I think this is all an argument that an ideal society would have libertarian governance with a variety of more restrictive cultures that dominate the national character, leaving escape valves for weird bohemians who want to do weird things. That seems to be the dynamic that has produced the most interesting achievements in art and technology - somewhat stifling and conformist cultures that allow their weirdos the latitude to be weird and discover new things.
And I'll note - weirdos thrive on being weird (duh). But as society moves more and more towards "personal truths" and other crap, there's less that's carved out as taboo, strange, unacceptable, evil, etc. I like to say, you have to have the courage to be weird. Our society requires very little courage, in fact, you're en-couraged (ha!) to be weird. Weird becomes another slice of the zeitgeist, as opposed to something largely outside it.
One can argue that's why today's truly "weird" ideas are more extreme than those in the past (teen angst used to look like black hair dye and fingernail polish - now its transgenderism) because there's simply a much higher bar to clear to be considered weird. And even then - as soon as the weird stake out new ground, the zeitgeist lurches to reabsorb them into some expanded concept of normal.
As someone who has seen himself as weird for much of his life, I don't relish being unceremoniously looped in with the "normies." I don't need you to tell me you think I'm now "normal" - I need you to largely leave me alone to be weird. I don't need to be accepted, I need to be tolerated. And there's a crucial difference there.
Lastly - as the zeitgeist resembles something like "everyone is equally beautiful and important and valid," we're all told (implicitly) that that makes us all largely the same, but when we look around - we feel alienated! These aren't my kind of people, we instinctively think. I think Randolph is sooooo right. Liberal society needs cultural divisions - we then fulfill our need to belong to one of these cultural groups and leaves the government to be that milquetoast, "one size fits all" entity. I think our general, modern ennui would decrease.
Yeah I may not be as far out of the ordinary as you are, but having a bit of individuality always seemed more desirable than soulless conformity. I see the same rising, desperate desire to make nothing weird in modern culture that you do, and there's some aspect to it that seems totally beyond comprehension. Insisting that everything must be normal itself seems weird to me.
When I try to analyze it, my sense is that it relates to the more distant and extreme corners of female psychology, where courage and self-efficacy are totally absent, feeling different is intolerable and terrifying, and normalizing absolutely everything is a way of chasing the sense of strangeness under the bed and into the closet with all the other scary monsters. Then again maybe I just read too much Are You There God, It's Me Margaret lately, IDK https://substack.com/profile/81704541-apple-pie/note/c-61710685
I think you're spot on - there's little argument (IMO) that the West, in particular the US, has shifted to a more "female modal" culture (my term), and with that come certain drawbacks (and benefits too).
Women, on average, have a different perspective then men, and favor different qualities more highly than men, on average. Similar to what you note: stuff like agreeableness, conformity, consensus. I think that in this female modal world - you get more social pressure to broaden the window of normalcy, to try to define more and more people as part of the "in group" and such. That's not all bad, of course, but female virtue, in theory if not in practice, tends to lean towards low conflict / be cautious of everyone's feelings territory. Its natural, as you note, that this results in more "inclusion" and less actual diversity.
See to me, diversity suggests there's both a mainstream and subcultures - and that we need both the "official" and "unofficial" for an appropriately multifaceted and dynamic society. But it does not, to me, suggest that diversity demands that we simply assimilate everyone into one incoherent blob and call that blob diverse. People have different views of the good life, and that's fine. Western society was built on the idea of tolerance, but increasingly demands acceptance. In part, the "Left" (however you care to define it) has long seen itself in the upstart/underdog position, so while its arguments were once, broadly, society needs to tolerate more ways of being - as the Left has usurped cultural power - that now becomes, essentially, everything is equally good and equally beautiful, which is simply untenable. We simply didn't quit when we were ahead.
Among other reasons, this is why I get so frustrated with the zero-sum aspect of social justice / culture wars. The argument ceases to be "I want to do my thing" and becomes "I want everyone to think my thing is great." And you just get this zero-sum see-saw between positions. Even if everyone agreed that, say, black folks were at the top of the victim heap - what happens when we don't just correct past injustices, we elevate blacks to the position we all used to complain whites were in (and some think whites still remain in?). Why do we want to trade a white-dominated society for a black-dominated one? Wouldn't that just beget a white social justice movement at some point, and we just keep playing king-of-the-hill until the sun explodes?
Cannonizing one group so we can demonize another is just the same shitty past in negative. It's not social justice - its a braindead kind of politics that looks for underdogs to side with for no other reason than they're underdogs. The same reason non-NYC baseball fans hate the Yankees (not as good an example as it was in my youth) or non-AL college football fans hated Saban/Alabama are the same reasons people go out of their way to show how much they dislike "male, hetero, white" society. America hates a winner. Instead of pointing out the "winner's" flaws, we instead cast the winner as wholly evil and other groups are seen as the morally pure underdogs. It's easy to root for the underdog, its hard to appreciate the champ.
You are creeping up on the idea (the true idea, I believe) that there are no such things as rights. What exist are duties. If you can, track down a copy of David Selbourne's "The Principle of Duty".
Law is founded on the idea of duties. Good faith bargaining, temperate public behaviour, and all the rest are duties, and the law is about the consequences of failure to execute a duty.
The preamble of the US's Declaration of Independence is a not-so-subtle joke. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights, it claims. Yet thousands are executed, millions are incarcerated, and virtually no-one in the US pursues happiness, all preferring social prestige instead. All three are routinely alienated.
The existence of either rights or duties would be a useful starting point to arguing for the existence of the other. For instance, if my children had a right to enjoy a slice of quality apple pie every week, then it would not be surprising if someone could convincingly show that their mother and I shared a duty to supply this pie.
Unfortunately, I doubt you can demonstrate that either rights *or* duties exist. This may not mean that neither rights nor duties exist, but I think you'd be hard pressed to show that they do. Laws appear to be social conventions adopted for reasons unrelated to morality - and sometimes flying in the face of intuitive conceptions of morality, such as the Indian custom of forced sati.
I wouldn't be surprised if libertarianism makes a comeback on the right after the Trumpian populists cause inflation with huge tariffs and make the whole world hate us with pulling out of our alliances and being a jerk about it on top of that. (As for the left, I think people are sick of being afraid of losing their jobs over a joke they made 20 years ago.)
After all, socialism is making a comeback because capitalism got too far. The pendulum usually swings back.
In America, the pendulum is permanently drawn like a magnet towards libertarianism. Libertarianism is kindof America's big thing, at least West of the Mississippi.
As for people being sick of having to be afraid of some joke they made 20 years ago, I doubt that will go away. It might if the moderates were a political force, but they aren't.
Granted, the right has been pushing back against cancel culture (and before that, political correctness) for decades, but the problem is that the right is never going to just push for that; it's also going to push for things that spook the left like abortion restrictions, relaxed climate regulation, and tight border security; on top of that, their fringe is constantly wondering when there's going to be action on the issues that really matter, like stolen elections, QAnon, and pedophiles in pizza joints. Oh and by the way Israel and Hamas is a thing everybody's going to freak out about and throw money at until America itself catches fire and sinks into the ocean.
Should libertarians care about cultural values? A reason debate.
