect, which I don't, there was no chance of it happening. They have a system that works well for growers, 2nd and 3rd generation Mexican-Americans and recent Mexican immigrants and I'm sure it will be working the same long after I'm gone
As an American, even the poorest have other options besides working in fields. If you told an Amazon warehouse worker that they could make $36 an hour to work in a field instead of $18/hour ho work in a warehouse, how many would take them up on the offer?
They had plenty of stories where field owners couldn’t find Americans who would stick to the work for more than week.
Would you work in the field for twice your current pay?
If I had a choice between living by myself and making $36/hour working in a field and getting a roommate and working in a warehouse (or an Amazon delivery driver), guess which one I would choose?
> They had plenty of stories where field owners couldn’t find Americans who would stick to the work for more than week.
Sure, because the pay or other benefits weren't good enough. There are sometimes other considerations as well, like that some of this work is temporary/seasonal and people want something steady.
> If I had a choice between living by myself and making $36/hour working in a field and getting a roommate and working in a warehouse (or an Amazon delivery driver), guess which one I would choose?
That's a weird question. You could easily keep working in that field and still get a roommate and you'd get to keep even more money.
That’s not the point. Once you have “enough” to meet your basic life needs - food, shelter, transportation - then you start making other choices.
I am sure I could give up my big house in the burbs and my wife and I could stay with another couple. But do you think I would make that choice?
On another related note, you saw the same thing with school bus drivers after Covid (my wife was one). No amount of money in the world was going to convince many bus drivers who didn’t really need the extra money to risk Covid to drive the bus. Many of them were just doing it for extra money.
Anyone could have more money saved if they found a roommate. But at some point we decide it’s not worth the trade off.
A shit ton. I worked up in the Alaskan fishing industry for a short period. About half the people there were white citizens. It is much worse than the field. You are stuck in a ship, in the Bering Sea (one of the most dangerous and nastiest coastal areas in the US), working 16+ hours a day under the worst conditions imaginable. Imagine being deathly sea sick while holding a knife in your hand, rocking violently from side to side. You're literally trapped, stuck with horrible smell of fish, horribly ill and worked to the bone with no escape and the boss will probably kick your ass if you bail while out at sea.
The upside of that 36/hr is many people were able to either take much of the year off or provide lavishly for their families when otherwise their children would have much fewer opportunities.
It's not even a question whether many would take it, it's a certainty.
Yes farming is heavily subsidized and they still don’t have high margins. How will they afford to pay enough to compete with much easier year round warehouse jobs with benefits that are much easier. It’s not like people in Alaska have too many choices and the relatively few fisherman pales in comparison to the number of farm workers needed.
Besides, Americans are already whining about inflation. Guess what would happen if food labor costs went up 5x?
1) Eliminate subsidies to agriculture (and fishing) gradually over say a decade. Effect: higher food prices
2) Phase out any tariffs or regulation on import of agriculture/fishing over say a decade. Effect: lower food prices
3) All workers should be on equal playing field. What regulation applies to one should apply to another. Let the free market determine rates within these regulatory constraints. Taking special advantage of undocumented immigrants to avoid labor regulations isn't an acceptable option. Regulations and law should apply equally to everyone, if it is to be applied at all.
Wages will rise until either the free market rate for this kind of labor is matched, or the farm in question becomes unprofitable. In the latter case, the farm is not compatible with efficient use of human resources and should adapt or fail. In the former case, workers benefit in the form of rising wages.
When there are subsidies, Americans pay one way or another. You can pay either in the form of increased government revenues (i.e. taxation/inflation/debt) or you can pay at the grocery store. I'm much more in favor of the latter as we don't need to add yet another middleman eating up resources in this equation. Costs should be born directly by those consuming the resource.
>And what happens when the US phases out subsidies and other countries don’t?
Then American consumers basically get fed at the expense of the rest of the world. Not ideal for the world, but great for those getting the cheap food. Labor directed in agriculture instead get focused into other industries we have a competitive advantage in.
Any industry has a competitive advantage internationally when your government is subsidizing it going out and imposing tariffs coming in.
As soon as the US industry is destroyed, the other countries remove subsidies and prices rise and we can do nothing about it.
Again, there are no easy answers. Either we subsidize farmers and pay more in taxes or we impose tariffs to level the playing field. Either way, we pay more than we should.
> Either we subsidize farmers and pay more in taxes or we impose tariffs to level the playing field.
Both of these don't level the playing field, they distort the playing field.
>As soon as the US industry is destroyed, the other countries remove subsidies and prices rise and we can do nothing about it.
Arguably it is subsidies that destroy farming industry, not the reverse. Farming can tolerate a lot more inefficiencies, bad practices, poor resource allocation and unreasonable crop selection when subsidies influence the market. This could be see India for example in the 70s where textile subsidies meant many people were working in sweatshops weaving with hand operated machines instead of maintaining well capitalized fully mechanized looms. Eliminating these subsidies gradually will allow farmers to develop techniques that make them more competitive on the international stage if these other countries "remove subsidies" (which is your prediction).
It is -very- hard to enforce your will of virtual enslavement when you have open borders. Even Karl Marx knew it would take an iron fist and closed borders to enforce his form of government for the masses by the masses.
>Americans don't want these jobs. But corporations don't want small town Americans to blame them for the foreign influx, so they blame Democrats in a constant drum beat on right wing media
It has nothing to do with Americans not wanting those jobs and more to do with undocumented immigration provides a workforce that can be underpaid and wont organize or ask for any benefits under threat of deportation. These farms pay under minimum wage to undocumented workers and provide 0 benefits; why would Americans work them. If either party were actually serious about this issue, they would start with fining corporations, not deportations.
> The secret is this; whichever party is in power, policies tend to be similar. In other words, government ideology has little effect in areas such as taxation, welfare and foreign policy.
That's not a secret. As shown by the old saw: "Whoever you vote for the government always gets in."
And it is easily explained by the huge inertia of vast numbers of people who rather like stability.
Title was changed, from "The biggest secret in political science" to "Whichever party is in power, policies tend to be similar" after 1 hour and 35 Comments.
So be aware that a few top level comments will be responding to the "secret revealed" click bait nature of the title.
What bothers me about a lot of current political tactics is that the people engaged in them don't appear to understand or even apprehend what the failure mode of politics is. Not if you fail, or they fail, but when the process of discourse itself fails. If there were a dynamic I could articulate with some hope of helping to give people some extra cognitive tools keep things on the rails it would be this.
Someone who self identifies as educated is untroubled by sustaining cognitive dissonance because from their perspective, the state and establishment is almost infinitely sophisticated and complex, so there is no reason to think you understand it, you just need to identify as it being yours, and by aligning to it by default and sustaining it, you are doing your part, and you get the rewards it offers. This is Pound's hedgehog knowing one thing. The one thing they need to know is if you sustain the establishment narrative, it will sustain you. Its leviathan vastness means you can't decide what about it is real or true, but you can find the hooks to align to it, and this is The Game people talk about. I have criticized the immoderate version of this in the past as "banal nihilism," but more generally, and charitably, there is an establishment We who ask things like what is to be done, and use terms like oxygen-starving, problematic, extremists, and other meta-social managerial terms to discuss how we will manage society. However, their ontology reduces to an infinte attrition game of musical chairs to determine who this We will include.
At the other pole are those who are attached to the idea of Truth. We can criticize it as a need for concreteness and a lack of cognitive or educated ability to engage The Game as an abstraction separate from their identities (like the from-somewhere and from-nowhere dichotomy), and so when a politician says something, we might take it at face value, and not as a signal of alignment to an abstraction. This ontology includes principles, expectations, loyalties, immovable facts, laws of the universe, consequences, permanence, stability. These are Jonathan Haidt's Righteous Mind tribes, but with a twist where it's not right/left. Other criticisms I've heard is of relating "transactionally," to people, where there is objectivity, truth, roles, state, and definition. What I would say is there is an underlying axiom that there is a truth that is objective, persistent, and independent of whether it's observed, and when you align to it, it makes us good. Even if good for what is not always clear. The key piece is it both instinctively and competently rejects dissonance as a misalignment to truth. In this view, if something is untrue it cannot be relatively powerful or legitimate. This orientation to truth is what makes trust that would facilitate reconciliation or even an equillibrium increasingly impossible.
There are a lot of frameworks for this including Jungian animus/anima, Marxist classes, Girardian memesis groups, etc. In the 90s when the so-called "neocons" arrived, they were a weird hybrid of these Game playing conservatives who appeared to support capitalistic ideas, but had an intellectual smarm and who looked down on others' inability to appreciate that this was just them playing this Game as an abstraction. The smarm was because they knew they were lying and didn't care. Tucker Carlson was very famously destroyed by John Stewart over this, and that takedown marked a cultural turning point, where I think the neocons popularly legitimized into the establishment the tactics of what people self-identify now as the "dirtbag left." (not an epithet, it's their word)
But this idea of liar becomes the friction point, because from both the dynamic We and the stable truth perspective, yes, Truth is Power, but it depends on the directionality of that equivalence. Are they equal, is one a superset or subset of the oth...
Thank you very much for writing this, very helpful explanation indeed! Probably more so than a traditional right-left abstraction.
I'd be very interested to explore this framework further. Could you recommend something to read that could inspire similar conclusions? Or, if this is a completely original thought, I shall await for the book to be published, hopefully soon :)
by European standards I guess. But the values the two parties hole are diametrically opposed.
Dems: diversity, equality amongst race, freedom of religion and though, open book policies, reproductive rights and guarantees for public education
Republicans: white-males at the top, pseudo equal rights for the rest, Christo-fascism for a religion, other religions considered dangerous with the possible exception of Judaism which got grandfathered in, repeal of voting rights to what amounts to poll taxes, shut down the borders, poor people fend for themselves for scraps tossed by "private charities", religion over facts in schools, the end of public education in favor of private conservative schools for those who can afford it, etc.
