Seamus Heaney and the Cranberries.
:dubious: I hope you realize that is nothing to boast of.
At least we still have Alaska. Plenty of ice floes.
Well, I tried to sell knives for a while in college and even my mother told me to go fuck myself. So it’s a skill.
Doesn’t matter. MLM is the kind of thing you should always be ashamed of, regardless of whether you succeed at the challenge or make a lot of money.
By what definition has New York been run by Democrats for years? The Senate’s only recently been majority blue, and the governor was a Republican from 1994 to 2006. And Democrats hardly ran California when there was a Republican governor and required Republican input on every budget. Similarly, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Michigan are hardly liberal states. But you’ve never let facts get in the way of your rants before, so I’m sure you won’t now.
Evidently if a state votes for a Democrat in a presidential election, it is by definition a liberal state.
Even in that sense California has only been “liberal” since 1992. Before that for many years they were a reliable Republican vote in presidential elections.
In my more optimistic moments, I tell myself this:
There is a core dichotomy in the world today - everywhere you look, knowledge is decentralizing and spreading out. Specialization is increasing. The result is that the importance of lateral networking, free trade, and bottom-up organization is growing rapidly, and the ability of governments to absorb and make efficient use of that information is declining.
In addition, the barriers that prevent people from running away from coercion and fiat are falling. Capital is more fluid than it’s ever been. Population migration is easier than it’s ever been for most people on the planet.
The result of all this is that central planning is becoming increasingly untenable. Coercive taxes are increasingly ineffective because capital can flow away from high tax regimes. Business regulation fails when businesses are virtual and can migrate wherever they please at little cost.
All of this spells the end of big government in the sense of trying to control the direction of the economy, regulate private activity, tax the rich an excessive amount, and impose onerous regulations and mandates on business.
The model of future interaction between people is the internet. The internet has no central planners. The only regulatory agency of any real note is ICANN, and all it controls is the distribution of domain names (and it puts no restrictions or conditions on them). The barriers to entry on the internet are virtually nonexistent. There are no zoning laws, no government web site inspectors, no union regulations forcing companies to hire union web designers. It’s a libertarian world.
On my bad days, I think that government won’t go down easy, and we’ll simply see the rise of international accords and regulatory frameworks that seek to increasingly stop the free flows of goods and people so that government can maintain control. We’ll see more of this: UN Mulls Internet Regulation Options.
There will always be rent-seekers and special interests, and they’ll always find it easier to get government to protect them and force people into their arms than to compete in the free market. And they’ll always have the well-meaning-but-misguided liberals on their side, helping them gain power and money at the point of a gun because they’ve been convinced that the world would be a better place with the rent-seekers in charge.
Oh, I’d say it’s the other way around. It’s easier to plan from a central location, because you have more information and communication is far faster. And, of course, the US doesn’t have anything close to high taxes; they’ve been getting reduced steadily for the last sixty years straight.
You can’t plan unless you have information. Information is becoming increasingly dispersed, and bound up in local knowledge of the participants. It’s increasingly inaccessible to central planners.
For example, a long time ago if you wanted to plan for more chairs, you could simply tell a chair factory to make more. If that factory was self-contained (i.e. it harvested its own wood, made the chairs out of simple tools, finished them in-house, and distributed them), you might be able to do that. Today, a ‘chair factory’ may be be little more than a place where the various parts of the chairs are put in boxes. The chairs themselves may be made out of smaller components produced by 50 factories in a complex supply chain. This is much harder to organize from the top down. Telling the chair factory to make more chairs would then require telling all the suppliers to make more supplies for the chair factory. And each of those factories may have 50 suppliers of its own providing even smaller components. Central management of all that becomes impossible.
But this is a trivial example. We see disaggregation of economic activity and information everywhere. For example, there is an increased fracturing of specialties in academia. Three hundred years ago, you could hope to be a ‘renaissance man’ and know enough about the sum total of human knowledge to be able to work at an expert level in any field you chose. A hundred years ago, you could study engineering and find work as an ‘engineer’. Fifty years ago, you might have to choose between civil, mechanical, or electrical engineering. Today, you might have to specialize as a robotics engineer, or a control-systems engineer, or a process control engineer, or a specialist in certain types of structures or materials. And even then, you’ll probably have to cede some control of your design to computer specialists, materials specialists, regulatory specialists, etc. Fifty years ago, you could get a Ph.D in ‘economics’ and work as an economist. Now, you’ll likely choose between macroeconomics, trade economics, behavioral economics, experimental economics, etc. An economist highly trained in one specialty may not even be able to follow the literature in another branch.
Medicine is the same way. Fewer general practitioners, more highly specialized doctors.
The same is true in our day-to-day jobs. More people are employed doing very specific types of work than are employed doing general labor or general office work.
This specialization has two downsides for central planning and control. The first is that it’s hard for central planners to understand what they’re planning, because there are no renaissance men any more. Even a planning board made up of smart people cannot hope to understand all the nuances of the things they are trying to control.
The other problem for central planners is that specialization is only possible because of increased information bandwidth. Rather than one person or one company knowing everything there is to know, specialists transmit information between them and specialized companies move intermediate goods between them to create final products. This makes the coordination of economic activity much, much harder. And the existence of highly specialized people with local knowledge means much of that information is locked up at the bottom and never makes its way to central planners.
