A good essay, exploring one of the specific aspects of woke capitalism. However, although I don’t hold with the prescriptions of Marx, sometimes Marxist analysis can be a useful tool. Methinks capitalists began to listen to the prophecies of Nick Hanauer, most notably when he gave his somewhat famous TED Talk (which was at one point banned, but swiftly reinstated by popular demand) and quickly converted to the new religion of Wokedom:
In the video, he describes the likelihood that there would be increasingly dissatisfaction with the capital class- which seems somewhat prophetic now that we have seen populism rise in any number of countries, be it on the Right, as with Trump, or on the Left, with Progressive Populists. Political economist Mark Blythe has given some interesting talks on the subject of Global Trumpism (which he sees as a rebellion against the neoliberal corrupt corporate duopoly which had existed at the centre of power in most advanced economies).
He has also written one of the books on my reading list (there are so many)- Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, the main thesis of which is that austerity measures during economic crises are worse than useful because they shrink the denominator of country’s GDP by more than the effect on the numerator, leaving a higher debt to GDP ratio than would have existed without austerity (see Greece). For those critical of his viewpoint, I would argue that it should be the constant job of politicians to shrink the structural costs of government for either reallocation or tax savings, but that suddenly discovering the long-lost urge when your economy is on the ropes can be disastrous.
Anyway, the real problem with corporations is that can be quite flat hierarchies in which there is little in the way of career progression for the vast bulk of employees. Yes, there are specialists, but increasingly these days they are hired mercenaries and university educated in specialist fields. Little or no thought is given to vocational training for gifted workers (which psychometrics could ascertain quite easily and incredibly cheaply these days). Ironically, it is America which is leading the way in this respect, as in so many other issues. I say ironic, because it does seem odd that a country which prides itself upon being a classless society should be introducing what effectively amounts to a caste system.
You see, almost all the young professionals in the New Managerial Elite are children of the top 10%. Why wouldn’t they be, given that they have an IRL network from their parents background, telling exactly what types of activities and qualifications can pay in the long run? With the increasingly commodified nature of education, they knew exactly where to go to university to optimise their chances of landing a cushy job. Most went to summer camps arranged by the exclusive private schools they attended, to give them a leg up on the new successor ideology of wokedom and to find new ways to exclude lower down the socio-economic pecking order (unless they happen to have the right skin colour and views). Previously, they has relied upon designer clothes with no labels which only each other could recognise, with the poor gormless children of hardworking parents turning up at university proudly sporting Timberlands- only to find themselves shunned and excluded by the cool (Rich) kids.
Or as Douglas Murray puts it, in The Madness of Crowds:
“As it is in politics, so it is in private and public companies. Fast-tracked diversity may promote the people who were nearest to their destination already. And very often these are the most privileged people of any group – including their own.”
And it begins in the university, where kids now display their luxury beliefs, the modern more ephemeral and emotive equivalent of Dolce & Gabbana. The truth is right there in the stats- although I have long since forgotten the source, progressives are four times more likely to come from a parental background in the top 10% of the socio-economic spectrum. If we consider that it is possibly to hold quite laudable, if somewhat misinformed, economically progressive views- based in the genuine desire to help the poor- then the correlation between these new cultural progressives and genuine privilege are probably even higher.
And that’s the other rather nasty aspect of this ideology. Studies has shown that white privilege training doesn’t do anything to improve empathy towards poorer African Americans, whilst simultaneously significantly reducing empathy towards poorer whites:
But their attitudes toward poor blacks remained unchanged, according to a study.
Est. reading time: 3 minutes
The impact of diversity drives is that those who has closest in class and viewpoint to the existing cosmopolitan elite are accepted whilst the rope line to VIP section for Latinos and African Americans further down the economic spectrum is as vigorously policed as ever. Worse still, with opportunities all but eliminated for talented types who didn’t attend university and partisanship only exacerbating the disdain amongst cosmopolitans for the great unwashed, a lack of social mixing and media-driven loathing for socially conservative views (which African Americans have long been known to possess)- it is highly unlikely that a talented and hardworking Black man who didn’t attend university would even be considered for an important role.
The pandemic only made the degree of class segregation more glaring- with wait staff forced to mask whilst diners get to be people. But even before, there were distinctions. I’ve dined with all sorts over the years, and in my experience well-heeled cosmopolitans tend to be hypercritical of wait staff and lousy tippers, whilst the best tippers are invariably better paid Blue Collar workers. Ironic, given the latter generally work harder for their money.
Corporate Wokism is a substitute for the genuine sympathy we should feel for people less fortunate than ourselves. It supplants the natural sense of guilt we should feel for being born lucky and the sense of duty which should necessarily follow, and replaces it with a cosmetic concern which not only abandons the notion of meritorious social mobility, but structurally actually blocks it.
And as the regulatory capture of government by the corporations, squeezing small and medium size enterprises, this denies the very essence of the market which Adam Smith once espoused in his two books, the first of which is all too neglected. It’s through proximity that we preserve our manners, the social airs and graces which is reciprocal and humane. It’s very hard to treat a name like a number when you see their face every day.
Distance is what keeps the wages low and the workload full to brimming. It is only through several degrees of separation that we can practice the spreadsheet inhumanity of rationalisation and pension theft. At least when you work for a small business there are opportunities for development. As you learn, your pay grows. But with the Pin Factory economics practiced in most corporations, the tasks performed by most workers are so monosyllabic and uniform that every human is a part which is interchangeable. The question for corporations is that if people’s labour lacks value or worth, how can we develop them to make the most of their talents? It’s the one aspect of Bismarck’s Welfare Capitalism which hasn’t made it into the 21st century in many countries, and some might say by far the most important.
And, of course, it’s all one big chicken farm. They are training the next set of elites to run the farm, and keeping the masses fed with the equity scraps they throw from their table. They are teaching the young to not only tolerate them for Corporate Wokism, but to also love them for it. Whether or not the vast majority of the younger generation actually falls for this crap is very much beside the point- because as we’ve already seen, the opinions of the great unwashed don’t really matter. It’s what the privileged children of the newly minted corporate class see when they look in the mirror last thing at night that really matters- and they can console themselves with the fact that it should be government’s job to provide more for their workers- with those pesky Republicans are to blame for the humiliation these children of the privileged dole out to their workers on a daily basis.
I apologise if I got a little snotty. I've always been a cosmopolitan liberal and only recently have I begun to delve into conservative thought (largely as a result of wanting to understand the reasons for Brexit and because I happened to have read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind at the time).
Don't get me wrong, I still largely believe in government- there is a psychologically positive impact to living in a country like the UK with universal healthcare. But I also discovered to my horror just how badly well-meaning interventions can go wrong. We had the same Leftie high density urban housing projects in the UK, with similar results to America- acting as amplifiers of social ills- the only difference being that the groups which were the beneficiaries also included a large segment of the working class white group, effectively turning them into an intergenerational underclass.
Public housing can work- but it needs to be the exclusive purview of the elderly and lower income workers in urban areas. Continental countries have done it successfully, but mainly by immediately evicting the anti-social and disruptive and making continuing employment a condition of tenancy.
Same thing with welfare. Don't get me wrong, I believe we should take care of our most vulnerable- but welfare systems could have been designed as income supplements rather than as an alternative to working- slowly being scaled out at a rate of between 25c and 33c for each dollar earned.
But the moist catastrophic thing of all was the disincentives to fatherhood built in. It all but guaranteed that there would be an abundant crop of young men for the War on Drugs. You see the data on social mobility shows that African American women actually show slightly higher rates of social mobility than white women- they can do fairly well without fathers in the community- but still face an intergenerational reset because even a moderate imbalance between admirable available males in secure employment and women looking for them, can hugely change the dynamics of inter-sex relations, giving men the unhealthy chance of ready available sex on tap, with none of the commitments and societally beneficial stable family formation.
But the data for African American males is truly awful. It's something like a household with $120k per annum, shows social mobility rates similar to a white household with 38K a year. Obviously there are other factors, not the least of which are racism, the agency-robbing narrative of racism, and things like gang grooming can have- but here's the really amazing thing- with higher fatherhood rates in the community and a father in the home, which only occurs about 1% of the time for African American boys, social mobility rates are exactly the same as for white boys.
That's why I strongly advocate for vocational training as a means of mass employment- particularly in the area of home building, where there is huge demand (it's also how China has been powering their economic miracle for the last few years). Only by drastically increasing rates of male employment (and thus stable family formation), can America finally reverse racial disparities. I call it a stepping stone generation.