I think the choice is pretty clear if you're paying attention at all.
Because governments of any size are largely run by bureaucracies. This is both positive and negative in that it's stabilizing, but also can become anti-democratic and parasitic.
The politicians in the modern Western world mostly just give speeches and make deals and go to meetings. Sure they can guide policy to varying degrees, but implementation is through the bureaucracy.
I have to imagine when a new leader or parliamentarian comes to town (if they haven't been in town for years already and know "how things work") they are immediately set upon by a plethora of advisors and "experts" who explain reality and what must be done.
The politician then most likely see the light, but if not, they proceed to run into massive difficulties and very probably won't be there long.
I'm only familiar with the system in the US, but I think this explains why people vote for something, then none of it happens, even the reverse.
As an educated black person in tech who grew up in America, I'll stick with voting democrat. I'd rather get lip service, be ignored, with some mostly superficial policy here and there than have policy that actively targets the community I grew up with and my family.
I'm constantly told the conclusions of the article and how I'm much better off getting my taxes lowered, but there are just plainly obvious differences between living in a red or blue state. I grew up in a red state that is purple now and the back and forth major policy changes depending on the party in charge are palpable. Even with my increased salary and status at work that has me going to fewer of the places I grew up going to and being around a variety of people, I know voting Republican has a much greater chance of hurting cousins, aunts, childhood friends that maybe didn't get the chances I got in my immediate family.
I also know no matter how well I do in life, I'm just one traffic stop away from death or disaster and I'd rather side with the party that at least occasionally tries to hold police accountable for their actions.
I'll differentiate between democrats and third party candidates but I'll never cast a vote for anyone with R next to their name, unless there's some great switch like a massively racist candidate like Barry Goldwater.
These are called wedge issues and are a favorite tool of the oligarchs to control both parties. I've long advocated for a third party aiming to take away the supermajority and force others to the table (peoples party!), but one of the biggest hurdles is how to address those wedge issues with getting sucked into the black hole of conversation they create.
Lesser of two evils is still evil, and its probably questionable if its actually lesser.
I don’t think there is some grand conspiracy here. Social conservatives are motivated by their desire for cultural homogeneity and protecting existing hierarchies. This isn’t a wedge issue, it’s a central part of what it means to be conservative in the first place. The left is defined by opposition to this idea to varying degrees (ranging from reform to revolution). The specifics of what it means to preserve tradition and how it might be challenged are specific to the historical and geo-political context.
I do think there is a grand conspiracy and its provable, but thats a discussion for another time. You are talking about the people that make up the labels, but I'm talking about the people who really control the parties. Without going into too much of a rant this is one of the biggest problems, that people talk about the left and the right as if they really have big influence over policy, when things like the Princeton study and many more prove otherwise, so I dont think its helpful to talk about the labels that apply to the vast majority of the populace instead of the actual people with influence: the uber-wealthy. Rest assured, even the "left" wealthy are just as interested in protecting existing hierarchies as any oil barron, and it's naive and unsupported by evidence to think otherwise.
I believe our democratic process gets corrupted by the influence of money (and the legalization of bribery by the courts). But there’s no evidence this is all part of some coordinated effort that persists over time. Even if there is some evil cabal out there, they clearly do not exert complete influence as evidence by all the populists officials elected in the last four years. Why would Google/Facebook et al hand pick officials that want to break them up? These people are bad for big business because they act on reckless impulse.
Also maybe the status quo democrats aren’t leftists after all? And yes, I think these are useful “labels”. You’re implying the Illuminati or someone made up the left/right dichotomy to divide us but these have been used for over 200 years. Finally, I don’t think supporting resource extraction is intrinsic to one side. Lots of socialist countries export billions of dollars of oil a year. Equating anti fossil fuel sentiment with leftism is a very western way of viewing the issue.
Honestly the only conspiracy I really see is the political nihilism evinced online. It’s like some people want the citizenry to just give up or something. It’s still possible to exert political power as a normal voter. Don’t like the two choices you were presented with? Well did you vote in the primary? No? Oh gee.
People are taking this article to mean we are all living in a veil of ignorance while our puppeteers present us with a false dichotomy. I think an easier explanation is the US Government is a lumbering bureaucracy with lots of momentum and a few newly elected officials aren’t going to change anything. People overrate the influence of individuals and try to form narratives that don’t exist to explain the world in a way that makes sense. When really events and changes emerge dynamically from complex systems in a way that can’t be easily explained
I strongly disagree. Look, I understand that it is a safe line to take that the government is just inept, apathetic, etc, but that simply doesn't match the facts, and it has nothing to do with whats an easier explanation. Don't get me wrong, having been inside the system first hand there is quite a bit of ineptitude, lumbering bureaucratic systems, etc. I'm not saying thats not also true, but when you say there is no evidence this is part of some coordinated effort you are absolutely wrong. I really try hard not to get into "conspiracy theory territory" too much on HN because the conversation usually devolves, so I really don't want to get into a long list of evidence, but I could recommend The Anglo-American Establishment by Carrol Quigley as a good starting point for understanding how over-time agendas can be propagated and enacted. Perhaps the interview by Norman Dodd with G Edward Griffin about the tax exempt foundations.
You are correct however when you say the powers that be don't have complete influence, but I would say that influence has grown vastly, mostly through consolidation of media and banking, and that to say it is extremely powerful influence is still an understatement. Also I would say it's a mischaracterization to say "Why would corporate execs hand pick officials that would break them up", one, because they aren't the real oligarchs behind the scenes, and two, because I highly doubt that any rhetoric about anti-trust/monopoly is real given the track record in that arena. [1]
I strongly dislike this far too often used rhetorical clip used to dismiss any conspiracy you use: "form narratives that don’t exist to explain the world in a way that makes sense." How about we follow the evidence to the truth however ugly it may be. It often feels to me rather like when presented with darker narratives that do exist people would rather dismiss this like this as a way of burying their head in the sand to pretend things are better than they are.
You aren't looking very hard then to be frank when you say "the only conspiracy I really see is..."
Also, while I do think the voters take a large amount of responsibility, I don't think that is a good analysis of how entrenched the oligarchy are in electoral systems via the two party duopoly they control. Just take a look at your secretary of states website and look at how asinine the rules are for any party or person not a part of the duopoly. If the oligarchs control both parties, which they do, then the real threat would be from anybody outside that system and thats why you can see the evidence of how hard they have worked to stop the people from having any real mechanisms of influence themselves. Voting in primaries can help if another person gets on the ballot, but good luck actually doing that.
Look, one of the most powerful tools the oligarchs have is that they think and operate on much longer timelines than the rest of us. They setup mechanisms, plans, etc that don't come to fruition until their children or grandchildren are at the helm. Until the people interested in this topic understand that, much of what is going on the world won't make much sense. In that note, I will leave you with a quote from Michael Parenti about this idea of absent minded empire.
"Empires are even sometimes represented as unintentional. That's when it really starts to get cute. This should have been called maybe the funnier myths of empire, this part of it. The product of unconcious circumstance. When I was a youth, ... I used to hear that the British Empire was put together in a fit of absent mindedness. ... In fact, ladies and gentlemen, I think a moments reflection would tell you that empires are products of deliberate contrivance, of deliberate confection, planning, calculation, and manipulation. No social order can maintain itself in the long run, no social order can maintain itself without concious human agency. In fact that's why you hav...
Just visited the NumbersUSA site because I never heard of the, and immediately regretted it. Ghastly. They oppose a few thousand additional green cards (a system that is already pretty exploitative) during a time when skilled immigration is drastically decreasing. I don’t get it all. If anything ever made America great it was high skill immigration.
You might find some of the writings of Thomas Sowell interesting. He is definitely not (R) but he goes over some of the issues with progressive politics in trapping both poor black and white through oppressive policies like minimum wage and also by trapping them into dependence on the state through transfer payments.
OP never said Democrats are flawless, quite the contrary. They made the statement that even though Democrats are flawed, they are not as openly hostile and oppressive as Republicans are. So while your statement may be true, it’s not relevant to the point being made.
The same Thomas Sowell who compared Obama to Hitler because he paid for environmental disaster mitigation? The same Thomas Sowell who violently criticized Obama for advocating that children should be automatically covered by their parent's insurance?
If you actually think that laissez faire economics and the removal of the minimum wage would be a net benefit for anyone except the top 2% of the country you're delusional, and so is Sowell.
I'm not aware of any "violence" he perpetrated towards Obama unless you're using "violently" to describe political and economic speech, which of course is nonsense.
The reference to 'Hitler' was only to describe a process where politicians rile up people who are not normally involved in politics. The BP oil spill was one of those opportunities. I don't think it's weird to make notes on the tactics of Hitler, or even compare those. And the process to 'accept' $20B from BP, without due process, under implied threat of the possibility regulatory impositions (which the President is in a good position to influence) was definitely an authoritarian move on Obama's part IMO. It's not the environmental mitigation that is questionable, but rather the process by which the funds were obtained and I think your representation here is intentionally misleading.
>If you actually think that laissez faire economics and the removal of the minimum wage would be a net benefit for anyone except the top 2% of the country you're delusional, and so is Sowell.
Oh definitely. The bottom 2% would be the biggest winners of eliminating minimum wage, because minimum wage essentially outlaws employing anyone who can generate less than minimum wage worth of value to an employer. But it's true, the top 2% would win too and so would everyone else. IMO it would be one of the most important tools to lift people out of poverty.
>I'm not aware of any "violence" he perpetrated towards Obama
If you interpret the phrase "violent criticism" as perpetrated violence, you are clearly doing whatever you can to interpret my argument in the worst people way. Allegory and metaphor are figures of speech anyone should understand when put forwards so plainly and with no other possible interpretation.
