Who wants “unlimited government”? Peeps on the liberal side don’t’ want that. They just want more then conservatives do. This does not equal unlimited.
Not, "more than conservatives do", just "more".
Every new group of "politicians" gets elected on promises of "more" spending, or finds "new" things that the gov "needs" to do. Every dollar of current gov spending is well defended by people who know darn well that they're screwed if it stops.
Other than after a war neither side has a clue how, or any desire to, reduce spending on any gov programs.
Gov spending as a percentage of the GDP is basically a linear line trending up, get rid of military spending and it's even sharper. In practice, I see no reason to think that long term the gov won't grow until something BIG stops it.
This is especially so when Congess is too dysfunctional to act as a meaningful check most of the time.
The GOP currently controls both sides of Congress. The IRS may still be suppressing free speech, no one has been punished for this, much less arrested. This was a VERY high profile issue they spent a lot of time on.
This isn't an example of Congress being too dysfunctional (although it often is), it's more that IRS (by itself) is too complex and large to reasonably answer to Congress.
My expectation is that if the Dems were still in charge there'd be no investigation and we wouldn't be wondering if the IRS had stopped because we'd be sure they were still at it.
an honest look on why many groups do not want limited government rather than they are wrong-headed.
In general the growth of government is NOT to protect civil rights or anything similar, it's just people wanting free stuff and/or "equality" for everyone. The state is effectively God for a lot of people, it's supposed to fix all problems, even the ones created by the state's own mismanagement.
The people who want an unlimited gov do NOT want (or envision) it used against them.
A President Trump could easily be dysfunctional enough that we turn to someone worse or really test how good the system is at controlling someone like Nixon.
I get why people want civil rights, law enforcement, etc. The flip side of those are people wanting sex police to 'control' gays, prevent abortion, and run the war on drugs.
IMHO "wrong-headed" is letting someone put together a system which will, sooner or later, be used against you. "Wrong-headed" also includes letting someone break economic systems we depend on via debt, hyperinflation, regulatory capture, etc.
@saul-degraw
Lucas' work drew heavily from the fall of Roman (and other) Democracies and should be viewed as a summation of histories various warnings.
One danger of the all powerful state is 'bread + circuses' where the people vote themselves benefits until the credit cards break. Alternatively we could have a fiscal problem which breaks the state, normally of the state's own making. In Lucas' example the state doesn't function because various interests have engaged in regulatory capture. The more people who depend on the state, the more of a problem it's lack of functioning is.
Then a strong man emerges to 'fix' things. The strong man is able to get more power by causing more problems. Roman Republic becomes the Roman Empire. Germany the failed state gets Hitler. Serbia gets Slobodan Milsevic. Zimbabwe gets their leader, etc.
Alternatively, another danger is where groups know darn well that they're going to be abused by the state if the wrong guy is in charge so they hold a civil war to see who gets to do that.
Modern day Iraq probably fits that description, but Egypt and Sudan probably do too.
The state, even the modern state, is not intrinsically a force for good, it's just a massive multiplier. A good state can deal with big problems, a bad state is a genocidal nightmare, the difference between them can be a decade or two.
One thing the article made clear to me is that respect for democracy respect for the different views of others. In your telling, only a belief in libertarianism can save democracy.
People who are attracted to power are often people who shouldn't have it.
Somehow I doubt the Dems using the IRS against the GOP showed 'respect for the different views of others'.
Sooner or later, Trump or someone much worse than him will be in charge.
That includes the 44% of Trump supporters who answered affirmatively on that black people are “lazier” than whites:
From the graph, I'd say "40%".
And Hillary's supporters "only" have a 25%.
Similarly for the 40% who answered the same way about “rudeness”.
That's 44%, and here Hillary's supporters are at 30%.
Ignore Trump and his supporters entirely and just talk about Hillary. Her numbers are also shockingly high, everything you've said could just as easily be claimed against her supporters.
Instead of what appears to be double-digit numbers of the GOP base.
Various people want to tell that story, some to drum up minority support for Hillary, others to keep the whole racism issue alive as a dragon which can be slain and which must be causing all sorts of other problems currently.
But when we dig into those numbers, what we find is not only Trump's base, but also plus a third of the GOP as a whole, and a third of Hillary's base. So something like 40% of the nation.
I find it more useful to describe acts or thoughts. 40% of people hold racist opinions on these topics. That feels like a very different statement than saying 40% of America is racist.
We really should be able to examine what's going on in society, and especially disparate impacts, without having the "you're a racist" brick thrown.