It's also a major contributory factor for elite income disparities. A Black doctor earns $50k less than a white doctor- some of this is age and relative seniority (the average age of a white person in America is 44, 32 if you are Black. But a far more important factor is the extent to which high paying careers are dependent upon a blue collar community with money to exist and get paid well. A doctor with primarily medicare and medicaid patients can only charge about 60% of what they charge their private patients, and the same holds true of lawyers, accountants, entrepreneurs and all the really desirable jobs in America.
People think of finance, software engineering and engineering. But I would hazard a guess that 80% of jobs in the top 20% of the income spectrum are dependent upon well-paid jobs further down. Hence blue collar.
Their are people who are critical because they want to score points. I am not one of them. I just wanted to try a distinctly different and heterodox approach to diagnosis and propose solutions to persisting disparity. It's been fifty years since legal equality and thirty years since cultural attitudes began to change. But the current solutions on display simply aren't working- there needs to be a revolutionary approach- every other group did it through well-paid labour- and that only happens in those areas of the blue collar economy which have intrinsically high value labour.
The reason why it's not happening is because in many countries in the West, there is what has been referred to as an Iron Triangle of Interest restricting housing supply, and the booming economics it can unlock.
“ Whether or not the vast majority of the younger generation actually falls for this crap is very much beside the point- because as we’ve already seen, the opinions of the great unwashed don’t really matter.”
I’d say that unfortunately a lot of them do. I’m 25 and went to a state school (public university) not an Ivy League, but I know a fair number of young people who do fall for the woke crap. It seems a little more rampant now than even when I was in school and it’s a little more prevalent among my sister’s friends (Georgetown alums and current students), although most of them are pretty reasonable and some of them are good friends of mine.
I also know a fair number of young people from the rural hinterlands where I grew up. The woke stuff is a lot less real there but it’s still prevalent. Worked in DOD and I saw there, too.
I wouldn't mind if the message wasn't about 'centering discomfort'- yes, that really is a feature of the ideology- the effects of white guilt and atonement in the sixties and seventies had at least as bad an effect on Black communities as the history of slavery and the legacy of Jim Crow. In the UK, we have the white working class (more aptly now described as an underclass). The self-same dynamic of high density urban housing which didn't discriminate with eligibility, intergenerational welfare and the loss of fathers caused by de-industrialisation (see hypergamy) all combined to make the rate of boys going to university from this group 9% (although the figures have somewhat improved since the last time I checked).
We should want to help others- but not because of guilt, because of agapē- our love of our fellow man. About 80% of all disparities occurred because of sheer stupidity on the part of government- not seeing the 2nd and 3rd order effects to policies which seemed quite benign and were designed to help at the very outset. Our cultures just aren't honest about who caused the problems in the first place- politicians and elected prosecutors invented the shit which police officers have had to shovel for so long, and usually its the media which goads them into making bad decisions.
Have you heard the latest? Many media sources now want to impose a no-fly zone- do they not know the preconditions required for such a thing to be possible? It would constitute an Act of War.
Most structural racism requires neither racism nor implicit bias- it exists because at exactly the point when African Americans were poised to take their rightful place in society, de-industrialisation happened across the West, and it was tantamount to stealing the ladder.
“the effects of white guilt and atonement in the sixties and seventies had at least as bad an effect on Black communities as the history of slavery and the legacy of Jim Crow. “
Milquetoast and ineffective liberals and their “white guilt” are equal or worse than 200 plus years of chattel slavery? You absolute crash dummy. You vegetable. you nabob.
African Americans were making more economic progress in the period before the introduction of the War on Poverty than afterwards- this is an observable economic fact and well detailed in Thomas Sowell's. Think of the disastrous influence of liberal High Density Urban housing projects, copied from Leftist welfare state European countries, and their Soviet equivalents and the way these urban centres acted as amplifies of social ills. This was White patronage in response to white guilt and the need to atone, made manifest in trying to 'help' people with the modernistic housing of the future.
And think of the way that welfare agents were sent out to African American families offering welfare checks, the only condition being that no man with an income could live in the home. It disincentivised fatherhood in ways Jim Crow never could. And we know from studying the life path of every child over the course of their life, that the level of fathers in a community is the single most important factor in upwards social mobility, more important even than quality of education. For details, simply read this article about a landmark study done by Dr Raj Chetty: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/01/new-harvard-study-where-is-the-land-of-opportunity-finds-single-parents-are-the-key-link-to-economic-opportunity.html
And I didn't state slavery, I stated the history of slavery. There is a difference. Obviously slavery was horrible and an abomination, and it was perhaps fitting the British spent more treasure eliminating it globally from almost every country in the world, than they earned from engaging in it. There was a need for that form of repayment of sins.
But if one looks at the structural determinism which occurs today, then fatherlessness at a community level is a greater driver of inequality of income and wealth than race is- and the damage done to the Black family occurred mainly as a result of liberal society and liberal guilt manifesting in systems which were incredibly poorly thought out. Don't get me wrong I'm a believer in welfare, but where is it written in stone that people should lose their entitlements for one working for one minute for one dollar, when a far more sensible solution would have been to create welfare as a low income stipend which phased out at the rate of 25% per dollar earned?
I'll tell you exactly why Johnson did it they way that he did- he wanted to reduce friction between his blue collar base and the African American votes he was aiming to keep. The idea was to give Black people enough to exist, but not enough to live, and to disincentivise them from competing with white blue collar workers. There was even an Air Force Colonel who reported hearing him say something vile about bribing African Americans for two hundred years. I won't repeat it. But there is your white guilt and white atonement, cynically manipulated to actually harm African Americans with enough to exist, but not enough to live.
And of course all of these forces conspired to really hurt African Americans when drugs hit the scene. Combined with deindustrialisation it produced the exactly the right toxic environment for gang grooming. Fathers do a pretty good job of stopping gang involvement at a community level. They also act as an unofficial safety net that shepherds young men who didn't well at school into pretty good blue collar jobs with dignity and decent pay. Even in socio-economic conditions where the gangs take hold, fathers actually seem to prevent most of the violence which arises from gangs. And it was violence for the most part which drove mass incarceration., although drugs inevitably also played a role in the unregulated market, the sentences for dealing far too harsh. Still, 50% of the entire US prison population is in prison for violent crimes, 20% for property. Around 20% for drugs- including dealing.
Mas incarceration could have been avoided if the family hadn't ben destabilised. America wouldn't have seen the violence associated with the drug scene if more fathers were present in communities, and in these circumstances the punitive sentences would have been more difficult to justify. Studies have shown that for every 1% the rate of fatherhood in a community drops, juvenile violence increases by 3%, and this often metastasises into criminality later on- also a function of the lack of the unofficial safety net fathers provide.
And as to wealth inequality, consider this- most of the wealth is concentrated in the top 1% far away from the hands of the 99%. And once one removes the top 10% from the spectrum, then a lot, but not all, of the economic differences between Black and White households disappear. Then we have to consider that the average White person is America is 44 and the average African American is 32. If a person doesn't increase their pay in those vital 12 years then they really should change job, and one would really expect them to have saved a fair amount, and paid off loans in the same period.
Plus, people ignore the most salient of details- it is all but impossible to build family wealth to pass down unless you are in a two income household saving up to 40% of living costs through cohabiting. Here is the thing- if I thought for one minute that reparations were going to go to towards the one thing which might remove disparities and start to heal and America, then I would be all for them.
But the Democrats are never going to spend massive amounts of money on vocational training, for the simple reason they, like their activist friends, would rather spend yet more money on useless higher educational bloat. Here is the thing. It's the kids that don't do well at school that need helping. It's what the Germans do, and they've been so successful with it and the, male mentoring it naturally provides, that they are the only Western country in the world that doesn't use crime density targeted proactive policing and still manages to keep crime low.
And here's the beauty of it- if you increase the number of young men who have stable reliable well-paid jobs you also massively increase the rate of stable family formation. That's the thing conservatives miss when they go on about values and personal responsibility, you need the right ingredients to make it work- otherwise you're making bricks without straw.
'Milquetoast and ineffective liberals and their “white guilt” are equal or worse than 200 plus years of chattel slavery?' I didn't say it was worse, I said it has worse effects- big difference. African Americans has managed to repair much of the damage of slavery and Jim Crow before the advent of The Great Society, and had it not been for the Great Society (barring legal and coting rights reform) then their progress would have likely been much faster.
