Well, there's a much quieter but also storied history of West Coast vs. East Coast rivalries. Even computer science had its own rivalries, before the Internet effectively erased the geographical distinction for most such purposes.
As is every political candidate. Tailored personas meant to attract our hopes and dreams for sanity. When they lose, it's as a hero and we tell ourselves that we supported the good fight. When they win and inevitably disappoint (being just public relations for the status quo), they're demonized as the villain to contain and channel outrage into support for the next round of a manufactured rivalry.
What do you mean "conservative hit piece?" Would you have used the term "liberal hit piece"!if the publication were Motherjones or MSNBC? Your comment reveals a lack of objectivity.
Given that California is generally considered one of the most liberal in the nation, and that the headline (or how he imagined it) is critical of the state in question, it's actually a very reasonable suspicion.
Your assumption that he would not use a comparable term for the opposite situation, say "a liberal hit piece about Texas" in fact reveals a much more obvious lack of objectivity.
The publication doesn't even have to be taken into account. The movie stars bit of the title makes one think California, and the 'what happens' gives a slight negative implication when combined with movie stars (at least that was my initial perception). Thus the title appeared to be casting California in a negative light. Being California leans liberal, a negative article reviewing the state would likely have a conservative lean to it. Thus the description can lead to the assumption without even needing to see the source of the article.
There are at least two California's, the liberal one we all see and live in on the coast and the more agricultural and conservative interior which we don't hear about so much.
Nah... I think it's more because they don't have much access to media. They are a sizable portion of the pop. But like most minorities, they are underrepresented in popular culture and zeitgeist.
For most intents and purposes they are a "forgotten backwater".
Do you think they are really under-represented, or simply proportionally represented? 3/4ths of Californians live in on of the three big coastal metropolitan areas. The other quarter of the people are spread out over an area as large as Spain.
What? If OP is conditioned to associate titles in that format with conservative hit pieces, then that says more about the hit pieces. He would be correct to at least give more weight to the possibility that the next title in that format will match the pattern.
You wouldn't criticize him for thinking, "Maybe the next thing that growls will bite too."
> Karunanidhi promised free televisions for all. He won, and a freebie arms race commenced. Since Jayalalithaa resumed office in 2011, she has given away or heavily subsidized laptops, saris, fans, rice, cows, goats, food processors and bicycles, and branded all of it with her face and the name Amma
I know this is going to be downvoted to hell and back, but that's OK, somebody has to say these things so you kids learn to think for yourselves rather than be captive to the indoctrination you were subjected to in school.
That, the quote above, is the left wing's preferred approach to amassing votes everywhere in the world. From Argentina through the US and on to India. Give shit away to buy votes. In places like Argentina and India it migt have taken the form of blenders and bikes. In places like the US it feels a bit more sophisticated but it is the same thing: pander to unions and minorities. And, just like in India and Argentina, the masses respond with votes. Once in office the politicians drop their "little people" supporters on their heads and proceed to enrich themselves.
The right wing has it's own set of issues, including seeing everything through the eyes of religious fanaticism of varying degrees. Which easily buys the votes of the religious masses.
Politics is such a mess. It is probably one of the lowest forms of the human condition. It causes those in the game to have to devolve into despicable beings for the all-mighty vote. Sick.
Nancy Kress wrote Beggars in Spain to explore nearly this exact topic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggars_in_Spain In the book, the upperclass controls all capital and productivity and, literally and directly, buys the votes necessary to stay in office.
That, the quote above, is the left wing's preferred
approach to amassing votes everywhere in the world.
Well, buying votes is the nature of politics. I happen to think that the left is far more despicable than the right because they claim to be for the little guys and the poor, use and abuse them for votes and then toss them aside until the next election. What's incomprehensible is that the masses keep getting duped and and the come back with more votes.
And, BTW, I am not only pointing the finger at the US political system. This is true almost everywhere. The particularly nasty examples are in most of Latin America, where the ruling parties (all leftists, socialists) play the masses like finely tuned violins, keep getting voted into office and all the get in return is more misery. Every single politician walks away rich, entitled, protected from legal repercussions. Talk about the 1 percent.
I actually got confused today because someone posted a picture of the religious leader nicknamed Amma and and I was like wait who, doesn't she have breakfast cereal named after her?
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the PEOPLE WILL ALWAYS VOTE FOR THOSE WHO PROMISE THE MOST BENEFITS from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."
The right gives things away too--they just give things away to corporations and to the wealthy. Libertarians are right alongside that--it's a huge gift of power to the corporations. The individual would get squeezed hard in a libertarian world.
It's a myth that the "left" does not do this as well. "Obamacare", food stamps and many other welfare programs are indirect corporate welfare. The military industrial complex, perhaps the most egregious example of corporate welfare is whole heartedly supported by both sides. Further evidence is how the same big banks donate huge amounts of money to candidates from both parties.
Speaking as someone who self-identifies as a pragmatic libertarian, if I were in charge, the way I would try to help the 99% would start with getting rid of a lot of ways the law supports rent-seeking behaviour by corporations and the wealthy in the form of things like enforced noncompete agreements, zoning laws, licensing and bureaucracy that hurt small businesses more than big ones and reduce competition among employers, credentialism et cetera.
I make enough money that any swing to the left generally costs me more than I gain from it. I don't vote that way because of narrow self-interest, I do it because I want a better society to live in, and the majority of the hard data I've seen says that a redistributive system results in a better society.
Redistribution results in one thing: equal levels of misery. Re: Cuba, Venenzuela, pre-Deng Xiaoping China, the Warsaw Pact countries, Vietnam. Standards of living are higher in capitalist countries, that's a fact. Aside from the insane, nobody in 1987 said, "Citizenship in the USSR would be so much I nicer than here in the U.S." Also interesting: the lines around US consulates to get immigrant visas-- they often extend around the block. Every single day. The line outside the Cuban embassy? None. If a redistributive economy is best, why aren't Latin Americans sneaking into Cuba instead of into the United States? Why aren't the Hondurans making the trip to Venenzuela instead of risking the danger of crossing through Mexico to get to the United States? I would offer that the poorest people in the world all want to go to the U.S. Not because of redistributive policies, but because of opportunity. You can't become rich in Cuba. You can't even start a business of any consequence there. You can't get capital loans. what's the incentive to innovate and work hard if the government is just going to steal your efforts. The government should have a regressive tax;bathe current tax system actually penalizes success and rewards failure.
I don't get how some people seem to think that there's only two possible political systems in the world.
When I say redistributive, I mean things like progressive taxation, estate taxes, and basic income. In terms of median household income, the US places 6th in the world (and dropping), behind 5 countries whose taxation systems are significantly more progressive, so I dispute your claim of "equal levels of misery":
I really do understand that incentives matter, and that progressive taxation is also progressively disincentivizing. However, the countries in the world that have a better quality of life for the majority of their people are to the left of America, not to the right. And I'm more swayed by data than abstract economic theories.
since your argument is about the effect of taxes, "median household income ... before deduction of taxes" (which is what the wikipedia page shows) isn't really a useful metric.
