Likewise, despite the right thinking otherwise, there was no crackpot stuff from Obama for Bush to disagree with.
Giving guns to drug dealers? Using the IRS against your political rivals? Inviting a member of the Supreme Court to a speech so you can bad mouth him?
There were lots of opportunities for political cheap shots.
Similarly I can think of things Clinton tried in the early days before he found his footing and Bush #1 didn't take him to task. The Bushes put country above taking partisan shots, apparently Obama isn't going to do that.
As far as I can tell, the problem is one of implementation, not "crackpot" ideology.
A good summation of what Trump is trying to do, and why, and the disconnect between that and how the media is reporting it, is here: http://thefederalist.com/2017/01/30/why-do-we-have-refugee-crisis-because-elite-failures-foreign-policy-immigration/
He got a lot of downscale white voters that won the Rust Belt, and he hemorrhaged piles of upscale white Republicans. But if Trump is gone, or his excesses can be perceived to be contained, or if they don’t negatively impact Republicans, I think a lot of those voters will come back.
Speaking personally, yes, that exactly.
I can get used to (i.e. ignore) Trump the drama artist and Trump the bull in a china shop. He's taken a lot of steps which give me pause for hope.
That’s really all that is behind good government. Thinking. Has the applicant for a government license really proved up its case? Have we thought through the alternatives, and the risks involved? Are we sure? Is the track record reviewable?
It is reasonable to think that low growth, regulatory capture, expansion of gov, etc are not "Good", and are more "self interest" than "expert thinking".
That was during the campaign. He’s not running against HRC, in 2018 and 2020, he’s running against his record. If his intent is good and he fishes up, then he’s of no use. You may as well get the person who doesn’t care and things muddle along.
Increase economic growth and all sorts of sins are forgiven and all kinds of things forgotten.
The previous elites have left a LOT of growth enhancing things on the table because of ideology or incompetence or self interest. That *should* be disturbing to people because it's opened the door to Trump.
The Presidency, even in its imperial form, doesn’t have all that much power in terms of giving direct orders to people.
Granted, if the people he can fire disobey and refuse to carry out his orders, then the only thing he can do is fire them. However that's not much of a limitation.
Similarly, if he bypasses long standing president on the separation of the Presidency from direct law enforcement against individuals rather than setting policy, he’s going to be in a heap of trouble fast.
Jaybird: If his policies keep getting high marks but his approval rating is in the gutter, then that strikes me as something that is unlikely to hold forever.
He's a bastard. But I can dislike him but like his policies. I can even think "I'm glad he's working for me".
This is why he seriously over punches at the voting booths.
I didn't support Trump when he ran for President, I voted against him, I don't support a lot of these policies...
...but there are parts of this that are entertaining and parts that might be useful. Trump was elected to break things that were broken so they might be fixed. If you're going to have a bull in a china shop there's going to be side effects.
Thus far he's looking pretty effective. He picked his crew, he's getting them past the Senate, and he's fulfilling his campaign promises.
I wouldn't be shocked if his popularity is going up, not down.
Then you get the reputaton as a moon-asker and people just refuse to negiotiate at all.
Trump really does have overwhelming force backing him up, aka the power of the gov after generations of building the imperial Presidency. Refusing to negotiate isn't an option for most people/companies/countries.
There's a good chance that what's he's doing here is legal. Similarly he can break any heavily regulated company via his minions, and probably even any company period. Given how complex our legal system is, there's a good chance he can arrest most people for *something*.
It makes sense if you assume the Left is going to get upset no matter what Trump does.
Trump just tried to implement "asking for the moon"... when he settles for half the moon, everyone will be relieved. Imagine a Mongol general riding up and saying he'll kill everyone man/woman/child in the city, and then after much talk he settles for just killing the soldiers.
But who is doing the “pricing” with natural resources like water?
...As we saw in our posts about water, just getting a handle on how rain that falls from the sky gets turned into property is itself a command and control exercise of political jousting.
That "command and control" is involved somewhere in the process does NOT mean the gov needs to set "pricing". The expectation should be that full "command control" use of a resource ends with water hungry crops being grown in the middle of a desert, i.e. extremely poor allocation of resources.