My expectation is various "black" issues are fueled by the war on drugs and other gov policies which have backfired. But in order to have that discussion, we probably need to admit these issues exist.
j r: And the questions from the survey seem pretty good for sussing out who does and who does not do that.
That's asking a lot from a survey, especially one which excluded anyone who answered "don't know" to any of the questions. I think this is a link to the original findings. http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/USA-ELECTION-RACE/010020H7174/USA-ELECTION-RACE.jpg
Looking at the numbers... a third of Hillary's supporters also agreed that Blacks are "more violent" than whites, roughly in line with the members of the GOP who voted for someone other than Trump.
So US, as a whole, is roughly 40% racist. And if all of Hillary's voters also voted for Obama, then a third of the base who voted him into office are racists.
Or maybe this survey wasn't a good way to measure racism.
DarkMatter: I think we’re protecting jobs and entrenched interests. Lots of gov spending on the drug war means lots of other economic actors are dependent on that spending.
Jaybird: At least this makes sense to me. “We’re creating crime where, otherwise, crime wouldn’t exist to pay for cops/guards.”
Another, maybe better, example is China's One Child Policy. They're going to need people in the next generation (so even the direct effects are bad), the indirect effects are also bad (male imbalance, etc), but the state agency which runs this is really powerful (it needed to be in order to force sterilization on unwilling people).
State agencies & agents have a lot of influence on state policy, they don't vote for their own termination.
If I have “taking drugs is bad” as a philosophy, and I let someone take drugs when I might have stopped them, then I have done something bad, and therefore I’m a bad person.
Philosophically, it's not just "drugs = bad" driving this. We also have "more state power = good" and "state power never has unintended side effects".
A large police force can be used for all sorts of things directly expands the power/budget of people who control/influence the gov.
The drug war is a way to express that ideal, if we didn't have that we'd have other "needs" which require the expansion of state power.
We get stories like this every few years. The next thing the drug warriors will do is take the licenses of any doctor who gives out "too many" (or "too long", or whatever) prescriptions, which instantly means really bad things for chronic pain sufferers.
trizzlor:
I get that you’re saying this for the sake of the argument...
True.
For all the shit the Kardashians get, they far outclass Trump both in terms of branding and earnings.
Them I know less well, but...
The Kardashians are a group and can't all be President. Nor do I see massive management skill; Their income is bigger because they're bigger celebrities (especially collectively) but they're basically a group of small businesses rather than one large.
And even if I'm totally wrong and they have tens of thousands of employees in their vast corp empire, so what? Their accomplishments do no lessen his.
Damon:
I’m more interested in what happens to the Republican and Democratic parties if Trump wins
For the GOP Best Case:
Trump "leads" by signing whatever Congress puts in front of him and claiming credit.
He does something for immigration reform in a Nixon-goes-to-China way.
He drops his economic messages and proves that he really does know management.
Worse Case:
Basically the opposite of that. He does for the national GOP what Wilson did for California on immigration, i.e. proves to an entire generation or three of hispanics that the GOP can't be trusted with power. He tries to implement economic insanity and gets the predictable results. He pulls us out of NATO and lets Russia/China become global cop(s).
what will the Dems do to gain it back?
Hopefully nominate someone who isn't openly corrupt. Maybe they decide they need a celebrity, but getting one would be easy enough.
DarkMatter: Those give him serious street cred. He knows about money, business, and management.
Stillwater: Strange comment coming from you Dark. Usually you’re the cynical one…
I see no way that he doesn't know about money, or business, or management. He's shown this over the decades multiple times and multiple ways, everything from his divorces to his management show to him being a real estate guy who lived through the crash. That's separate from his PR act which is also impressive. We can measure him by his accomplishments and they're extensive enough that making him President isn't unreasonable.
However there's this amazing disconnect between all that and what comes out of his mouth on the campaign trail. If he were running on economic sanity rather than economic insanity I'd vote for him, as it is I take him at his word... even though given who and what he is, he *must* know what he's saying is nuts.
I’d say something about how poorly it reflects upon Conservatives that they can listen to Trump and hear someone “who sounds like he knows what he’s doing,”
Trump has a mostly self made Billion dollars and this vast corporate empire. Those give him serious street cred. He knows about money, business, and management.
Of course his arguments are totally at odds with how he built his empire and what he knows(?) to be true, but to understand that you have to have some knowledge of economics and policy.
Stillwater:
You also didn’t respond to what I viewed as the most important point of that comment: that the pre-ACA healthcare delivery system had no transparent “market based” mechanism by which price is determined.
My solution, i.e. what the ACA should have done, is that it should have made pricing transparent.