>The reference to 'Hitler' was only to describe a process where politicians rile up people who are not normally involved in politics. The BP oil spill was one of those opportunities. I don't think it's weird to make notes on the tactics of Hitler, or even compare those.
If you sincerely believe this you need study the run-up to WW2 in more detail. A politician trying to make the common person conscious of a real crisis which affects their lives and is representative of a serious systemic problem where greater public conscience is necessary is in no way comparable to the peddling of lies and conspiracy theories in order to drum up hatred against minorities in order to justify atrocities. If you honestly think this and go around repeating it, you are doing a great service to fascists all around the world by equating their methods to the way a democracy needs to operate.
>And the process to 'accept' $20B from BP, without due process, under implied threat of the possibility regulatory impositions (which the President is in a good position to influence) was definitely an authoritarian move on Obama's part IMO.
No, it was not. 20 billion dollars is far less than what BP should have paid for the oil spill. It was a deal he cut with BP so that the environmental crisis could be paid for without going through a decades long process by which time BP could have completely offloaded their assets or would have lost them due to the uncertainty of a ~100B$ fine hanging over their heads. It's exactly the same thing as a plea deal, except the perpetrator was caught doing the crime in broad daylight in front of thousands people.
> It's not the environmental mitigation that is questionable, but rather the process by which the funds were obtained and I think your representation here is intentionally misleading.
The process by which the funds were obtained is absolutely normal in the United States. If you have an issue with how lax regulation in the US is, you can say that instead of doing Hitler comparisons.
>Oh definitely. The bottom 2% would be the biggest winners of eliminating minimum wage, because minimum wage essentially outlaws employing anyone who can generate less than minimum wage worth of value to an employer. But it's true, the top 2% would win too and so would everyone else. IMO it would be one of the most important tools to lift people out of poverty.
No, they would not, and we both know this. There is a necessary amount of unemployment in any capitalist economy. If the bottom two percent magically got employed with a sub-minimum wage, the entire economy would suffer greatly from reduced wages and higher barriers to entry, or another 2% would find themselves unemployed anyways. A reserve army of labour is absolutely necessary. Reducing the minimum wage would hurt those people, because now on top of being unemployed, they also have much lower prospects once they do find employment. This is evident to anyone who thinks beyond incredibly simplistic supply-demand graphs whose interpretation contradicts itself.
>If you interpret the phrase "violent criticism" as perpetrated violence, you are clearly doing whatever you can to interpret my argument in the worst people way. Allegory and metaphor are figures of speech anyone should understand when put forwards so plainly and with no other possible interpretation.
I felt 'violently' was chosen for a reason to put Sowell in the worst possible way, but perhaps I misinterpreted. My apologies if you were just choosing to show Sowell is passionate, I misinterpreted.
>If you sincerely believe this you need study the run-up to WW2 in more detail. A politician trying to make the common person conscious of a real crisis which affects their lives and is representative of a serious systemic problem where greater public conscience is necessary is in no way comparable to the peddling of lies and conspiracy theories in order to drum up hatred against minorities in order to justify atrocities. If you honestly think this and go around repeating it, you are doing a great service to fascists all around the world by equating their methods to the way a democracy needs to operate.
What's you point here, that Hitler had some good ideas that we also implement today? He sure did. That's how he (his party) got elected. He also had a lot of bad ones. I don't think Obama is Hitler and neither did Sowell. It would also just be fallacious to suggest because of one mention of Hitler you disapprove of, that somehow the rest of his arguments are discredited.
>No, it was not. 20 billion dollars is far less than what BP should have paid for the oil spill. It was a deal he cut with BP so that the environmental crisis could be paid for without going through a decades long process by which time BP could have completely offloaded their assets or would have lost them due to the uncertainty of a ~100B$ fine hanging over their heads. It's exactly the same thing as a plea deal, except the perpetrator was caught doing the crime in broad daylight in front of thousands people.
I don't agree with the way plea deals happen either. Plea deals I see as an extrajudicial way for a prosecutors to exercise power, and should be illegal. But plea deal is a great way to describe this extra-judicial process devoid of due process. If ~$100B is the fair fine, let due process extract that out, not some 'plea deal' by Obama.
>No, they would not, and we both know this. There is a necessary amount of unemployment in any capitalist economy. If the bottom two percent magically got employed with a sub-minimum wage, the entire economy would suffer greatly from reduced wages and higher barriers to entry, or another 2% would find themselves unemployed anyways. A reserve army of labour is absolutely necessary. Reducing the minimum wage would hurt those people, because now on top of being unemployed, they also have much lower prospects once they do find employment. This is evident to anyone who thinks beyond incredibly simplistic supply-demand graphs whose interpretation contradicts itself.
Sure, there is a 'necessary' amount of unemployment as workers are in friction seeking new employment, stuck in a hospital, or so disabled they cannot find any work they are fit to perform, etc. But there is also a sort of unemployment of those who cannot generate enough value to meet minimum wage, thus they are outlawed from legal employment and definitely not part of a 'reserve army'. In particular, elimination of minimum wage will help these people enter the career ladders to start gaining traction (and even if they don't have the capacity to move up, at least to create some wealth on their own outside of transfer payment or illegal activity.) Reducing minimum wage actually help everyone, by reducing the need for transfer payments, expanding the outputs of the nation, and developing and enriching some under or unemployed low-skill workers. Reducing minimum wage would definitely not cause more people to become unemployed or stay that way longer...
No need to reduce minimum wage if we had a decent safety net. In reality, we do. Look how many people are "on disability", many of them could work. They are often trapped in physical labor because of the area the live, or lack of education. They are no longer able to perform this physical labor, so we pay them.
Even with a safety net, some people may still choose to enter into labor at a low rate to start climbing the career ladder. A system with a safety-net could offer some phase-out so that working is at least somewhat higher revenue than not working. That is to say, there's no requirement that safety nets must have accompanying minimum wage.
In any case, it would be wise to align incentives so that an individual employing their full capacities is better for them than not.
Tell me you don't read history without telling my you don't read history.
The minimum wage is necessary because of the way labor is viewed in America. We subsidize the wealthy enough without letting them destroy the working class (any more then they already are).
What do you mean by subsidizing the wealthy? Surely you don't view transfer payments that are designed to aid the poor as something that subsidize the wealthy. If those payments subsidize the wealthy and not the poor, we should eliminate them. I'm definitely not in favor of subsidies that only benefit the wealthy.
Minimum wage benefits some people who would otherwise earn below minimum wage, at the expense of many more you can't see (because they're exclusively welfare instead) that can't get a job because the value they're able to add doesn't meet minimum wage. Unfortunately for these people their skills and physical fitness may atrophy while they're sidelined exclusively welfare rather than on the horse and developing themselves and their productive capacities. They're the victims of minimum wage, cast aside so some winners can MAYBE make a little more money.
If you believe supporting the working poor's survival is a 'subsidy' to the wealthy then are you arguing for eliminating of welfare for anyone working?
Paying low wages subsidizes the wealthy. Work should pay enough to live on. When is doesn't, we make up the difference with charity or a social safety net.
Here comes the old trope that everyone needs employment to be happy. We can afford to establish a floor and take care of people below it. There's a million ways they can enjoy their life without an "occupation"they get paid to do.
Only if they're only able to pay low wages because of welfare making up the difference between what a person would actually work for (without welfare) and what they're currently paying. You seem to be in favor of welfare in at least some circumstances, so your simultaneous opposition to it is rather confusing. If you are against us making up the difference, then you're against welfare. You're going to have to make up your mind here, do you want to risk 'subsidizing the wealthy' (indirectly while you subsidize the poor) to help some poor, or do you want to really stck it to the poors by eliminating this welfare so that the wealthy can't gain whatever perceived benefits you see by the working poor being given aid. Keep in mind subsidizing the wealthy is really nonsensical statement here once you realize the middle and upper class are the ones paying for these tranfer payments to the poorer amongst us anyway.
>Work should pay enough to live on. When is doesn't, we make up the difference with charity or a social safety net.
You can have charity or social safety net while simultaneously not having minimum wage. Again, this is why I'm in favor of structuring aid so that employing a person's full capacities is the highest revenue option for them. That is, gradually phasing out as people earn more. I don't see a 'trap' where you HAVE to generate at least minimum wage worth of value or else you're stuck with your skills and fitness possibly atrophying as a good soluton. I also don't think you can will your way into every 'work' being profitable enough to ensure the survival of everyones unique living situation ( ex: a single mom with diabetes needs significantly more resources than a healthy 20 year old that's happy living in a tent in the woods ). You wouldn't outlaw the healthy 20 year old's job just because it doesn't generate enough for the single mom; and maybe the 20 year old is gaining skills at work to let him earn enough to someday fall in love with and marry the single mom and help take care of the family.
> Here comes the old trope that everyone needs employment to be happy.
No but many people are happier if they're able to start putting themselves more and more in a position where they survive from their own wits and abilities rather than handouts. I just want people who are unhireable at current minimimum wage to have the OPTION to work at the best wage they can negotiate. We shouldn't resort to the old trop the poorest among us are unproud people who just want to suck the government teet.
> We can afford to establish a floor and take care of people below it.
Again, you can establish a floor while simultaneously allowing people to gradually escape this floor rather than a winner-take-all scenario where those who benefit from minimum wage snuff out those who can't make the cut. Previously you made this floor sound like a 'subsidy to the wealthy' so I really wish you would make up your mind here.
I'm either arguing with an 11 year old or someone willfully ignorant.
>so your simultaneous opposition to it is rather confusing.
No opposition to welfare. It should be more generous and more readily avaliable.