Kerry Howley, Todd Seavey, and Daniel McCarthy | From the November 2009 issue of 'Reason'
Libertarians traditionally have viewed coercion, especially when institutionalized in the form of government, as the main threat to freedom. But cultural pressures outside the state also can restrict people's ability to live as they please. Is that another limit on liberty worth criticizing, or is it a function of voluntary choices?
In the first essay below, Contributing Editor Kerry Howley argues for a wider vision of human liberty, one that acknowledges government is not the only threat to freedom. In a reply, Todd Seavey says fighting for property rights is difficult enough without taking on cultural baggage. In another response, Daniel McCarthy agrees that culture and liberty are linked but suggests that freedom demands a more pluralistic view of acceptable cultures than Howley's vision might allow.
I find your study on India and libertarianism interesting since E. Michael Jones had talk about Indian society and his take seems to line up with yours. He didn't mention libertarianism by name but the way he described the ills of Indian society seems to be the effect of libertarianism gone wrong.
As for the gun issue, I'm inclined to agree with you even though I've had my fair share of hanging around American conservative circles. I live in Jakarta, Indonesia and gun crimes are practically unheard of (the only exception I can think of was a high profile murder case involving a general, IIRC). It's not like Indonesia's a high trust society like Japan. While you don't have to worry about getting shot (or even violent crimes in general), you do have to worry about pickpockets or people robbing your house while you're away. And while Indonesians are a polite people, we're not completely docile. Street fights still happen, usually among gangs of high school students (it's called "tawuran"). Imagine if these kids have guns, lol.
The only explanation for this is that only military/police really own guns, and gun ownership for civilians is fairly difficult from what I can tell.
This is a really interesting comment! Part of what I love about having a blog is hearing from people across the world what things are like in places I've never had the chance to go.
> Street fights still happen, usually among gangs of high school students (it's called "tawuran"). Imagine if these kids have guns, lol.
This is only possible because there are no guns around, and I think it's a further argument for better gun control, although I realize that I look crazy when I try to make it. I probably have a rather unusual attitude towards fist fights from a modern standpoint - I think that physical risk and aggression is much less a problem than most Americans take for granted. Yes, parents and teachers should break up fights when they happen, but just brush yourselves off afterwards and forget about it, no need for lawsuits or criminal proceedings. I remember being a teenager and getting scrapes, bruises, and the occasional black eye, and I think it made me a *much* more well-rounded person, with more resilience in the face of life's inevitable dangers than, say, just about any American Millennial or member of Gen Z.
I think the key problem with this argument, is that libertarianism has declined as a principle influencing government policy, given that government has increased in size and power continuously. That's a point you admit in the article, when you state that democracy has led to outcomes contrary to libertarian preference.
So if the actual conditions in our society are less libertarian at the same time that society and culture seems to be deteriorating, why is libertarianism seemingly taking the blame here?
I don't speak for AP, but I must disagree with the idea that American society's less libertarian. I would say it's more libertarian, but not in ways the libertarians want. As I said in the comments section of another Substack...
The ironic thing about libertarians is how they believe their ideology is being overlooked and yet libertarianism is the hidden grammar of American politics. We have 'em on both sides of the political aisle, the Republicans (fiscal libertarianism) and the Democrats (social libertarianism). For all the talk the GOP has about preserving our Christian culture and for all the talk the Dems have about the helping the worker, the downtrodden, when it comes down to it the Republicans will always prioritize lower taxes and helping big corporations while the Democrats will always prioritize promoting sexual degeneracy and drugs.
There's a difference between rhetoric and policy. Policy is what matters. Has the rhetoric of Republicans matched policy? No, it hasn't. Government spending has only increased, and the funding for that spending has simply supplemented the (truly absurd) gauntlet of of income, sales, and property taxes with inflation, which is functionally (and purposefully) a tax in a society where the money supply is controlled by the state.
The only way government policy is "libertarian" is by selectively redefining the word, frequently in opposite directions as the situation requires, whenever government policy doesn't achieve it's stated goals.
Partly we have a different perspective on the meaning of libertarianism; you seem particularly concerned about its fiscal aspects, while I'm interested in libertarianism broadly. Seen in broad terms, America is libertarian, with a degree of personal freedom not experienced in most advanced nations. This can be seen most strikingly in its treatment of firearms and immigration, which are much more carefully regulated across most similar countries.
But even if we were to really focus on economic issues, I can only agree that government spending has risen in contradiction to libertarian principle. I don't agree that America is somehow authoritarian, or even unlibertarian, in comparison to other wealthy nations. Notice that...
...government spending is generally higher as overall wealth increases, but America's governmental spending is less than most economic powerhouses. Check the list and you'll find the United States' government spending is closest to impoverished countries like Bangladesh, Equatorial Guinea, Malawi, and Cameroon.
So no, it really doesn't look like the United States even has an unlibertarian spending profile. All the information I've got points to a pretty obvious conclusion that America is a country heavily influenced by libertarian ideology.
I see US at ~31% of GDP which isnt far below Sweden and Germany. But this data is also the national government only. I would venture to guess that the govt spending of local and state governments in the US is much higher than the equivalent structures in the European countries, since public schools are funded locally in the US.
And even besides that... 31% of GDP is completely insane.
The failure to take culture seriously, and so to think about it seriously, has led to many ills, including dysfunctional migration policy and the disastrous hubris in Afghanistan. The breakthrough moment for me was reading Kenneth Pollack’s PhD dissertation years ago.
I'll see if I can find that. My own realization that culture was a thing was more gradual, but it really came into the foreground when I discovered Geert Hofstede's work. Hofstede was never the greatest social scientist, but he at least made an effort to measure culture numerically, and his findings were interesting:
Interesting essay (just came across it late via Substack Reads). Might I suggest another rhetorical question to follow on from your penultimate one "....do I truly have no responsibility to the culture that provides not only economic opportunities, but meaning, to my entire life?".....Is the truth perhaps that people do not really value Freedom anything like as much as Libertarians imagine they do.....they just want a little bit more of it than North Korea offers?
You may be confusing Caperu_Wesperizzon with me? I don't think he appeared in this discussion before.
I can at least reply to your suggestion by saying that people would probably be better off if they didn't even worry about slicing things up in terms of freedom and unfreedom so often. In other words yes, you can say North Korea is bad because half the people would leave but they don't have the freedom to, but they wouldn't *want* to leave if it were run with sensitivity and integrity. I think those who would leave North Korea if they could, would rather see it improve so they could stay and be happy.
You're confusing me here! My reply WAS to Caperu Wesperrizon's "freedom for me but not for thee".
The main point of my comment is that the assumption that everyone values freedom (top of their value system) is perhaps the greatest confusion in our Western democratic politics. SOME people value freedom above all else but most people want rules, boundaries....and leaders. (I have written on these themes on my own 'stack if you are interested.)
It sounds to me as though your gripe is more with libertinism than libertarianism...that is, if you are willing to allow a distinction, and I will grant you that, in practice, the two are more than just highly correlated: they seem to be deeply intertwined, at least/especially here in America.
I'll allow that distinction, definitely! But on reflection, I'm not sure libertinism is really the problem in nearly the same way that sincere and ethically-minded libertarianism is. Antireligious attitudes, drug use, and prostitution aren't tearing the fabric of America apart - and even if they were, they aren't what I was complaining about. I didn't even mention the decline of religion, the rise in venereal disease, or adolescent exposure to pornography, and I *couldn't* have mentioned teen pregnancies even if I'd wanted to, since those are down.