It's not that liberals weren't well intentioned, but their 'help' did nothing of the sort. The liberal or Leftist efforts of HUD were the worst, but if they had only created a welfare system which acted as an income supplement rather than as an income replacement things could have been so much better. And before you come back to me with sentencing disparities and drugs, its worth considering that the penalties for Meth (prevalent amongst poorer whites) were just as harsh as for crack. It was never about drug using in America, but more about being poor and drug using in America. All those wealth white liberal ladies were terrified of being mugged- irrationally so, given 90% of all drug violence is intra-gang.
I think what you're highlighting here is the latest manifestation of the elite. The point about being an elite is that entry is restricted to a certain few who fit the category. Thus the fact that it's woke capitalism is actually irrelevant and it will be replaced by a new manifestation further down the road as elites adapt and change and are replaced.
The Trumpist reaction is just an attempt by the excluded to break into the elite environment. If they are successful then they will form the elite and have their own set of excludatory rules.
I do agree with you with to a certain extent- but we have to remember that places like Harvard or Stanford should only really be admitting kids who are at the very least in the top 2% of the cognitive spectrum, but that the inherited elites or legacies who make into the very top flight universities only average about top 5% of the cognitive spectrum, which would tend to suggest that some may only be top 10%, given the inevitability of distributions.
More room should be made for those who score in the top 1%, but who come from the bottom 60% of the socio-economic spectrum- we like to think of ourselves as meritocratic, and to a certain extent it is true- but plenty have fallen through the cracks in the past through parental laziness, substance abuse and mental illness. I mentioned the bottom 60% because research shows that if one is born in the top 1% of the socio-economics spectrum one is more likely to attend an elite university than the total from the bottom 60%.
Interesting figures. They do rather prove my point about the elite. Intelligence or ability have never been factors in entering an elite. Rather conformity to a set of norms or ability to adopt those norms has much higher value. The history of the English nobility in the 19th century is instructive. An elite comes under threat when it is too closed (as was the French nobility of the Ancien Regime) but the concept of the elite will not wither or be dispensed with. It will merely change. There are many examples but the anti-intellectual Nazi elite is perhaps one of the best.
Great point. I think it is biological- we are driven to make often artificial distinctions between each other because as animals we crave status. It is amazing how much perceived elites can influence the low status amongst us. In the 20th century, we saw high status women denounce marriage and then get married. Monogamy and marriage are vocally disdained in some circles of the elites, but those with the highest incomes are both most likely to get married and stay married...
Yes I totally agree. Monogamy has always been optional for the elites and this practice has a long tradition. Marriage though is still seen as a garantor of status. So much so that in Japan if you're an unmarried female of a certain age you're labelled a 'loser dog'.
Predicting people suffer greed, envy and jealousy is hardly an insight.
Any failures of free market capitalism will resolve themselves. Either businesses do well according to their customers who freely choose to trade with them, or they fail. Either they consume limited capital or they become starved of it so others can use it. Only government can prop up bad businesses to survive longer (too big to fail/TARP/CARES/ACA, special tax privileges, tariffs, regulations and licensing to reduce competition) because it's based on force by a special small group in the ruling class.
Ironically, you are arguing my point. Woke capitalism allows all these things to happen without admitting the ''vile maxim'. As a hybrid, where the ruling class pay lip service to the ideology, it is a patina of virtue disguising something far darker- another word for an unholy alliance between big business and big government is fascism.
Indeed, I usually agree with you, but thought it funny that Nick Hanauer was pretending to say something new rather than using government power (who needs Marx when you have American politicians implementing his vision) to implement the greedy, envy and jealousy of the Demos over free market capitalism.
Yes, well- he is wrong about the minimum wage- my brother is a chef, and once one implements the higher prices which invariably follow, the tips per person reduce by more than the gains in wages or salary. Perhaps the tax breaks we've seen with company-wide PRP schemes is the answer (it's like a lower rate of flat tax on earnings, which is contingent upon the bonuses stretching all the way down to the bottom of the corporate ladder).
One of the reasons for stinginess on wages is the fear of adding structural costs which may be inimical to business survival when times are lean- bonuses allow employers to be generous when times are good. I am less against government intervention when it is framed in the form of tax breaks for sound business and good ethics.
Most employers are deluded when it comes to the benefits of man-management for achieving high rates of worker productivity. BSI research showed years ago that incentivised pay achieves a roughly 50% increase vs. flat rates. A combination of good method study, front end employee selection and high morale can achieve productivity rates between 250% and 400% of standard, depending upon the extent to which machine capacities are a factor.
Good God, we mustn't implement Greed and Envy among the working class where it is Bad, we must reserve Greed and Envy for the Plutocrats, where it is Good.
> Any failures of free market capitalism will resolve themselves.
So the plutocrats say. So said JP Morgan and JD Rockefeller. So says Bezos. But I always listen when any member of an elite confesses that his membership in that elite isn't quite as meritorious as the members usually do. Why would he lie? On the contrary, I think he knows exactly what he's talking about.
Greed and envy are in all people. It's something that is only a real problem when force is applied to make it happen, whether just a bad actor or government which is the king of doing this to take from one to give to another (and mostly to the powerful and rich).
Government controls our markets, so we get bad outcomes like CARES, TARP/too big to fail, forced low interest rates, massive spending on big business, big pharma and the military. Government has no money, so it just takes or prints it, and these are the opposite of free markets where voluntary exchange is always win-win or it doesn't take place.
> voluntary exchange is always win-win or it doesn't take place.
That's what the robber barons said. 'We control the economy. You'll work for starvation wages and die slowly, or you'll decline our offer and die quickly. It's entirely up to you.' win-win.
The plutocrats, oligarchs, royalty and robber barons only exist when government force keeps them in place.
Please share about the bad economic outcomes that resulted from voluntary consumers of anything offered by the so-called robber barons (aside from that given by government force). In general, all they controlled went up in production and down in price over their tenures.
Some people may just overvalue what they own, what they produce, and the services they can offer others. Pithy grumblings may be satisfying, but if you do a voluntary exchange that makes you worse off, please share.
We haven't had absolute TFM since the stone age. Weights and measures and currency have been regulated since Sargon. But I take your point. There was a time when Adam Smith's Invisible Hand actually worked and Market Forces really did solve most (tho never all) problems. I'm a huge fan of genuine capitalism.
> a strong economy does create inequality because people are unequal
Quite right. Equity is neither possible nor desirable. However inequality can become too extreme as well, and it has.
> and then enact laws spending other people's money
From the time of the late Victorians up to about the 70's governments were often frugal and efficient in spending other people's money. No need to list the exceptions. The Victorians were perhaps the most zealous TFMers the world ever saw, but even they had the good sense to realize that London's sewer problems were not going to be solved by TFM, it rather took government action. So they hired one of the great unsung heroes of engineering, Joseph B. who's work, rather than being about maximizing shareholder value, was about providing sanitation for all. His system still functions.
> and most were once the new competitors to those people previously cried were too powerful
Sure. The problem is that the lean and mean will become the fat and lazy if we let them. The people who preach competition and innovation will actually suppress those things once they reach the top. My doctrine is to keep competition and innovation going by doing what Teddy R. did, namely suppressing monopolies or demi-monopolies. You mentioned that the price of kerosene went down during the Standard Oil monopoly; I'd reply that it would have gone down much faster if the monopoly had been broken up sooner.
Per woke capitalism is lost in the discussion, but we do have more horizontal space. ;-)
The stone age had no capitalism or TFM. You need a stable currency and courts+law to enforce contracts. I'd guess there was more might makes right in those days.
I think inequality is only extreme when viewed as equality is real, rather than equal protection under the law. I'll never be equal to anybody in pro sports, medicine, law, arts like painting/dance/singing, physics, chemistry, etc. As long as the winners are not rigging the game or lying/defrauding (what courts address, and for most people, what brand names and third party independent lab results/certifications provide), and those who give the money do so voluntarily, let those most productive/admired become Everest while others are death valley, and if you are so inclined to voluntarily help them out like a good neighbor or follower of many religions, wonderful.
Why do you hate that people become fat and lazy so long as you don't have to fund their lives and you are free to choose elsewhere or refrain from trade entirely? We also go from powerless fetus to decrepit powerless elderly (if we live long enough), and there's nothing a collective force can do to resolve that either. When the buggy goes, the car comes. When the whale oil goes, here comes kerosene, then electricity, etc.
In the end, it's just about preferences and vying for limited resources. You can go voluntary route and achieve all that humans can achieve with their innovation and compassion and risk taking and tastes. Or you can use force, which is what all governments do, what all criminal/thieves do, and my preference is for less force and more voluntary choice. If that makes me anything bad, I'm for bad over the theory of using force to make things better.