>you realize the middle and upper class are the ones paying for these tranfer payments to the poorer amongst us anyway.
Yes, note the and, if we were actually taxing the wealthy; it would be less of a subsidy.
Graduated benefits do not conflict with a minimum wage. Why do you believe all work must be paid?
The simple fact is that it takes a minimum amount to live in our Society. Jobs should pay that. I haven't seen a single coherent argument about sub minimum wage work, aside from; "It might make give someone the ability to learn a trade."
This is simultaneously ignorant and short-sighted. How would anyone benefit from learning a trade where people are working for a pittance to "learn" how to do the trade? They'll be shuffled out as soon as they start to earn too much. There are also multiple ways to learn trades without worrying about minimum wage, it's just a silly red-herring.
If there were a world where hiring people to learn well paying jobs made sense, you'd see scholarships or free programs setup to do this. Where are they? It doesn't make sense, from a corporate perspective. Sub-minimum wage would only ever exploit.
>I'm either arguing with an 11 year old or someone willfully ignorant.
Please refrain from these sort of personal character attacks, they don't lead to fruitful discussion and they suggest a weak argument.
>No opposition to welfare. It should be more generous and more readily available.
Then you really don't have any problem with subsidizing those who aren't earning enough to cover a living. Which makes me confused again by your rhetoric about "subsidies to the rich."
>Why do you believe all work must be paid?
If a worker and the employer agree upon a wage, I see no reason for the employee not to be paid.
>The simple fact is that it takes a minimum amount to live in our Society.
That number depends on a number of unique individual factors. You can't broadly decide what an individual requires. When I was young and living in the woods, it only cost me about $300/mo to survive and I was very happy to do odd day labor for shit wages which fully provided for my lifestyle. A single mom with diabetes may need at least $2k / mo to stay out of 'poverty', and quite possibly more than that. You wouldn't outlaw the services I provided when I was young to people that kept me alive, just because someone else may need more than me.
>How would anyone benefit from learning a trade where people are working for a pittance to "learn" how to do the trade?
You don't see the benefit of learning a trade and progressively being paid more while doing so? Being paid _something_ is better than nothing, unless of course you're in the sort of welfare trap that cuts off some of your aid in a way that makes you worse off for working.
>They'll be shuffled out as soon as they start to earn too much.
If you're shuffled out of a position, then you now have more bargaining power for the next one if you have more skills. Also it would be dumb to fire someone who you're paying market rate and employing profitably for a position critical to your business.
>it's just a silly red-herring.
You've just dismissed a wide swath of people who may want to work but can't, because any employment they could do is effectively outlawed, as a 'red herring.'
>If there were a world where hiring people to learn well paying jobs made sense, you'd see scholarships or free programs setup to do this. Where are they? It doesn't make sense, from a corporate perspective. Sub-minimum wage would only ever exploit.
It does make sense to hire people in a capacity where they will move up, and some businesses do. In a variety of positions, the education isn't 'free' but rather you learn on the job and provide your labor and in turn you become more qualified in industry. There are plenty of people hiring apprentices and entry-level positions. A simple search 'apprentice' on indeed yields a number of positions like this. Unfortunately minimum wage puts a floor at where people can start, and especially those starting from a very disadvantaged starting point may not be able to get a foot on the ladder at all unless minimum wage is sufficiently low.
> It doesn't make sense, from a corporate perspective.
Training people makes sense from a corporate perspective, and about every job I can remember entails some sort of training. Just handing things away for free doesn't make sense -- corporations aren't charity (of course I am overlooking some corporate charity and scholarships, but on the whole of course corporations aren't there to give you free things).
>me confused again by your rhetoric about "subsidies to the rich."
If you hire people, you should pay them. Every person who works for less then minimum wage is impacting the wages of people working for more then. It's a race to the bottom and corporations/wealthy have all the power. I strong minimum wage (which should be way higher) is an important part of this.
>You wouldn't outlaw the services I provided when I was young to people that kept me alive, just because someone else may need more than me.
You would be better off if you'd made more. You should get paid what you're worth.
I think this covers all your arguments. It's just not a level field. Just like we don't let children work, we should limit the race to the bottom with a minimum wage. We should also take care of people who can't work or don't want to. Everyone should have a right to basic food and shelter.
There is something about hypocrisy that has always rubbed me the wrong way. There isn’t much worse than being a traitor to your own cause. Both parties are like this to an extent, but I feel the Republicans are more honest in their motivations and allegiances than the Democrats, even if I disagree with them.
But they aren't. They have this vision of white-male-controlled America from the 40s and 50s that kept minorities and women in "their place". The wish to bring back dangerous biases against POC being less than whites, and males being the dominant deciders in all matters. It's so blatantly obvious with how their chosen messiahs like Desantis and Trump favor only policies that further empower white males and lessen the power of women, POC, and those who aren't gender normative. They aren't rooting for "middle America" they only filling them with fear about diversity and non traditional opinions being equally as valid as "christian" beliefs. Democrats are flawed, but the GOP has become a party of white supremacy which came to a head under the Trump presidency because they found one of their own who wasn't hiding behind the moderate "business forward Republican" persona of past republicans.
This is the worst and most painful example of motivated reasoning I have read in a long time..
Why can’t these people own up the ideology they ascribe to..? Or are they actually under the wrong impression that they are somehow conducting “neutral” economic analysis?
Externally the clear is not who is in power but the change one can see at least during the transition. Only 100 days as said and then back to dynamics, one may say. But is it really so in real life.
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[ 65.2 ms ] story [ 5170 ms ] threadBut I'd also argue that this problem (policies are similar no matter what party rues) is not one of the trivial ones.
It's one of the hard ones, because it is sometimes true (especially in dual party systems like the US). And in other - very important - cases, it's suddenly not true.
In other words, the limits of politics are mostly very narrow, but sometimes frighteningly wide. Covid is a prime example.
We (society, citizens, politicians, scientists) need to do a better job understanding the state transitions from narrow to wide; but it's a hard question because there are so incredibly many factors and very small N (few observations, cannot easily transfer insights from one leader to another due to biography, for example).
Now, theres a good argument to make that tribal politics is ALL that matters..... which we see demonstrated all the time on social media and in these comments.... but political scientists should know better!
Many mainstream Republicans did jump on the "don't listen to the medical profession" bandwagon for various reasons, and it's not that easy to get everybody else off it, especially not if their shouting about the evils of vaccine mandates (out of genuine principle or not) is still louder than their insistence that vaccines are actually good. The irony is I think a lot of the shouting down the medical establishment came when they were trying to convince people that the worst effects of COVID could easily be prevented when it couldn't, and now the whole thing's flipped over...
So I'd count that as an indicator of the potential variation.
In countries where this system is not in place, you tend to get many more parties with a much wider spectrum of political ideologies. For example, in the Netherlands there is currently a party (with only 1 seat atm) in our equivalent to Congress that exclusively focuses on the interests of farmers (a group consisting of <2% of the labor force). Also while all parties have some opinion about immigration, there are also more single-issue parties both for and against the topic.
I'm not saying either system is better than the other (multiparty systems tend to have a much more difficult time forming governing coalitions than FPTP systems for example), but it is not an issue relevant to all countries.
Why is engagement or "populism" still an end in itself, if it makes little effective difference? I can imagine its not "engagement" per se, that is desired, it is discipline. (Edit) Isn't this precisely what failed on January 6th? People (for mostly delusional reasons) were angry at a break down of politics itself, in their mind.
The sports analogy makes sense, but there are economic interests there, on the part of the owners of the teams and the league, engagement by people to an arbritray cause translates to more tickets to the games, ad revenue for the broadcasts. There is maybe a distinction there, at least.
There may be some areas of government that see relatively few differences, especially in the machinery of the bureaucracy. But in other areas the article's thesis couldn't be more wrong.
Taxes, guns, COVID lockdowns, abortion, and many other issues have laws directly attributable to what party is in power.
Sure, they are constrained by the art of the possible: massive top-rate rises and cuts are extremely appealing to left/right bases respectively but are constrained by the fact that (i) the median voter they need to woo doesn't like extreme change and (ii) extreme changes usually won't actually have the positive impact on the economy which left/right ideology claims they will. So tax changes usually aren't drastic, and don't show up well in panel data studies. But there's still plenty of changes at the margin and especially to tax incidence which are the result of one party being elected over another.
But for the other items on the list. It all depends on what you, and we as people, would consider to be important changes. For example major global events like a war in the middle east was started by the left in the UK, and the right in the US, it could have been swapped around and indeed was swapped around a few times but the policies, the war and damage continued.
Are the changes tribal politics or real politics, is what the article is asking. The author is attacking tribal politics and by extension those invested in cultural war type issues.
People want so badly to believe that there’s a middle consensus where they can stand between the parties.
This takes us in the opposite direction from his conclusion for activists (essentially, give up because it doesn't matter) toward a more productive one that asks, if left/right party politics does not produce meaningful change, then what kind of politics can?
There's also a clever load-bearing phrase buried in here that sweeps the explanation for real variation in policy under the rug: "these governments followed the spirit of the age." Now, what is the spirit of the age but the movement of politics?
Of course, the author's motivations are clearer if you look at the other trash that they've written: an article about not being ideological (recently litigated on hacker news [1]), dozens of posts ragging about "the left," and a few articles about how much they hate trans people.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29957328
An important fact that has gone completely under the radar is the radically changing demographics of the media (both sides). The media used to be much more decentralized with a much greater diversity of views (rich and poor).
Now with increasing technology and centralization of distribution, the demographics of people in the media is largely that of the elites. Journalists working for CNN, Fox or MSNBC are paid very high wages, come from the best schools and according to all conventional markers are in the top 10% of society. And this is reflected in the content they put out which is to generate controversy, keep the plebs squabbling amongst themselves and divert attention way from wealthy elites.
