@p @Phil Liechtenstein’s full population is 40K and it’s a tax haven. If you think Norway is a special case… I guess by most standards it’d be villages that in practice have the right to secede. I don’t think Liechtenstein can serve as a persuasive governance model for anywhere else.
Good point that the UK has its own nukes.
Whether Finns are grateful or not for the nuke umbrella, free-riding off it doesn’t explain their success.
Finns are not cattle.
@Phil And yet by pretty much every measure of well-being they do better, cost of living measures don't incorporate education quality or health care expense volatility.
The US gloats about its high "real GDP per capita" but it apparently buys nothing good with it. Much of it just covers tolls people elsewhere don't have to pay.
@Phil Anyway, I can tell you what country I want the US to be more like, in governance and outcomes. To put aside oil wealth quibbles, I'll say Finland. What's yours? Don't say Argentina, that wheel is still in spin.
@Phil I hope we won't, but if we do, I promise I won't gloat and say I told you so. We'll have to work hand-in hand to, um, build back better.
@Phil You my friend are completely snowed and completely brainwashed.
Which countries provide the highest quality of life, including material prosperity, to the broadest group of people? The Nordics, by a long mile. Small government is not the key. Argentina has been a basket case for decades, and I don't know what the result of its current experiments will be, but whatever happens the mechanism will not be "small government universally good".
@Phil I wish you had examples of a stable, actually existing, actually prospering state that proves your point. What country in the world do you want the United States to become more like. Obviously not Argentina. It's going through changes, it's not a stable thing. Is there anywhere that approximates what you want?
@Phil The US has been destroyed from within by the neoliberal experiment that began in the 1970s and 1980s, and has worked to paralyze governance for the narrow and short-sighted interests of people, who like you, perceive burdens but deny benefits. 1/
@Phil The US will have to recover the capacity to actively govern and superintend its economy to become a hopeful outlier again. That will require investment in a capable state. Your path will bring "strength" to government only in policing, in crushing internal dissent. That is the worst kind of state. You will find that you, and your business, don't like it either. /fin
@Phil people traveled from Europe to America before the 20th Century, so it's bullshit for easy marks that airplanes matter.
my friend, if you are unlucky your theories will be tested. for your sake as much of mind, i'll try to limit the likelihood, though. for my kid's sake, i'll look for alternatives elsewhere.
from #AndreaLongChu https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/pamela-paul-goodbye-to-the-new-york-times-opinion-columnist.html ht @ryanlcooper
Text: I think of it as the far center: a loose coalition of disillusioned Democrats, principled humanists, staid centrists, anti-woke journalists, civil libertarians, wronged entertainers, skeptical academics, and toothless novelists, all brought together by their shared antipathy to what they regard as the illiberal left. The far center is for free speech and bourgeois institutions; it is against cancel culture, student protests, and radicalism of any kind. Yet it rejects the idea of a shared ideology or politics. Instead, its members see themselves as independently sane individuals — concerned citizens who wish only to defend civil society from the unbearable encroachments of politics. So the far center is liberal, in that its highest value is freedom; but it is also reactionary, in that its vision of freedom lacks any corresponding vision of justice. It can be difficult to tell the far center from regular old conservatism.
@Phil if that were the case, you'd think there would be these brilliant outliers that have shaken off the parasite. But in fact they don't exist. The closest you can come is states like Singapore, which seem to have a low government share of GDP, but instead of taxes they require forced "private" savings in a central provident fund, from which you purchase health and housing services on a sliding scale. They synthesize what in most places is public as a compulsory notional private.
@Phil Government is absolutely investment. It's not always the most romantic investment. Maintaining the pipes and sewers in your business establishment may not be exciting, but it's necessary and it's absolutely investment. So it is with government. If the government didn't have its take, you'd have zero employees, no roads, no court, no common currency, and widespread banditry. You are getting a bargain, even with the not-so-great quality f government we currently have.