As for sewers and water, I'd guess the collective would voluntarily join forces to implement these (as indeed happened the world over). I'm sure they'd agree to shared paths/roads/trails as well. Most are fine with having laws to protect against people harming others, and for having police and courts to work those out. The very term barn raising shows this was chosen without needing to threaten all with harm/violence/theft.
And even in the US, we see more mediation and contracts chosen over courts and laws because our government can't even handle the laws they've imposed, can't process the presumed innocent in a timely fashion, and our punishments seem to presume all crimes harm the state rather than individuals.
A powerful person cannot suppress competition in a free market, and only can do so if it uses corrupted government (redundant expression the world over today) to block it with regulations, licensing, tariffs and the other forms of rent seeking.
Re: barn raising- they has two things we lack in the modern era- the right ethos and communities of shared values, in which the dynamics that usually govern families were extended outwards. Tragically, our societies have become so fragmented we lack the umbrella of unified belief in common goals and shared dreams. Most of these types of conversations online only exist because we have lost something vital to our ethos. J. P. Morgan famously said that he thought it immoral to be paid more than 20 times the income of his average worker- but, of course, the statement also implies a distinction between income and capital.
For the most part, we also lack the by-product of regular warfare to unify society. The is nothing like a shared trench to dissolve artificial distinctions between officer and private, wealth and the lack thereof. Our peacetime societies generated respect for bosses and the desire for the humane and dignified treatment of workers as a result- and it also helps that wars cut down the friction of political partisanship.
Libertarians generally avoid talking about morality, because it can mean the imposition of the tyranny of others (although Dave Smith the comedian and political commentator is a notable exception- his most recent podcast on JRE Spotify is well worth a watch). But ethos needs to be a implicit part of the libertarian discussion, because there is good deal of evidence that human distributed networks naturally tend to polarise over time- it's written in a history of blood and there needs to be a unifying ethos to stop natural polarisation occurring.
We lose much of social grace when we instead rely on government force to provide, to care, etc. Good people are good people and they act in goodness without being forced to do so.
I think there's no morality that's worthy anything if it uses force to impose it. Religions are fine, but if I force you to be in my religion, it's immoral.
> the right ethos and communities of shared values, in which the dynamics that usually govern families were extended outwards
Exactly. Killed by muliculturalism.
> J. P. Morgan famously said that he thought it immoral to be paid more than 20 times the income of his average worker
JP said that? Sheesh, I think of him as the paradigm of the robber baron. Mind, I prefer(ed) the robber barons to the modern bankster. JP funded real industries that made real stuff. And as DOK noted, many of those buggers ended their days as philanthropists.
> there needs to be a unifying ethos to stop natural polarisation occurring
Dunno if it's just the way dolphins look at things, or part of the ethos of being a centrist, but I don't bother worrying about whether capitalism is 'good' or 'bad'. It is a phenomenon that has certain properties and if it is managed with those properties in mind, the results can be very good. But as you say, one of those properties is polarization especially of wealth accumulation. The natural state of things is feudalism -- the lord owns everything and the serfs are beasts of burden. I vote for some very prudent amount of redistribution.
> You need a stable currency and courts+law to enforce contracts.
Sure. I don't think we disagree as much as we might have thought. I expended many a keystroke back in the old days of Quillette arguing with TFM fundamentalists who suppose that *everything* is solved by TFM -- no government *at all*. Your views are reasonable even if IMHO extreme.
> and if you are so inclined to voluntarily help them out like a good neighbor
Like the vast majority of people I vote to live in a society that is not based on absolute selfishness. As I said, I'd like to see the Ayn Randian view of the world implemented somewhere so we can see how a modern version of it would work out, but I don't think it would be a very nice place.
> Why do you hate that people become fat and lazy
It's more when economies become fat and lazy. What used to be a vigorous economy of genuine investment in real things is now concerned with rent collecting and banksterism. Contrast Goldman Sachs and, say, Elon Musk.
> Or you can use force
Or you can find the sweet spot that balances the best of both. I don't think you really disagree in practice. Putting it in the broadest possible way, I tend to say that the economy should be 80:20 private vs. public.
> The very term barn raising shows this was chosen without needing to threaten all with harm/violence/theft.
But that's the thing, people *choose* to live in ordered societies. I choose to be subject to the law and to even be subject to force because that same force protects me from the criminal. I gain more from government force than I loose.
> our government can't even handle the laws they've imposed
Like everything else, governments can go fat and lazy if we let them -- and we have. The cure is not TFM, the cure is resurrecting Truman. Meanwhile it has always been true that raw capitalism is grossly unstable. Booms and busts, exploitation and monopoly are the normal state of affairs. Not to mention gross amounts of waste and duplication of effort. Nope, capitalism and markets are very valuable things, but the must not be left to themselves. That's the reality, notwithstanding the narrative to the contrary. The Chinese were regulating the rice market 4000 years ago.
Ayn Rand isn't TFM, but objectivism. TFM is just voluntary society, one based on live and let live. It doesn't reject being kind or charitable as ignoble, wasting your resources on lessor beings. A free market simply means people voluntarily exchange a good/service at an agreed upon price so that all parties involved feel each is better off for it. Otherwise you don't trade. It's what most US transactions are, even if they are laced with anti-poor/anti-worker things like sales taxes and income taxes; with odd regulations and tariffs and licensing that increase costs and result in fewer choices, less competition and reduced innovation, while brands and trusted third party certifications would likely provide incentive and market information for consumers.
Personally, while I'm more libertarian than society will ever be (barring some huge catastrophe), I'd agree to most democratically voted for projects if and only if the project included a fixed rate tax that all paid to cover the costs. Then you'd at least have programs people actually agree on and are willing to pay their fair share to have. If you vote to take my money for your needs, that's not a democracy that's moral; it's based on greed, envy and theft by rule of the mob (a form of rule by power).
I'm unsure how Elon Musk is an example of a once vigorous economy, rent collection or banksterism. His satellites are useful for rural people and those in war torn areas like Ukraine; his spaceship was used to resupply the space station; his electric cars and charging stations make him #1 in e-vehicles today even if the government pretends only the it with big industry can make e-vehicles and charging stations something for the future.
Does government need to build churches and other religious schools and institutions to have religiously moral people? Character doesn't come from government force, ever. There is nothing moral to be found in any coerced action, other than self-defense/restitution for some prior aggression.
But surely Objectivism is a tarted up form of TFM? At least the overlap almost completely, no?
> TFM is just voluntary society
So is socialism if that's what people vote for, and they do. Denmark is a democracy and TFM parties are there to be voted for if that's what you like. But the Danes choose not to live like hyenas -- you kill and you eat until you are killed and eaten -- they prefer society as they have built it -- a bit kinder.
Too bad each individual can't self-design their own society! It were possible I'd permit yourself to sorta opt out -- government asks nothing of you and gives nothing back -- but it just isn't possible. However, what would be possible is buying some island off Indonesia and setting up a TFM/ancap utopia where every transaction is voluntary. I would honestly like to see how that would work out. Seems that some ancappers attempted to take over a town in New Hampshire and run the experiment.
> It's what most US transactions are, even if they are laced with anti-poor/anti-worker things like sales taxes and income taxes;
Sure, most transactions always have been and hopefully always will be TFM. The regulatory state should oversee things with as light a hand as possible. For example, I am glad that here in Canada the government checks out all electrical devices for safety and attaches a 'CSA approved' sticker to them. I want this. I vote for it. I'm happy to pay for it. If you don't like it you can vote for your local libertarian but if you loose the election, I'm afraid that you are not going to get your way.
> it's based on greed, envy and theft by rule of the mob
All democracies are at risk of that kind of thing, however almost all functioning, thriving democracies also have some progressive taxation rate. The thinking goes that those who have reaped the most benefit from society have the greatest obligation to keep that society running. Greed seems to be good for some -- as Gordon Gekko famously said -- but reprehensible for others.
> I'm unsure how Elon Musk is an example
But you seem to agree with me that he's a producer of useful things.
> There is nothing moral to be found in any coerced action
Whether it is 'moral' or not to arrest people who drive on the wrong side of the road, I care not. Still I would have them arrested and fined and I'd use force on them if they did not comply. Probably 99% of the electorate shares my view on this kind of issue, so that's the way it is likely to stay.
Well, Objectivism is TFM as much as the Crusades is Christianity, and Manifest Destiny is liberal democracy.
Sure, socialism can (and does in communal living areas, though they rarely last long because it doesn't work well in practice) exist within a free country just fine. But a socialist country cannot have free country.