This is their agenda and it's working fabulously.
Today we only have choices of mckinsey/academic/media/think tank generic empty suits to vote for. This is true all over the western world.
Example: DNC's chosen one Buttigieg cargo culting being a politician:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
I'm a registered Democrat FWIW in case this triggers someone
'Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.'
https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/huxleya-bravenewworldrevisited/h...
And a follow up post: https://thomasjprosser.wordpress.com/2021/02/25/why-speak-ou...
That’s because those who choose not to live in filthy crime ridden cities shouldn’t have to suffer from the lowest common denominator laws and high taxes said cities “require” to not fall apart since people aren’t meant to live that close together.
I’m not going to even mention the opioid epidemic in rural America is killing far more people than in the inner city.
But why should the minority get to dictate policies if the majority? Is rural America willing to get rid of all of the farm subsidies? The unneeded military bases that the military is trying to close but politicians don’t let them?
People love to be pro-whatever but unless you’ve lived among the farmers and heard the crap they put up with you shouldn’t really be mouthing off on the topic. It’s complex with good and bad from corporate interest and government. This isn’t a matter of more or less government involvement, or of more or less market freedom… it’s fundamentally about a need for all of these interests to actually take the time to see the struggles farmers face before taking more action. The right to repair is a great example of this working well, where people did listen and John Deere may get a good come-uppance.
One last thing, the way you worded that first part of your comment makes you sound like someone prejudiced against the rural poor. Nice and classist style. That is precisely why the majority of rural Americans hate urban Americans so much.
There are no production quotas in the US, except on sugar. There are limits to subsidies, however.
I know how the life of farmers goes, and not just in the US. You just have no idea what it looks like when what you're asking for happens. There is a reason that no major economy doesn't have agricultural subsidies.
If those went away, US exports of agricultural products would essentially go to zero.
But agricultural subsidies are far from the only, and perhaps not even the largest, type of subsidy that farmers receive.
Indeed, farms in the US are greatly under-taxed. Despite the median farm household income being much higher than the overall median household income, farming households on average pay around 14% in income taxes, around 4900$ in property taxes.
This is is much lower than the tax load of the average US household, and much lower still than the tax load of the average US household of the same income.
Thus, if you wanted to actually end the support that farms are getting, you would also need to raise taxes on farms significantly, and cut subsidies. Then you'd also have the fact that the average farmer requires much costlier infrastructure than the average city dweller in per-capita equivalents.
Would it really be possible for US farms to make a living if their taxes were almost doubled, if all subsidies were ended, and if prices were allowed to fluctuate? The answer is, definitely, absolutely, not at all.
If you don't think rural America would trade those subsidies in the blink of an eye for the dissolution of those cities into their own separate union or something, you really don't know rural America.
> But why should the minority get to dictate policies if the majority?
Because a few pinprick-sized geographical locations overflowing with millions of people who think that's how everyone should live / does live (it's not) shouldn't get to dictate the policies of the entire rest of the country that is living in relative peace and comfort away from such overpopulated, crime-ridden areas with extremely high costs of living and an overall terrible QoL. Look at any US-wide election map, by county; see how few areas are truly blue. The homogeneous state of southern California should not get to decide how the rest of us live/suffer.
The founders knew what they were doing.
Every single violent and property crime statistic ever.
Don't want to pay taxes? Fine, you're on your own. Rural areas receive all kinds of investment and subsidies that far exceed their contribution in taxes. Fortunately for everybody, things don't work that way.
Consider California, who's GDP would rank it among most countries. Most of the economic activity in the state is concentrated in the large, coastal cities. This generates massive amounts of state and federal taxes that rural areas ultimately benefit from.
Cities pay for your rural lifestyle. You're welcome. No need to thank us, we're all in this together.
It is logistically impossible for the people that live outside cities to have anywhere near the quality of life they currently enjoy without the existence of people living in cities.
Indeed, without subsidies paid for by city folk, agricultural prices would plummet and become unstable, which would greatly hamper the prosperity of anyone related to the agricultural sector.
Without cities, it would also be impossible to pay for the infrastructure enjoyed by suburbia and rural areas. The amount and quality of roads would have to decrease drastically, and suburbs would have to pay multiple times more for running water, electricity infrastructure, wastewater management (you would have to move to a septic tank with all of the costs those entail). This would have knock-on effects increasing the prices of all goods and it would make transportation either very expensive or impossible.
This would lead to a complete collapse of rural and suburban life in North America.
If you want to know what that would look like, you can envision life in rural China, or somewhat worse even.
Urbanisation is absolutely necessary for the quality of life you enjoy. In the relationship, despite it being mutually beneficial, those who live in rural areas are the ones who are moreso compensated. As for suburbia, it's not clear that it is beneficial at all to those who live in cities.
With most of the US critically thinking about the electoral / senatorial systems, and how the scales do tip towards rural states..
What concessions, if any, should rural states / areas be entitled to, given that they are the food producers for our country? On paper, that could provide leverage / a "bargaining chip" in this discussion.
The flip-side to this coin is that the more urban states / areas are the economic drivers of the country, which is clearly a source of leverage as well.
I feel like most people don't think about it in these terms, and I'm curious how it would impact their opinions when adding the dimension of leverage / "social value" to population.
Perhaps these should have no weight on a discussion of representation?
How is the quality of life of more agrarian societies compared to more industrial nations?
When a worldwide pandemic happens, how is rural America going to do? How are poorer more agrarian countries now doing in the midst of Covid compared to the industries countries?
If I can’t find a job in my state based on my skillset, I can move to anywhere in the US. Heck, my company is on the opposite coast and I WFH. Knowledge workers have a lot more mobility and much less capital tied up in their labor.
In other words, if my state went to shit because CA is not subsidizing it, it wouldn’t affect me.
Source? I inspected various parts of the canada-us border using google maps and can't find an example of this.
That’s why the States are referred to as experiments in democracy. It’s a decentralized form of government (With guardrails, written into the US Constitution). It doesn’t matter that there are millions of people in Los Angeles, their voice shouldn’t have a disproportionate say in how farmers in say, Iowa, run their government. The needs, economies, and demographics of different states are completely different and a using decentralized system of government is much more intuitive than trying to manage it from the top down.
But, the point is that people in CA can only elect two Senators while five or six states whose population doesn’t equal CA can elect 10 or 12.
Remove states and all levels of local government? Just single voting area for entirely country where from pool of candidates those with most votes are elected? Just single federal level?
We will then find out how much red states truly miss “socialism” then.
I'm reminded of the fact that whatever house of congress the republicans own all of a sudden become the most important legislative body. When the Dems had the house and the Reps had the senate, the house was an afterthought. When reversed, the house were the arbiters of final word on legislation (at least it was based on CNN's characterization for the last 20-odd years).
The state of gerrymandering also reflects this, to reduce the political power of democratic strength in populous cities.
If the rich had their power via cities, then districting would enforce this and the house would be the most powerful.
The federal government has inertia by design since the spoils system was removed. The rich have the means to influence this inertia over time.
Also, do you wonder why elections are so close? The rich pay only enough to form a coalition to maintain the status quo. They buy just enough to win some of the time, and even if they lose, they roadblock changes. They advance the agenda when they win, and resist when they don't.
Over time, that has resulted in the current state of wealth inequality.
In fact, even on foreign policy, I'd be surprised if the forever wars in the middle east enjoy majority support among the right. Isn't isolationism also right-wing? If it's at all helpful to classify policies into 'left' and 'right'..
Isolationism could be left wing or right wing.
Public ownership of certain systems does not imply abolishing money.
Our entire current wave is based in 90s tea party astroturfing by billionaires that got out of control when it encountered the militia movement.
left vs right rather seems like a shell game to me where the dealer has the piece the whole time.
In the western world claims of being 'hated' are often a desperate cry for visibility and relevance in society.
Try to raise awareness about issues that are roughly orthogonal to the main left-right divide. It's easy and can lead to major results and policy improvements over the status quo, precisely because very few people are interested in it.
the eternal struggle is between the populace and power-grubbers, because a little government in good hands is a net-good, while a lot of government (i.e., centralized power) or government in bad hands, is net-negative.
americans have completely lost this simple, eternal narrative in favor of just about anything spewing from democrats/republicans and their media surrogates. that's all bullshit. look past it and apply your own brains to figure out what you believe and want to support. forget parties, and especially forget any dipshit dichotomy like 'left-right'.
The RepubliCratic cancer needs to go, but I doubt it will.
Why? It actively votes against the will of the population, in service of the wealthy donors who fund their reelection campaigns.
While blame should be placed on politicians who use such issues to drive votes instead of tackling bigger, more boring challenges, we also have to fault the populace for being easily distracted, emotive, etc.
Wedge issues are what make them angry, or scared enough to post on social media, etc. It collectively is a dark pattern that subverts our tendency to fix broken things by making us believe that everything is broken.
Wedge issues are bad overall for society, but they are not anyone's "fault" except for society. What you're arguing connotes to me that people are victims of some kind, but the fact is the "dark pattern" works because people care about that stuff. I think they are logically incorrect for assigning these issues disproportionate weight, but like...they're free to lol, and it's not inherently invalid.
But then, take something like abortion. Some people really feel strongly about that issue (on both sides of the political spectrum). There are people who do vote based on that single issue alone. They are free voters who have constructed their moral/political rubric or w/e, and have elected to accord that single issue decisive importance in their political decisions. That would seem to me to be a feature, not a bug, of democracy.
The results of that diversion can be seen all over the country as things literally collapse, or fall apart.
Programs that are popular with the people consistently go to die in Congress.
All this with the support of a media that almost exclusively covers wedge issues, and ignores bipartisan screwjobs.