Not doing anything is still a dumb strategy. And its generally much cheaper to make changes earlier rather than latter.
It is probably worth doing a little, it's not worth doing a lot.
The world's median long term growth rate is roughly 3.75% (google). So in a hundred years we'll be roughly 40x richer.
Explaining to someone who earns $10k a year that he needs to make sacrifices so someone who earns $400k won't need to is a problem.
Similarly technology's improvement is amazingly important. When the car was introduced en mass roughly a century ago, it was a HUGE anti-pollution device, because the alternative was breathing dust made from dried up horse shit.
Mostly Good governments exist to deal with (prevent) market failures.
What this works out to in practice is...
Create a police department (it's bad when the local rich guy pays for and thus owns the police)
Create an army (see the police)
Enforce contracts (ditto)
Create a Fire department (out of control fires are bad).
Create roads/bridges (the plan fails if one person won't sell his land, law of averages says someone won't).
Break up or regulate monopolies (electromagnetic spectrum is a naturally occurring monopoly)
And yes, deal with the externalities problem.
However not every problem is a market failure, not every solution is worth the cost of implementing it, gov solutions are not cost free or risk free, and every generation of politicians requires something to do in order to prove their worth.
So it’s not that including externalities would reduce demand, but that it would increase price (via regulation or tax, whatever) to reduce consumption.
Agreed, that is the theory exactly... but see below.
Taking the externality argument seriously doesn’t mean eliminating fossil fuels from the market, but merely reducing their use (via whatever mechanism) to mitigate against the economic costs such use incurs.
Also agreed, *however*, the "economic costs" their use incurs are exceptionally vague and ill defined (weather is not climate). There are a few people who are clearly having problems via the oceans rising, but often they're not in the countries who are benefiting from carbon.
To a first approximation, the benefits are vast enough that everyone benefits, and the problems are small enough that that no one suffers. Now agreed, the benefits and the costs are not equally distributed, but it's very rare to find someone in the first world who would (in theory) be better off if coal and oil hadn't been discovered.
In theory, we'd have a carbon tax which matched it's externalities cost. In theory, we'd use the money from that tax to repair or compensating people.
In practice, carbon is already taxed at a level which is probably higher than it's externalities cost. Not because it's carbon but because it's a cash cow, and not uniformly but at various levels of gov, and not consistently but whatever.
In practice, we mostly don't have a clue who is harmed by climate change, and the money from taxing oil companies goes into the general government funding where it's spent on whatever. Political realities means the gov will help people when they have weather related acts of god drop on them. Political realities also mean the gov would misspend an additional carbon tax.
The world we already have is one where Green energy is greatly supported by the gov (and thus oil taxes), and carbon already sells at a price higher than it should because of the gov's desire for other people's money.
...here is a market in water, right now. How would you change it?
...Its Complicated, but The Government Decides Who Owns What, When, and How.
Your first statement disagrees with your second. As far as I can tell it's the second one which is correct, although it's not my field nor am I especially educated on this one (I don't live out West).
Good Governments exist to create property rights and markets.
So... something along the line of how the gov decides who gets how much bandwidth spectrum seems appropriate, i.e. because we're looking at a naturally limited resource (I assume we're talking about the farms in the middle of deserts out West). Have an auction, let people bid for their priority then be able to buy/sell that.
A situation which begs for market solutions. If we'd allow market pricing for water many of these nuttier endeavors would go away.
In 23 years, we will be unable to feed 2/3rds of America’s current population. Other countries will have it worse.
This is a Malthusian catastrophe prediction. They've been a staple since 1779, always a few years away, but somehow never showing up.
These predictions have been consistently wrong for the last 237 years because they assume there is no market and that people never change their behaviors.
Americans will starve to death rather than waste less food, change what we plant, raise the cost of food, and we'll even continue to pay farmers to not plant crops. Even as people die in the streets, no one will recognize this as a money making opportunity.
Mass starvation is a result of the lack of money and/or war and not an issue of a lack of food. In the US the current number of people who starve to death is effectively zero (excluding mental illness, murder, being lost in the wilderness, etc).
My easy prediction is that in 23 years, the number of people who starve to death in the US will continue to be effectively zero, and there will continue to be predictions of mass starvation in two or three more decades.