That, by itself, is probably pretty hard but imho it's a lot more likely to do something than command and control. There are insurance structures which let consumers capture the results of savings, which put downward pressure on prices.
I dissent on the idea that Trump sounds like he knows what he is doing. He sounds like someone who does everything on the fly. Sometimes it works, often it does not.
For me the anti-economic arguments are another big clue. But both of us are probably a lot more informed than the typical Trump voter.
Imagine that you know literally nothing about economics, or history, or technology, and you think the elites have structured things so they win at your expense. All we need to do is break the lock that the elites have had on policy and America of the 1950's comes back.
That mindset doesn't make you "racist", but I think it's one of Trump's core demographics.
Stillwater:
DarkMatter: The pre-ACA market system was also a heavily government regulated system.
Stillwater: Dark, I gotta say I’ve lost my patience with this argument. All the conceptually based ideologically motivated idealizations in the world won’t effect how the world actually is tho it does, conventiently, effect how certain types of people judge the world and its actors.
Pot, meet Kettle. After the ACA fails to contain costs, will you want to see more market, or more government?
DarkMatter: If we’re serious about using the gov to reducing medical expenses, then we need to have a long discussion on the benefits of death panels
Stillwater: Obama actually wanted to have that discussion, which led to Palinistas to coin the term you neutrally use to refer to it: “death panels”.
It's a good, descriptive, term. I am trying to use it neutrally, and I fully support the idea as long as we're going to have the gov deeply involved in paying for things.
Stillwater: Look, if you/we want to limit health care costs a part of that discussion is end of life care and rationing. And I mean that as a matter of logic, one which applies to the private insurance model just as much as any particular gummint program.
Agreed... but imho insurance is mechanically better suited towards dealing with this. Do you want to pay for that last year or not? If the answer is yes, then your insurance rate is 'this'. If the answer is no, then your insurance bill is a fraction of that.
Politicians who even try to suggest this instantly have attack ads with them throwing little old women in wheelchairs off cliffs. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2012/08/12/liberal-group-throws-granny-off-cliff-again/#31518908420f
Granted, we need to have that discussion, and badly, but I don't expect it from the politicians.
A person can win the GOP nomination for President by appealing to 35 percent of the Party that is very into openly bigoted appeals.
I think this is lumping together the anti-Islam, nativist, racist, anti-immigration, no-insiders, anti-free-trade, and enforce-the-laws sections of the party. This is also underestimating the power of being a celebrity and of raw Charisma.
Some of these groups overlap, but Trump does actually have a coalition of sorts. You don't have to be a racist to reach for the "elect a strong man who sounds like he knows what he's doing" solution.
From where I sit, the main complaint – correctly – is that our pre-ACA market system was wholly inequiped to deal with reducing medical costs. In fact, it was “designed” to inflate ’em, among other problems. Hence the ACA.
The pre-ACA market system was also a heavily government regulated system. So we have the gov deciding that because the gov messed things up, we need more government.
If we're serious about using the gov to reducing medical expenses, then we need to have a long discussion on the benefits of death panels (or whatever you want to call 'intelligent rationing'), why they're a good thing, and how they'd work in practice.
What we're doing instead is pretending that we can write a blank check to everyone for all medical expenses.
But the good news is millions of new people, most of them poor and working class, have health insurance. And their using it.
Any and every entitlement is a good thing as long as we only look at the benefits side.
Paying for it is an issue, whether we get value for our dollar is another issue, and paying for all entitlements collectively (long term, meaning 50+ years) is a huge issue.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The American Interest: A Republic If You Can Keep It”
@greginak
Not, "more than conservatives do", just "more".
Every new group of "politicians" gets elected on promises of "more" spending, or finds "new" things that the gov "needs" to do. Every dollar of current gov spending is well defended by people who know darn well that they're screwed if it stops.
Other than after a war neither side has a clue how, or any desire to, reduce spending on any gov programs.
Gov spending as a percentage of the GDP is basically a linear line trending up, get rid of military spending and it's even sharper. In practice, I see no reason to think that long term the gov won't grow until something BIG stops it.
"
The GOP currently controls both sides of Congress. The IRS may still be suppressing free speech, no one has been punished for this, much less arrested. This was a VERY high profile issue they spent a lot of time on.
This isn't an example of Congress being too dysfunctional (although it often is), it's more that IRS (by itself) is too complex and large to reasonably answer to Congress.
My expectation is that if the Dems were still in charge there'd be no investigation and we wouldn't be wondering if the IRS had stopped because we'd be sure they were still at it.