Extremists do indeed do this, and surely do it more than others...but I think we should always be very careful of the mind's tendency to convert positions on a spectrum into a binary representation.
A pattern that I propose can be observed on all social media including HN: if an article takes an abstract perspective upon politics (or any culture war topic), most people are pretty good at nuance and compromise....but if an article is discussing a specific, object level issue, it seems like the aggregate ability of commenters to discuss matters in a nuanced, non-biased manner massively decreases.
If for the sake of discussion we assume this theory to have a non-trivial amount of truth to it, it seems to me that it would be useful to come up with some theories of how this phenomenon could be detected and managed, or perhaps even reversed through collective effort (leveraging the innately unique differing perspective of members, combined with our ability to be self-aware and highly logical if that state of mind can be achieved (which I believe could be achieved through an explicit process/reminders/etc)).
Alternatively, humanity can continue doing exactly the same thing we are doing now, one aspect of which is using social media only for entertainment, suppressing discussion about using it to improve ourselves and the world, etc.
Yes I’m aware that the “War on Crime” and the “War on Drugs” was perpetrated by the Democratic and Republican Administrations in the 90s.
One party repeatedly blocks voting rights bills.
One party closes poll locations, gerrymanders and makes it harder to register and get ID's.
A two party duopoly is bad. But there's clearly a choice one could make between the two.
My feeling is that this changes dramatically when you look at local politics, which is where most of the interesting action is. There's not much that the French government can do that, when zoomed out, is fundamentally different from Germany or Spain. There's a lot more leeway when you compare Tokyo or Shanghai with Mexico City.
I haven't read the paper yet, but noticed it uses a regression discontinuity design without showing raw data (i.e. a scatterplot).
There have been some cases where such discontinuity analyses were extremely misleading [1], so some caution is advised.
[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/03/11/regression...
Maybe you'll like this better method then: Bayesian counterfactual time-series analysis [1]. In essence, it compares a "neutral" time series and another one affected by a natural experiment and produces bayesian point-estimates for the causal impact.
Super powerful, there's a great R package, and really easy to use.
[1] https://research.google/pubs/pub41854/
Well, nothing changed. It's not the Democrats doing. It's industry bring in Mexicans for cheap labor. For example, in chicken processing factories. Americans don't want these jobs. But corporations don't want small town Americans to blame them for the foreign influx, so they blame Democrats in a constant drum beat on right wing media. "Democrats need new voters. They get them by bringing them here and putting them on welfare." When their people are in charge, they get them to claim they're building a wall and they're dealing with this influx that happened under Democrats.
Corporations and industry shift the blame away from themselves for any social problem caused by the influx of cheap labor, even though they are responsible for it. Nothing changes under either party in power, only the blame rhetoric gets changed. That's political science in America.
They don't want these jobs at the current pay rates. Let's not forget the most important qualifier here.
If you're looking for the subset of manual labourers willing to move to remote locations, you're competing with oil companies that really well, and people aren't queuing round the block for those jobs either. Labour intensive food production isn't particularly likely to be able to compete with oil on salary.
Would you work in the field for twice your current pay?
If I had a choice between living by myself and making $36/hour working in a field and getting a roommate and working in a warehouse (or an Amazon delivery driver), guess which one I would choose?
Sure, because the pay or other benefits weren't good enough. There are sometimes other considerations as well, like that some of this work is temporary/seasonal and people want something steady.
> If I had a choice between living by myself and making $36/hour working in a field and getting a roommate and working in a warehouse (or an Amazon delivery driver), guess which one I would choose?
That's a weird question. You could easily keep working in that field and still get a roommate and you'd get to keep even more money.
I am sure I could give up my big house in the burbs and my wife and I could stay with another couple. But do you think I would make that choice?
On another related note, you saw the same thing with school bus drivers after Covid (my wife was one). No amount of money in the world was going to convince many bus drivers who didn’t really need the extra money to risk Covid to drive the bus. Many of them were just doing it for extra money.
Anyone could have more money saved if they found a roommate. But at some point we decide it’s not worth the trade off.
The upside of that 36/hr is many people were able to either take much of the year off or provide lavishly for their families when otherwise their children would have much fewer opportunities.
It's not even a question whether many would take it, it's a certainty.
And the fishing industry is highly subsidized
https://www.lenfestocean.org/~/media/legacy/lenfest/pdfs/sub...
If your point is the industry (fishing) is subsidized, well farming also is highly subsidized.
Besides, Americans are already whining about inflation. Guess what would happen if food labor costs went up 5x?
1) Eliminate subsidies to agriculture (and fishing) gradually over say a decade. Effect: higher food prices
2) Phase out any tariffs or regulation on import of agriculture/fishing over say a decade. Effect: lower food prices
3) All workers should be on equal playing field. What regulation applies to one should apply to another. Let the free market determine rates within these regulatory constraints. Taking special advantage of undocumented immigrants to avoid labor regulations isn't an acceptable option. Regulations and law should apply equally to everyone, if it is to be applied at all.
Wages will rise until either the free market rate for this kind of labor is matched, or the farm in question becomes unprofitable. In the latter case, the farm is not compatible with efficient use of human resources and should adapt or fail. In the former case, workers benefit in the form of rising wages.
When there are subsidies, Americans pay one way or another. You can pay either in the form of increased government revenues (i.e. taxation/inflation/debt) or you can pay at the grocery store. I'm much more in favor of the latter as we don't need to add yet another middleman eating up resources in this equation. Costs should be born directly by those consuming the resource.
American farmers are then less competitive here and abroad.
Yes I know, there are no easy answers.
Then American consumers basically get fed at the expense of the rest of the world. Not ideal for the world, but great for those getting the cheap food. Labor directed in agriculture instead get focused into other industries we have a competitive advantage in.
As soon as the US industry is destroyed, the other countries remove subsidies and prices rise and we can do nothing about it.
Again, there are no easy answers. Either we subsidize farmers and pay more in taxes or we impose tariffs to level the playing field. Either way, we pay more than we should.
Both of these don't level the playing field, they distort the playing field.
>As soon as the US industry is destroyed, the other countries remove subsidies and prices rise and we can do nothing about it.
Arguably it is subsidies that destroy farming industry, not the reverse. Farming can tolerate a lot more inefficiencies, bad practices, poor resource allocation and unreasonable crop selection when subsidies influence the market. This could be see India for example in the 70s where textile subsidies meant many people were working in sweatshops weaving with hand operated machines instead of maintaining well capitalized fully mechanized looms. Eliminating these subsidies gradually will allow farmers to develop techniques that make them more competitive on the international stage if these other countries "remove subsidies" (which is your prediction).
Yes tariffs (inbound) and subsidies (outbound) both distort the playing field. But no country can unilaterally disarm.
https://aussiesta.wordpress.com/2020/06/04/karl-marx-on-open...
It has nothing to do with Americans not wanting those jobs and more to do with undocumented immigration provides a workforce that can be underpaid and wont organize or ask for any benefits under threat of deportation. These farms pay under minimum wage to undocumented workers and provide 0 benefits; why would Americans work them. If either party were actually serious about this issue, they would start with fining corporations, not deportations.
That's not a secret. As shown by the old saw: "Whoever you vote for the government always gets in."
And it is easily explained by the huge inertia of vast numbers of people who rather like stability.
So be aware that a few top level comments will be responding to the "secret revealed" click bait nature of the title.
Someone who self identifies as educated is untroubled by sustaining cognitive dissonance because from their perspective, the state and establishment is almost infinitely sophisticated and complex, so there is no reason to think you understand it, you just need to identify as it being yours, and by aligning to it by default and sustaining it, you are doing your part, and you get the rewards it offers. This is Pound's hedgehog knowing one thing. The one thing they need to know is if you sustain the establishment narrative, it will sustain you. Its leviathan vastness means you can't decide what about it is real or true, but you can find the hooks to align to it, and this is The Game people talk about. I have criticized the immoderate version of this in the past as "banal nihilism," but more generally, and charitably, there is an establishment We who ask things like what is to be done, and use terms like oxygen-starving, problematic, extremists, and other meta-social managerial terms to discuss how we will manage society. However, their ontology reduces to an infinte attrition game of musical chairs to determine who this We will include.
At the other pole are those who are attached to the idea of Truth. We can criticize it as a need for concreteness and a lack of cognitive or educated ability to engage The Game as an abstraction separate from their identities (like the from-somewhere and from-nowhere dichotomy), and so when a politician says something, we might take it at face value, and not as a signal of alignment to an abstraction. This ontology includes principles, expectations, loyalties, immovable facts, laws of the universe, consequences, permanence, stability. These are Jonathan Haidt's Righteous Mind tribes, but with a twist where it's not right/left. Other criticisms I've heard is of relating "transactionally," to people, where there is objectivity, truth, roles, state, and definition. What I would say is there is an underlying axiom that there is a truth that is objective, persistent, and independent of whether it's observed, and when you align to it, it makes us good. Even if good for what is not always clear. The key piece is it both instinctively and competently rejects dissonance as a misalignment to truth. In this view, if something is untrue it cannot be relatively powerful or legitimate. This orientation to truth is what makes trust that would facilitate reconciliation or even an equillibrium increasingly impossible.
There are a lot of frameworks for this including Jungian animus/anima, Marxist classes, Girardian memesis groups, etc. In the 90s when the so-called "neocons" arrived, they were a weird hybrid of these Game playing conservatives who appeared to support capitalistic ideas, but had an intellectual smarm and who looked down on others' inability to appreciate that this was just them playing this Game as an abstraction. The smarm was because they knew they were lying and didn't care. Tucker Carlson was very famously destroyed by John Stewart over this, and that takedown marked a cultural turning point, where I think the neocons popularly legitimized into the establishment the tactics of what people self-identify now as the "dirtbag left." (not an epithet, it's their word)
But this idea of liar becomes the friction point, because from both the dynamic We and the stable truth perspective, yes, Truth is Power, but it depends on the directionality of that equivalence. Are they equal, is one a superset or subset of the oth...