The US is 7th, behind a very similar group of steep-progressive-tax countries.
I would say an even better metric is median quality of life indicators (which tell a similar story of the US trailing left-wing countries) but that's an understandably more controversial index.
A further nitpick: pretty much any index of this sort (particularly QoL) also has to be corrected for demographic trends -- the US absorbs around 20% of the world's total immigrant population [0], and the majority come from much poorer countries (#33 Mexico, not-even-ranked China, India, Philippines, Vietnam, El Salvador, etc. [1]) Those are countries with much worse economies, health care outcomes, education systems, etc. -- all of which have significant effects on both "median" and "average" numbers for measures of the US as a whole.
Sweden gets around 10% of its immigrants [0] from Finland, which is nearly tied with it in the net take-home pay list above. Sweden gets an additional >10% of its immigrants from countries above it in the net take-home pay list, or more than 20% total from top-20 countries.
The US, on the other hand, gets the vast majority of its immigrants from much poorer countries [1]. The US gets around 7% of its immigrants from top-20 countries.
Particularly when it comes to median statistics, adding people at the bottom of the scale is going to skew the stats.
If you look at table 29, immigrants make 93% as much income as natives nation-wide. Given that they account for only 13% of the population, that means that they represent less than a percent of income reduction nation-wide. Admittedly I'm talking mean not median here, but I'm not buying the argument that a regular person in the most powerful economy on the planet is having a harder time than the ones in the tiny countries of Australia, Belgium, and Germany because of a 1% drag on national income.
Americans have forgone universal health care, a strong social safety net, free or cheap higher education, all in the pursuit of a better economy and higher personal incomes. Lots of leftist countries haven't had to make that sacrifice, and yet even if you added 1% to the per capita income of Americans, they'd still be at least in the same ballpark, if not still ahead. From where I stand, that was not a good trade.
> "I'm not buying the argument that a regular person in the most powerful economy on the planet is having a harder time than the ones in the tiny countries ... because of a 1% drag"
... that's OK, since I never made that argument.
What I'm arguing is simply that statistics that don't correct for population/immigration trends aren't going to give you a complete picture. You're not comparing directly comparable situations.
> "Americans have forgone universal health care, a strong social safety net, free or cheap higher education, all in the pursuit of a better economy and higher personal incomes."
Americans have foregone those things, opting for crappier, more expensive, and less universal variants of those things, mostly in the name of refusing to compromise while actually compromising in entirely moronic ways. There is no sense in which the government has done a good job of crafting programs to be efficient and therefore to improve the economy or personal incomes. (Personally, I'm a fan of the "basic income" as the foundation for a strong safety net, as well as more efficient systems of education overall. It's in one sense more extreme and in another sense less extreme than what's common in Europe. But we'll never get it because everyone would rather play political football and end up with compromise solutions that are the worst of both worlds.)
[EDIT: going out of town for a week. You may have the last word if you so desire.]
"behind 5 countries whose taxation systems are significantly more progressive, so I dispute your claim of "equal levels of misery":"
Maybe not equal levels of misery, but significantly less purchasing power (In Australia for instance, a small bag of chips and a 20 oz. of coke is $11 at the local 7-11 when I was there last year), less innovation, and less freedom beyond a corporate 9-5.
When it takes a court case to fire an employee and taxes and restrictions are that large, how can 3 people in a dorm room possibly build a successful company? It's also pretty telling when venture capitalists pretty much avoid any of those countries.
Here are average wages in Sweden for instance (2012):
You'll note that Austria and Norway beat the US, and Sweden and Finland are in the ballpark.
I'm not arguing about innovation or "freedom", I'm arguing about a better society - one with less crime, better social mobility, etc. - for the average person. Not the Internet startup lotto winner.
And the government doesn't "get" a large percentage of your income - they don't keep any of it. Your fellow citizens get it. It goes to pay for the huge amount of infrastructure that you used while amassing your fortune (court system, transporation system, an educated healthy population to draw employees from, etc.).
You view taxation as theft. I view people who use infrastructure and then don't want to contribute back as welchers.
"I'm arguing about a better society - one with less crime, better social mobility, etc."
Those countries have less crime because they are very strict on immigration. Many people come to the US and instead of creating a new life and a new culture, keep the broken culture from the county they left, and in many cases, means an increase in crime.
It's also easier to maintain because those countries have as many people as a large city in the US..so the comparison isn't really fair.
"It goes to pay for the huge amount of infrastructure that you used while amassing your fortune (court system, transporation system, an educated healthy population to draw employees from, etc.)."
Those are already paid through many other taxes, so this isn't really a valid reason. Most people that are wealthy already paid many more in taxes than they will ever use. Where did all that money go?
"You view taxation as theft. I view people who use infrastructure and then don't want to contribute back as welchers."
I view an estate tax as theft, not taxes in general. Stop putting words in my mouth to fit your agenda. Let me guess: You are in your early-mid 20s and don't have a lot of wealth?
I run 2 very successful businesses and pay way more money in taxes than most people make in a year...and will continue to pay more in taxes than I will ever take from the system.
We also don't really have any government accountability. If we could actually track where our money was going, there might not be all of this need to take more.
"better social mobility"
How do you think we achieve social mobility? One of the best ways is to start a company. You don't even need an education. In the US, you can pay less than $50 in most states to make your company official..or even just run it under your own name as a sole-proprietorship.
In all of the countries you mention, there is virtually no social mobility and pretty much the only place to get a job is either at a large corporation or for the government.
And lastly, I just don't trust the government to manage my tax money that well.
I don't think you can blame immigrants as the deciding factor in crime. To quote Wikipedia: "In the US, studies have found lower crime rates among immigrants than among non-immigrants" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime). Furthermore, as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the US doesn't have a higher immigrant population than other places such as Sweden and Norway with much lower crime. And finally, immigrants are only 13% of the US population, so there would have to be a very large difference in criminality to move the needle in the overall population.
Sorry for misinterpreting your comment about taxes, I read it too broadly. The reasoning behind estate taxes isn't theft, it was an effort by the US founding fathers to try and stop a hereditary aristocracy from taking hold in America, the way it had in Europe. Inherited wealth is directly opposed to the principles of meritocracy that they held high.
And no, I am not in my 20s. And I too have years of business experience. And I've paid a lot in taxes. I'm genuinely arguing from the perspective of wanting a better society, not how much I can personally acquire.
In terms of social mobility, the data directly contradicts you:
The US has a strong culture of valuing social mobility (pull yourself up by your own bootstraps), but it's not the case in practice.
And finally, the reason that I believe in progressive taxation isn't based on what's more fair or not to the individual taxpayer. I agree that it's not a good feeling to watch your tax rate go up in response to success. But societies that don't engage in redistributive practices in that vein empirically end up in a worse spot across the board (economically and socially). I'd rather live in a better country than one that has a flat tax for ideological reasons. If I'm presented with an example of a society running well with a flat tax, I'd probably change my mind, as (all things being equal) it is much simpler and less unfair.