Hedonists lacking Honesty-Humility are a headache and a half, but they're nothing new. It's the very sincere movement of idealistic and even Puritanical leftists who've sent America down the drain, while all the principled libertarians gathered along the sidelines, gaping in feckless horror.
The example in recent months of a Canadian youtuber family, the Feenstra, who for religious reasons moved to Russia, because of teh gays, and discovered what a bureaucratic nightmare Russia is (they were seriously interrogated for having that-much-money in the bank account even though they said well we sold our farm in Canada.. to move here... proof? we can't speak Russian and we hate gays..….not good enough) .Some think the Soviet union was bureaucratic, because communism, but really it is part of the Russian soul, i.e. complete lack of individual agency, everything is argued through the medium of the law and legislation that is Russkyi mir.
And teenagers elsewhere still complain about the structure of their lives... if they have lived anywhere else the privilege and space to become a libertarian, or anarchist in my case, it was the 80s, would have been but a dream. Admittedly libertarians would not make a good meat wave, but insurrections for the man are another thing it seems. Anarchists would do neither.
Hilarious! I've never heard of the Feenstra, and feel a bit bad for laughing at them - the Feenstra see the world in a very different way from the way that I do, but they're at least following through on their beliefs. Most Christian right-wingers just kick dirt clods and complain fecklessly about Donald Trump being disrespectful of the Bible and commies taking over the country.
I've noticed that people in most political movements experience this strong pull to enter a social bubble, simplify everything in their minds, stop seeing gradations and middle ground, and reason in extremely simplistic ways. These people had the courage to actually follow through: "We hate homosexuals. Russia hates homosexuals. We love Russia. Russia is good! Russia will welcome us!" No surprise Russia responded like Jerry Seinfeld when he first met Kesha https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX3_L8z2uw4&pp=ygUSamVycnkgc2VpbmZlbGQgaHVn
You say culture matters, therefore libertarians are wrong. I say that human capacity to wage war matters, therefore libertarians are wrong. It means the same thing. The latter is just a more drastic way of expressing it.
...That's not what I'm really trying to say. I think:
* Libertariansm, like utilitarianism, has an arbitrary foundation. Arbitrary claims are not likely to be correct.
* Certain outcomes of libertarianism are dysfunctional. (Granted, these outcomes may not be inevitable; a libertarianism that didn't specifically focus on firearm freedom probably wouldn't have resulted in a culture of spree killings.)
* Libertarianism tends to go along with a blind spot for culture because it sees individuals as disconnected. This blind spot rendered American libertarians helpless to stop their opponents from seizing control over their country.
> I say that human capacity to wage war matters, therefore libertarians are wrong.
Really? America is probably the most libertarian country on the Earth, and it's also one of the most militaristic. If libertarianism in America became as powerful and as sick as the idealistic left has become, I could definitely see libertarians starting to attack the postal service, the roads, the police, and the military. But generally speaking, if there's any institution libertarians agree should exist, it's the military.
Yes. And I would just say that war is the foundation of arbitrary human culture. People use their warring capacity to get their way, whatever they are feeling. And often they decide to make war for non-libertarian causes, like the right to eat. Like you say, human psychology is not libertarian to its nature, so people can easily get the idea to use collective violence for another cause. And I think that acknowledging that is just a harder way to say "humans are cultural beings".
>>Really? America is probably the most libertarian country on the Earth, and it's also one of the most militaristic.
Libertarians fail to acknowledge that people will kill for whatever cause they feel is justified and they will do so jointly. Cynics see that the welfare state is not there because it IS RIGHT, but because starving people will sooner or later inevitably get the idea that it is right and cause a lot of trouble.
I think you're confusing libertarianism with opposition to the safety net. The former is broad and general, arising from foundational philosophical claims, while the latter is a single issue that has little to do with the broad libertarian programme. Indeed, libertarianism in general is *friendly* to financial transfers to the poor, so long as these transfers are simple, minimize bureaucracy, and maintain personal agency:
many of the most outspoken supporters of a universal basic income have been self-described libertarians—even though libertarians are generally considered to be antagonistic toward redistribution and a universal basic income is, at its core, a program of income redistribution... a basic safety net is not only consistent with, but likely required by, several (though not all) strands of libertarian thought.
libertarian principles can support universal, unconditional cash transfers in the form of a Basic Income... [S]uch transfers further individual autonomy by recognizing that all individuals—including the poor—are usually better judges of their own needs than the government. Second, decoupling redistributive transfers from work requirements acknowledges the inability of the government accurately to distinguish the ‘deserving’ from the ‘undeserving’ in a principled way.
America’s population is wealthier than any in history. Every year, the American government redistributes more than a trillion dollars of that wealth to provide for retirement, health care, and the alleviation of poverty. We still have millions of people without comfortable retirements, without adequate health care, and living in poverty. Only a government can spend so much money so ineffectually. The solution is to give the money to the people.
_______________________
It will probably help if you understand that the Rationalist movement is 1/3 Utilitarianism, 1/3 Libertarianism, 1/6 HBD, and 1/6 Bay Area Nerdi--I mean Bay Area Coolness. But you aren't from the San Fransisco Bay Area, and you don't seem to be a Utilitarian, so when you use the word "rational," no surprise that it carries a strong flavor of "libertarian." Of the complaints you raise about Swedish culture in your blog, 90% are that it isn't libertarian enough. This may be part of the reason you and I get along.
Yes. I'm living in the past. Libertarians a hundred years ago did not propose a universal basic income. Eating was considered more of a privilege than a right then (if nothing else, that is obvious from George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London).
Even libertarians 20 years ago mostly denied or ignored any need for distribution. At least those I heard. But you are right, the times have changed.
>>Of the complaints you raise about Swedish culture in your blog, 90% are that it isn't libertarian enough. This may be part of the reason you and I get along.
I admit it. I'm a closet libertarian. And just like you, I recognize that most other people are not libertarian, so preaching libertarianism is most often of little value, as things are.
If Ayn Rand had focused on "bureaucracy" per se rather than a form or intrumentalisation of it in the Soviet Union as inherited totalitarianism from Russian Imperialism, her Obejctivisim would have been a whole lot better (even if this suggested focus on bureaucracy is just another possible animism / agency blindspot in some cases) . The Rand mistep is an example of the blind spot for culture. (my worlding / worldbuilding re-working of the extended phenotype). And the way we mistake outcomes for causes.
If bureaucracy were really so bad, why would things like universal health care seem to work so well? My conservative relatives always insisted it would fail utterly, but looking around, both Sweden's and Australia's health care systems seem well regarded. Aren't they huge bureaucracies? (That's how they look from a libertarian American perspective!)
Your average universal healthcare system is less bureaucratic then the American healthcare system (which is basically quasi universal but with many many bureaucracies falling over each other).
Yeah that's my sense of it, though I'm not sure how exactly it came to this - maybe the market kept trying to fill gaps and over time it started to look a bit like a bureaucratic dungeon? (Or a Dungeons & Dragons rulebook)
If health insurance had remained entirely private and largely unregulated it’s possible it would be less bureaucratic then universal healthcare, but that would mean that many people would be shut out if the health insurance market (because they are bad risks at any premium level they could realistically afford).
