If you listen to what reporters who are talking to White House officials say, this is all going nowhere. For one thing they are giving the game away in fundraising emails (and for the record, anyone who actually cares about poor conservatives should be DEEPLY offended they are basically pulling a Nigerian Prince scheme pretending to contest election results when they are actually retiring campaign debt in the small print, and, suffice to say, I've seen some things professionally that make me think Trump's email fundraising is even more shady than that). And it now seems like Trump is itching to take on FOX News head on. I'm not making the same mistake I made in 2016 and rooting for him to win the intra-party fight. The right-wing media sphere is already insanely destructive. One pushed even FURTHER to coo-coo land by Trump would be even worse.
Meanwhile, the countries with the highest happiness and highest quality of life index are pretty much invariably mixed socialist/capitalist economies, like Finland and Denmark.
This has been the rallying call for social welfare spending for my entire life. Unfortunately, happiness is only moderately linked to economics. Things like health, self esteem and identity, family and friends are more important. You can have wealthy and unhappy populations, without a doubt. Recreating an economic model isn't a magic pill for solving the deep issues the U.S has.
The military will not help Trump take power regardless of who is in at the top of it.
The generals will follow orders, but only if they are legal. This is what got Esper fired as Trump wanted to use the military against protestors, Esper went to the generals with the orders and the generals said no.
My biggest concern was the courts and the senate siding with Trump in his attempt to steal the election. It looks like neither are going to help him so he’s gone by the end of the year.
I do hope the courts actually order his team to start the transition however.
Remember that scene in "The Patriot" where Mel Gibson walks into a tavern and says "Long live King George!", and everyone in the tavern throws daggers and stuff at him? That's what this discussion about monarchies reminds me of.
They are rich despite the socialism, not cuz the socialism.
Making an analogy, the impact of wasting half of everything that you make on Casinos when you are a millionaire is different than the impact of wasting half of your money if you are a minimum wage worker. And if you are extremely rich and has a small culturally homogeneous population, you have much more money to waste.
But they adopted welfare state AFTER becoming incredible rich, not before. They would be even richer is they had maintained the capitalism.
The article you link goes something like this:
- up to 1932 = amazing growth
- up to 1950 = some socialism creeping in, so growth slowing
- up to 1976 = massive socialist expansion, leading to
- stagflation in 1970s and 1980s
- economic downturn in early 1990s
- 1992 reforms restore more free market enterprise allowing partial recovery up to 2005, without really tackling structural problems in economy
- article written in 2006 and predicts the artificial boom will come to an end and the Swedish economy will crash once more
Now let's do a sanity check on that picture. All countries have ups and downs in their economy, but this information shows Sweden's relative performance in per capita GDP from 1950 (when the mises article suggests they were at their relative peak) to 2020.
That does suggest a marginal relative decline compared to a handful of the most successful economies, but not at all the major slump you would expect from that article.
Even though I don't think the article gives an objective view of what's happened, I think it is at least possible that Swedish GDP would have gone up by more if they had maintained the lack of regulation there was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, that would certainly also have meant a far more unequal society. As @WarChiefZeke says above economic success is a relatively minor criteria when assessing how happy citizens are likely to feel. I think it's really no surprise that a society where the socio-economic model values it's population (for instance by providing universal health care, education, maternity and retirement benefits) is likely to produce happier people than a society that does not.
2) It will 100% be corrupted and used predominently against "undesirable" economic and ethnic groups.
3) It's evil.
4) No country has 100% employment, it is not possible for everyone to have a job all of the time. The vast majority of people on welfare would work if we could, this is a known and proven fact from multitudes of studies in different countries and places. Anybody who has told you differently has no regard for the truth. The few people that genuinely don't want to work, it is cheaper to simply pay a subsistence wage than to try and force them to do (substandard) work, particularly given any net trying to catch them will inevitably catch and punish many innocent people. Welfare is also a benefit to the economy because a) it keeps temporary unemployment from destroying the economic position of people and b) poor people generally spend all their money, leading to direct recirculation of funds with the economy.
5) It's evil.