"I don't think you can blame immigrants as the deciding factor in crime"
I'm not blaming immigrants. At this point, we have 2nd and 3rd generations of citizens that have not integrated into US culture and continue to keep their own. You don't see this in countries like Sweden, Denmark, or Finland for instance.
I'm blaming people with broken cultures and views that don't integrate into their host country. Abandoning broken cultures is a good thing as it helps us progress as a society. We are so politically correct in the US, broken cultures are not only allowed to survive, but thrive.
"I'm genuinely arguing from the perspective of wanting a better society,"
We have a great society now. Of course it's not perfect and could use some changes. However, limiting successful people and encouraging people to not work is not the answer.
The ability to succeed has been what's made us great in the first place. We should be encouraging and rewarding success and making it easier for the average person to start and build a company, not harder.
"in terms of social mobility, the data directly contradicts you:"
You have:
-High taxes (When added up, Sweden is close to 70%..which is on par with Denmark, Finland, Norway, and France)
-The inability for the average person to start a company because of government restrictions
-A lack of investors
-Culture norms like Jante law (which looks down upon people achieving success..a requirement for social mobility): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
With all of this said, there can't possibly be that much social mobility. It limits the success of anyone that truly wants to improve their lifestyle and redistributes their wealth to everyone, even if they don't contribute anything to society for the better. This isn't the same as social mobility.
The US has great social mobility. If you are willing to put the time and effort, you can go from poor, to middle class, and even rich. You don't even have to have an education. The possibilities are endless.
In countries like Sweden, your possibilities are limited severely, but the amount of free money you get from the government is much more. So, you pretty much end up with one class of people. Both low and upper classes converge toward the middle.
All successful companies (IKEA is a good example of this) (and even many singers) leave Sweden because of these harsh restrictions.
"The US has a strong culture of valuing social mobility (pull yourself up by your own bootstraps), but it's not the case in practice."
It's not the case now because so many people aren't willing to put the work into it. All of the successful people that I know worked nights, days, and weekends for years. The majority of people just aren't willing to put the effort to succeed. They want to party during college, have fun on the weekends, and hang out with their friends or watch TV at night. This is fine, but you can't expect to get ahead in any career unless you sacrifice.
"I agree that it's not a good feeling to watch your tax rate go up in response to success. But societies that don't engage in redistributive practices in that vein empirically end up in a worse spot across the board (economically and socially)"
I'm not saying this to be deliberately combative, but when you say things like "With all of this said, there can't possibly be that much social mobility." you're favouring a theoretical model over actual reality.
The data in the links I posted say, unambigiously, that if you're born in a poor family in the US, you are more likely to stay poor than someone who is born in poverty in Sweden. That's not a theory, that's what the data says; and it's not controversial data - all they have to do is look at your income tax records and then your parents to see if you've escaped poverty.
You make an argument about the amount of regulation, the disincentivizing force of taxes, the lack of investment, the difficulty in starting new companies. Sure, I can see how that makes sense as a concept. But the concept is clearly flawed, because if you look at the black and white numbers (as opposed to what you've observed anecdotally) it doesn't reflect what's actually happened on the ground.
Despite the high taxes, despite all of the companies that are apparently fleeing the country, despite all of the regulations, poor Swedes with gumption and drive actually have a better chance at escaping poverty than poor Americans.
There's any number of theories about why that is: it's easier to take chances on starting a company when you know you're not risking homelessness when you fail; very low cost higher education is actually helpful in improving your lot in life; having high quality nutrition and primary education regardless of your parent's income helps poor children do better, etc. But those are just theories - who knows if they're right? They're just possible explanations for how things got to be the way they are.
Bottom line is that Sweden (and many other leftist countries) are doing well at making sure the average person living there is being rewarded according to who they are and not who their parents are. The US, though it has many impressive qualities, and though people talk a lot about hard work being rewarded, isn't doing as well.
In terms of your link about immigration, "tens of people" rioting is not the kind of numbers that people should look at when deciding policy. Riots involving thousands of people often happen over sports, yet there's no call for legislation around that. Also, an article describing problems that muslims cause from a site called "United With Isreal" is clearly not a good source of unbiased opinion on the matter.
And redistributive Northern Europe is more miserable than non-redistributive sub-Saharan Africa?
(Actually, on the subject of redistribution in notionally communist countries, it's pretty funny when you're sat round a beer stall in Saigon and its the citizens of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam that are loudly condemning the amount of money that gets redistributed to the indolent poor in the US because the biggest handout most of their own unemployed ever get is a 10% cut on any state lottery tickets they can sell...)
The USA is very redistributive, but is less efficient in doing so in many ways than other countries.
For example the health care system in america is significantly less economically efficient then the health care system of Canada, which causes a lot of human misery in the USA.
To 'redistribute' wealth, you don't have to directly take money in the form of taxes and directly give it to others. You can also redistribute wealth with 2nd order effects such as rent control, or limiting the supply of doctors through unrelated expensive requirements and so on. Much of the economic inefficiency in the US's health care system comes from these 2nd order policies.
So am I leftist if I want the US to adopt single payer health care and to cut a lot of it's negative 2nd order policies? Or am I conservative/libertarian for wanting it?
This is basically the mirror argument of the "if you like libertarianism so much, why don't you move to Somalia?" argument that didgeoridoo rightly calls out in this thread.
You don't have to be a Marxist to point out that often where there's well-funded, universally accessible mental health and addiction treatment programs crime has dropped significantly, for instance.
I'm not arguing against social programs. I'm noting the fact that the grandest experiment in redistribution to date resulted in massive amounts of human misery.
Absolutely! And as clever science-minded individuals, it's important that we DO learn from it before praising the all-powerful curative nature of wealth redistribution just because it feels good.
You're both arguing against a straw man (no one in this thread has even hinted that wealth redistribution is an "all-powerful curative"), and belittling people by implying that their reasoning is based on what "feels good" rather than logic and empiricism.
It would make HN better if you tried to make more substantive arguments for your position.
If you genuinely believe that you are in agreement, I think you missed pavel_lishin's point.
And while it's true you have no obligation towards my feelings, you have obligation to the quality of discussion here on HN. You have to act like those with differing opinions might have arrived at them through a lot of thought and study, not just by being overly-emotional and ignorant of economics.
I think the mistake you are making is to equate the left or left-leaning policies with with a better society.
Comparing to other countries and looking at a ranking system in Wikipedia is also a mistake. We are not the same. You are not comparing the same things. There are societal, cultural and historical differences that have a huge impact on the results of any given policy. Also, our economy is much, much larger and diverse, in absolute terms, than that of most countries.
The Nordic countries tend to be used as a model to support distributive socialist positions. The problem is that you just can't draw parallels between these nations and the US. Our system, our people, our politicians, our industry, our geography our social construct is very different from theirs.