Driving on the wrong side of the road is a form of aggression as bad outcomes are likely. But you would recognize a law against that as being unjust if your side of the road were blocked and no traffic was coming on the other side and then you did it. TFM doesn't reject laws, but demands they be enforced for a level playing field and to support contracts. The US has so many laws that nobody knows them, making ignorance of the law true for 100% of the people; heck, the IRS can't even answer tax law questions very well.
> Objectivism is TFM as much as the Crusades is Christianity
Please elaborate. Of course Objectivism considers itself a full philosophical system with all the bells and whistles whereas TFM is a very simple idea that can be quite well explained in a few sentences, still I'm interested in how you'd differentiate them.
> they rarely last long because it doesn't work well in practice
The nordics have had what most folks call socialism (Geary disagrees with the label) for over a century and no doubt there are the predictable problems however they have managed to produce a society in which even working people do very well and can put a roof over their heads.
Let's avoid overboard caricatures either way -- Communism is a complete failure, Venezuela is a disaster, Maoism was a horror show. But so was Franco's Spain and any South American capitalist dictatorship you care to name. I'm a centrist paleo-liberal democrat. I'm a wet Torry. I have socialist dreams but a conservative mind. I have very strong libertarian gut feelings about things too. Let's see how close we can get to each other.
I quite agree with Geary and yourself and many righties that our governments are mostly all far too big, far to bloated and far too lazy. Dunno if the problem is 'socialism' as much as it is the fact that *all* big, monopolistic institutions suffer from the same problems. But Guatemala isn't a very nice place either, nor Somalia and they are both almost TFM incarnate. Some US cities are now like Lagos. I don't think libertarianism -- BTW did you read that article about the town in New Hampshire? -- is the answer even if much more liberty is desirable.
> but demands they be enforced for a level playing field and to support contracts
Who could disagree?
> The US has so many laws that nobody knows them
If I ran the place I'd pass an amendment to the Constitution to the effect that the total corpus of all active laws, regulations ... everything ... would be ... interesting coming up with the actual number, but for now say one billion characters. Point being that you can't pass a new law without pruning out an old one or, even better, rewriting it in concise, understandable Spanish. Just kidding. English.
'Or you can find the sweet spot that balances the best of both. I don't think you really disagree in practice. Putting it in the broadest possible way, I tend to say that the economy should be 80:20 private vs. public.'
90% persuasion and 10% force is still force or coercion- it is better to argue from the perspective of freedom from and freedom to. From the point that government gets into the business of licensing perfectly harmless activities, for fear that the riffraff isn't capable or worthy of taking care of a dog, then liberty is lost and the slippery slope comes into play.
Remember every tyrant uses the excuse of taking action for societies own good- Justin Trudeau included. No banks accounts! Only allowed to shop for pharmacy products! What a crock- we now know that vaccination only does a very little to prevent virus spread.
All disagreements aside, it’s a great word when you want to keep it clean but clearly derisive. More or less interchangeable with ‘Maroon’.
I apologise if I got a little snotty. I've always been a cosmopolitan liberal and only recently have I begun to delve into conservative thought (largely as a result of wanting to understand the reasons for Brexit and because I happened to have read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind at the time).
Don't get me wrong, I still largely believe in government- there is a psychologically positive impact to living in a country like the UK with universal healthcare. But I also discovered to my horror just how badly well-meaning interventions can go wrong. We had the same Leftie high density urban housing projects in the UK, with similar results to America- acting as amplifiers of social ills- the only difference being that the groups which were the beneficiaries also included a large segment of the working class white group, effectively turning them into an intergenerational underclass.
Public housing can work- but it needs to be the exclusive purview of the elderly and lower income workers in urban areas. Continental countries have done it successfully, but mainly by immediately evicting the anti-social and disruptive and making continuing employment a condition of tenancy.
Same thing with welfare. Don't get me wrong, I believe we should take care of our most vulnerable- but welfare systems could have been designed as income supplements rather than as an alternative to working- slowly being scaled out at a rate of between 25c and 33c for each dollar earned.
But the moist catastrophic thing of all was the disincentives to fatherhood built in. It all but guaranteed that there would be an abundant crop of young men for the War on Drugs. You see the data on social mobility shows that African American women actually show slightly higher rates of social mobility than white women- they can do fairly well without fathers in the community- but still face an intergenerational reset because even a moderate imbalance between admirable available males in secure employment and women looking for them, can hugely change the dynamics of inter-sex relations, giving men the unhealthy chance of ready available sex on tap, with none of the commitments and societally beneficial stable family formation.
But the data for African American males is truly awful. It's something like a household with $120k per annum, shows social mobility rates similar to a white household with 38K a year. Obviously there are other factors, not the least of which are racism, the agency-robbing narrative of racism, and things like gang grooming can have- but here's the really amazing thing- with higher fatherhood rates in the community and a father in the home, which only occurs about 1% of the time for African American boys, social mobility rates are exactly the same as for white boys.
That's why I strongly advocate for vocational training as a means of mass employment- particularly in the area of home building, where there is huge demand (it's also how China has been powering their economic miracle for the last few years). Only by drastically increasing rates of male employment (and thus stable family formation), can America finally reverse racial disparities. I call it a stepping stone generation.
It's also a major contributory factor for elite income disparities. A Black doctor earns $50k less than a white doctor- some of this is age and relative seniority (the average age of a white person in America is 44, 32 if you are Black. But a far more important factor is the extent to which high paying careers are dependent upon a blue collar community with money to exist and get paid well. A doctor with primarily medicare and medicaid patients can only charge about 60% of what they charge their private patients, and the same holds true of lawyers, accountants, entrepreneurs and all the really desirable jobs in America.
People think of finance, software engineering and engineering. But I would hazard a guess that 80% of jobs in the top 20% of the income spectrum are dependent upon well-paid jobs further down. Hence blue collar.
Their are people who are critical because they want to score points. I am not one of them. I just wanted to try a distinctly different and heterodox approach to diagnosis and propose solutions to persisting disparity. It's been fifty years since legal equality and thirty years since cultural attitudes began to change. But the current solutions on display simply aren't working- there needs to be a revolutionary approach- every other group did it through well-paid labour- and that only happens in those areas of the blue collar economy which have intrinsically high value labour.
The reason why it's not happening is because in many countries in the West, there is what has been referred to as an Iron Triangle of Interest restricting housing supply, and the booming economics it can unlock.
“ Whether or not the vast majority of the younger generation actually falls for this crap is very much beside the point- because as we’ve already seen, the opinions of the great unwashed don’t really matter.”
I’d say that unfortunately a lot of them do. I’m 25 and went to a state school (public university) not an Ivy League, but I know a fair number of young people who do fall for the woke crap. It seems a little more rampant now than even when I was in school and it’s a little more prevalent among my sister’s friends (Georgetown alums and current students), although most of them are pretty reasonable and some of them are good friends of mine.
I also know a fair number of young people from the rural hinterlands where I grew up. The woke stuff is a lot less real there but it’s still prevalent. Worked in DOD and I saw there, too.
I wouldn't mind if the message wasn't about 'centering discomfort'- yes, that really is a feature of the ideology- the effects of white guilt and atonement in the sixties and seventies had at least as bad an effect on Black communities as the history of slavery and the legacy of Jim Crow. In the UK, we have the white working class (more aptly now described as an underclass). The self-same dynamic of high density urban housing which didn't discriminate with eligibility, intergenerational welfare and the loss of fathers caused by de-industrialisation (see hypergamy) all combined to make the rate of boys going to university from this group 9% (although the figures have somewhat improved since the last time I checked).
We should want to help others- but not because of guilt, because of agapē- our love of our fellow man. About 80% of all disparities occurred because of sheer stupidity on the part of government- not seeing the 2nd and 3rd order effects to policies which seemed quite benign and were designed to help at the very outset. Our cultures just aren't honest about who caused the problems in the first place- politicians and elected prosecutors invented the shit which police officers have had to shovel for so long, and usually its the media which goads them into making bad decisions.
Have you heard the latest? Many media sources now want to impose a no-fly zone- do they not know the preconditions required for such a thing to be possible? It would constitute an Act of War.
Most structural racism requires neither racism nor implicit bias- it exists because at exactly the point when African Americans were poised to take their rightful place in society, de-industrialisation happened across the West, and it was tantamount to stealing the ladder.
A Very Serious Take from a Very Smart Man:
“the effects of white guilt and atonement in the sixties and seventies had at least as bad an effect on Black communities as the history of slavery and the legacy of Jim Crow. “
Milquetoast and ineffective liberals and their “white guilt” are equal or worse than 200 plus years of chattel slavery? You absolute crash dummy. You vegetable. you nabob.