@Phil "Productivity" depends on people with purchasing power paying for stuff. When people were no longer necessary on farms, sure, now richer farmers were willing to pay more for new things, but they were a small fraction of those made poor. Factories could produce tons of new things, but who would buy them? Factory workers, said Ford. But those were never enough, and now they are robots too. Without a state purchasing broadly, sure we can produce a lot, but we have few buyers. 1/
@Phil Why do no states of the kind you say you want actually exist in the world? Why is the correlation between prosperity and govt share of GDP, both in a formal GDP sense but also in an informal, is this a prosperous place sense, so resolutely and obviously positive among developed countries? https://peterlevine.ws/?p=23198 2/
@Phil i am sorry for whatever experience you are living. i have friends who've had shitty (state) government jobs that have turned them resolutely MAGA-ish. but individual workplace experiences don't overwhelm the aggregate experience of the 20th C (only government can ensure full employment), and the contemporary experience, size-of-state tends to correlated positively with prosperity. 3/
@Phil @Phil there is lots of important work that should be done to improve the quality of government! obviously, if quality of expenditure is shitty enough, whatever forces drive the correlation of prosperity with government would break down. i'm first to agree that US governance is particularly pathological and incompetent. just read @Alon. 4/
@Phil I am glad that you at least admit you are destroying what exists on the basis of what ultimately is an optimistic faith about what would happen if we just shook the etch-a-sketch.
It would however be a catastrophe if people for whom hope and such faith were their only plan took control of government.
Oh, wait. Fuck.
@Phil The Federal debt is not money borrowed from future generations, any more than GMs debt is. It's the capital structure of the government and the base of private sector financial assets. That doesn't mean we shouldn't worry about it -- the main problem with the Federal debt is it compels the government to make current payments to disproportionately already rich people. 1/
@Phil I wonder what contemporary countries you do not consider shitholes spend substantially less on government than the US. It's a very different world than 1900, everywhere. In 1900, most people still subsisted on land near where they lived. Under contemporary agriculture practices, most of us would starve absent some other basis for a claim to that food. 2/
@Phil The "higher productivity jobs" that came later did not arrive in sufficient numbers purely spontaneously. Absent the broadening of purchasing power created by the Federal government pursuing public goods more expansively and direct redistributions of purchasing power like Social Security, much of the country would have starved, begged, or been wards of private charity. If you want 19th C govt, you need 19th C labor intensive agricultue. /fin
@Phil you don't like population as baseline, even though population is what the government serves. you think share of workforce should have collapsed even faster than it did, though it collapsed at an extraordinary rate during the 1970s, because of women's entry into the workforce.
it feels like like maybe these are arguments looking to justify a present conclusion, rather than a conclusion base on intelligible arguments.
@Phil I am fine with state and local governments. But if my native Maryland were an independent country, it's be a small, weak, powerless country and I'd sure hope it was in some kind of union that could protect and pursue its interests. (If my current Florida were becoming an independent country, I'd be a refugee somewhere else before trusting its current government.)
@Phil I do wish local governments had the same kind of power against state governments that US state governments have against the Federal government.
@Phil This graph is all the years FRED has. I didn't cherry pick anything. Here's Federal employment to labor force. Also no editing of dates, just what FRED has.
Graph of Federal employment to civilian labor force. Just over 3% in 1948, rises to 4% in the early 1950s, well below 2% now.
@Phil I can't imagine a statement more obviously and foolishly wrong than this one.
I hope you don't get proven wrong and can continue to enjoy these luxury resentments, because I don't want to have to live in the reality that disproves you.
@Phil I'd love to see the methodology behind these "stats" that enrage you. Of course there are cases of Federal workers hitting porn sites. You'll find cases of any class of desktop workers hitting porn sites, unless employer surveillance is known to be very strict and punishment known to be severe.
You are succumbing to pure propaganda that reinforces your prejudices. I'm sure all those postal workers are masturbating to their phones while walking to your doorstep with your mail.
Graph of Federal employees to population, plummeting from 1.6% in 1952 to less than 0.9% now.