Here's an interesting paper from MIT discussing some of their challenges:
"The two phenomena taken together imply a tendency for total spending on welfare services to rise faster than GDP over time. As long as the production of these services remains in the public domain, or as long as they are tax-financed, the tax burden must also exhibit a tendency to rise continuously with GDP. This
is a problem of the welfare state that we have been living with for decades now. However, starting from an already high tax burden, the efficiency cost of further increases in tax wedges will at some stage rise steeply, and high taxes will eventually cause serious harm to employment and growth. It seems to us that we may be close to a critical point where the deadweight losses due to high tax wedges and, particularly, their effect on labour force participation rates start to bite seriously. This is particularly so in view of some of the consequences of globalization and demographic change."
And that's the problem. You can make it work for a while in some societies, but it is not a sustainable long-term model. Greece being a bad example of this.
An almost trivial exercise using Excel can easily demonstrate how flawed these ideas tend to be.
The Nordic countries can, to a large extent, live the way they live thanks to a lot of what has come out of "the west". Look around your home or office. All of what you see is the result of capitalism at work. From your clothes to your furniture, watch, phone, computer, car, etc. The life saving devices the Nordic countries use to treat their population would not have existed had the entire world operated as they do. They are all the result of capitalism. In other words, socialist societies, could be argued, have been able to keep the status quo thanks to capitalism.
That's one view. The other is purely mathematical (the Excel spreadsheet model).
I find that anyone who's run a non-trivial business for many years eventually gains an understanding that seems impossible to get as an employee or as a government worker. When you run a business you very quickly understand that income distribution is a formula for disaster. It is not sustainable and it does not, despite how it is being sold by the left, result in a better society.
If you want a better society to live in you owe it to yourself to truly and objectively look at what the welfare state has done to our country. The war on poverty is decades old and our poor as more miserable than ever. The war on education, same thing. All of these government programs create more misery than wealth.
Look at the contrast between a SpaceX and traditional aerospace contractors. Amazing! And, frankly, you don't get the full sense of the difference until you actually walk through SpaceX --as I have-- and see how different things are when compared to traditional government contractors. It's almost the difference between being motivated and being brain-dead.
If you want a better society then you should want more freedom, more entrepreneurship...
Your opening argument precludes a huge amount of critical empirical information. Comparing how policies work out in other countries isn't perfect, but it's the only way to know anything about how they operate in the real world other than actually implementing the policy in your own country. And that's a chicken-and-egg thing, because why would you try a different policy direction if there's no evidence that it works?
I understand the impulse behind American Exceptionalism, but it looks to me like a recipe for gridlocked ideology, because instead of evidence from other countries, one can only argue using abstract theories...
...which is what I'd categorize most of the rest of your post. All the excel spreadsheets and econ papers in the world aren't going to hold sway with me against the significant numerical evidence that if you're anything but rich in the US, you're probably better off in a number of other countries. Yes of course there are meaningful differences between countries, but leisure hours, bankruptcies due to medical reasons, violent crime rates - these and many more are very universal and can be compared.
Furthermore, even if the US is incomparable, most other countries (for example New Zealand or Canada) are much more similar to Norway than the US, and should be following policies that have been successful for the later, not the former.
In terms of the failed social policies of the US and Greece, I would put that down to poor governance. Better designed policies in the same vein have succeeded, demonstrably, in other countries.
So while I appreciate the time you've taken to write your post, there's nothing in it that lends weight to your argument that leftist policies result in a worse place. The US, even the Democrats, are right of centre. If things were better in Reagan's past, you can't pin it on leftism. Since his time, they've reduced business taxes, reduced progressive taxation, and failed to implement leftist programs like universal healthcare. Yes, things are worse for the median American - this is what the left predicted. Things have gotten better for the average Swede in the same time period.
Of course, you seem to be arguing that governments in general make things worse the more that they are involved. But it's very easy to come up with an imaginary system of governance that is better than the status quo. That's what Marx did. It's a completely different thing to see it work in practice, and if you've got an example of a functioning society where the averge person doesn't suffer for the lack of environmental, labour, etc. regulations, and from the lack of universal education and healthcare, I would love to see it.
Finally, that "Just think. Don't follow. Lead." line. I know you mean it to be inspiring, but implying that I hold these opinions because I haven't considered them deeply, or that I've been brainwashed, just isn't productive.
The tech workers who make up the majority of my friends and acquaintances are heavily left-leaning. What is the US left wing supposedly giving away to them to buy their support?
I think it's ironic that you go through this (IMO justified) rant about how awful politics is, and then immediately turn around and propose your own political philosophy as the answer. Sorry, but libertarianism is still politics. I'm sure you have plenty of answers about how that's not true and your way is inherently different from all the others, but they all say that.
"What is the US left wing supposedly giving away to them to buy their support?"
Moral authority over conservatives, and cleansing of the sins of racism and other -isms and damage against Mother Earth by voting properly (and possibly some targeted donations).
I'm not sure how to do a good Google search for this but you can find some science on how people who perform token acts of environmentalism or race consciousness then often account to themselves some "moral capital" which they immediately spend, e.g. "Yeah, I flew to the mountains to ski but I recycle my trash so it all works out."
Conservatives are of course selling purity (a concept that actually goes quite deep; google "disgust" for some recent and fascinating research on this human characteristic) and tradition, and feeding into outrage about various changes going on.
Libertarianism (disclaimer: I mostly identify here) sells on the idea of secret understandings that few people have, invoking the ancient "mystery religion" [1] psychological programs that are actually surprisingly absent in the modern world. Many variants also have more than a whiff of "if we just did this ONE THING all our problems would be solved", offering an appealing unified theory of why everything sucks so hard that has the advantage of near-unfalsifiability since the realistic chances of any major libertarian polity rapidly approaches zero as its size grows, while being very appealing simplified. (See also gold-buggery... "one simple thing" that would fix our whole economy.)
All the political positions are selling emotional appeals.
Oh, and in the middle of this tumult there's some policy things too, but who really votes for those? Policies are tied together in really weird ways, and there is a far greater of cohesion of beliefs into "blocs" than you'd expect with a naive model of beliefs. Either our understanding of human psychology is still really limited and there's some good reason that the various beliefs are tied together, "team" voting is vastly disproportional in power vs. what it theoretically should be, or some combination of both, as I could argue both pretty well with various science results that have been coming out over the past 10 years.
[1]: This is a technical term, BTW; you may have a fun time googling it if you've never heard of it before.
First to address the last part of your comment. I think we can agree that politics will not go away any time soon. That means you either take sides or let others decide for you. So, no, there's no conflict in my statement. Politics sucks. I believe that a moderate "centrist" Libertarian approach will suck a lot less.
Now, about your left-leaning tech friends. There are probably multiple answers to this question.
The first answer is simple: Nothing.
Politicians need massive numbers of people to vote for them in order to win. This is done by giving to the masses, not to highly paid tech workers. This is why the rich are easy targets in political speeches. They don't represent a large voting block. There are enough rich people supporting each party to keep the cash coming in. I have yet to see one politician, regardless of affiliation, not take a single dime from the rich people they vilify in public.