Humidity and heat, those’ll kill India dead. All it takes is a day at a high enough temperature/humidity pairing and you get dead zones where all the people and animals die.
(All data from wiki)
India had a really bad year for heat related deaths in 2015, killing roughly 2,500 people
More than 20,000 people have died of heat-related causes in India since 1990.
To put those numbers into perspective:
238,562 people died from traffic related accidents for 2013 (the most recent data).
Heat isn't a problem in India compared to traffic accidents. Heat isn't a problem in India compared to lots of things (diseases, clean water).
Those other things are normally MUCH cheaper and easier to deal with than global warming, and don't insist on you continuing to be poor.
Carbon has been the backbone of the industrial revolution, transportation, the generation of electricity, and a long list of other things I won't go into.
If we look for people who have been hurt more than helped by carbon, we need to turn to not only the 3rd world, but people who are backward and poor even by those standards. Certainly they exist, but the solution isn't to keep them poor.
Take externalities into effect and the winners still grossly outnumber the losers, and carbon's benefits still grossly outweighs its side effects. The Externalities argument implies that demand for carbon would be less if it's total effects were taken into account, but there's such a vast positive effect on the economy that the answer is "mostly no".
That's why we hear absurd arguments like "malaria will come back" or "nuclear armed refugees". Math isn't in their favor so they need to pound on the table. If we actually make dollars and cents calculations, what we want to do is "deal with externalities piecemeal and wait for technology to improve".
It's a lot easier for the rich to deal with Climate Change than the poor, and burning carbon makes entire societies rich.
Dark Matter: If the land is worth keeping, then let people pay to keep it. If it’s not, then let the ocean take it.
Stillwater: After all the other weak arguments, when the chips are finally on the table, THIS is your solution to the problem of climate change.
Yes. Paying for things you value has a grand tradition of Working.
I figure that's enough for a century or two, and somewhere in there the level of technology will rise enough to do something more direct if we actually feel the need.
Put differently, if we wanted to spend a Trillion dollars on the environment for the planet, then, to get the most bang for the buck, we should give places clean water, get rid of malaria, and so forth. Asking people to go without clean water (or power, or whatever) so that we can delay the warming of the planet by a year over the next century doesn't seem cost effective or moral.
Black Bloc/Anarchists are about as much of the left as the Anarcho Capitalists/New Hampshire Free Staters are a part of the right. That is, they are when people want to play affiliation games, but mostly not.
If it were limited to affiliation games then I wouldn't be listing them together.
The guys who shoot abortion doctors are clearly affiliated with the Pro-Life movement, but the movement makes a strong enough effort to disavow them, discourage them, and arrest them that I don't add them to the Right's violence count.
The WTO protests aren't viewed as a failure by the Left because of the violence. The Black Bloc wasn't disavowed and arrested, their actions are one of the reasons why the protest was a success. Speaking as Joe Normal, they hit the radar as footsoldiers, not random lunatics.
The guys in the black masks who give the cops an easy excuse to beat on you at a protest because they consider it fun aren’t popular with those at a protest though. They’re doing a lot to kill the fun of it.
Does the Left make an effort to kick these guys out of the group? Have them arrested? Cooperate when the police try to?
Dark Matter: Doesn’t the left view them as members of the left?
Mike: No, and whenever they turn non-violent protests int violent ones, that’s made very clear., e.g at the 1999 Seattle WTO meetings.
By late morning, the black bloc had swelled to 200 people and smashed dozens of shops and police cars. This seems to have set off a chain reaction of sorts, with previously nonviolent protesters throwing bottles at police and joining in the vandalism shortly before noon.
Nor do I read how the left views those protests as failures because they got out of hand, nor is it clear to me that the left helped in their arrest (if they were arrested).
It’s not like the GOP, which does less and less to distinguish itself from the Klan.
Yes, back in the time when they were fighting off the Soviets (who invaded them because they were insufficiently communist or something), the Mujahadeen were our allies. And your point is?
You may also wish to read up on Luis Posada Corrales, a terrorist who set of a bomb blowing up an airliner killing 73 innocent civilians, later given sanctuary by several American Presidents.