Once you decide that coverage is going to be universal government regulation of some kind is inevitable because the government is paying.
Most universal health systems were designed on purpose after ww2, with varying degrees of success but at least universal coverage was intentional in the design from the start.
America never got universal health insurance. Employer group health insurance was the backbone with Medicare and Medicaid getting added in 1965 since employer based didn’t cover those not working. Obamacare and other programs got added on too much later. So it’s a patchwork Frankenstein of systems and payers that got added as you went without any kind of central design. I call this “backdoor universal” because pretty much everyone can be covered if they want to by one of these programs but they all step on each others toes and it’s a mess.
This isn’t prescriptive, I don’t see any good ways to reform the American healthcare system. It is what it is at this point, it would take a war or hyper inflation to make a significant difference.
*note: universal coverage doesn’t have to be government run. Switzerland has universal coverage with private insurance companies competing. And having a government insurance program doesn’t mean private insurance has to be outlawed, even though some systems have done that.
having help run a small co-op or business or two, I see how bureaucracies protect peeps doing the work in dealing on the spot with the general public, unfortunately when established it can becomes a racket, and suddenly one has to hire a consultant to deal with the bureaucracy (lawyers would be the first example of this guild)(in Tasmania we now have local planning consultants like one might hire an drainage engineer to design drains, only to deal with local council even for things like getting a tree cut down). Narcissists are a major pathway for good process to be turned into bureaucratic nightmares. They are attracted to concierge roles. And uniforms.
In Australia medicare insurance is paid for by a hypothecated and medicare named extra levy which is cheap to raise as it is automatically added to your income tax lodgement (we only have commonwealth/federal income taxes -- a result of WW2). Problems arise in spending it as the states pay for public hospitals, and the medicare raised levy/insurance pays for local doctors and specialists & drugs (this is what is so good about the system as most healthcare is about that sort of thing) but, see, there is this cost-shifting baloney where if you go for stitches because you cut yourself to emergency then the state pays for it, but if you went to a local general practitioner(GP) clinic then medicare does. This is causing problems as larger GP clinics in some areas are closing (they used to be like mum&dad practices) which means more peeps are going to emergency which is affecting the hospitals abilities to do stuff, plus the general lack of qualified staff across the anglophone world such that we a poaching across all specialties and nurses... which is partly the result of guild decisions of the AMA (doctors' union but they don't call it that) a generation ago in each speciality to restrict the number of, say, hematologists or gynacologists by having the pass mark at 99.9% on the guild entry exam. Given Aus growing population this is insane. as it takes so long to train them. Friends of mine who studied medicine 25 years ago, said back then you needed a wife to look after all your physical needs while you study (to become a gyno), and another wife to earn the money for all three to eat and be housed and stuff. She never became a gynecologist. Such production numbers should not be decided by a doctors' club/union/guild.
You'd be about 30yo by then, with maybe 20 years of useful life ahead of you if you keep up with the science and tech, if you do not have kids. Friends of mine who are oncologists have nannies. This is looked down upon in Australi.
What I do not understand about the American system is how good the tech in medicine is and how bad the general outcome of health care is in the States-- given how much money by way of employer back insurance goes into the system, and the price gauging you put up with... isn't a free market suppose to lead to efficient allocation of resources -- looks like a racket to me
libertarian thought that gives no heed to economic externalities and the costs of monopoly powers and attendant price-fixing is all a part of the blindness....
it's interesting that some of the "libertarian" tech bros do not believe in the stockmarket (like anarcho-capitalists do) they just believe in personally owning/controlling stuff under their name as brand maybe, much like medieval elites owned the land and everything and everyone and their lives and their labour on the land... markets and liberty are for city slickers not real bros, many libertarians come across to me as robber barons, crying foul about gubermint until they can become King and President for life.
There's so much here... and I understand 95% of it!
> unfortunately when established it can becomes a racket,
Yeah, this is the general criticism of bureaucracy, that (if we take the perspective of Carrol Quigley) bureaucracy very rapidly devolves from an instrument into an institution. Seen another way, Natural Selection acts on Burger King, Walmart, and the local shoe store, but it doesn't act on any bureaucracy. I'm no longer so sure that this is the case, but I've never seen any evidence to the contrary.
> What I do not understand about the American system is how good the tech in medicine is and how bad the general outcome of health care is in the States... looks like a racket to me
Everything you wrote about the Australian system is news to me, and I'm not really sure what to make of it. But I can say that the American system is a surprisingly complex bureaucracy supported by insurance and buffered from market incentives. For instance, drug prices skyrocket for the simple reason that they can:
From 2007 to 2016, Mylan raised the list price of its EpiPen about 500%, from just under $100 to more than $600. From 2002 to 2013, insulin prices more than tripled. From 2012 to 2019, the average price of AbbVie’s rheumatoid-arthritis drug Humira climbed from $19,000 a year to $60,000 a year—and that’s after rebates. These are dramatic examples of a systemwide problem: prices for brand-name drugs are rising at a rate that far outstrips inflation.
What’s behind these rapid price hikes? It’s a simple question with a complicated answer that involves three central entities: drug manufacturers, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and insurers. Together, they create a complicated supply chain that helps drive drug prices aggressively upward. “We have a system that is all engine and no brake...”
> libertarian thought that gives no heed to economic externalities and the costs of monopoly powers and attendant price-fixing is all a part of the blindness....
In libertarianland, externalities are minimal; in reality, they seem enormous. I don't much care about economic issues when it comes down to it, but whatever, start with economics: Having a 1. thriving economy depends on 2. people with 3. a culture, living in 4. an environment. Externalities don't just exist in #1 the way libertarians wish, or the realm of #4, the way antilibertarian Greens insist; they also exist for #1 and #2.
USA doesn’t lead in either firearm deaths (all categories) nor murder rates (all causes) if Detroit, Chicago and Washington DC are excluded from the dataset. It drops to 168th out of 173. Those 3 Dem cities with very strict gun control regulations are combined worth about 160 ranks (loose stats there).
The point is that the USA is so large, so populous and so diverse demographically and culturally, that treating it as a single entity statistically has low validity.
It would be interesting to see him cite a source for his claim so we could see how much of America's firearm death rate were attenuated by excluding those cities, but given that their population sizes aren't very large, I think chances are pretty low that it would bring the US in line with other countries.
I read it this week in another substack, which I cannot immediately locate. However World Population Review has stats for 2019 which rank USA 2nd in absolute number and 22nd in rate of the 193 (of 204) countries with data for that year.
I was really trying to focus on guns, not murder. I started that section with the headline "Gun violence is remaking America's classrooms." Maybe I could have inserted even more phrases like "firearm-related" or "gun-related" or "caused by guns," to stress that I wasn't trying to discuss murder in the broadest sense, but it was already starting to feel as though I was hammering that home much more than I needed to.
I think this is all an argument that an ideal society would have libertarian governance with a variety of more restrictive cultures that dominate the national character, leaving escape valves for weird bohemians who want to do weird things. That seems to be the dynamic that has produced the most interesting achievements in art and technology - somewhat stifling and conformist cultures that allow their weirdos the latitude to be weird and discover new things.
And I'll note - weirdos thrive on being weird (duh). But as society moves more and more towards "personal truths" and other crap, there's less that's carved out as taboo, strange, unacceptable, evil, etc. I like to say, you have to have the courage to be weird. Our society requires very little courage, in fact, you're en-couraged (ha!) to be weird. Weird becomes another slice of the zeitgeist, as opposed to something largely outside it.