Politicians get votes from giving to the masses. It's a simple formula really. I don't think tech workers fit that category. What's interesting is that this sort of talk on HN will result in vicious down-voting yet nobody stops to think and understand that what people like me are saying is supported by massive amounts of evidence, not just in the US but all over the world. The very article that started this thread talks about it being common in India. I speak about Argentina because my family lived there for a number of years and I came to learn about just how fucked-up and manipulative their politics are.
And so, when one sees American (or any other for that matter) politics with the benefit of years of exposure to other cultures and the blatant use and abuse of the masses for political gain, well, it's only natural to want to alert others. The emperor has no clothes. Yet nobody wants to stop and think.
The explanations for the left-leaning of your tech worker friends would require knowing each of them personally. If I am to generalize I'll say that it is very likely there was a degree of indoctrination at home. BTW, this is true of any political bend.
It is also no secret that our universities are permeated with far-left-leaning professors. And it is no secret that a degree of indoctrination goes on in many classes. My own son often tells me about experiences he is having in college with militant left-leaning professors consuming class time to indoctrinate. It's sick.
In a lot of cases there's a situation of not having enough life experience and cultural exposure outside the US. I know people in the US that have almost never ventured outside their city. Young 20-something tech workers simply don't know what they don't know when it comes to political reality. They just know what makes them feel good and what their friends and bosses might think. And they fall right in line with them.
Note that I am not favoring Republicans when I speak ill of Democrats. I think both parties have degenerated into ugly piles of manure. They are collectively doing more damage to this country than we can probably quantify today.
All I ask is that people stop to really think about these things because, in the end, they will really affect your life in massive ways. And the lives of your children. I know that to a 20-something rocking it in Silicon Valley this might be hard to connect with (the idea of thinking about children you don't have) yet, it is the way you need to start thinking if you want things to get better rather than worst.
More government isn't the solution because it is giving more control to people who think it reasonable to spend a billions dollars (or whatever it was) to build a website or billions of dollars bombing the shit out of people we should have nothing to do with or a joke of a high speed train to nowhere.
More government is NOT the solution. Leaning left or right in a mindless manner, or just to be part of the group you associate with is exactly what you should not be doing. You need to ...
Wait, did you just equate caring for minorities and people in positions where they can easily be taking advantage of, to buying TVs for people branded with a politicians face? I think you did. And you did it in an incredibly condescending manner to boot. If that's what waking up feels like, I'd rather stay asleep thank you.
I often wonder if people who advocate for libertarianism are aware of the history of feudalism.
Like, you know that there are a bunch of places in the world that fundamentally operate on libertarian rulesets, right? You can go and try to be a warlord in the unrule-y sections of Africa or the Middle East if you really believe so strongly in it.
What exactly makes you philosophically opposed to living in the society you want that exists today rather than changing the society you live in to be different? Do you just not like the idea of learning the lingua franca?
This "if you like libertarianism so much, why don't you move to Somalia?" meme has got to stop. You're thinking of anarchism. Libertarianism REQUIRES a strong rule of law to ensure that individuals cannot trample on each other's rights.
Anarchism, at least anarcho-capitalism (there are many flavors of anarchism), also requires a strong rule of law. The difference is the law is enforced through private parties, and the enforcement of law is reactive to the initialization of force. There is one overarching law and that is the non-aggression principle.
They do it in Guatemala, too, and it's hilarious. Essentially, for a free meal and bus ride and some empty rhetoric, you can get people out en masse to protest or vote. And since many voters can't read well and the country is a mess, political adverts are just a couple weird words, like "No extortion!"
The best advert I've seen is literally "Jimmy for President. Not a thief."
There's no better handout than tax cuts for corporations that fund a politician. I'm so glad that this isn't something morally superior right doesn't do. Except that, yeah, life's not Ayn Rand's book.
The movie-star to politics transition pretty much is run from late 60s and mid 80s. The two storied legends are MGR in Tamil Nadu and NTR in Andhra Pradesh. J. Jayalalitha was protege of MGR and she took over after a internal struggle after MGR's death.
The present day India does have its movie-star to Politican transition most of them are topped off at the most as MPs or MLAs, many tried but nobody ever reached the zenith like MGR, Jayalalitha and NTR.
Movie stars in India esp. South tend to be super duper populists and when Movies were the only medium of entertainment (they still are primary) they wear their movie character out into the real world when they transform into Politicians.
The results are mediocre, but this transition brought a Personality Cult or should I say exaggerated that mentality, pretty much each politician in India who is running for Chief Minster or Prime Minister runs as if they are the "Savior" who will turn the 70 years mis-rule on the head.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 80.9 ms ] threadYour assumption that he would not use a comparable term for the opposite situation, say "a liberal hit piece about Texas" in fact reveals a much more obvious lack of objectivity.
For most intents and purposes they are a "forgotten backwater".
You wouldn't criticize him for thinking, "Maybe the next thing that growls will bite too."
I know this is going to be downvoted to hell and back, but that's OK, somebody has to say these things so you kids learn to think for yourselves rather than be captive to the indoctrination you were subjected to in school.
That, the quote above, is the left wing's preferred approach to amassing votes everywhere in the world. From Argentina through the US and on to India. Give shit away to buy votes. In places like Argentina and India it migt have taken the form of blenders and bikes. In places like the US it feels a bit more sophisticated but it is the same thing: pander to unions and minorities. And, just like in India and Argentina, the masses respond with votes. Once in office the politicians drop their "little people" supporters on their heads and proceed to enrich themselves.
The right wing has it's own set of issues, including seeing everything through the eyes of religious fanaticism of varying degrees. Which easily buys the votes of the religious masses.
Politics is such a mess. It is probably one of the lowest forms of the human condition. It causes those in the game to have to devolve into despicable beings for the all-mighty vote. Sick.
Think Libertarian.
Wake Up!
And, BTW, I am not only pointing the finger at the US political system. This is true almost everywhere. The particularly nasty examples are in most of Latin America, where the ruling parties (all leftists, socialists) play the masses like finely tuned violins, keep getting voted into office and all the get in return is more misery. Every single politician walks away rich, entitled, protected from legal repercussions. Talk about the 1 percent.
Despicable.
When I say redistributive, I mean things like progressive taxation, estate taxes, and basic income. In terms of median household income, the US places 6th in the world (and dropping), behind 5 countries whose taxation systems are significantly more progressive, so I dispute your claim of "equal levels of misery":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income
I really do understand that incentives matter, and that progressive taxation is also progressively disincentivizing. However, the countries in the world that have a better quality of life for the majority of their people are to the left of America, not to the right. And I'm more swayed by data than abstract economic theories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_take-...
The US is 7th, behind a very similar group of steep-progressive-tax countries.
I would say an even better metric is median quality of life indicators (which tell a similar story of the US trailing left-wing countries) but that's an understandably more controversial index.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_immigrant...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...
The US, on the other hand, gets the vast majority of its immigrants from much poorer countries [1]. The US gets around 7% of its immigrants from top-20 countries.
Particularly when it comes to median statistics, adding people at the bottom of the scale is going to skew the stats.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Sweden#Country_...