I also had to look nabob up. Good word. Thanks for that.
PS 'Milquetoast' is usually an accusation which gets levelled at me. How refreshing to see it used in another context.
African Americans were making more economic progress in the period before the introduction of the War on Poverty than afterwards- this is an observable economic fact and well detailed in Thomas Sowell's. Think of the disastrous influence of liberal High Density Urban housing projects, copied from Leftist welfare state European countries, and their Soviet equivalents and the way these urban centres acted as amplifies of social ills. This was White patronage in response to white guilt and the need to atone, made manifest in trying to 'help' people with the modernistic housing of the future.
And think of the way that welfare agents were sent out to African American families offering welfare checks, the only condition being that no man with an income could live in the home. It disincentivised fatherhood in ways Jim Crow never could. And we know from studying the life path of every child over the course of their life, that the level of fathers in a community is the single most important factor in upwards social mobility, more important even than quality of education. For details, simply read this article about a landmark study done by Dr Raj Chetty: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/01/new-harvard-study-where-is-the-land-of-opportunity-finds-single-parents-are-the-key-link-to-economic-opportunity.html
And I didn't state slavery, I stated the history of slavery. There is a difference. Obviously slavery was horrible and an abomination, and it was perhaps fitting the British spent more treasure eliminating it globally from almost every country in the world, than they earned from engaging in it. There was a need for that form of repayment of sins.
But if one looks at the structural determinism which occurs today, then fatherlessness at a community level is a greater driver of inequality of income and wealth than race is- and the damage done to the Black family occurred mainly as a result of liberal society and liberal guilt manifesting in systems which were incredibly poorly thought out. Don't get me wrong I'm a believer in welfare, but where is it written in stone that people should lose their entitlements for one working for one minute for one dollar, when a far more sensible solution would have been to create welfare as a low income stipend which phased out at the rate of 25% per dollar earned?
I'll tell you exactly why Johnson did it they way that he did- he wanted to reduce friction between his blue collar base and the African American votes he was aiming to keep. The idea was to give Black people enough to exist, but not enough to live, and to disincentivise them from competing with white blue collar workers. There was even an Air Force Colonel who reported hearing him say something vile about bribing African Americans for two hundred years. I won't repeat it. But there is your white guilt and white atonement, cynically manipulated to actually harm African Americans with enough to exist, but not enough to live.
And of course all of these forces conspired to really hurt African Americans when drugs hit the scene. Combined with deindustrialisation it produced the exactly the right toxic environment for gang grooming. Fathers do a pretty good job of stopping gang involvement at a community level. They also act as an unofficial safety net that shepherds young men who didn't well at school into pretty good blue collar jobs with dignity and decent pay. Even in socio-economic conditions where the gangs take hold, fathers actually seem to prevent most of the violence which arises from gangs. And it was violence for the most part which drove mass incarceration., although drugs inevitably also played a role in the unregulated market, the sentences for dealing far too harsh. Still, 50% of the entire US prison population is in prison for violent crimes, 20% for property. Around 20% for drugs- including dealing.
Mas incarceration could have been avoided if the family hadn't ben destabilised. America wouldn't have seen the violence associated with the drug scene if more fathers were present in communities, and in these circumstances the punitive sentences would have been more difficult to justify. Studies have shown that for every 1% the rate of fatherhood in a community drops, juvenile violence increases by 3%, and this often metastasises into criminality later on- also a function of the lack of the unofficial safety net fathers provide.
And as to wealth inequality, consider this- most of the wealth is concentrated in the top 1% far away from the hands of the 99%. And once one removes the top 10% from the spectrum, then a lot, but not all, of the economic differences between Black and White households disappear. Then we have to consider that the average White person is America is 44 and the average African American is 32. If a person doesn't increase their pay in those vital 12 years then they really should change job, and one would really expect them to have saved a fair amount, and paid off loans in the same period.
Plus, people ignore the most salient of details- it is all but impossible to build family wealth to pass down unless you are in a two income household saving up to 40% of living costs through cohabiting. Here is the thing- if I thought for one minute that reparations were going to go to towards the one thing which might remove disparities and start to heal and America, then I would be all for them.
But the Democrats are never going to spend massive amounts of money on vocational training, for the simple reason they, like their activist friends, would rather spend yet more money on useless higher educational bloat. Here is the thing. It's the kids that don't do well at school that need helping. It's what the Germans do, and they've been so successful with it and the, male mentoring it naturally provides, that they are the only Western country in the world that doesn't use crime density targeted proactive policing and still manages to keep crime low.
And here's the beauty of it- if you increase the number of young men who have stable reliable well-paid jobs you also massively increase the rate of stable family formation. That's the thing conservatives miss when they go on about values and personal responsibility, you need the right ingredients to make it work- otherwise you're making bricks without straw.
'Milquetoast and ineffective liberals and their “white guilt” are equal or worse than 200 plus years of chattel slavery?' I didn't say it was worse, I said it has worse effects- big difference. African Americans has managed to repair much of the damage of slavery and Jim Crow before the advent of The Great Society, and had it not been for the Great Society (barring legal and coting rights reform) then their progress would have likely been much faster.
It's not that liberals weren't well intentioned, but their 'help' did nothing of the sort. The liberal or Leftist efforts of HUD were the worst, but if they had only created a welfare system which acted as an income supplement rather than as an income replacement things could have been so much better. And before you come back to me with sentencing disparities and drugs, its worth considering that the penalties for Meth (prevalent amongst poorer whites) were just as harsh as for crack. It was never about drug using in America, but more about being poor and drug using in America. All those wealth white liberal ladies were terrified of being mugged- irrationally so, given 90% of all drug violence is intra-gang.
I like that - agape, not guilt.
I think what you're highlighting here is the latest manifestation of the elite. The point about being an elite is that entry is restricted to a certain few who fit the category. Thus the fact that it's woke capitalism is actually irrelevant and it will be replaced by a new manifestation further down the road as elites adapt and change and are replaced.
The Trumpist reaction is just an attempt by the excluded to break into the elite environment. If they are successful then they will form the elite and have their own set of excludatory rules.
I do agree with you with to a certain extent- but we have to remember that places like Harvard or Stanford should only really be admitting kids who are at the very least in the top 2% of the cognitive spectrum, but that the inherited elites or legacies who make into the very top flight universities only average about top 5% of the cognitive spectrum, which would tend to suggest that some may only be top 10%, given the inevitability of distributions.
More room should be made for those who score in the top 1%, but who come from the bottom 60% of the socio-economic spectrum- we like to think of ourselves as meritocratic, and to a certain extent it is true- but plenty have fallen through the cracks in the past through parental laziness, substance abuse and mental illness. I mentioned the bottom 60% because research shows that if one is born in the top 1% of the socio-economics spectrum one is more likely to attend an elite university than the total from the bottom 60%.
Interesting figures. They do rather prove my point about the elite. Intelligence or ability have never been factors in entering an elite. Rather conformity to a set of norms or ability to adopt those norms has much higher value. The history of the English nobility in the 19th century is instructive. An elite comes under threat when it is too closed (as was the French nobility of the Ancien Regime) but the concept of the elite will not wither or be dispensed with. It will merely change. There are many examples but the anti-intellectual Nazi elite is perhaps one of the best.
Great point. I think it is biological- we are driven to make often artificial distinctions between each other because as animals we crave status. It is amazing how much perceived elites can influence the low status amongst us. In the 20th century, we saw high status women denounce marriage and then get married. Monogamy and marriage are vocally disdained in some circles of the elites, but those with the highest incomes are both most likely to get married and stay married...
Yes I totally agree. Monogamy has always been optional for the elites and this practice has a long tradition. Marriage though is still seen as a garantor of status. So much so that in Japan if you're an unmarried female of a certain age you're labelled a 'loser dog'.
Predicting people suffer greed, envy and jealousy is hardly an insight.
Any failures of free market capitalism will resolve themselves. Either businesses do well according to their customers who freely choose to trade with them, or they fail. Either they consume limited capital or they become starved of it so others can use it. Only government can prop up bad businesses to survive longer (too big to fail/TARP/CARES/ACA, special tax privileges, tariffs, regulations and licensing to reduce competition) because it's based on force by a special small group in the ruling class.
Ironically, you are arguing my point. Woke capitalism allows all these things to happen without admitting the ''vile maxim'. As a hybrid, where the ruling class pay lip service to the ideology, it is a patina of virtue disguising something far darker- another word for an unholy alliance between big business and big government is fascism.