6) It would not actually help Brazil to do this in any way, because Brazil's problems do not include overpopulation. Brazil is, as I am sure you are aware, incredibly huge and having 2/3 the population of the United States is an asset, not a liability. Shrinking populations are actually disastrous to countries, which is why countries with naturally shrinking populations make up the difference with immigration.
7) It's effing evil this is the twenty-first century forced sterilisation is actual Nazi shit what the actual hell please stop sounding like a comic book villain.
They are rich despite the socialism, not cuz the socialism.
Making an analogy, the impact of wasting half of everything that you make on Casinos when you are a millionaire is different than the impact of wasting half of your money if you are a minimum wage worker. And if you are extremely rich and has a small culturally homogeneous population, you have much more money to waste.
But they adopted welfare state AFTER becoming incredible rich, not before. They would be even richer is they had maintained the capitalism.
The article you link goes something like this:
- up to 1932 = amazing growth
- up to 1950 = some socialism creeping in, so growth slowing
- up to 1976 = massive socialist expansion, leading to
- stagflation in 1970s and 1980s
- economic downturn in early 1990s
- 1992 reforms restore more free market enterprise allowing partial recovery up to 2005, without really tackling structural problems in economy
- article written in 2006 and predicts the artificial boom will come to an end and the Swedish economy will crash once more
Now let's do a sanity check on that picture. All countries have ups and downs in their economy, but this information shows Sweden's relative performance in per capita GDP from 1950 (when the mises article suggests they were at their relative peak) to 2020.
That does suggest a marginal relative decline compared to a handful of the most successful economies, but not at all the major slump you would expect from that article.
Even though I don't think the article gives an objective view of what's happened, I think it is at least possible that Swedish GDP would have gone up by more if they had maintained the lack of regulation there was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, that would certainly also have meant a far more unequal society. As @WarChiefZeke says above economic success is a relatively minor criteria when assessing how happy citizens are likely to feel. I think it's really no surprise that a society where the socio-economic model values it's population (for instance by providing universal health care, education, maternity and retirement benefits) is likely to produce happier people than a society that does not.
Socialism takes time to ruin the country. The socialism started to ruin this countries some time AFTER 1950.
And note that USA is no longer the richest country in GDP per capita like was in 1950. This of course, according to your own sources... Argentina was above Norway and Germany in 1950. Then Peronism ruined the country... Venezuela appears ABOVE Canada in 1950.
Both countries had far more socialist policies than any Scandinavian country and hence, failed hardly.
Venezuela was the 4th most developed country in the world in GDP per capita and now, not even Haitians wanna life there.
@SorcererV1ct0r I still don't understand why you think we need monarchies today, in the 21st century. Even if I accepted your argument that all of the monarchies of the past were better than democracy (and I don't accept this argument, by the way), please explain to me why we need monarchies today.
You only need to look at some of the members of the House of Lords to see that having an ancestor that was very good at waving a sword around or who happened to discover coal does not necessarily make great ruling material.
I still don't understand why you think we need monarchies today, in the 21st century. Even if I accepted your argument that all of the monarchies of the past were better than democracy (and I don't accept this argument, by the way), please explain to me why we need monarchies today.
Hans Hermann Hoppe said in the book Democracy: The God That Failed that historically monarchists had way more prosperity, stability and granted far more propriety rights of the general population.
Imagine an farm. If you own the farm, you wanna the farm to prosper and to give the lands to your heirs. If you are only in the farm for few years as a "temporary owner", you don't care about the farm future, you wanna take more and focus only on short therm. Democracies also are very prone to legal bribing aka lobbing, short therm focus, mass manipulation and the state expanded far more during a democracy.
One metric to see how a State is tyrannical is how much he wanna to disarm the population. For eg, North Korea establishes death penalty for illegally owning an firearm. USA has some gun legislation but not that harsh cuz it is not tyrannical as North Korea. On ancient China, peasants could own repeating crossbows with poisoned bolts. An really nasty weapon. In modern China, they are disarmed. People also could "vote with their feet", when the laws was extremely decentralized, which is the best form of ""democracy"", since people tend to vote for socialism and then ran away to live under capitalism[note]. Kings are also prepared since the childhood to be kings. They receive the best education possible.