[1] http://cis.org/2012-profile-of-americas-foreign-born-populat...
http://cis.org/node/3877
If you look at table 29, immigrants make 93% as much income as natives nation-wide. Given that they account for only 13% of the population, that means that they represent less than a percent of income reduction nation-wide. Admittedly I'm talking mean not median here, but I'm not buying the argument that a regular person in the most powerful economy on the planet is having a harder time than the ones in the tiny countries of Australia, Belgium, and Germany because of a 1% drag on national income.
Americans have forgone universal health care, a strong social safety net, free or cheap higher education, all in the pursuit of a better economy and higher personal incomes. Lots of leftist countries haven't had to make that sacrifice, and yet even if you added 1% to the per capita income of Americans, they'd still be at least in the same ballpark, if not still ahead. From where I stand, that was not a good trade.
... that's OK, since I never made that argument.
What I'm arguing is simply that statistics that don't correct for population/immigration trends aren't going to give you a complete picture. You're not comparing directly comparable situations.
> "Americans have forgone universal health care, a strong social safety net, free or cheap higher education, all in the pursuit of a better economy and higher personal incomes."
Americans have foregone those things, opting for crappier, more expensive, and less universal variants of those things, mostly in the name of refusing to compromise while actually compromising in entirely moronic ways. There is no sense in which the government has done a good job of crafting programs to be efficient and therefore to improve the economy or personal incomes. (Personally, I'm a fan of the "basic income" as the foundation for a strong safety net, as well as more efficient systems of education overall. It's in one sense more extreme and in another sense less extreme than what's common in Europe. But we'll never get it because everyone would rather play political football and end up with compromise solutions that are the worst of both worlds.)
[EDIT: going out of town for a week. You may have the last word if you so desire.]
Maybe not equal levels of misery, but significantly less purchasing power (In Australia for instance, a small bag of chips and a 20 oz. of coke is $11 at the local 7-11 when I was there last year), less innovation, and less freedom beyond a corporate 9-5.
When it takes a court case to fire an employee and taxes and restrictions are that large, how can 3 people in a dorm room possibly build a successful company? It's also pretty telling when venture capitalists pretty much avoid any of those countries.
Here are average wages in Sweden for instance (2012):
http://lostinstockholm.com/2012/01/10/average-salaries-in-sw...
"estate tax and basic income"
Everything you mentioned are just schemes for redistributing wealth. It's exactly what the op said they don't want.
If I work my entire life to build my fortunes, why should the government get a large percentage before my family? I see it no different than theft.
http://www.statista.com/statistics/226956/average-world-wage...
You'll note that Austria and Norway beat the US, and Sweden and Finland are in the ballpark.
I'm not arguing about innovation or "freedom", I'm arguing about a better society - one with less crime, better social mobility, etc. - for the average person. Not the Internet startup lotto winner.
And the government doesn't "get" a large percentage of your income - they don't keep any of it. Your fellow citizens get it. It goes to pay for the huge amount of infrastructure that you used while amassing your fortune (court system, transporation system, an educated healthy population to draw employees from, etc.).
You view taxation as theft. I view people who use infrastructure and then don't want to contribute back as welchers.
Those countries have less crime because they are very strict on immigration. Many people come to the US and instead of creating a new life and a new culture, keep the broken culture from the county they left, and in many cases, means an increase in crime.
It's also easier to maintain because those countries have as many people as a large city in the US..so the comparison isn't really fair.
"It goes to pay for the huge amount of infrastructure that you used while amassing your fortune (court system, transporation system, an educated healthy population to draw employees from, etc.)."
Those are already paid through many other taxes, so this isn't really a valid reason. Most people that are wealthy already paid many more in taxes than they will ever use. Where did all that money go?
"You view taxation as theft. I view people who use infrastructure and then don't want to contribute back as welchers."
I view an estate tax as theft, not taxes in general. Stop putting words in my mouth to fit your agenda. Let me guess: You are in your early-mid 20s and don't have a lot of wealth?
I run 2 very successful businesses and pay way more money in taxes than most people make in a year...and will continue to pay more in taxes than I will ever take from the system.
We also don't really have any government accountability. If we could actually track where our money was going, there might not be all of this need to take more.
"better social mobility"
How do you think we achieve social mobility? One of the best ways is to start a company. You don't even need an education. In the US, you can pay less than $50 in most states to make your company official..or even just run it under your own name as a sole-proprietorship.
In all of the countries you mention, there is virtually no social mobility and pretty much the only place to get a job is either at a large corporation or for the government.
And lastly, I just don't trust the government to manage my tax money that well.
Sorry for misinterpreting your comment about taxes, I read it too broadly. The reasoning behind estate taxes isn't theft, it was an effort by the US founding fathers to try and stop a hereditary aristocracy from taking hold in America, the way it had in Europe. Inherited wealth is directly opposed to the principles of meritocracy that they held high.
And no, I am not in my 20s. And I too have years of business experience. And I've paid a lot in taxes. I'm genuinely arguing from the perspective of wanting a better society, not how much I can personally acquire.
In terms of social mobility, the data directly contradicts you:
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/mar/10/oecd-uk-wors... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Social_mobility_is_lower_... (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility)
The US has a strong culture of valuing social mobility (pull yourself up by your own bootstraps), but it's not the case in practice.
And finally, the reason that I believe in progressive taxation isn't based on what's more fair or not to the individual taxpayer. I agree that it's not a good feeling to watch your tax rate go up in response to success. But societies that don't engage in redistributive practices in that vein empirically end up in a worse spot across the board (economically and socially). I'd rather live in a better country than one that has a flat tax for ideological reasons. If I'm presented with an example of a society running well with a flat tax, I'd probably change my mind, as (all things being equal) it is much simpler and less unfair.
I'm not blaming immigrants. At this point, we have 2nd and 3rd generations of citizens that have not integrated into US culture and continue to keep their own. You don't see this in countries like Sweden, Denmark, or Finland for instance.
When you do, things like this happens:
http://unitedwithisrael.org/it-was-like-a-war-zone-muslims-r...
I'm blaming people with broken cultures and views that don't integrate into their host country. Abandoning broken cultures is a good thing as it helps us progress as a society. We are so politically correct in the US, broken cultures are not only allowed to survive, but thrive.
"I'm genuinely arguing from the perspective of wanting a better society,"
We have a great society now. Of course it's not perfect and could use some changes. However, limiting successful people and encouraging people to not work is not the answer.
The ability to succeed has been what's made us great in the first place. We should be encouraging and rewarding success and making it easier for the average person to start and build a company, not harder.
"in terms of social mobility, the data directly contradicts you:"
You have:
-High taxes (When added up, Sweden is close to 70%..which is on par with Denmark, Finland, Norway, and France) -The inability for the average person to start a company because of government restrictions -A lack of investors -Culture norms like Jante law (which looks down upon people achieving success..a requirement for social mobility): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
With all of this said, there can't possibly be that much social mobility. It limits the success of anyone that truly wants to improve their lifestyle and redistributes their wealth to everyone, even if they don't contribute anything to society for the better. This isn't the same as social mobility.