Sanctuary? We arrested him and tried very hard to find a country to deport him to which wouldn't torture him. When that failed we tried hard to find some way to keep him in prison here. He's out of prison because he was found not guilty of whatever. This is an example of the government failing to deal with a criminal, but not from lack of trying.
the Nicaraguan Contras, a terrorist group who were embraced by Ronald Reagan.
An example of us openly supporting another country's revolutionary movement, complicated by Congress and POTUS fighting over who was in charge of foreign policy.
Rep. Peter King, Republican of Long Island.
An open supporter of another country's revolutionary movement... although weirdly he seems to be doing this in his personal life rather than his professional one. As odious as he is, afaict he's done no violence here and what he's doing seems to be covered under the 1st AM.
None of these are examples of someone running around setting off bombs or murders or whatever inside of America, and then joining the mainstream (or, worse, apparently never leaving the mainstream), without changing ideology.
In the last 50 years, the American Left is a lot more politically violent than the Right, and it continues to be more violent.
It's easy for me to picture some "protest" getting out of hand and burning down a city (or just having some people beaten up and/or killed), and then the Dems continuing to give support to its leaders. There's even multiple groups where this might come from.
The GOP equiv would be... what? I can picture some separatists shooting it out with the police, but until that happens we don't know whether the mainstream right supports them or cooperates with their arrest.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Morning Ed: Muslims {2017.01.30.M}”
Giving guns to drug dealers? Using the IRS against your political rivals? Inviting a member of the Supreme Court to a speech so you can bad mouth him?
There were lots of opportunities for political cheap shots.
Similarly I can think of things Clinton tried in the early days before he found his footing and Bush #1 didn't take him to task. The Bushes put country above taking partisan shots, apparently Obama isn't going to do that.
As far as I can tell, the problem is one of implementation, not "crackpot" ideology.
A good summation of what Trump is trying to do, and why, and the disconnect between that and how the media is reporting it, is here: http://thefederalist.com/2017/01/30/why-do-we-have-refugee-crisis-because-elite-failures-foreign-policy-immigration/
"
Speaking personally, yes, that exactly.
I can get used to (i.e. ignore) Trump the drama artist and Trump the bull in a china shop. He's taken a lot of steps which give me pause for hope.
"
It is reasonable to think that low growth, regulatory capture, expansion of gov, etc are not "Good", and are more "self interest" than "expert thinking".
"
Increase economic growth and all sorts of sins are forgiven and all kinds of things forgotten.
The previous elites have left a LOT of growth enhancing things on the table because of ideology or incompetence or self interest. That *should* be disturbing to people because it's opened the door to Trump.
"
Granted, if the people he can fire disobey and refuse to carry out his orders, then the only thing he can do is fire them. However that's not much of a limitation.
Julian Assange might disagree with you.
"
He's a bastard. But I can dislike him but like his policies. I can even think "I'm glad he's working for me".
This is why he seriously over punches at the voting booths.
"
Actually...
"
Are you claiming these countries are running death camps and engaging in Nazi style genocide?
"
I didn't support Trump when he ran for President, I voted against him, I don't support a lot of these policies...
...but there are parts of this that are entertaining and parts that might be useful. Trump was elected to break things that were broken so they might be fixed. If you're going to have a bull in a china shop there's going to be side effects.
Thus far he's looking pretty effective. He picked his crew, he's getting them past the Senate, and he's fulfilling his campaign promises.
I wouldn't be shocked if his popularity is going up, not down.
"
Trump really does have overwhelming force backing him up, aka the power of the gov after generations of building the imperial Presidency. Refusing to negotiate isn't an option for most people/companies/countries.
There's a good chance that what's he's doing here is legal. Similarly he can break any heavily regulated company via his minions, and probably even any company period. Given how complex our legal system is, there's a good chance he can arrest most people for *something*.
"
It makes sense if you assume the Left is going to get upset no matter what Trump does.
Trump just tried to implement "asking for the moon"... when he settles for half the moon, everyone will be relieved. Imagine a Mongol general riding up and saying he'll kill everyone man/woman/child in the city, and then after much talk he settles for just killing the soldiers.