In other words, monarchy is like a private ownership of the government. Democracy is susceptible to the Tragedy of the commons.
Note : - You can see it on USA, when people vote for a big semi socialist government on California and then, start to leave to Texas and other "red" states. You can see it when Venezuelans voted for socialism, ruined the 4th most prosperous country in the world and now prefer to ilegally live in French Guiana, or when Bolivians mass migrate to Chile to vote for Barchelet and new constituition. Mexicas fleeing to USA. There are a lot of times where people vote for the left but then do everything that they can to not live under the government of the left.
You only need to look at some of the members of the House of Lords to see that having an ancestor that was very good at waving a sword around or who happened to discover coal does not necessarily make great ruling material.
Plus, how would monarchies even function today for countries like Australia and the United States? Should they go back to being colonies of the British Empire? Or should USA have it's own king? If the argument is that Donald Trump should be the King of the United States, not metaphorically, but literally, then I can't continue to be part of this conversation. Everyone has their own limit to what they're willing to seriously discuss, this would be mine.
I still don't understand why you think we need monarchies today, in the 21st century. Even if I accepted your argument that all of the monarchies of the past were better than democracy (and I don't accept this argument, by the way), please explain to me why we need monarchies today.
Hans Hermann Hoppe said in the book Democracy: The God That Failed that historically monarchists had way more prosperity, stability and granted far more propriety rights of the general population.
Imagine an farm. If you own the farm, you wanna the farm to prosper and to give the lands to your heirs. If you are only in the farm for few years as a "temporary owner", you don't care about the farm future, you wanna take more and focus only on short therm. Democracies also are very prone to legal bribing aka lobbing, short therm focus, mass manipulation and the state expanded far more during a democracy.
One metric to see how a State is tyrannical is how much he wanna to disarm the population. For eg, North Korea establishes death penalty for illegally owning an firearm. USA has some gun legislation but not that harsh cuz it is not tyrannical as North Korea. On ancient China, peasants could own repeating crossbows with poisoned bolts. An really nasty weapon. In modern China, they are disarmed. People also could "vote with their feet", when the laws was extremely decentralized, which is the best form of ""democracy"", since people tend to vote for socialism and then ran away to live under capitalism[note]. Kings are also prepared since the childhood to be kings. They receive the best education possible.
In other words, monarchy is like a private ownership of the government. Democracy is susceptible to the Tragedy of the commons.
Note : - You can see it on USA, when people vote for a big semi socialist government on California and then, start to leave to Texas and other "red" states. You can see it when Venezuelans voted for socialism, ruined the 4th most prosperous country in the world and now prefer to ilegally live in French Guiana, or when Bolivians mass migrate to Chile to vote for Barchelet and new constituition. Mexicas fleeing to USA. There are a lot of times where people vote for the left but then do everything that they can to not live under the government of the left.
Monarchies did not allow the peasantry to be armed. I don't know where you're getting your information from but whoever is filling your mind with this nonsense is wearing rose-tinted glasses...
You only need to look at some of the members of the House of Lords to see that having an ancestor that was very good at waving a sword around or who happened to discover coal does not necessarily make great ruling material.
Plus, how would monarchies even function today for countries like Australia and the United States?
I an not saying that monarchy should be a world wide solution.
Only that Brazil and other countries would be better under monarchy. There are rumors that the guy who would be the Prince if we become a monarchy will be a candidate to presidency. If he wins, that would be the first step of a long road towards monarchy.
I still don't understand why you think we need monarchies today, in the 21st century. Even if I accepted your argument that all of the monarchies of the past were better than democracy (and I don't accept this argument, by the way), please explain to me why we need monarchies today.
Hans Hermann Hoppe said in the book Democracy: The God That Failed that historically monarchists had way more prosperity, stability and granted far more propriety rights of the general population.
Imagine an farm. If you own the farm, you wanna the farm to prosper and to give the lands to your heirs. If you are only in the farm for few years as a "temporary owner", you don't care about the farm future, you wanna take more and focus only on short therm. Democracies also are very prone to legal bribing aka lobbing, short therm focus, mass manipulation and the state expanded far more during a democracy.