The US has great social mobility. If you are willing to put the time and effort, you can go from poor, to middle class, and even rich. You don't even have to have an education. The possibilities are endless.
In countries like Sweden, your possibilities are limited severely, but the amount of free money you get from the government is much more. So, you pretty much end up with one class of people. Both low and upper classes converge toward the middle.
The average wages show this in practice:
http://lostinstockholm.com/2012/01/10/average-salaries-in-sw...
All successful companies (IKEA is a good example of this) (and even many singers) leave Sweden because of these harsh restrictions.
"The US has a strong culture of valuing social mobility (pull yourself up by your own bootstraps), but it's not the case in practice."
It's not the case now because so many people aren't willing to put the work into it. All of the successful people that I know worked nights, days, and weekends for years. The majority of people just aren't willing to put the effort to succeed. They want to party during college, have fun on the weekends, and hang out with their friends or watch TV at night. This is fine, but you can't expect to get ahead in any career unless you sacrifice.
"I agree that it's not a good feeling to watch your tax rate go up in response to success. But societies that don't engage in redistributive practices in that vein empirically end up in a worse spot across the board (economically and socially)"
I disagree. Everyone talks about how bad th...
The data in the links I posted say, unambigiously, that if you're born in a poor family in the US, you are more likely to stay poor than someone who is born in poverty in Sweden. That's not a theory, that's what the data says; and it's not controversial data - all they have to do is look at your income tax records and then your parents to see if you've escaped poverty.
You make an argument about the amount of regulation, the disincentivizing force of taxes, the lack of investment, the difficulty in starting new companies. Sure, I can see how that makes sense as a concept. But the concept is clearly flawed, because if you look at the black and white numbers (as opposed to what you've observed anecdotally) it doesn't reflect what's actually happened on the ground.
Despite the high taxes, despite all of the companies that are apparently fleeing the country, despite all of the regulations, poor Swedes with gumption and drive actually have a better chance at escaping poverty than poor Americans.
There's any number of theories about why that is: it's easier to take chances on starting a company when you know you're not risking homelessness when you fail; very low cost higher education is actually helpful in improving your lot in life; having high quality nutrition and primary education regardless of your parent's income helps poor children do better, etc. But those are just theories - who knows if they're right? They're just possible explanations for how things got to be the way they are.
Bottom line is that Sweden (and many other leftist countries) are doing well at making sure the average person living there is being rewarded according to who they are and not who their parents are. The US, though it has many impressive qualities, and though people talk a lot about hard work being rewarded, isn't doing as well.
In terms of your link about immigration, "tens of people" rioting is not the kind of numbers that people should look at when deciding policy. Riots involving thousands of people often happen over sports, yet there's no call for legislation around that. Also, an article describing problems that muslims cause from a site called "United With Isreal" is clearly not a good source of unbiased opinion on the matter.
(Actually, on the subject of redistribution in notionally communist countries, it's pretty funny when you're sat round a beer stall in Saigon and its the citizens of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam that are loudly condemning the amount of money that gets redistributed to the indolent poor in the US because the biggest handout most of their own unemployed ever get is a 10% cut on any state lottery tickets they can sell...)
For example the health care system in america is significantly less economically efficient then the health care system of Canada, which causes a lot of human misery in the USA.
To 'redistribute' wealth, you don't have to directly take money in the form of taxes and directly give it to others. You can also redistribute wealth with 2nd order effects such as rent control, or limiting the supply of doctors through unrelated expensive requirements and so on. Much of the economic inefficiency in the US's health care system comes from these 2nd order policies.
So am I leftist if I want the US to adopt single payer health care and to cut a lot of it's negative 2nd order policies? Or am I conservative/libertarian for wanting it?
You don't have to be a Marxist to point out that often where there's well-funded, universally accessible mental health and addiction treatment programs crime has dropped significantly, for instance.
It would make HN better if you tried to make more substantive arguments for your position.
If you feel belittled then that is on you. I have no particular obligation to ensure that you feel good about your position.
And while it's true you have no obligation towards my feelings, you have obligation to the quality of discussion here on HN. You have to act like those with differing opinions might have arrived at them through a lot of thought and study, not just by being overly-emotional and ignorant of economics.
Comparing to other countries and looking at a ranking system in Wikipedia is also a mistake. We are not the same. You are not comparing the same things. There are societal, cultural and historical differences that have a huge impact on the results of any given policy. Also, our economy is much, much larger and diverse, in absolute terms, than that of most countries.
The Nordic countries tend to be used as a model to support distributive socialist positions. The problem is that you just can't draw parallels between these nations and the US. Our system, our people, our politicians, our industry, our geography our social construct is very different from theirs.
Here's an interesting paper from MIT discussing some of their challenges:
http://economics.mit.edu/files/5726
Here's an excerpt:
"The two phenomena taken together imply a tendency for total spending on welfare services to rise faster than GDP over time. As long as the production of these services remains in the public domain, or as long as they are tax-financed, the tax burden must also exhibit a tendency to rise continuously with GDP. This is a problem of the welfare state that we have been living with for decades now. However, starting from an already high tax burden, the efficiency cost of further increases in tax wedges will at some stage rise steeply, and high taxes will eventually cause serious harm to employment and growth. It seems to us that we may be close to a critical point where the deadweight losses due to high tax wedges and, particularly, their effect on labour force participation rates start to bite seriously. This is particularly so in view of some of the consequences of globalization and demographic change."
And that's the problem. You can make it work for a while in some societies, but it is not a sustainable long-term model. Greece being a bad example of this.
An almost trivial exercise using Excel can easily demonstrate how flawed these ideas tend to be.
The Nordic countries can, to a large extent, live the way they live thanks to a lot of what has come out of "the west". Look around your home or office. All of what you see is the result of capitalism at work. From your clothes to your furniture, watch, phone, computer, car, etc. The life saving devices the Nordic countries use to treat their population would not have existed had the entire world operated as they do. They are all the result of capitalism. In other words, socialist societies, could be argued, have been able to keep the status quo thanks to capitalism.
That's one view. The other is purely mathematical (the Excel spreadsheet model).
I find that anyone who's run a non-trivial business for many years eventually gains an understanding that seems impossible to get as an employee or as a government worker. When you run a business you very quickly understand that income distribution is a formula for disaster. It is not sustainable and it does not, despite how it is being sold by the left, result in a better society.
If you want a better society to live in you owe it to yourself to truly and objectively look at what the welfare state has done to our country. The war on poverty is decades old and our poor as more miserable than ever. The war on education, same thing. All of these government programs create more misery than wealth.
Look at the contrast between a SpaceX and traditional aerospace contractors. Amazing! And, frankly, you don't get the full sense of the difference until you actually walk through SpaceX --as I have-- and see how different things are when compared to traditional government contractors. It's almost the difference between being motivated and being brain-dead.
If you want a better society then you should want more freedom, more entrepreneurship...
I understand the impulse behind American Exceptionalism, but it looks to me like a recipe for gridlocked ideology, because instead of evidence from other countries, one can only argue using abstract theories...