"
@leeesq
In general the growth of government is NOT to protect civil rights or anything similar, it's just people wanting free stuff and/or "equality" for everyone. The state is effectively God for a lot of people, it's supposed to fix all problems, even the ones created by the state's own mismanagement.
The people who want an unlimited gov do NOT want (or envision) it used against them.
A President Trump could easily be dysfunctional enough that we turn to someone worse or really test how good the system is at controlling someone like Nixon.
I get why people want civil rights, law enforcement, etc. The flip side of those are people wanting sex police to 'control' gays, prevent abortion, and run the war on drugs.
IMHO "wrong-headed" is letting someone put together a system which will, sooner or later, be used against you. "Wrong-headed" also includes letting someone break economic systems we depend on via debt, hyperinflation, regulatory capture, etc.
"
@saul-degraw
Lucas' work drew heavily from the fall of Roman (and other) Democracies and should be viewed as a summation of histories various warnings.
One danger of the all powerful state is 'bread + circuses' where the people vote themselves benefits until the credit cards break. Alternatively we could have a fiscal problem which breaks the state, normally of the state's own making. In Lucas' example the state doesn't function because various interests have engaged in regulatory capture. The more people who depend on the state, the more of a problem it's lack of functioning is.
Then a strong man emerges to 'fix' things. The strong man is able to get more power by causing more problems. Roman Republic becomes the Roman Empire. Germany the failed state gets Hitler. Serbia gets Slobodan Milsevic. Zimbabwe gets their leader, etc.
Alternatively, another danger is where groups know darn well that they're going to be abused by the state if the wrong guy is in charge so they hold a civil war to see who gets to do that.
Modern day Iraq probably fits that description, but Egypt and Sudan probably do too.
The state, even the modern state, is not intrinsically a force for good, it's just a massive multiplier. A good state can deal with big problems, a bad state is a genocidal nightmare, the difference between them can be a decade or two.
People who are attracted to power are often people who shouldn't have it.
Somehow I doubt the Dems using the IRS against the GOP showed 'respect for the different views of others'.
Sooner or later, Trump or someone much worse than him will be in charge.
"
As the gov controls more and more (and gives out more and more), it becomes more and more important to make sure "your" guy is at the top.
“So this is how liberty dies–with thunderous applause.”
-Padmé Amidala
On “Coates: Why the Media Didn’t Bother to Verify if Hillary Clinton’s Remark About Half of Donald Trump’s Supporters Being ‘Deplorable’ Was True”
From the graph, I'd say "40%".
And Hillary's supporters "only" have a 25%.
That's 44%, and here Hillary's supporters are at 30%.
Ignore Trump and his supporters entirely and just talk about Hillary. Her numbers are also shockingly high, everything you've said could just as easily be claimed against her supporters.
"
Various people want to tell that story, some to drum up minority support for Hillary, others to keep the whole racism issue alive as a dragon which can be slain and which must be causing all sorts of other problems currently.
But when we dig into those numbers, what we find is not only Trump's base, but also plus a third of the GOP as a whole, and a third of Hillary's base. So something like 40% of the nation.
"
@kazzy
We really should be able to examine what's going on in society, and especially disparate impacts, without having the "you're a racist" brick thrown.
My expectation is various "black" issues are fueled by the war on drugs and other gov policies which have backfired. But in order to have that discussion, we probably need to admit these issues exist.
"
@j-r
...when everyone's super no one will be.
-Syndrome from the Incredibles
We're lowering the bar on what it takes to be a racist to the point where it's no longer useful.
"
That's asking a lot from a survey, especially one which excluded anyone who answered "don't know" to any of the questions. I think this is a link to the original findings. http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/USA-ELECTION-RACE/010020H7174/USA-ELECTION-RACE.jpg
Looking at the numbers... a third of Hillary's supporters also agreed that Blacks are "more violent" than whites, roughly in line with the members of the GOP who voted for someone other than Trump.
So US, as a whole, is roughly 40% racist. And if all of Hillary's voters also voted for Obama, then a third of the base who voted him into office are racists.
Or maybe this survey wasn't a good way to measure racism.
On “Quartz: Chronic pain patients are suffering because of the US government’s ongoing War on Drugs”
@jaybird
Another, maybe better, example is China's One Child Policy. They're going to need people in the next generation (so even the direct effects are bad), the indirect effects are also bad (male imbalance, etc), but the state agency which runs this is really powerful (it needed to be in order to force sterilization on unwilling people).
State agencies & agents have a lot of influence on state policy, they don't vote for their own termination.