I'd be very interested to explore this framework further. Could you recommend something to read that could inspire similar conclusions? Or, if this is a completely original thought, I shall await for the book to be published, hopefully soon :)
Dems: diversity, equality amongst race, freedom of religion and though, open book policies, reproductive rights and guarantees for public education
Republicans: white-males at the top, pseudo equal rights for the rest, Christo-fascism for a religion, other religions considered dangerous with the possible exception of Judaism which got grandfathered in, repeal of voting rights to what amounts to poll taxes, shut down the borders, poor people fend for themselves for scraps tossed by "private charities", religion over facts in schools, the end of public education in favor of private conservative schools for those who can afford it, etc.
I think the choice is pretty clear if you're paying attention at all.
The politicians in the modern Western world mostly just give speeches and make deals and go to meetings. Sure they can guide policy to varying degrees, but implementation is through the bureaucracy.
I have to imagine when a new leader or parliamentarian comes to town (if they haven't been in town for years already and know "how things work") they are immediately set upon by a plethora of advisors and "experts" who explain reality and what must be done.
The politician then most likely see the light, but if not, they proceed to run into massive difficulties and very probably won't be there long.
I'm only familiar with the system in the US, but I think this explains why people vote for something, then none of it happens, even the reverse.
I'm constantly told the conclusions of the article and how I'm much better off getting my taxes lowered, but there are just plainly obvious differences between living in a red or blue state. I grew up in a red state that is purple now and the back and forth major policy changes depending on the party in charge are palpable. Even with my increased salary and status at work that has me going to fewer of the places I grew up going to and being around a variety of people, I know voting Republican has a much greater chance of hurting cousins, aunts, childhood friends that maybe didn't get the chances I got in my immediate family.
I also know no matter how well I do in life, I'm just one traffic stop away from death or disaster and I'd rather side with the party that at least occasionally tries to hold police accountable for their actions.
I'll differentiate between democrats and third party candidates but I'll never cast a vote for anyone with R next to their name, unless there's some great switch like a massively racist candidate like Barry Goldwater.
Lesser of two evils is still evil, and its probably questionable if its actually lesser.
Also maybe the status quo democrats aren’t leftists after all? And yes, I think these are useful “labels”. You’re implying the Illuminati or someone made up the left/right dichotomy to divide us but these have been used for over 200 years. Finally, I don’t think supporting resource extraction is intrinsic to one side. Lots of socialist countries export billions of dollars of oil a year. Equating anti fossil fuel sentiment with leftism is a very western way of viewing the issue.
Honestly the only conspiracy I really see is the political nihilism evinced online. It’s like some people want the citizenry to just give up or something. It’s still possible to exert political power as a normal voter. Don’t like the two choices you were presented with? Well did you vote in the primary? No? Oh gee.
People are taking this article to mean we are all living in a veil of ignorance while our puppeteers present us with a false dichotomy. I think an easier explanation is the US Government is a lumbering bureaucracy with lots of momentum and a few newly elected officials aren’t going to change anything. People overrate the influence of individuals and try to form narratives that don’t exist to explain the world in a way that makes sense. When really events and changes emerge dynamically from complex systems in a way that can’t be easily explained
You are correct however when you say the powers that be don't have complete influence, but I would say that influence has grown vastly, mostly through consolidation of media and banking, and that to say it is extremely powerful influence is still an understatement. Also I would say it's a mischaracterization to say "Why would corporate execs hand pick officials that would break them up", one, because they aren't the real oligarchs behind the scenes, and two, because I highly doubt that any rhetoric about anti-trust/monopoly is real given the track record in that arena. [1]
I strongly dislike this far too often used rhetorical clip used to dismiss any conspiracy you use: "form narratives that don’t exist to explain the world in a way that makes sense." How about we follow the evidence to the truth however ugly it may be. It often feels to me rather like when presented with darker narratives that do exist people would rather dismiss this like this as a way of burying their head in the sand to pretend things are better than they are.
You aren't looking very hard then to be frank when you say "the only conspiracy I really see is..."
Also, while I do think the voters take a large amount of responsibility, I don't think that is a good analysis of how entrenched the oligarchy are in electoral systems via the two party duopoly they control. Just take a look at your secretary of states website and look at how asinine the rules are for any party or person not a part of the duopoly. If the oligarchs control both parties, which they do, then the real threat would be from anybody outside that system and thats why you can see the evidence of how hard they have worked to stop the people from having any real mechanisms of influence themselves. Voting in primaries can help if another person gets on the ballot, but good luck actually doing that.
Look, one of the most powerful tools the oligarchs have is that they think and operate on much longer timelines than the rest of us. They setup mechanisms, plans, etc that don't come to fruition until their children or grandchildren are at the helm. Until the people interested in this topic understand that, much of what is going on the world won't make much sense. In that note, I will leave you with a quote from Michael Parenti about this idea of absent minded empire.
"Empires are even sometimes represented as unintentional. That's when it really starts to get cute. This should have been called maybe the funnier myths of empire, this part of it. The product of unconcious circumstance. When I was a youth, ... I used to hear that the British Empire was put together in a fit of absent mindedness. ... In fact, ladies and gentlemen, I think a moments reflection would tell you that empires are products of deliberate contrivance, of deliberate confection, planning, calculation, and manipulation. No social order can maintain itself in the long run, no social order can maintain itself without concious human agency. In fact that's why you hav...
If you actually think that laissez faire economics and the removal of the minimum wage would be a net benefit for anyone except the top 2% of the country you're delusional, and so is Sowell.
The reference to 'Hitler' was only to describe a process where politicians rile up people who are not normally involved in politics. The BP oil spill was one of those opportunities. I don't think it's weird to make notes on the tactics of Hitler, or even compare those. And the process to 'accept' $20B from BP, without due process, under implied threat of the possibility regulatory impositions (which the President is in a good position to influence) was definitely an authoritarian move on Obama's part IMO. It's not the environmental mitigation that is questionable, but rather the process by which the funds were obtained and I think your representation here is intentionally misleading.
>If you actually think that laissez faire economics and the removal of the minimum wage would be a net benefit for anyone except the top 2% of the country you're delusional, and so is Sowell.
Oh definitely. The bottom 2% would be the biggest winners of eliminating minimum wage, because minimum wage essentially outlaws employing anyone who can generate less than minimum wage worth of value to an employer. But it's true, the top 2% would win too and so would everyone else. IMO it would be one of the most important tools to lift people out of poverty.
If you interpret the phrase "violent criticism" as perpetrated violence, you are clearly doing whatever you can to interpret my argument in the worst people way. Allegory and metaphor are figures of speech anyone should understand when put forwards so plainly and with no other possible interpretation.
>The reference to 'Hitler' was only to describe a process where politicians rile up people who are not normally involved in politics. The BP oil spill was one of those opportunities. I don't think it's weird to make notes on the tactics of Hitler, or even compare those.
If you sincerely believe this you need study the run-up to WW2 in more detail. A politician trying to make the common person conscious of a real crisis which affects their lives and is representative of a serious systemic problem where greater public conscience is necessary is in no way comparable to the peddling of lies and conspiracy theories in order to drum up hatred against minorities in order to justify atrocities. If you honestly think this and go around repeating it, you are doing a great service to fascists all around the world by equating their methods to the way a democracy needs to operate.
>And the process to 'accept' $20B from BP, without due process, under implied threat of the possibility regulatory impositions (which the President is in a good position to influence) was definitely an authoritarian move on Obama's part IMO.
No, it was not. 20 billion dollars is far less than what BP should have paid for the oil spill. It was a deal he cut with BP so that the environmental crisis could be paid for without going through a decades long process by which time BP could have completely offloaded their assets or would have lost them due to the uncertainty of a ~100B$ fine hanging over their heads. It's exactly the same thing as a plea deal, except the perpetrator was caught doing the crime in broad daylight in front of thousands people.
> It's not the environmental mitigation that is questionable, but rather the process by which the funds were obtained and I think your representation here is intentionally misleading.
The process by which the funds were obtained is absolutely normal in the United States. If you have an issue with how lax regulation in the US is, you can say that instead of doing Hitler comparisons.
>Oh definitely. The bottom 2% would be the biggest winners of eliminating minimum wage, because minimum wage essentially outlaws employing anyone who can generate less than minimum wage worth of value to an employer. But it's true, the top 2% would win too and so would everyone else. IMO it would be one of the most important tools to lift people out of poverty.
No, they would not, and we both know this. There is a necessary amount of unemployment in any capitalist economy. If the bottom two percent magically got employed with a sub-minimum wage, the entire economy would suffer greatly from reduced wages and higher barriers to entry, or another 2% would find themselves unemployed anyways. A reserve army of labour is absolutely necessary. Reducing the minimum wage would hurt those people, because now on top of being unemployed, they also have much lower prospects once they do find employment. This is evident to anyone who thinks beyond incredibly simplistic supply-demand graphs whose interpretation contradicts itself.
I felt 'violently' was chosen for a reason to put Sowell in the worst possible way, but perhaps I misinterpreted. My apologies if you were just choosing to show Sowell is passionate, I misinterpreted.
>If you sincerely believe this you need study the run-up to WW2 in more detail. A politician trying to make the common person conscious of a real crisis which affects their lives and is representative of a serious systemic problem where greater public conscience is necessary is in no way comparable to the peddling of lies and conspiracy theories in order to drum up hatred against minorities in order to justify atrocities. If you honestly think this and go around repeating it, you are doing a great service to fascists all around the world by equating their methods to the way a democracy needs to operate.