The only way such a system can work well is through a market-based mechanism. Something that allows information to flow laterally between participants and which allows decisions to be made at the same level where the information is. Prices are the information bus of the market - they transmit the information participants need to make decisions, and they constantly fluctuate as trades and negotiations between specialists take place. There is no equivalent mechanism available to central planners.
This has always been the problem with central planning - “The Coordination Problem” is a major topic in economics. Hayek wrote of the inability of central governments to attain and use knowledge fifty years ago. But the problem is growing increasingly worse for central planners. And our economy has gained in efficiency in part because the old economy had a lot of ‘slack’ in it that we’ve designed out. That slack acted as a bit of a buffer that allowed central planners a bit of breathing room to correct their mistakes.
For example, fifty years ago the limitations of transportation and communication meant that we had to warehouse a lot of intermediate goods. That cost us in economic efficiency, but it meant that errors in anticipating supply or demand could be corrected before a plant or a store ran out of materials or goods to sell. Today, ‘just-in-time’ inventory practices are highly efficient, but use of them means that a disruption in a supply chain can cause cascading effects that are very economically destructive.
The product you buy in a store today may have come off an assembly line only days earlier. Fifty years ago, it was probably manufactured weeks, months, or even years earlier. So fifty years ago, a central planning bureau might have been able to make long, complex decisions about production and take its time doing so. And if it got it wrong, it might get back information about shortages or inventory depletion in the supply chain and correct them before they caused shortages at the next level. Today, the economy moves too fast for them to keep up.
You are absolutely wrong. Do you really think a central planner can really gather information from 300 million sources and adequately plan for them? Central planners can plan in large strokes. They cannot micromange the needs and wants of millions of people and it has been a disaster whenever they have tried.
“…and the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan.”
~Ronald Reagan
OTOH, when central planning works it really works. See Japan post-1868.
Actually, what really worked in Japan was privatization and the market.
The Meiji regime was formed while Japan was still largely a feudal state. The first steps it took were the ones really responsible for the explosion of wealth in the economy: It removed feudal restrictions on land, which allowed consolidation and private ownership, which resulted in huge investments being made privately in agriculture. This resulted in efficiencies that released a lot of people to be available as paid labourers, which enabled the growth of the industrial economy.
Japan had also been struggling because of liquidity problems, so the Meiji government created a central bank and established the Yen, which was then backed by gold. This created a stable monetary system.
That created the environment for markets to flourish. The Meiji government then removed trade tariffs and opened the borders to allow Japanese citizens to travel abroad and attend schools. This brought a whole bunch of knowledge back to Japan.
The Meiji government also tried to centrally plan industrialization and modernization, but largely failed at that. It originally used tax money to build factories and infrastructure and other state-owned businesses. But they generally ran at a loss, and were dragging the government down, so all such assets were sold off to private companies.
The government had successes as well - the construction of telegraphs, shipyards, roads, and rail opened up the country and allowed markets to be more distributed and therefore for more specialization to occur. But the main factors in the economic boom of the late 1800’s were that it was a period when Japan ended Feudalism, opened its borders, established a stable currency, and allowed the creation of a large private market economy.
Compare that to the experiences of other Asian countries which attempted to do what Japan did. None of them were remotely as successful, because they all lacked the main ingredients that Japan had - a free market and open borders.
In the second half of the 20th century, a lot of these countries finally saw the light and started opening their borders and loosening the control of the state. State planning bureaus were replaced by markets to some degree in South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. And all of them rapidly began moving towards the first world. Countries that refused to give up state planning and control stayed behind, and remained among the poorest nations in the world.
Social security was based on a specific tax allocated for the program. But we’ll just add it to the 14 trillion dollar debt. Fewer people paying more taxes. Problem solved. And when 30 million illegal aliens get voted into citizenship we’ll just raise taxes to cover their social security. And when health care kicks in we’ll raise taxes again. Lather rinse and repeat.
emphases added
Why shouldn’t you be proud of making money selling something that you can find a thriving market for?
That. I can’t help but smile at the dreams of triumphalism from both ends of the spectrum every time there’s a swing in the trends. And BTW, both sides do quite a bit of goalpost-moving in order to claim it, or to counter that either we’ve gone too far or not far enough.
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The right answer is NOT usually, and not even most of the time, right “in the middle” – but it is hardly ever all-the-way-no-exceptions absolute 100% ideologically pure one side or the other. Sometimes the long-term consensus ends up closer to the “liberal” position (e.g. civil rights, desegregation), sometimes to the “conservative” position.
While both sides do indeed move the goalposts to declare their ideology triumphant, I believe self-described conservatives do so more often. Overall, liberals are more likely to call for change. Change can be good or bad. But the only way calls for change won’t sometimes triumph will be when the world stops changing, and that’s not going to happen until we’re an ice ball.
There are exceptions to this: some people once thought communism a workable system, and many more rejected containment in favor of friendly relations with the USSR (although one of the foremost of these was President Nixon, which underscores the whole point that it’s not simple to define what constitutes a liberal or conservative).
One reason I rarely take part in discussions about the success/failure/degree of liberalism and conservatism is that people are usually too imprecise for any meaningful dialogue. Three people can call themselves ‘conservative’. One is religious; one is a hawk; one is a laissez-faire capitalist. While such people often have common interests (much more during the cold war than now), there’s no guarantee they will. When someone asks me if I’m a liberal or a conservative, I reply, “On what issue?”