perhaps laura loomer is an antibody, an apparatus to which a threat is drawn, rendering it visible and visibly noxious to the larger system.
“the right to interstate travel is a lot like the right to abortion once was: a core freedom that is grounded in our Constitution but does not appear in the text of the document” @andyreports and Lisa Needham https://www.publicnotice.co/p/texas-medical-records-abortion ht @memeorandum
“social housing development can impose competitive discipline on private rivals. As a public option in the housing market, it can rein in the pricing power of private landlords and pressure them to raise standards of habitability for poor, working, and middle-class families.” #BrianCallaci #SandeepVaheesan https://hbr.org/2024/09/the-market-alone-cant-fix-the-u-s-housing-crisis ht @jwmason
This (apocryphal) practice that has overtaken the national debate, I think I have a name for it — fidophagia.
@akkartik Yes. Certainly. Saying that a state's formal fiscal footprint tends to correlate with social democracy in some sense doesn't say anything about the character of a government that might, for example, persecute minorities or worse even as it implements a comfy herenvolk Keynesianism. States are not inherently good. They are inherently powerful. So capable of great good, and also great evil, and usually both.
@akkartik Not perhaps the strongest endorsement of my (duly chastened!) argument.
It does sound like "intention" maps to the laws the somewhat accountable central state formally enacts, but that a pretty complete lack of accountability of those charged to execute those intentions undo them?
@akkartik @billseitz Good point! My thinking was definitely eurocentric. The short answer is I don't know. When the Indian state overtly distributes on-balance-sheet state resources, do you think its distributions are narrower than private-sector outcomes? 1/
@akkartik @billseitz I suspect not overtly, but I think I make an assumption that may not hold in India, that programs enacted by the central state are more or less executed as intended, no doubt with some degree of leakage due to corruption by those performing the execution or in more local governments to which programs are delegated, but that such leakage would be modest. 2/
@akkartik @billseitz I think (but could be wrong, would be grateful to be corrected) that the argument largely holds at the level of central government enactment, but that corruption at levels of execution or delegation might undo it in India's case. 3/
@akkartik @billseitz I worry that my knowledge here is so casual it may only be stereotype, though. Do let me know if that's the case. I do know that the Indian central state has had some extraordinary successes too (my fintech friends have raved about the Unified Payments Interface). /fin
@billseitz @akkartik just for the record, i don’t support debt-financed purchase of equities into a SWF by the state. it was Cowen’s thought experiment, and in an earlier draft i had an caveat explanation paragraph, but i thought it diluted the main idea of the piece. i would support equity or investment more broadly purchases by a progressive-tax financed SWF. but not by debt or money issuance, except under very particular circumstances.
@billseitz @akkartik (i've added back my caveat paragraphs as an appendix-style update to the post, fwiw. thanks both of you for all the feedback!)
@billseitz @akkartik a couple of things: i think even quite imperfectly democratic states are structurally more progressive when they have resources to distribute than private sector market institutions, but not because private sector market institutions are “more corrupt”. 1/
@billseitz @akkartik on the contrary, rich-get-richer outcomes are market institutions working as advertised. each participant is fully invited to pursue her self-interest, and more resources brings more capacity to pursue ones self-interest effectively. 2/
@billseitz @akkartik state-mediated distributional institutions are always “corrupt”, to some greater or lesser degree, but they can only be that way because they have a “fair”, often egalitarian, benchmark they can fail to live up to. even failing to live up, they yield far more egalitarian outcomes than market institutions, *when the state is openly, directly doing the distributing*. 3/
@billseitz @akkartik contemporary imperfect democratic states do certainly also undergird very regressive transfers, but those are almost always when it does not have an transparent distributive role. tax breaks rather than open benefits, regulatory loopholes that are obscure, that only beneficiaries really track and understand. (this is the form “capture” usually takes.) 4/
@billseitz @akkartik to a first approximation, among all the countries that count as liberal democracies, the on-balance-sheet fiscal footprint of the state (relative to some measure of size, usually GDP) is a measure of how social democratic the state is. 5/
@billseitz @akkartik that is not independent of corruption of course. there’s a straightforward reason to expect “less corrupt” (it’s always hard to measure) states would have larger fiscal footprints under (even imperfect) democratic institutions. so we see a cluster of less-corrupt, bigger footprint democratic states like the scandinavians. 6/