One can argue that's why today's truly "weird" ideas are more extreme than those in the past (teen angst used to look like black hair dye and fingernail polish - now its transgenderism) because there's simply a much higher bar to clear to be considered weird. And even then - as soon as the weird stake out new ground, the zeitgeist lurches to reabsorb them into some expanded concept of normal.
As someone who has seen himself as weird for much of his life, I don't relish being unceremoniously looped in with the "normies." I don't need you to tell me you think I'm now "normal" - I need you to largely leave me alone to be weird. I don't need to be accepted, I need to be tolerated. And there's a crucial difference there.
Lastly - as the zeitgeist resembles something like "everyone is equally beautiful and important and valid," we're all told (implicitly) that that makes us all largely the same, but when we look around - we feel alienated! These aren't my kind of people, we instinctively think. I think Randolph is sooooo right. Liberal society needs cultural divisions - we then fulfill our need to belong to one of these cultural groups and leaves the government to be that milquetoast, "one size fits all" entity. I think our general, modern ennui would decrease.
Yeah I may not be as far out of the ordinary as you are, but having a bit of individuality always seemed more desirable than soulless conformity. I see the same rising, desperate desire to make nothing weird in modern culture that you do, and there's some aspect to it that seems totally beyond comprehension. Insisting that everything must be normal itself seems weird to me.
When I try to analyze it, my sense is that it relates to the more distant and extreme corners of female psychology, where courage and self-efficacy are totally absent, feeling different is intolerable and terrifying, and normalizing absolutely everything is a way of chasing the sense of strangeness under the bed and into the closet with all the other scary monsters. Then again maybe I just read too much Are You There God, It's Me Margaret lately, IDK https://substack.com/profile/81704541-apple-pie/note/c-61710685
I think you're spot on - there's little argument (IMO) that the West, in particular the US, has shifted to a more "female modal" culture (my term), and with that come certain drawbacks (and benefits too).
Women, on average, have a different perspective then men, and favor different qualities more highly than men, on average. Similar to what you note: stuff like agreeableness, conformity, consensus. I think that in this female modal world - you get more social pressure to broaden the window of normalcy, to try to define more and more people as part of the "in group" and such. That's not all bad, of course, but female virtue, in theory if not in practice, tends to lean towards low conflict / be cautious of everyone's feelings territory. Its natural, as you note, that this results in more "inclusion" and less actual diversity.
See to me, diversity suggests there's both a mainstream and subcultures - and that we need both the "official" and "unofficial" for an appropriately multifaceted and dynamic society. But it does not, to me, suggest that diversity demands that we simply assimilate everyone into one incoherent blob and call that blob diverse. People have different views of the good life, and that's fine. Western society was built on the idea of tolerance, but increasingly demands acceptance. In part, the "Left" (however you care to define it) has long seen itself in the upstart/underdog position, so while its arguments were once, broadly, society needs to tolerate more ways of being - as the Left has usurped cultural power - that now becomes, essentially, everything is equally good and equally beautiful, which is simply untenable. We simply didn't quit when we were ahead.
Among other reasons, this is why I get so frustrated with the zero-sum aspect of social justice / culture wars. The argument ceases to be "I want to do my thing" and becomes "I want everyone to think my thing is great." And you just get this zero-sum see-saw between positions. Even if everyone agreed that, say, black folks were at the top of the victim heap - what happens when we don't just correct past injustices, we elevate blacks to the position we all used to complain whites were in (and some think whites still remain in?). Why do we want to trade a white-dominated society for a black-dominated one? Wouldn't that just beget a white social justice movement at some point, and we just keep playing king-of-the-hill until the sun explodes?
Cannonizing one group so we can demonize another is just the same shitty past in negative. It's not social justice - its a braindead kind of politics that looks for underdogs to side with for no other reason than they're underdogs. The same reason non-NYC baseball fans hate the Yankees (not as good an example as it was in my youth) or non-AL college football fans hated Saban/Alabama are the same reasons people go out of their way to show how much they dislike "male, hetero, white" society. America hates a winner. Instead of pointing out the "winner's" flaws, we instead cast the winner as wholly evil and other groups are seen as the morally pure underdogs. It's easy to root for the underdog, its hard to appreciate the champ.
You are creeping up on the idea (the true idea, I believe) that there are no such things as rights. What exist are duties. If you can, track down a copy of David Selbourne's "The Principle of Duty".
Law is founded on the idea of duties. Good faith bargaining, temperate public behaviour, and all the rest are duties, and the law is about the consequences of failure to execute a duty.
The preamble of the US's Declaration of Independence is a not-so-subtle joke. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights, it claims. Yet thousands are executed, millions are incarcerated, and virtually no-one in the US pursues happiness, all preferring social prestige instead. All three are routinely alienated.
The existence of either rights or duties would be a useful starting point to arguing for the existence of the other. For instance, if my children had a right to enjoy a slice of quality apple pie every week, then it would not be surprising if someone could convincingly show that their mother and I shared a duty to supply this pie.
Unfortunately, I doubt you can demonstrate that either rights *or* duties exist. This may not mean that neither rights nor duties exist, but I think you'd be hard pressed to show that they do. Laws appear to be social conventions adopted for reasons unrelated to morality - and sometimes flying in the face of intuitive conceptions of morality, such as the Indian custom of forced sati.
I wouldn't be surprised if libertarianism makes a comeback on the right after the Trumpian populists cause inflation with huge tariffs and make the whole world hate us with pulling out of our alliances and being a jerk about it on top of that. (As for the left, I think people are sick of being afraid of losing their jobs over a joke they made 20 years ago.)
After all, socialism is making a comeback because capitalism got too far. The pendulum usually swings back.
In America, the pendulum is permanently drawn like a magnet towards libertarianism. Libertarianism is kindof America's big thing, at least West of the Mississippi.
As for people being sick of having to be afraid of some joke they made 20 years ago, I doubt that will go away. It might if the moderates were a political force, but they aren't.
Granted, the right has been pushing back against cancel culture (and before that, political correctness) for decades, but the problem is that the right is never going to just push for that; it's also going to push for things that spook the left like abortion restrictions, relaxed climate regulation, and tight border security; on top of that, their fringe is constantly wondering when there's going to be action on the issues that really matter, like stolen elections, QAnon, and pedophiles in pizza joints. Oh and by the way Israel and Hamas is a thing everybody's going to freak out about and throw money at until America itself catches fire and sinks into the ocean.
Are Property Rights Enough?
Should libertarians care about cultural values? A reason debate.
Kerry Howley, Todd Seavey, and Daniel McCarthy | From the November 2009 issue of 'Reason'
Libertarians traditionally have viewed coercion, especially when institutionalized in the form of government, as the main threat to freedom. But cultural pressures outside the state also can restrict people's ability to live as they please. Is that another limit on liberty worth criticizing, or is it a function of voluntary choices?
In the first essay below, Contributing Editor Kerry Howley argues for a wider vision of human liberty, one that acknowledges government is not the only threat to freedom. In a reply, Todd Seavey says fighting for property rights is difficult enough without taking on cultural baggage. In another response, Daniel McCarthy agrees that culture and liberty are linked but suggests that freedom demands a more pluralistic view of acceptable cultures than Howley's vision might allow.