On “Morning Ed: Science {2017.01.25.W}”
That "command and control" is involved somewhere in the process does NOT mean the gov needs to set "pricing". The expectation should be that full "command control" use of a resource ends with water hungry crops being grown in the middle of a desert, i.e. extremely poor allocation of resources.
"
It is probably worth doing a little, it's not worth doing a lot.
The world's median long term growth rate is roughly 3.75% (google). So in a hundred years we'll be roughly 40x richer.
Explaining to someone who earns $10k a year that he needs to make sacrifices so someone who earns $400k won't need to is a problem.
Similarly technology's improvement is amazingly important. When the car was introduced en mass roughly a century ago, it was a HUGE anti-pollution device, because the alternative was breathing dust made from dried up horse shit.
"
Mostly Good governments exist to deal with (prevent) market failures.
What this works out to in practice is...
Create a police department (it's bad when the local rich guy pays for and thus owns the police)
Create an army (see the police)
Enforce contracts (ditto)
Create a Fire department (out of control fires are bad).
Create roads/bridges (the plan fails if one person won't sell his land, law of averages says someone won't).
Break up or regulate monopolies (electromagnetic spectrum is a naturally occurring monopoly)
And yes, deal with the externalities problem.
However not every problem is a market failure, not every solution is worth the cost of implementing it, gov solutions are not cost free or risk free, and every generation of politicians requires something to do in order to prove their worth.
"
Agreed, that is the theory exactly... but see below.
Also agreed, *however*, the "economic costs" their use incurs are exceptionally vague and ill defined (weather is not climate). There are a few people who are clearly having problems via the oceans rising, but often they're not in the countries who are benefiting from carbon.
To a first approximation, the benefits are vast enough that everyone benefits, and the problems are small enough that that no one suffers. Now agreed, the benefits and the costs are not equally distributed, but it's very rare to find someone in the first world who would (in theory) be better off if coal and oil hadn't been discovered.
In theory, we'd have a carbon tax which matched it's externalities cost. In theory, we'd use the money from that tax to repair or compensating people.
In practice, carbon is already taxed at a level which is probably higher than it's externalities cost. Not because it's carbon but because it's a cash cow, and not uniformly but at various levels of gov, and not consistently but whatever.
In practice, we mostly don't have a clue who is harmed by climate change, and the money from taxing oil companies goes into the general government funding where it's spent on whatever. Political realities means the gov will help people when they have weather related acts of god drop on them. Political realities also mean the gov would misspend an additional carbon tax.
The world we already have is one where Green energy is greatly supported by the gov (and thus oil taxes), and carbon already sells at a price higher than it should because of the gov's desire for other people's money.
"
Your first statement disagrees with your second. As far as I can tell it's the second one which is correct, although it's not my field nor am I especially educated on this one (I don't live out West).
Good Governments exist to create property rights and markets.
So... something along the line of how the gov decides who gets how much bandwidth spectrum seems appropriate, i.e. because we're looking at a naturally limited resource (I assume we're talking about the farms in the middle of deserts out West). Have an auction, let people bid for their priority then be able to buy/sell that.
"
A situation which begs for market solutions. If we'd allow market pricing for water many of these nuttier endeavors would go away.
This is a Malthusian catastrophe prediction. They've been a staple since 1779, always a few years away, but somehow never showing up.
These predictions have been consistently wrong for the last 237 years because they assume there is no market and that people never change their behaviors.
Americans will starve to death rather than waste less food, change what we plant, raise the cost of food, and we'll even continue to pay farmers to not plant crops. Even as people die in the streets, no one will recognize this as a money making opportunity.
Mass starvation is a result of the lack of money and/or war and not an issue of a lack of food. In the US the current number of people who starve to death is effectively zero (excluding mental illness, murder, being lost in the wilderness, etc).
My easy prediction is that in 23 years, the number of people who starve to death in the US will continue to be effectively zero, and there will continue to be predictions of mass starvation in two or three more decades.
"
(All data from wiki)
India had a really bad year for heat related deaths in 2015, killing roughly 2,500 people
More than 20,000 people have died of heat-related causes in India since 1990.
To put those numbers into perspective:
238,562 people died from traffic related accidents for 2013 (the most recent data).