What's you point here, that Hitler had some good ideas that we also implement today? He sure did. That's how he (his party) got elected. He also had a lot of bad ones. I don't think Obama is Hitler and neither did Sowell. It would also just be fallacious to suggest because of one mention of Hitler you disapprove of, that somehow the rest of his arguments are discredited.
>No, it was not. 20 billion dollars is far less than what BP should have paid for the oil spill. It was a deal he cut with BP so that the environmental crisis could be paid for without going through a decades long process by which time BP could have completely offloaded their assets or would have lost them due to the uncertainty of a ~100B$ fine hanging over their heads. It's exactly the same thing as a plea deal, except the perpetrator was caught doing the crime in broad daylight in front of thousands people.
I don't agree with the way plea deals happen either. Plea deals I see as an extrajudicial way for a prosecutors to exercise power, and should be illegal. But plea deal is a great way to describe this extra-judicial process devoid of due process. If ~$100B is the fair fine, let due process extract that out, not some 'plea deal' by Obama.
>No, they would not, and we both know this. There is a necessary amount of unemployment in any capitalist economy. If the bottom two percent magically got employed with a sub-minimum wage, the entire economy would suffer greatly from reduced wages and higher barriers to entry, or another 2% would find themselves unemployed anyways. A reserve army of labour is absolutely necessary. Reducing the minimum wage would hurt those people, because now on top of being unemployed, they also have much lower prospects once they do find employment. This is evident to anyone who thinks beyond incredibly simplistic supply-demand graphs whose interpretation contradicts itself.
Sure, there is a 'necessary' amount of unemployment as workers are in friction seeking new employment, stuck in a hospital, or so disabled they cannot find any work they are fit to perform, etc. But there is also a sort of unemployment of those who cannot generate enough value to meet minimum wage, thus they are outlawed from legal employment and definitely not part of a 'reserve army'. In particular, elimination of minimum wage will help these people enter the career ladders to start gaining traction (and even if they don't have the capacity to move up, at least to create some wealth on their own outside of transfer payment or illegal activity.) Reducing minimum wage actually help everyone, by reducing the need for transfer payments, expanding the outputs of the nation, and developing and enriching some under or unemployed low-skill workers. Reducing minimum wage would definitely not cause more people to become unemployed or stay that way longer...
In any case, it would be wise to align incentives so that an individual employing their full capacities is better for them than not.
The minimum wage is necessary because of the way labor is viewed in America. We subsidize the wealthy enough without letting them destroy the working class (any more then they already are).
Minimum wage benefits some people who would otherwise earn below minimum wage, at the expense of many more you can't see (because they're exclusively welfare instead) that can't get a job because the value they're able to add doesn't meet minimum wage. Unfortunately for these people their skills and physical fitness may atrophy while they're sidelined exclusively welfare rather than on the horse and developing themselves and their productive capacities. They're the victims of minimum wage, cast aside so some winners can MAYBE make a little more money.
If you believe supporting the working poor's survival is a 'subsidy' to the wealthy then are you arguing for eliminating of welfare for anyone working?
Here comes the old trope that everyone needs employment to be happy. We can afford to establish a floor and take care of people below it. There's a million ways they can enjoy their life without an "occupation"they get paid to do.
Only if they're only able to pay low wages because of welfare making up the difference between what a person would actually work for (without welfare) and what they're currently paying. You seem to be in favor of welfare in at least some circumstances, so your simultaneous opposition to it is rather confusing. If you are against us making up the difference, then you're against welfare. You're going to have to make up your mind here, do you want to risk 'subsidizing the wealthy' (indirectly while you subsidize the poor) to help some poor, or do you want to really stck it to the poors by eliminating this welfare so that the wealthy can't gain whatever perceived benefits you see by the working poor being given aid. Keep in mind subsidizing the wealthy is really nonsensical statement here once you realize the middle and upper class are the ones paying for these tranfer payments to the poorer amongst us anyway.
>Work should pay enough to live on. When is doesn't, we make up the difference with charity or a social safety net.
You can have charity or social safety net while simultaneously not having minimum wage. Again, this is why I'm in favor of structuring aid so that employing a person's full capacities is the highest revenue option for them. That is, gradually phasing out as people earn more. I don't see a 'trap' where you HAVE to generate at least minimum wage worth of value or else you're stuck with your skills and fitness possibly atrophying as a good soluton. I also don't think you can will your way into every 'work' being profitable enough to ensure the survival of everyones unique living situation ( ex: a single mom with diabetes needs significantly more resources than a healthy 20 year old that's happy living in a tent in the woods ). You wouldn't outlaw the healthy 20 year old's job just because it doesn't generate enough for the single mom; and maybe the 20 year old is gaining skills at work to let him earn enough to someday fall in love with and marry the single mom and help take care of the family.
> Here comes the old trope that everyone needs employment to be happy.
No but many people are happier if they're able to start putting themselves more and more in a position where they survive from their own wits and abilities rather than handouts. I just want people who are unhireable at current minimimum wage to have the OPTION to work at the best wage they can negotiate. We shouldn't resort to the old trop the poorest among us are unproud people who just want to suck the government teet.
> We can afford to establish a floor and take care of people below it.
Again, you can establish a floor while simultaneously allowing people to gradually escape this floor rather than a winner-take-all scenario where those who benefit from minimum wage snuff out those who can't make the cut. Previously you made this floor sound like a 'subsidy to the wealthy' so I really wish you would make up your mind here.
>so your simultaneous opposition to it is rather confusing.
No opposition to welfare. It should be more generous and more readily avaliable.
>you realize the middle and upper class are the ones paying for these tranfer payments to the poorer amongst us anyway. Yes, note the and, if we were actually taxing the wealthy; it would be less of a subsidy.
Graduated benefits do not conflict with a minimum wage. Why do you believe all work must be paid? The simple fact is that it takes a minimum amount to live in our Society. Jobs should pay that. I haven't seen a single coherent argument about sub minimum wage work, aside from; "It might make give someone the ability to learn a trade."
This is simultaneously ignorant and short-sighted. How would anyone benefit from learning a trade where people are working for a pittance to "learn" how to do the trade? They'll be shuffled out as soon as they start to earn too much. There are also multiple ways to learn trades without worrying about minimum wage, it's just a silly red-herring.
If there were a world where hiring people to learn well paying jobs made sense, you'd see scholarships or free programs setup to do this. Where are they? It doesn't make sense, from a corporate perspective. Sub-minimum wage would only ever exploit.
Please refrain from these sort of personal character attacks, they don't lead to fruitful discussion and they suggest a weak argument.
>No opposition to welfare. It should be more generous and more readily available.
Then you really don't have any problem with subsidizing those who aren't earning enough to cover a living. Which makes me confused again by your rhetoric about "subsidies to the rich."
>Why do you believe all work must be paid?
If a worker and the employer agree upon a wage, I see no reason for the employee not to be paid.
>The simple fact is that it takes a minimum amount to live in our Society.
That number depends on a number of unique individual factors. You can't broadly decide what an individual requires. When I was young and living in the woods, it only cost me about $300/mo to survive and I was very happy to do odd day labor for shit wages which fully provided for my lifestyle. A single mom with diabetes may need at least $2k / mo to stay out of 'poverty', and quite possibly more than that. You wouldn't outlaw the services I provided when I was young to people that kept me alive, just because someone else may need more than me.
>How would anyone benefit from learning a trade where people are working for a pittance to "learn" how to do the trade?
You don't see the benefit of learning a trade and progressively being paid more while doing so? Being paid _something_ is better than nothing, unless of course you're in the sort of welfare trap that cuts off some of your aid in a way that makes you worse off for working.
>They'll be shuffled out as soon as they start to earn too much.
If you're shuffled out of a position, then you now have more bargaining power for the next one if you have more skills. Also it would be dumb to fire someone who you're paying market rate and employing profitably for a position critical to your business.
>it's just a silly red-herring.
You've just dismissed a wide swath of people who may want to work but can't, because any employment they could do is effectively outlawed, as a 'red herring.'
>If there were a world where hiring people to learn well paying jobs made sense, you'd see scholarships or free programs setup to do this. Where are they? It doesn't make sense, from a corporate perspective. Sub-minimum wage would only ever exploit.
It does make sense to hire people in a capacity where they will move up, and some businesses do. In a variety of positions, the education isn't 'free' but rather you learn on the job and provide your labor and in turn you become more qualified in industry. There are plenty of people hiring apprentices and entry-level positions. A simple search 'apprentice' on indeed yields a number of positions like this. Unfortunately minimum wage puts a floor at where people can start, and especially those starting from a very disadvantaged starting point may not be able to get a foot on the ladder at all unless minimum wage is sufficiently low.
> It doesn't make sense, from a corporate perspective.
Training people makes sense from a corporate perspective, and about every job I can remember entails some sort of training. Just handing things away for free doesn't make sense -- corporations aren't charity (of course I am overlooking some corporate charity and scholarships, but on the whole of course corporations aren't there to give you free things).
>You wouldn't outlaw the services I provided when I was young to people that kept me alive, just because someone else may need more than me.
You would be better off if you'd made more. You should get paid what you're worth.
I think this covers all your arguments. It's just not a level field. Just like we don't let children work, we should limit the race to the bottom with a minimum wage. We should also take care of people who can't work or don't want to. Everyone should have a right to basic food and shelter.
Why can’t these people own up the ideology they ascribe to..? Or are they actually under the wrong impression that they are somehow conducting “neutral” economic analysis?
But at the local level, things really are different.
Wouldn't it be weird to, for example, pass single payer national healthcare under D and then repeal it 4-8 years later under R?
The fact that our political systems avoid radical swings is a feature. Certainly change happens on a longer timescale, which sounds reasonable to me.