@ https://reason.com/2009/10/20/are-property-rights-enough/
I find your study on India and libertarianism interesting since E. Michael Jones had talk about Indian society and his take seems to line up with yours. He didn't mention libertarianism by name but the way he described the ills of Indian society seems to be the effect of libertarianism gone wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0drM_JEpmE
As for the gun issue, I'm inclined to agree with you even though I've had my fair share of hanging around American conservative circles. I live in Jakarta, Indonesia and gun crimes are practically unheard of (the only exception I can think of was a high profile murder case involving a general, IIRC). It's not like Indonesia's a high trust society like Japan. While you don't have to worry about getting shot (or even violent crimes in general), you do have to worry about pickpockets or people robbing your house while you're away. And while Indonesians are a polite people, we're not completely docile. Street fights still happen, usually among gangs of high school students (it's called "tawuran"). Imagine if these kids have guns, lol.
The only explanation for this is that only military/police really own guns, and gun ownership for civilians is fairly difficult from what I can tell.
This is a really interesting comment! Part of what I love about having a blog is hearing from people across the world what things are like in places I've never had the chance to go.
> Street fights still happen, usually among gangs of high school students (it's called "tawuran"). Imagine if these kids have guns, lol.
This is only possible because there are no guns around, and I think it's a further argument for better gun control, although I realize that I look crazy when I try to make it. I probably have a rather unusual attitude towards fist fights from a modern standpoint - I think that physical risk and aggression is much less a problem than most Americans take for granted. Yes, parents and teachers should break up fights when they happen, but just brush yourselves off afterwards and forget about it, no need for lawsuits or criminal proceedings. I remember being a teenager and getting scrapes, bruises, and the occasional black eye, and I think it made me a *much* more well-rounded person, with more resilience in the face of life's inevitable dangers than, say, just about any American Millennial or member of Gen Z.
I think the key problem with this argument, is that libertarianism has declined as a principle influencing government policy, given that government has increased in size and power continuously. That's a point you admit in the article, when you state that democracy has led to outcomes contrary to libertarian preference.
So if the actual conditions in our society are less libertarian at the same time that society and culture seems to be deteriorating, why is libertarianism seemingly taking the blame here?
I don't speak for AP, but I must disagree with the idea that American society's less libertarian. I would say it's more libertarian, but not in ways the libertarians want. As I said in the comments section of another Substack...
The ironic thing about libertarians is how they believe their ideology is being overlooked and yet libertarianism is the hidden grammar of American politics. We have 'em on both sides of the political aisle, the Republicans (fiscal libertarianism) and the Democrats (social libertarianism). For all the talk the GOP has about preserving our Christian culture and for all the talk the Dems have about the helping the worker, the downtrodden, when it comes down to it the Republicans will always prioritize lower taxes and helping big corporations while the Democrats will always prioritize promoting sexual degeneracy and drugs.
There's a difference between rhetoric and policy. Policy is what matters. Has the rhetoric of Republicans matched policy? No, it hasn't. Government spending has only increased, and the funding for that spending has simply supplemented the (truly absurd) gauntlet of of income, sales, and property taxes with inflation, which is functionally (and purposefully) a tax in a society where the money supply is controlled by the state.
The only way government policy is "libertarian" is by selectively redefining the word, frequently in opposite directions as the situation requires, whenever government policy doesn't achieve it's stated goals.
Partly we have a different perspective on the meaning of libertarianism; you seem particularly concerned about its fiscal aspects, while I'm interested in libertarianism broadly. Seen in broad terms, America is libertarian, with a degree of personal freedom not experienced in most advanced nations. This can be seen most strikingly in its treatment of firearms and immigration, which are much more carefully regulated across most similar countries.
But even if we were to really focus on economic issues, I can only agree that government spending has risen in contradiction to libertarian principle. I don't agree that America is somehow authoritarian, or even unlibertarian, in comparison to other wealthy nations. Notice that...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_budget
...government spending is generally higher as overall wealth increases, but America's governmental spending is less than most economic powerhouses. Check the list and you'll find the United States' government spending is closest to impoverished countries like Bangladesh, Equatorial Guinea, Malawi, and Cameroon.
So no, it really doesn't look like the United States even has an unlibertarian spending profile. All the information I've got points to a pretty obvious conclusion that America is a country heavily influenced by libertarian ideology.
I see US at ~31% of GDP which isnt far below Sweden and Germany. But this data is also the national government only. I would venture to guess that the govt spending of local and state governments in the US is much higher than the equivalent structures in the European countries, since public schools are funded locally in the US.
And even besides that... 31% of GDP is completely insane.
The failure to take culture seriously, and so to think about it seriously, has led to many ills, including dysfunctional migration policy and the disastrous hubris in Afghanistan. The breakthrough moment for me was reading Kenneth Pollack’s PhD dissertation years ago.
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11219
More recently, he published Armies of Sand, which is a great read.
I'll see if I can find that. My own realization that culture was a thing was more gradual, but it really came into the foreground when I discovered Geert Hofstede's work. Hofstede was never the greatest social scientist, but he at least made an effort to measure culture numerically, and his findings were interesting:
https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison-tool?countries=australia%2Cisrael%2Crussia
I still run into Hofstede's Culture's Consequences in university libraries.
Interesting essay (just came across it late via Substack Reads). Might I suggest another rhetorical question to follow on from your penultimate one "....do I truly have no responsibility to the culture that provides not only economic opportunities, but meaning, to my entire life?".....Is the truth perhaps that people do not really value Freedom anything like as much as Libertarians imagine they do.....they just want a little bit more of it than North Korea offers?
I think “freedom for me, but not for thee” is very popular.
So you had something to say after all!
You may be confusing Caperu_Wesperizzon with me? I don't think he appeared in this discussion before.
I can at least reply to your suggestion by saying that people would probably be better off if they didn't even worry about slicing things up in terms of freedom and unfreedom so often. In other words yes, you can say North Korea is bad because half the people would leave but they don't have the freedom to, but they wouldn't *want* to leave if it were run with sensitivity and integrity. I think those who would leave North Korea if they could, would rather see it improve so they could stay and be happy.
You're confusing me here! My reply WAS to Caperu Wesperrizon's "freedom for me but not for thee".
The main point of my comment is that the assumption that everyone values freedom (top of their value system) is perhaps the greatest confusion in our Western democratic politics. SOME people value freedom above all else but most people want rules, boundaries....and leaders. (I have written on these themes on my own 'stack if you are interested.)
It sounds to me as though your gripe is more with libertinism than libertarianism...that is, if you are willing to allow a distinction, and I will grant you that, in practice, the two are more than just highly correlated: they seem to be deeply intertwined, at least/especially here in America.
I'll allow that distinction, definitely! But on reflection, I'm not sure libertinism is really the problem in nearly the same way that sincere and ethically-minded libertarianism is. Antireligious attitudes, drug use, and prostitution aren't tearing the fabric of America apart - and even if they were, they aren't what I was complaining about. I didn't even mention the decline of religion, the rise in venereal disease, or adolescent exposure to pornography, and I *couldn't* have mentioned teen pregnancies even if I'd wanted to, since those are down.