...which is what I'd categorize most of the rest of your post. All the excel spreadsheets and econ papers in the world aren't going to hold sway with me against the significant numerical evidence that if you're anything but rich in the US, you're probably better off in a number of other countries. Yes of course there are meaningful differences between countries, but leisure hours, bankruptcies due to medical reasons, violent crime rates - these and many more are very universal and can be compared.
Furthermore, even if the US is incomparable, most other countries (for example New Zealand or Canada) are much more similar to Norway than the US, and should be following policies that have been successful for the later, not the former.
In terms of the failed social policies of the US and Greece, I would put that down to poor governance. Better designed policies in the same vein have succeeded, demonstrably, in other countries.
So while I appreciate the time you've taken to write your post, there's nothing in it that lends weight to your argument that leftist policies result in a worse place. The US, even the Democrats, are right of centre. If things were better in Reagan's past, you can't pin it on leftism. Since his time, they've reduced business taxes, reduced progressive taxation, and failed to implement leftist programs like universal healthcare. Yes, things are worse for the median American - this is what the left predicted. Things have gotten better for the average Swede in the same time period.
Of course, you seem to be arguing that governments in general make things worse the more that they are involved. But it's very easy to come up with an imaginary system of governance that is better than the status quo. That's what Marx did. It's a completely different thing to see it work in practice, and if you've got an example of a functioning society where the averge person doesn't suffer for the lack of environmental, labour, etc. regulations, and from the lack of universal education and healthcare, I would love to see it.
Finally, that "Just think. Don't follow. Lead." line. I know you mean it to be inspiring, but implying that I hold these opinions because I haven't considered them deeply, or that I've been brainwashed, just isn't productive.
I think it's ironic that you go through this (IMO justified) rant about how awful politics is, and then immediately turn around and propose your own political philosophy as the answer. Sorry, but libertarianism is still politics. I'm sure you have plenty of answers about how that's not true and your way is inherently different from all the others, but they all say that.
Moral authority over conservatives, and cleansing of the sins of racism and other -isms and damage against Mother Earth by voting properly (and possibly some targeted donations).
I'm not sure how to do a good Google search for this but you can find some science on how people who perform token acts of environmentalism or race consciousness then often account to themselves some "moral capital" which they immediately spend, e.g. "Yeah, I flew to the mountains to ski but I recycle my trash so it all works out."
Conservatives are of course selling purity (a concept that actually goes quite deep; google "disgust" for some recent and fascinating research on this human characteristic) and tradition, and feeding into outrage about various changes going on.
Libertarianism (disclaimer: I mostly identify here) sells on the idea of secret understandings that few people have, invoking the ancient "mystery religion" [1] psychological programs that are actually surprisingly absent in the modern world. Many variants also have more than a whiff of "if we just did this ONE THING all our problems would be solved", offering an appealing unified theory of why everything sucks so hard that has the advantage of near-unfalsifiability since the realistic chances of any major libertarian polity rapidly approaches zero as its size grows, while being very appealing simplified. (See also gold-buggery... "one simple thing" that would fix our whole economy.)
All the political positions are selling emotional appeals.
Oh, and in the middle of this tumult there's some policy things too, but who really votes for those? Policies are tied together in really weird ways, and there is a far greater of cohesion of beliefs into "blocs" than you'd expect with a naive model of beliefs. Either our understanding of human psychology is still really limited and there's some good reason that the various beliefs are tied together, "team" voting is vastly disproportional in power vs. what it theoretically should be, or some combination of both, as I could argue both pretty well with various science results that have been coming out over the past 10 years.
[1]: This is a technical term, BTW; you may have a fun time googling it if you've never heard of it before.
Now, about your left-leaning tech friends. There are probably multiple answers to this question.
The first answer is simple: Nothing.
Politicians need massive numbers of people to vote for them in order to win. This is done by giving to the masses, not to highly paid tech workers. This is why the rich are easy targets in political speeches. They don't represent a large voting block. There are enough rich people supporting each party to keep the cash coming in. I have yet to see one politician, regardless of affiliation, not take a single dime from the rich people they vilify in public.
Politicians get votes from giving to the masses. It's a simple formula really. I don't think tech workers fit that category. What's interesting is that this sort of talk on HN will result in vicious down-voting yet nobody stops to think and understand that what people like me are saying is supported by massive amounts of evidence, not just in the US but all over the world. The very article that started this thread talks about it being common in India. I speak about Argentina because my family lived there for a number of years and I came to learn about just how fucked-up and manipulative their politics are.
And so, when one sees American (or any other for that matter) politics with the benefit of years of exposure to other cultures and the blatant use and abuse of the masses for political gain, well, it's only natural to want to alert others. The emperor has no clothes. Yet nobody wants to stop and think.
The explanations for the left-leaning of your tech worker friends would require knowing each of them personally. If I am to generalize I'll say that it is very likely there was a degree of indoctrination at home. BTW, this is true of any political bend.
It is also no secret that our universities are permeated with far-left-leaning professors. And it is no secret that a degree of indoctrination goes on in many classes. My own son often tells me about experiences he is having in college with militant left-leaning professors consuming class time to indoctrinate. It's sick.
In a lot of cases there's a situation of not having enough life experience and cultural exposure outside the US. I know people in the US that have almost never ventured outside their city. Young 20-something tech workers simply don't know what they don't know when it comes to political reality. They just know what makes them feel good and what their friends and bosses might think. And they fall right in line with them.
Note that I am not favoring Republicans when I speak ill of Democrats. I think both parties have degenerated into ugly piles of manure. They are collectively doing more damage to this country than we can probably quantify today.
All I ask is that people stop to really think about these things because, in the end, they will really affect your life in massive ways. And the lives of your children. I know that to a 20-something rocking it in Silicon Valley this might be hard to connect with (the idea of thinking about children you don't have) yet, it is the way you need to start thinking if you want things to get better rather than worst.
More government isn't the solution because it is giving more control to people who think it reasonable to spend a billions dollars (or whatever it was) to build a website or billions of dollars bombing the shit out of people we should have nothing to do with or a joke of a high speed train to nowhere.
More government is NOT the solution. Leaning left or right in a mindless manner, or just to be part of the group you associate with is exactly what you should not be doing. You need to ...
Like, you know that there are a bunch of places in the world that fundamentally operate on libertarian rulesets, right? You can go and try to be a warlord in the unrule-y sections of Africa or the Middle East if you really believe so strongly in it.
What exactly makes you philosophically opposed to living in the society you want that exists today rather than changing the society you live in to be different? Do you just not like the idea of learning the lingua franca?
That requires free thought. Something which is actively suppressed in the US since it threatens those who lead the sheep around.
The best advert I've seen is literally "Jimmy for President. Not a thief."
Movie stars in India esp. South tend to be super duper populists and when Movies were the only medium of entertainment (they still are primary) they wear their movie character out into the real world when they transform into Politicians.
The results are mediocre, but this transition brought a Personality Cult or should I say exaggerated that mentality, pretty much each politician in India who is running for Chief Minster or Prime Minister runs as if they are the "Savior" who will turn the 70 years mis-rule on the head.