Indeed, I usually agree with you, but thought it funny that Nick Hanauer was pretending to say something new rather than using government power (who needs Marx when you have American politicians implementing his vision) to implement the greedy, envy and jealousy of the Demos over free market capitalism.
Yes, well- he is wrong about the minimum wage- my brother is a chef, and once one implements the higher prices which invariably follow, the tips per person reduce by more than the gains in wages or salary. Perhaps the tax breaks we've seen with company-wide PRP schemes is the answer (it's like a lower rate of flat tax on earnings, which is contingent upon the bonuses stretching all the way down to the bottom of the corporate ladder).
One of the reasons for stinginess on wages is the fear of adding structural costs which may be inimical to business survival when times are lean- bonuses allow employers to be generous when times are good. I am less against government intervention when it is framed in the form of tax breaks for sound business and good ethics.
Most employers are deluded when it comes to the benefits of man-management for achieving high rates of worker productivity. BSI research showed years ago that incentivised pay achieves a roughly 50% increase vs. flat rates. A combination of good method study, front end employee selection and high morale can achieve productivity rates between 250% and 400% of standard, depending upon the extent to which machine capacities are a factor.
Good God, we mustn't implement Greed and Envy among the working class where it is Bad, we must reserve Greed and Envy for the Plutocrats, where it is Good.
> Any failures of free market capitalism will resolve themselves.
So the plutocrats say. So said JP Morgan and JD Rockefeller. So says Bezos. But I always listen when any member of an elite confesses that his membership in that elite isn't quite as meritorious as the members usually do. Why would he lie? On the contrary, I think he knows exactly what he's talking about.
Greed and envy are in all people. It's something that is only a real problem when force is applied to make it happen, whether just a bad actor or government which is the king of doing this to take from one to give to another (and mostly to the powerful and rich).
Government controls our markets, so we get bad outcomes like CARES, TARP/too big to fail, forced low interest rates, massive spending on big business, big pharma and the military. Government has no money, so it just takes or prints it, and these are the opposite of free markets where voluntary exchange is always win-win or it doesn't take place.
> voluntary exchange is always win-win or it doesn't take place.
That's what the robber barons said. 'We control the economy. You'll work for starvation wages and die slowly, or you'll decline our offer and die quickly. It's entirely up to you.' win-win.
The plutocrats, oligarchs, royalty and robber barons only exist when government force keeps them in place.
Please share about the bad economic outcomes that resulted from voluntary consumers of anything offered by the so-called robber barons (aside from that given by government force). In general, all they controlled went up in production and down in price over their tenures.
Some people may just overvalue what they own, what they produce, and the services they can offer others. Pithy grumblings may be satisfying, but if you do a voluntary exchange that makes you worse off, please share.
DOK, you there?
> The US did TFM for 100 years.
We haven't had absolute TFM since the stone age. Weights and measures and currency have been regulated since Sargon. But I take your point. There was a time when Adam Smith's Invisible Hand actually worked and Market Forces really did solve most (tho never all) problems. I'm a huge fan of genuine capitalism.
> a strong economy does create inequality because people are unequal
Quite right. Equity is neither possible nor desirable. However inequality can become too extreme as well, and it has.
> and then enact laws spending other people's money
From the time of the late Victorians up to about the 70's governments were often frugal and efficient in spending other people's money. No need to list the exceptions. The Victorians were perhaps the most zealous TFMers the world ever saw, but even they had the good sense to realize that London's sewer problems were not going to be solved by TFM, it rather took government action. So they hired one of the great unsung heroes of engineering, Joseph B. who's work, rather than being about maximizing shareholder value, was about providing sanitation for all. His system still functions.
> and most were once the new competitors to those people previously cried were too powerful
Sure. The problem is that the lean and mean will become the fat and lazy if we let them. The people who preach competition and innovation will actually suppress those things once they reach the top. My doctrine is to keep competition and innovation going by doing what Teddy R. did, namely suppressing monopolies or demi-monopolies. You mentioned that the price of kerosene went down during the Standard Oil monopoly; I'd reply that it would have gone down much faster if the monopoly had been broken up sooner.
Per woke capitalism is lost in the discussion, but we do have more horizontal space. ;-)
The stone age had no capitalism or TFM. You need a stable currency and courts+law to enforce contracts. I'd guess there was more might makes right in those days.
I think inequality is only extreme when viewed as equality is real, rather than equal protection under the law. I'll never be equal to anybody in pro sports, medicine, law, arts like painting/dance/singing, physics, chemistry, etc. As long as the winners are not rigging the game or lying/defrauding (what courts address, and for most people, what brand names and third party independent lab results/certifications provide), and those who give the money do so voluntarily, let those most productive/admired become Everest while others are death valley, and if you are so inclined to voluntarily help them out like a good neighbor or follower of many religions, wonderful.
Why do you hate that people become fat and lazy so long as you don't have to fund their lives and you are free to choose elsewhere or refrain from trade entirely? We also go from powerless fetus to decrepit powerless elderly (if we live long enough), and there's nothing a collective force can do to resolve that either. When the buggy goes, the car comes. When the whale oil goes, here comes kerosene, then electricity, etc.
In the end, it's just about preferences and vying for limited resources. You can go voluntary route and achieve all that humans can achieve with their innovation and compassion and risk taking and tastes. Or you can use force, which is what all governments do, what all criminal/thieves do, and my preference is for less force and more voluntary choice. If that makes me anything bad, I'm for bad over the theory of using force to make things better.
As for sewers and water, I'd guess the collective would voluntarily join forces to implement these (as indeed happened the world over). I'm sure they'd agree to shared paths/roads/trails as well. Most are fine with having laws to protect against people harming others, and for having police and courts to work those out. The very term barn raising shows this was chosen without needing to threaten all with harm/violence/theft.
And even in the US, we see more mediation and contracts chosen over courts and laws because our government can't even handle the laws they've imposed, can't process the presumed innocent in a timely fashion, and our punishments seem to presume all crimes harm the state rather than individuals.
A powerful person cannot suppress competition in a free market, and only can do so if it uses corrupted government (redundant expression the world over today) to block it with regulations, licensing, tariffs and the other forms of rent seeking.
Re: barn raising- they has two things we lack in the modern era- the right ethos and communities of shared values, in which the dynamics that usually govern families were extended outwards. Tragically, our societies have become so fragmented we lack the umbrella of unified belief in common goals and shared dreams. Most of these types of conversations online only exist because we have lost something vital to our ethos. J. P. Morgan famously said that he thought it immoral to be paid more than 20 times the income of his average worker- but, of course, the statement also implies a distinction between income and capital.
For the most part, we also lack the by-product of regular warfare to unify society. The is nothing like a shared trench to dissolve artificial distinctions between officer and private, wealth and the lack thereof. Our peacetime societies generated respect for bosses and the desire for the humane and dignified treatment of workers as a result- and it also helps that wars cut down the friction of political partisanship.
Libertarians generally avoid talking about morality, because it can mean the imposition of the tyranny of others (although Dave Smith the comedian and political commentator is a notable exception- his most recent podcast on JRE Spotify is well worth a watch). But ethos needs to be a implicit part of the libertarian discussion, because there is good deal of evidence that human distributed networks naturally tend to polarise over time- it's written in a history of blood and there needs to be a unifying ethos to stop natural polarisation occurring.
We lose much of social grace when we instead rely on government force to provide, to care, etc. Good people are good people and they act in goodness without being forced to do so.
I think there's no morality that's worthy anything if it uses force to impose it. Religions are fine, but if I force you to be in my religion, it's immoral.
> the right ethos and communities of shared values, in which the dynamics that usually govern families were extended outwards
Exactly. Killed by muliculturalism.
> J. P. Morgan famously said that he thought it immoral to be paid more than 20 times the income of his average worker
JP said that? Sheesh, I think of him as the paradigm of the robber baron. Mind, I prefer(ed) the robber barons to the modern bankster. JP funded real industries that made real stuff. And as DOK noted, many of those buggers ended their days as philanthropists.
> there needs to be a unifying ethos to stop natural polarisation occurring
Dunno if it's just the way dolphins look at things, or part of the ethos of being a centrist, but I don't bother worrying about whether capitalism is 'good' or 'bad'. It is a phenomenon that has certain properties and if it is managed with those properties in mind, the results can be very good. But as you say, one of those properties is polarization especially of wealth accumulation. The natural state of things is feudalism -- the lord owns everything and the serfs are beasts of burden. I vote for some very prudent amount of redistribution.