One metric to see how a State is tyrannical is how much he wanna to disarm the population. For eg, North Korea establishes death penalty for illegally owning an firearm. USA has some gun legislation but not that harsh cuz it is not tyrannical as North Korea. On ancient China, peasants could own repeating crossbows with poisoned bolts. An really nasty weapon. In modern China, they are disarmed. People also could "vote with their feet", when the laws was extremely decentralized, which is the best form of ""democracy"", since people tend to vote for socialism and then ran away to live under capitalism[note]. Kings are also prepared since the childhood to be kings. They receive the best education possible.
In other words, monarchy is like a private ownership of the government. Democracy is susceptible to the Tragedy of the commons.
Note : - You can see it on USA, when people vote for a big semi socialist government on California and then, start to leave to Texas and other "red" states. You can see it when Venezuelans voted for socialism, ruined the 4th most prosperous country in the world and now prefer to ilegally live in French Guiana, or when Bolivians mass migrate to Chile to vote for Barchelet and new constituition. Mexicas fleeing to USA. There are a lot of times where people vote for the left but then do everything that they can to not live under the government of the left.
Monarchies did not allow the peasantry to be armed. I don't know where you're getting your information from but whoever is filling your mind with this nonsense is wearing rose-tinted glasses...
Wrong. Completely wrong.
Some Kings on the medieval Britain required that the population practiced with a longbow at least once a day. Except by Slaves and Freed slaves, everyone could own firearms during the empire of Brazil.
Russians only lost the right to bear arms under the revolution after the monarchy fell.
Here is an article explaining how Russians lost their right to bear arms "In 1918 the Bolsheviks initiated a large scale confiscation of civilian firearms, outlawing their possession and threatening up to 10 years in prison for concealing a gun."https://www.rbth.com/history/326865-guns-rifles-russia-revolution
They are rich despite the socialism, not cuz the socialism.
Making an analogy, the impact of wasting half of everything that you make on Casinos when you are a millionaire is different than the impact of wasting half of your money if you are a minimum wage worker. And if you are extremely rich and has a small culturally homogeneous population, you have much more money to waste.
But they adopted welfare state AFTER becoming incredible rich, not before. They would be even richer is they had maintained the capitalism.
The article you link goes something like this:
- up to 1932 = amazing growth
- up to 1950 = some socialism creeping in, so growth slowing
- up to 1976 = massive socialist expansion, leading to
- stagflation in 1970s and 1980s
- economic downturn in early 1990s
- 1992 reforms restore more free market enterprise allowing partial recovery up to 2005, without really tackling structural problems in economy
- article written in 2006 and predicts the artificial boom will come to an end and the Swedish economy will crash once more
Now let's do a sanity check on that picture. All countries have ups and downs in their economy, but this information shows Sweden's relative performance in per capita GDP from 1950 (when the mises article suggests they were at their relative peak) to 2020.
That does suggest a marginal relative decline compared to a handful of the most successful economies, but not at all the major slump you would expect from that article.
Even though I don't think the article gives an objective view of what's happened, I think it is at least possible that Swedish GDP would have gone up by more if they had maintained the lack of regulation there was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, that would certainly also have meant a far more unequal society. As @WarChiefZeke says above economic success is a relatively minor criteria when assessing how happy citizens are likely to feel. I think it's really no surprise that a society where the socio-economic model values it's population (for instance by providing universal health care, education, maternity and retirement benefits) is likely to produce happier people than a society that does not.
Socialism takes time to ruin the country. The socialism started to ruin this countries some time AFTER 1950.
And note that USA is no longer the richest country in GDP per capita like was in 1950. This of course, according to your own sources... Argentina was above Norway and Germany in 1950. Then Peronism ruined the country... Venezuela appears ABOVE Canada in 1950.
Both countries had far more socialist policies than any Scandinavian country and hence, failed hardly.
Venezuela was the 4th most developed country in the world in GDP per capita and now, not even Haitians wanna life there.