Hedonists lacking Honesty-Humility are a headache and a half, but they're nothing new. It's the very sincere movement of idealistic and even Puritanical leftists who've sent America down the drain, while all the principled libertarians gathered along the sidelines, gaping in feckless horror.
The example in recent months of a Canadian youtuber family, the Feenstra, who for religious reasons moved to Russia, because of teh gays, and discovered what a bureaucratic nightmare Russia is (they were seriously interrogated for having that-much-money in the bank account even though they said well we sold our farm in Canada.. to move here... proof? we can't speak Russian and we hate gays..….not good enough) .Some think the Soviet union was bureaucratic, because communism, but really it is part of the Russian soul, i.e. complete lack of individual agency, everything is argued through the medium of the law and legislation that is Russkyi mir.
And teenagers elsewhere still complain about the structure of their lives... if they have lived anywhere else the privilege and space to become a libertarian, or anarchist in my case, it was the 80s, would have been but a dream. Admittedly libertarians would not make a good meat wave, but insurrections for the man are another thing it seems. Anarchists would do neither.
Basically Russia is one big imperial HOA.
Hilarious! I've never heard of the Feenstra, and feel a bit bad for laughing at them - the Feenstra see the world in a very different way from the way that I do, but they're at least following through on their beliefs. Most Christian right-wingers just kick dirt clods and complain fecklessly about Donald Trump being disrespectful of the Bible and commies taking over the country.
I've noticed that people in most political movements experience this strong pull to enter a social bubble, simplify everything in their minds, stop seeing gradations and middle ground, and reason in extremely simplistic ways. These people had the courage to actually follow through: "We hate homosexuals. Russia hates homosexuals. We love Russia. Russia is good! Russia will welcome us!" No surprise Russia responded like Jerry Seinfeld when he first met Kesha https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX3_L8z2uw4&pp=ygUSamVycnkgc2VpbmZlbGQgaHVn
I've been meaning to add for weeks now. Finally I am an actually fan of the man.
Sorry, what's that? You now like Jerry Seinfeld?
no no, I am a FAN now
You say culture matters, therefore libertarians are wrong. I say that human capacity to wage war matters, therefore libertarians are wrong. It means the same thing. The latter is just a more drastic way of expressing it.
...That's not what I'm really trying to say. I think:
* Libertariansm, like utilitarianism, has an arbitrary foundation. Arbitrary claims are not likely to be correct.
* Certain outcomes of libertarianism are dysfunctional. (Granted, these outcomes may not be inevitable; a libertarianism that didn't specifically focus on firearm freedom probably wouldn't have resulted in a culture of spree killings.)
* Libertarianism tends to go along with a blind spot for culture because it sees individuals as disconnected. This blind spot rendered American libertarians helpless to stop their opponents from seizing control over their country.
> I say that human capacity to wage war matters, therefore libertarians are wrong.
Really? America is probably the most libertarian country on the Earth, and it's also one of the most militaristic. If libertarianism in America became as powerful and as sick as the idealistic left has become, I could definitely see libertarians starting to attack the postal service, the roads, the police, and the military. But generally speaking, if there's any institution libertarians agree should exist, it's the military.
Yes. And I would just say that war is the foundation of arbitrary human culture. People use their warring capacity to get their way, whatever they are feeling. And often they decide to make war for non-libertarian causes, like the right to eat. Like you say, human psychology is not libertarian to its nature, so people can easily get the idea to use collective violence for another cause. And I think that acknowledging that is just a harder way to say "humans are cultural beings".
>>Really? America is probably the most libertarian country on the Earth, and it's also one of the most militaristic.
Libertarians fail to acknowledge that people will kill for whatever cause they feel is justified and they will do so jointly. Cynics see that the welfare state is not there because it IS RIGHT, but because starving people will sooner or later inevitably get the idea that it is right and cause a lot of trouble.
I think you're confusing libertarianism with opposition to the safety net. The former is broad and general, arising from foundational philosophical claims, while the latter is a single issue that has little to do with the broad libertarian programme. Indeed, libertarianism in general is *friendly* to financial transfers to the poor, so long as these transfers are simple, minimize bureaucracy, and maintain personal agency:
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=13519&context=journal_articles
many of the most outspoken supporters of a universal basic income have been self-described libertarians—even though libertarians are generally considered to be antagonistic toward redistribution and a universal basic income is, at its core, a program of income redistribution... a basic safety net is not only consistent with, but likely required by, several (though not all) strands of libertarian thought.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-41001-7_25
libertarian principles can support universal, unconditional cash transfers in the form of a Basic Income... [S]uch transfers further individual autonomy by recognizing that all individuals—including the poor—are usually better judges of their own needs than the government. Second, decoupling redistributive transfers from work requirements acknowledges the inability of the government accurately to distinguish the ‘deserving’ from the ‘undeserving’ in a principled way.
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/-in-our-hands_105549266790.pdf
America’s population is wealthier than any in history. Every year, the American government redistributes more than a trillion dollars of that wealth to provide for retirement, health care, and the alleviation of poverty. We still have millions of people without comfortable retirements, without adequate health care, and living in poverty. Only a government can spend so much money so ineffectually. The solution is to give the money to the people.
_______________________
It will probably help if you understand that the Rationalist movement is 1/3 Utilitarianism, 1/3 Libertarianism, 1/6 HBD, and 1/6 Bay Area Nerdi--I mean Bay Area Coolness. But you aren't from the San Fransisco Bay Area, and you don't seem to be a Utilitarian, so when you use the word "rational," no surprise that it carries a strong flavor of "libertarian." Of the complaints you raise about Swedish culture in your blog, 90% are that it isn't libertarian enough. This may be part of the reason you and I get along.
Yes. I'm living in the past. Libertarians a hundred years ago did not propose a universal basic income. Eating was considered more of a privilege than a right then (if nothing else, that is obvious from George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London).
Even libertarians 20 years ago mostly denied or ignored any need for distribution. At least those I heard. But you are right, the times have changed.
Did you have any thoughts about the last paragraph, though?
This one?
>>Of the complaints you raise about Swedish culture in your blog, 90% are that it isn't libertarian enough. This may be part of the reason you and I get along.
I admit it. I'm a closet libertarian. And just like you, I recognize that most other people are not libertarian, so preaching libertarianism is most often of little value, as things are.
Let me think about this.
If Ayn Rand had focused on "bureaucracy" per se rather than a form or intrumentalisation of it in the Soviet Union as inherited totalitarianism from Russian Imperialism, her Obejctivisim would have been a whole lot better (even if this suggested focus on bureaucracy is just another possible animism / agency blindspot in some cases) . The Rand mistep is an example of the blind spot for culture. (my worlding / worldbuilding re-working of the extended phenotype). And the way we mistake outcomes for causes.
Tove really hates bureaucracy, too. (For example, https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/everybody-wants-a-piece-of-marc-andreessen .) I used to loathe bureaucracy because I used to be a libertarian, but now I wonder about it.
If bureaucracy were really so bad, why would things like universal health care seem to work so well? My conservative relatives always insisted it would fail utterly, but looking around, both Sweden's and Australia's health care systems seem well regarded. Aren't they huge bureaucracies? (That's how they look from a libertarian American perspective!)
Your average universal healthcare system is less bureaucratic then the American healthcare system (which is basically quasi universal but with many many bureaucracies falling over each other).