> You need a stable currency and courts+law to enforce contracts.
Sure. I don't think we disagree as much as we might have thought. I expended many a keystroke back in the old days of Quillette arguing with TFM fundamentalists who suppose that *everything* is solved by TFM -- no government *at all*. Your views are reasonable even if IMHO extreme.
> and if you are so inclined to voluntarily help them out like a good neighbor
Like the vast majority of people I vote to live in a society that is not based on absolute selfishness. As I said, I'd like to see the Ayn Randian view of the world implemented somewhere so we can see how a modern version of it would work out, but I don't think it would be a very nice place.
> Why do you hate that people become fat and lazy
It's more when economies become fat and lazy. What used to be a vigorous economy of genuine investment in real things is now concerned with rent collecting and banksterism. Contrast Goldman Sachs and, say, Elon Musk.
> Or you can use force
Or you can find the sweet spot that balances the best of both. I don't think you really disagree in practice. Putting it in the broadest possible way, I tend to say that the economy should be 80:20 private vs. public.
> The very term barn raising shows this was chosen without needing to threaten all with harm/violence/theft.
But that's the thing, people *choose* to live in ordered societies. I choose to be subject to the law and to even be subject to force because that same force protects me from the criminal. I gain more from government force than I loose.
> our government can't even handle the laws they've imposed
Like everything else, governments can go fat and lazy if we let them -- and we have. The cure is not TFM, the cure is resurrecting Truman. Meanwhile it has always been true that raw capitalism is grossly unstable. Booms and busts, exploitation and monopoly are the normal state of affairs. Not to mention gross amounts of waste and duplication of effort. Nope, capitalism and markets are very valuable things, but the must not be left to themselves. That's the reality, notwithstanding the narrative to the contrary. The Chinese were regulating the rice market 4000 years ago.
Ayn Rand isn't TFM, but objectivism. TFM is just voluntary society, one based on live and let live. It doesn't reject being kind or charitable as ignoble, wasting your resources on lessor beings. A free market simply means people voluntarily exchange a good/service at an agreed upon price so that all parties involved feel each is better off for it. Otherwise you don't trade. It's what most US transactions are, even if they are laced with anti-poor/anti-worker things like sales taxes and income taxes; with odd regulations and tariffs and licensing that increase costs and result in fewer choices, less competition and reduced innovation, while brands and trusted third party certifications would likely provide incentive and market information for consumers.
Personally, while I'm more libertarian than society will ever be (barring some huge catastrophe), I'd agree to most democratically voted for projects if and only if the project included a fixed rate tax that all paid to cover the costs. Then you'd at least have programs people actually agree on and are willing to pay their fair share to have. If you vote to take my money for your needs, that's not a democracy that's moral; it's based on greed, envy and theft by rule of the mob (a form of rule by power).
I'm unsure how Elon Musk is an example of a once vigorous economy, rent collection or banksterism. His satellites are useful for rural people and those in war torn areas like Ukraine; his spaceship was used to resupply the space station; his electric cars and charging stations make him #1 in e-vehicles today even if the government pretends only the it with big industry can make e-vehicles and charging stations something for the future.
Does government need to build churches and other religious schools and institutions to have religiously moral people? Character doesn't come from government force, ever. There is nothing moral to be found in any coerced action, other than self-defense/restitution for some prior aggression.
> Ayn Rand isn't TFM, but objectivism.
But surely Objectivism is a tarted up form of TFM? At least the overlap almost completely, no?
> TFM is just voluntary society
So is socialism if that's what people vote for, and they do. Denmark is a democracy and TFM parties are there to be voted for if that's what you like. But the Danes choose not to live like hyenas -- you kill and you eat until you are killed and eaten -- they prefer society as they have built it -- a bit kinder.
Too bad each individual can't self-design their own society! It were possible I'd permit yourself to sorta opt out -- government asks nothing of you and gives nothing back -- but it just isn't possible. However, what would be possible is buying some island off Indonesia and setting up a TFM/ancap utopia where every transaction is voluntary. I would honestly like to see how that would work out. Seems that some ancappers attempted to take over a town in New Hampshire and run the experiment.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling
> It's what most US transactions are, even if they are laced with anti-poor/anti-worker things like sales taxes and income taxes;
Sure, most transactions always have been and hopefully always will be TFM. The regulatory state should oversee things with as light a hand as possible. For example, I am glad that here in Canada the government checks out all electrical devices for safety and attaches a 'CSA approved' sticker to them. I want this. I vote for it. I'm happy to pay for it. If you don't like it you can vote for your local libertarian but if you loose the election, I'm afraid that you are not going to get your way.
> it's based on greed, envy and theft by rule of the mob
All democracies are at risk of that kind of thing, however almost all functioning, thriving democracies also have some progressive taxation rate. The thinking goes that those who have reaped the most benefit from society have the greatest obligation to keep that society running. Greed seems to be good for some -- as Gordon Gekko famously said -- but reprehensible for others.
> I'm unsure how Elon Musk is an example
But you seem to agree with me that he's a producer of useful things.
> There is nothing moral to be found in any coerced action
Whether it is 'moral' or not to arrest people who drive on the wrong side of the road, I care not. Still I would have them arrested and fined and I'd use force on them if they did not comply. Probably 99% of the electorate shares my view on this kind of issue, so that's the way it is likely to stay.
Well, Objectivism is TFM as much as the Crusades is Christianity, and Manifest Destiny is liberal democracy.
Sure, socialism can (and does in communal living areas, though they rarely last long because it doesn't work well in practice) exist within a free country just fine. But a socialist country cannot have free country.
Driving on the wrong side of the road is a form of aggression as bad outcomes are likely. But you would recognize a law against that as being unjust if your side of the road were blocked and no traffic was coming on the other side and then you did it. TFM doesn't reject laws, but demands they be enforced for a level playing field and to support contracts. The US has so many laws that nobody knows them, making ignorance of the law true for 100% of the people; heck, the IRS can't even answer tax law questions very well.
> Objectivism is TFM as much as the Crusades is Christianity
Please elaborate. Of course Objectivism considers itself a full philosophical system with all the bells and whistles whereas TFM is a very simple idea that can be quite well explained in a few sentences, still I'm interested in how you'd differentiate them.
> they rarely last long because it doesn't work well in practice
The nordics have had what most folks call socialism (Geary disagrees with the label) for over a century and no doubt there are the predictable problems however they have managed to produce a society in which even working people do very well and can put a roof over their heads.
Let's avoid overboard caricatures either way -- Communism is a complete failure, Venezuela is a disaster, Maoism was a horror show. But so was Franco's Spain and any South American capitalist dictatorship you care to name. I'm a centrist paleo-liberal democrat. I'm a wet Torry. I have socialist dreams but a conservative mind. I have very strong libertarian gut feelings about things too. Let's see how close we can get to each other.
I quite agree with Geary and yourself and many righties that our governments are mostly all far too big, far to bloated and far too lazy. Dunno if the problem is 'socialism' as much as it is the fact that *all* big, monopolistic institutions suffer from the same problems. But Guatemala isn't a very nice place either, nor Somalia and they are both almost TFM incarnate. Some US cities are now like Lagos. I don't think libertarianism -- BTW did you read that article about the town in New Hampshire? -- is the answer even if much more liberty is desirable.
> but demands they be enforced for a level playing field and to support contracts
Who could disagree?
> The US has so many laws that nobody knows them
If I ran the place I'd pass an amendment to the Constitution to the effect that the total corpus of all active laws, regulations ... everything ... would be ... interesting coming up with the actual number, but for now say one billion characters. Point being that you can't pass a new law without pruning out an old one or, even better, rewriting it in concise, understandable Spanish. Just kidding. English.
'Or you can find the sweet spot that balances the best of both. I don't think you really disagree in practice. Putting it in the broadest possible way, I tend to say that the economy should be 80:20 private vs. public.'
90% persuasion and 10% force is still force or coercion- it is better to argue from the perspective of freedom from and freedom to. From the point that government gets into the business of licensing perfectly harmless activities, for fear that the riffraff isn't capable or worthy of taking care of a dog, then liberty is lost and the slippery slope comes into play.
Remember every tyrant uses the excuse of taking action for societies own good- Justin Trudeau included. No banks accounts! Only allowed to shop for pharmacy products! What a crock- we now know that vaccination only does a very little to prevent virus spread.
> 10% force is still force or coercion
Has to happen tho. One does not let a cop arrest you if you feel like it.
> the slippery slope comes into play
We are always on a slippery slope. Liberty is always at risk. You know I agree with you that our governments all need a severe rollback.