Well the mises article says that problems in the late 70s were directly attributable to the socialist measures taken prior to that. It also says that all the harmful measures were taken prior to 1992 (at which time they were partially reversed). I agree that you need to look over a reasonable length of time to assess effects, but saying that the Swedish economy is due to tank at some future point as a result of changes made 30+ years ago is stretching that argument a bit too far I think.
I certainly do note that the US has had a relative decline over time (significantly more so than Sweden) - to me though that's just more evidence that moderate socialism is not the problem. One of the problems in the US in the last generation has been the increasing inequality of wealth. That can be a social problem, but just in pure economic terms, the richer you are the lower the proportion of your wealth you typically spend and invest, i.e. the richest proportion of the population becomes steadily less productive. At some point that effect will outweigh the incentive people have to accumulate more wealth - and I suspect the US passed that point a while ago.
The South American countries had high levels of inequality linked to their high GDP and that was one cause of problems. Corruption was another major cause, but I agree with you that the actions of the governments were bad mistakes. However, their attempts to micro-manage foreign-owned industries through regulation, have very little similarity to the economic model practiced in Western and Northern Europe.
I am not opposed to Monarchy on principle. I also don't think Athenian Democracy is necessarily the high point of government. I can see merits and drawbacks for both, and of course we are not limited to those two choices.
One of the problems in the US in the last generation has been the increasing inequality of wealth.
It is the social issue of our time and has a variety of manifestations. One of the worst ways in which is does is in the nearly unimaginable levels that the price of the necessities of life have skyrocketed. Education could be paid for by a part time job, houses bought and families raised on one income. Now it takes two incomes just to afford rent and bills for many, and education is paid for with a lifetime with the benefits uncertain at best.
A lot of contributing factors but to name a few, the gutting of entire industries in manufacturing and service offshores, low levels of unionization, citizens shooting themselves in the foot by supporting all sorts of nutty political policies that ignore and hurt American workers.
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I certainly do note that the US has had a relative decline over time (significantly more so than Sweden) - to me though that's just more evidence that moderate socialism is not the problem. One of the problems in the US in the last generation has been the increasing inequality of wealth. That can be a social problem, but just in pure economic terms, the richer you are the lower the proportion of your wealth you typically spend and invest, i.e. the richest proportion of the population becomes steadily less productive. At some point that effect will outweigh the incentive people have to accumulate more wealth - and I suspect the US passed that point a while ago.
The South American countries had high levels of inequality linked to their high GDP and that was one cause of problems. Corruption was another major cause, but I agree with you that the actions of the governments were bad mistakes. However, their attempts to micro-manage foreign-owned industries through regulation, have very little similarity to the economic model practiced in Western and Northern Europe.
Quantitative easing and other things. After so many government interventions, this will gonna be the FIRST generation with less purchasing power than the previous one.
As for inequality, every heterogeneous society is unequal. Not due the racist fallacies but due the fact that different groups has different cultures. People in north america tends to see all latin americans as a homogenous blob when even among the native amerindian population, an Fuegian and an Aztec are completely different just like a Cherokee and a Aztec are different. You have a lot of completely different groups, from East Asians to Western Africans living here.
And micro managing companies via regulation is "light socialism" IMO. The state is owning the means of production. And worse, the state is not responsible for the negative effects of the crippling regulations approved by the state.
And the government taxing the richer regions and giving money to poorer regions is only making everyone more equally poor. There is no short therm solution.
I am not opposed to Monarchy on principle. I also don't think Athenian Democracy is necessarily the high point of government. I can see merits and drawbacks for both, and of course we are not limited to those two choices.
When you have a extremely decentralized government, it can work.
But sadly, people wanna the same law everywhere with everything.
For eg, gun control obviously has a different and higher impact on the less dense region of Alaska than in the most populous city of California. But people wanna a central government determining laws for an continental country. So gun control will not only ruin only Chicago, will ruin the entire country.