Yeah that's my sense of it, though I'm not sure how exactly it came to this - maybe the market kept trying to fill gaps and over time it started to look a bit like a bureaucratic dungeon? (Or a Dungeons & Dragons rulebook)
If health insurance had remained entirely private and largely unregulated it’s possible it would be less bureaucratic then universal healthcare, but that would mean that many people would be shut out if the health insurance market (because they are bad risks at any premium level they could realistically afford).
Once you decide that coverage is going to be universal government regulation of some kind is inevitable because the government is paying.
Most universal health systems were designed on purpose after ww2, with varying degrees of success but at least universal coverage was intentional in the design from the start.
America never got universal health insurance. Employer group health insurance was the backbone with Medicare and Medicaid getting added in 1965 since employer based didn’t cover those not working. Obamacare and other programs got added on too much later. So it’s a patchwork Frankenstein of systems and payers that got added as you went without any kind of central design. I call this “backdoor universal” because pretty much everyone can be covered if they want to by one of these programs but they all step on each others toes and it’s a mess.
This isn’t prescriptive, I don’t see any good ways to reform the American healthcare system. It is what it is at this point, it would take a war or hyper inflation to make a significant difference.
*note: universal coverage doesn’t have to be government run. Switzerland has universal coverage with private insurance companies competing. And having a government insurance program doesn’t mean private insurance has to be outlawed, even though some systems have done that.
having help run a small co-op or business or two, I see how bureaucracies protect peeps doing the work in dealing on the spot with the general public, unfortunately when established it can becomes a racket, and suddenly one has to hire a consultant to deal with the bureaucracy (lawyers would be the first example of this guild)(in Tasmania we now have local planning consultants like one might hire an drainage engineer to design drains, only to deal with local council even for things like getting a tree cut down). Narcissists are a major pathway for good process to be turned into bureaucratic nightmares. They are attracted to concierge roles. And uniforms.
In Australia medicare insurance is paid for by a hypothecated and medicare named extra levy which is cheap to raise as it is automatically added to your income tax lodgement (we only have commonwealth/federal income taxes -- a result of WW2). Problems arise in spending it as the states pay for public hospitals, and the medicare raised levy/insurance pays for local doctors and specialists & drugs (this is what is so good about the system as most healthcare is about that sort of thing) but, see, there is this cost-shifting baloney where if you go for stitches because you cut yourself to emergency then the state pays for it, but if you went to a local general practitioner(GP) clinic then medicare does. This is causing problems as larger GP clinics in some areas are closing (they used to be like mum&dad practices) which means more peeps are going to emergency which is affecting the hospitals abilities to do stuff, plus the general lack of qualified staff across the anglophone world such that we a poaching across all specialties and nurses... which is partly the result of guild decisions of the AMA (doctors' union but they don't call it that) a generation ago in each speciality to restrict the number of, say, hematologists or gynacologists by having the pass mark at 99.9% on the guild entry exam. Given Aus growing population this is insane. as it takes so long to train them. Friends of mine who studied medicine 25 years ago, said back then you needed a wife to look after all your physical needs while you study (to become a gyno), and another wife to earn the money for all three to eat and be housed and stuff. She never became a gynecologist. Such production numbers should not be decided by a doctors' club/union/guild.
You'd be about 30yo by then, with maybe 20 years of useful life ahead of you if you keep up with the science and tech, if you do not have kids. Friends of mine who are oncologists have nannies. This is looked down upon in Australi.
What I do not understand about the American system is how good the tech in medicine is and how bad the general outcome of health care is in the States-- given how much money by way of employer back insurance goes into the system, and the price gauging you put up with... isn't a free market suppose to lead to efficient allocation of resources -- looks like a racket to me
libertarian thought that gives no heed to economic externalities and the costs of monopoly powers and attendant price-fixing is all a part of the blindness....
it's interesting that some of the "libertarian" tech bros do not believe in the stockmarket (like anarcho-capitalists do) they just believe in personally owning/controlling stuff under their name as brand maybe, much like medieval elites owned the land and everything and everyone and their lives and their labour on the land... markets and liberty are for city slickers not real bros, many libertarians come across to me as robber barons, crying foul about gubermint until they can become King and President for life.
There's so much here... and I understand 95% of it!
> unfortunately when established it can becomes a racket,
Yeah, this is the general criticism of bureaucracy, that (if we take the perspective of Carrol Quigley) bureaucracy very rapidly devolves from an instrument into an institution. Seen another way, Natural Selection acts on Burger King, Walmart, and the local shoe store, but it doesn't act on any bureaucracy. I'm no longer so sure that this is the case, but I've never seen any evidence to the contrary.
> What I do not understand about the American system is how good the tech in medicine is and how bad the general outcome of health care is in the States... looks like a racket to me
Everything you wrote about the Australian system is news to me, and I'm not really sure what to make of it. But I can say that the American system is a surprisingly complex bureaucracy supported by insurance and buffered from market incentives. For instance, drug prices skyrocket for the simple reason that they can:
https://time.com/5564547/drug-prices-medicine/
From 2007 to 2016, Mylan raised the list price of its EpiPen about 500%, from just under $100 to more than $600. From 2002 to 2013, insulin prices more than tripled. From 2012 to 2019, the average price of AbbVie’s rheumatoid-arthritis drug Humira climbed from $19,000 a year to $60,000 a year—and that’s after rebates. These are dramatic examples of a systemwide problem: prices for brand-name drugs are rising at a rate that far outstrips inflation.
What’s behind these rapid price hikes? It’s a simple question with a complicated answer that involves three central entities: drug manufacturers, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and insurers. Together, they create a complicated supply chain that helps drive drug prices aggressively upward. “We have a system that is all engine and no brake...”
> libertarian thought that gives no heed to economic externalities and the costs of monopoly powers and attendant price-fixing is all a part of the blindness....
In libertarianland, externalities are minimal; in reality, they seem enormous. I don't much care about economic issues when it comes down to it, but whatever, start with economics: Having a 1. thriving economy depends on 2. people with 3. a culture, living in 4. an environment. Externalities don't just exist in #1 the way libertarians wish, or the realm of #4, the way antilibertarian Greens insist; they also exist for #1 and #2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
USA doesn’t lead in either firearm deaths (all categories) nor murder rates (all causes) if Detroit, Chicago and Washington DC are excluded from the dataset. It drops to 168th out of 173. Those 3 Dem cities with very strict gun control regulations are combined worth about 160 ranks (loose stats there).
The point is that the USA is so large, so populous and so diverse demographically and culturally, that treating it as a single entity statistically has low validity.
It would be interesting to see him cite a source for his claim so we could see how much of America's firearm death rate were attenuated by excluding those cities, but given that their population sizes aren't very large, I think chances are pretty low that it would bring the US in line with other countries.
I read it this week in another substack, which I cannot immediately locate. However World Population Review has stats for 2019 which rank USA 2nd in absolute number and 22nd in rate of the 193 (of 204) countries with data for that year.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-deaths-by-country
I'll follow up when I find the substack.
I was really trying to focus on guns, not murder. I started that section with the headline "Gun violence is remaking America's classrooms." Maybe I could have inserted even more phrases like "firearm-related" or "gun-related" or "caused by guns," to stress that I wasn't trying to discuss murder in the broadest sense, but it was already starting to feel as though I was hammering that home much more than I needed to.