"
@densityduck
@jaybird
Philosophically, it's not just "drugs = bad" driving this. We also have "more state power = good" and "state power never has unintended side effects".
A large police force can be used for all sorts of things directly expands the power/budget of people who control/influence the gov.
The drug war is a way to express that ideal, if we didn't have that we'd have other "needs" which require the expansion of state power.
"
@jaybird
I think we're protecting jobs and entrenched interests.
Lots of gov spending on the drug war means lots of other economic actors are dependant on that spending.
"
test
"
We get stories like this every few years. The next thing the drug warriors will do is take the licenses of any doctor who gives out "too many" (or "too long", or whatever) prescriptions, which instantly means really bad things for chronic pain sufferers.
On “The Republican Party and the Right After Trump”
True.
Them I know less well, but...
The Kardashians are a group and can't all be President. Nor do I see massive management skill; Their income is bigger because they're bigger celebrities (especially collectively) but they're basically a group of small businesses rather than one large.
And even if I'm totally wrong and they have tens of thousands of employees in their vast corp empire, so what? Their accomplishments do no lessen his.
"
For the GOP Best Case:
Trump "leads" by signing whatever Congress puts in front of him and claiming credit.
He does something for immigration reform in a Nixon-goes-to-China way.
He drops his economic messages and proves that he really does know management.
Worse Case:
Basically the opposite of that. He does for the national GOP what Wilson did for California on immigration, i.e. proves to an entire generation or three of hispanics that the GOP can't be trusted with power. He tries to implement economic insanity and gets the predictable results. He pulls us out of NATO and lets Russia/China become global cop(s).
Hopefully nominate someone who isn't openly corrupt. Maybe they decide they need a celebrity, but getting one would be easy enough.
"
@Stillwater
I see no way that he doesn't know about money, or business, or management. He's shown this over the decades multiple times and multiple ways, everything from his divorces to his management show to him being a real estate guy who lived through the crash. That's separate from his PR act which is also impressive. We can measure him by his accomplishments and they're extensive enough that making him President isn't unreasonable.
However there's this amazing disconnect between all that and what comes out of his mouth on the campaign trail. If he were running on economic sanity rather than economic insanity I'd vote for him, as it is I take him at his word... even though given who and what he is, he *must* know what he's saying is nuts.
"
@don-zeko
Trump has a mostly self made Billion dollars and this vast corporate empire. Those give him serious street cred. He knows about money, business, and management.
Of course his arguments are totally at odds with how he built his empire and what he knows(?) to be true, but to understand that you have to have some knowledge of economics and policy.
On “ITV: Plans to deny surgery to obese and smokers ‘put on hold’”
@Stillwater
My solution, i.e. what the ACA should have done, is that it should have made pricing transparent.
That, by itself, is probably pretty hard but imho it's a lot more likely to do something than command and control. There are insurance structures which let consumers capture the results of savings, which put downward pressure on prices.
On “The Republican Party and the Right After Trump”
@saul-degraw
For me the anti-economic arguments are another big clue. But both of us are probably a lot more informed than the typical Trump voter.
Imagine that you know literally nothing about economics, or history, or technology, and you think the elites have structured things so they win at your expense. All we need to do is break the lock that the elites have had on policy and America of the 1950's comes back.
That mindset doesn't make you "racist", but I think it's one of Trump's core demographics.
On “ITV: Plans to deny surgery to obese and smokers ‘put on hold’”
@stillwater
On “The Republican Party and the Right After Trump”
@saul-degraw
I think this is lumping together the anti-Islam, nativist, racist, anti-immigration, no-insiders, anti-free-trade, and enforce-the-laws sections of the party. This is also underestimating the power of being a celebrity and of raw Charisma.
Some of these groups overlap, but Trump does actually have a coalition of sorts. You don't have to be a racist to reach for the "elect a strong man who sounds like he knows what he's doing" solution.
On “ITV: Plans to deny surgery to obese and smokers ‘put on hold’”
@stillwater
The pre-ACA market system was also a heavily government regulated system. So we have the gov deciding that because the gov messed things up, we need more government.
If we're serious about using the gov to reducing medical expenses, then we need to have a long discussion on the benefits of death panels (or whatever you want to call 'intelligent rationing'), why they're a good thing, and how they'd work in practice.
What we're doing instead is pretending that we can write a blank check to everyone for all medical expenses.
"
Any and every entitlement is a good thing as long as we only look at the benefits side.
Paying for it is an issue, whether we get value for our dollar is another issue, and paying for all entitlements collectively (long term, meaning 50+ years) is a huge issue.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.