@billseitz @akkartik we also see a french state with a big fiscal footprint and much less universal benefits distribution, which i think reflects peculiarities of french democracy, and the way certain favored cohorts have unusual leverage for historical and institutional reasons. is that “corruption”? “capture”? 7/
@billseitz @akkartik maybe. the distributions are overtly made to mass constituencies according to law, but the outcomes may seem unfair, eg unusually generous pensions for some, favored job categories. even there, it’s loss less narrow than the same resources would have been distributed if by private market institutions. 8/
@billseitz @akkartik another objection one might raise would be be defense and intelligence expenditures, which are large, overtly allocated, but distributed with extraordinary corruption. but i think this is the exception that proves the rule: the exception occurs in the sector explicitly shielded from even ordinary, flawed procedures for public accountability. 9/
@billseitz @akkartik overall, i think overt state distribution of benefits, in the context of even very imperfect liberal democracies, is a pretty good measure of social democraticness, and a pretty good direction to strive towards. though not blindly, obviously for the relationship to continue to hold, expansions of fiscal footprint must be matched with commensurate institutions of public accountability. 10/
@billseitz @akkartik this usually comes “naturally” in democratic-ish states when resources are openly distributed at scale, but beneath this “natural” is always activists demanding and insisting, and politicians fearful of embarrassment. it’s easy to conceive of failures of, workarounds to, attacks on this “nature”. 11/
@billseitz @akkartik we really can fuck things up. fetishizing and gamifying and measure, including e.g. fiscal expenditure per GDP, is an invitation for Goodhart’s Law to bite. 12/
@billseitz @akkartik nevertheless it’s a good direction, if pursued with care and attention.
for more (really?) see https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5675.html
/fin
[new draft post] Another man's poison https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/09/12/another-mans-poison/index.html
@chrisp I am talking about the contemporary American state, here. Not all states in history. (I’d say it applies to most contemporary “advanced democracies” as well, but not all contemporary states.)
“In this context, Keynes is now irrelevant. ‘It is in determining the volume, not the direction, of actual employment that the existing system has broken down’ he wrote. That might have been true in the 1930s but it is not now. Redirecting labour requires not macroeconomic policy but specific measures targetting these egregious jobs.” #ChrisDillow https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2024/09/beyond-tax-rises.html
so much of contemporary politics is coming up with something sacred they are profaning.
@Snowshadow @SharpHQ Life is a comedy of ‘em. Let’s keep it up!
@Snowshadow @SharpHQ (Sorry to both of you! I just responded to this like it was for me, mistaking my home tab for notifications! I delete the post, but apologize for the intrusion.)
@IzzyChambers Thanks! I’ve run VirtualBox for… something? Probably linux as a guest OS (on MacOS) for something container-ish. I can’t imagine MS would be okay with running Windows without a license on a machine real or virtual, though. If I got good at VirtualBox, at least it’d save me the unpleasantness of Parallels!
@djc That’s an interesting idea! There is an InstallShield, though. I wonder whether they’d allow that.
@phillmv yeah. it’s already been a bit ridiculous. it seemed like it should be a no brainer, just what Azure should be good for. it’s a reminder of how infuriatingly and ruthlessly MS wields intellectual property that something so trivial they are well-placed to provide is such a nightmare. (if you have that youtube link, i’m curious!)
@sidereal i totally agree. i’ve started doing that for simpler returns, and would do it for this one if i had a template to work off of. going through what i’d need to put together, i found stuff that seemed unclear to me, even checking the IRS instructions. i’d end up paying a tax accountant for phone time, or be nervous that i made a poor choice.
@phillmv on AWS i can spawn Windows Server, and connect with it by remote desktop. i do that occasionally. but the tax software demands Windows 10 or Windows 11. (i could try the latest Windows Server and see if it works anyway, but grrr.) 1/
@phillmv Azure support (i’ve talked a bunch to MS customer service people, who strike me as simultaneously nice and helpless) says I should choose a server image without BWOL terms. For the desktop Windows editions, no images include information about licensing terms at all, and all that I’ve tried demand clicking a box that would create legal jeopardy for me (admittedly because I’d be fibbing), and I don’t trust Microsoft not to make me miserable. 2/
@phillmv I’ve not been able to find any Windows desktop OS AMIs on AWS, or my usual (usually linux) virtual cloud server providers. (I haven’t tried GCS, but it seems unlikely and annoying to get into.) I’m pretty sure MS is intentionally trying to force people like me to their expensive Windows365 subscription product.
I won’t feel bad about just taking the free trial under these circumstances. If it works for me! MS is so flaky. But I’ve no plan for next year. /fin