Heat isn't a problem in India compared to traffic accidents. Heat isn't a problem in India compared to lots of things (diseases, clean water).
Those other things are normally MUCH cheaper and easier to deal with than global warming, and don't insist on you continuing to be poor.
"
Carbon has been the backbone of the industrial revolution, transportation, the generation of electricity, and a long list of other things I won't go into.
If we look for people who have been hurt more than helped by carbon, we need to turn to not only the 3rd world, but people who are backward and poor even by those standards. Certainly they exist, but the solution isn't to keep them poor.
Take externalities into effect and the winners still grossly outnumber the losers, and carbon's benefits still grossly outweighs its side effects. The Externalities argument implies that demand for carbon would be less if it's total effects were taken into account, but there's such a vast positive effect on the economy that the answer is "mostly no".
That's why we hear absurd arguments like "malaria will come back" or "nuclear armed refugees". Math isn't in their favor so they need to pound on the table. If we actually make dollars and cents calculations, what we want to do is "deal with externalities piecemeal and wait for technology to improve".
It's a lot easier for the rich to deal with Climate Change than the poor, and burning carbon makes entire societies rich.
"
Yes. Paying for things you value has a grand tradition of Working.
I figure that's enough for a century or two, and somewhere in there the level of technology will rise enough to do something more direct if we actually feel the need.
Put differently, if we wanted to spend a Trillion dollars on the environment for the planet, then, to get the most bang for the buck, we should give places clean water, get rid of malaria, and so forth. Asking people to go without clean water (or power, or whatever) so that we can delay the warming of the planet by a year over the next century doesn't seem cost effective or moral.
"
If it were limited to affiliation games then I wouldn't be listing them together.
The guys who shoot abortion doctors are clearly affiliated with the Pro-Life movement, but the movement makes a strong enough effort to disavow them, discourage them, and arrest them that I don't add them to the Right's violence count.
The WTO protests aren't viewed as a failure by the Left because of the violence. The Black Bloc wasn't disavowed and arrested, their actions are one of the reasons why the protest was a success. Speaking as Joe Normal, they hit the radar as footsoldiers, not random lunatics.
"
Does the Left make an effort to kick these guys out of the group? Have them arrested? Cooperate when the police try to?
"
By late morning, the black bloc had swelled to 200 people and smashed dozens of shops and police cars. This seems to have set off a chain reaction of sorts, with previously nonviolent protesters throwing bottles at police and joining in the vandalism shortly before noon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests
Nor do I read how the left views those protests as failures because they got out of hand, nor is it clear to me that the left helped in their arrest (if they were arrested).
Straw man much?
On “Status 451: Days of Rage”
IMHO that's mixing the "violent" with the "potentially violent", which seems unreasonable.
But it is probably where "The Right is more violent" claim originates.
"
Yes, back in the time when they were fighting off the Soviets (who invaded them because they were insufficiently communist or something), the Mujahadeen were our allies. And your point is?
Sanctuary? We arrested him and tried very hard to find a country to deport him to which wouldn't torture him. When that failed we tried hard to find some way to keep him in prison here. He's out of prison because he was found not guilty of whatever. This is an example of the government failing to deal with a criminal, but not from lack of trying.
An example of us openly supporting another country's revolutionary movement, complicated by Congress and POTUS fighting over who was in charge of foreign policy.
An open supporter of another country's revolutionary movement... although weirdly he seems to be doing this in his personal life rather than his professional one. As odious as he is, afaict he's done no violence here and what he's doing seems to be covered under the 1st AM.
None of these are examples of someone running around setting off bombs or murders or whatever inside of America, and then joining the mainstream (or, worse, apparently never leaving the mainstream), without changing ideology.
In the last 50 years, the American Left is a lot more politically violent than the Right, and it continues to be more violent.
It's easy for me to picture some "protest" getting out of hand and burning down a city (or just having some people beaten up and/or killed), and then the Dems continuing to give support to its leaders. There's even multiple groups where this might come from.
The GOP equiv would be... what? I can picture some separatists shooting it out with the police, but until that happens we don't know whether the mainstream right supports them or cooperates with their arrest.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.