The "both sides" screed would have more impact if we weren't literally living in a situation where people are dying by the thousands each day, mostly due to the DIRECT incompetence of the current President, who can't even be bothered to utter a single WORD about it while a once in a century pandemic is now raging out of control. Spare me. It was every bit as bad as those on the left warned about the entire time. In fact, it ended up being far worse. The fact that 47% of voters can't recognize the reality of the situation is not because we were mean to them. Enough. This was an unmitigated disaster. And nothing comparable has happened under a Democratic President in my lifetime. The country has been driven into an absolute ditch by the last two GOP Presidents. Indisputable.
I'm in a state where where the train has gone off the rails. The state next to us has an estimated 1 in 54 people infected. Neither Governor will so much as issue a mask mandate. It's been 9 months. And we're worse off now than we were in April. This should be inconceivable, yet it was almost predictable. Fix problems?? Make things better?? The current Administration abandoned the entire country to mass death. I'd go so far as to say they encouraged it.
And I'm sorry, but the idea Hilary Clinton ever did anything that is even in the same ballpark (or sport) as using the White House podium to claim she had won an election she lost, much less continue to do so multiple times a day for WEEKS afterward while making shit up out of thin air is ludicrous. It absurd to even mention it in the same sentence. But since she made some comments about her feelings about the Russia investigation in some podcast two years later, it's all the "both sides" brigade needs to make a completely ridiculous false equivalency. Even mentioning them in the same breath is a dishonest take on the difference.
. The right-wing media sphere is already insanely destructive. One pushed even FURTHER to coo-coo land by Trump would be even worse.
On the other hand, wouldn't a Fox News pushed further into centre-right reasonableness because of Trump taking over the far-right batshit conspiracy theory market actually not be a pretty good thing, all told?
I mean, you might as well at least consider positive possible outcomes as well as negative ones.
FOX will only ever be center-right if we continue moving the Overton Window towards their side, which we've been doing pretty much constantly since 1980.
And yet you promptly, without apparent irony, spent a paragraph doing exactly that.
We are now at FOUR PRESIDENTS IN A ROW where large portions of the political opposition refused to accept the legitimacy of the president's election. This is deeply corrosive to democracy and far more dangerous than Trump's predictable impotent flailing.
Trump is denying he lost. He is threatening to have the highest court court with people he appointed invalidate the will of the people. He has fired top people in the military and replaced them with loyalists possibly setting the state for a military coup. He has elected officials, and states colluding together and disputing the Biden victory. He has an army of propagandists claiming he actually won the election.
To me, sure technically you are correct, which is the best kind of correct, but you are also splitting hairs. There is a slow motion attempt to overturn the election that could turn at any moment into a coup. Or if you'll indulge me in a little language - there's a "cold coup" in progress that could turn into a "hot coup" at any minute.
No. There isn't. There is impotent flailing by a weak and unpopular President who decisively lost an election, which has no chance for success. Take a lesson from your President-elect, when asked about this subject:
"(The) United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House."
That is literally all Trump's bullshit, by itself, amounts to.
Stop pretending Donald Trump is a Machiavellian mastermind that will snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. He revealed his actual secret plan to steal the election (trying to stop mail in ballots from counting) months before the election actually happened. They tried to hire the team to do it the day of the election. It failed miserably. There is literally nothing in his history, character or situation that suggests he can pull this off. If it were so easy for a weak, unpopular president who decisively lost an election to cling to power anyway, the American republic would have ceased to exist a long time ago.
This is not to say that there are no problems with American democracy. There absolutely are. But they have nothing to do with your conspiratorial fantasies about coups above. Sure, Trump would love to cheat the results of the election and stay in power, but he has no actual ability to do so. Pretending he does is denying reality, just like he is doing. It's over. He lost. He was just as susceptible to the judgement of the public as any other President. Stop being so afraid.
I believe I addressed this just yesterday. Why should the ATTEMPT be shrugged off just because it's doomed to fail?? 90% of elected leaders in the GOP are entertaining it out of fear of Trump's voters. The people who aren't are Mitt Romney and a couple others you can count on one hand. And Romney is only doing it because Utah is a unique landscape electorally and he's a human wind-sock.
The most serious threat to American democracy is that both sides consider the other an implacable threat to everything they hold dear, and consider every election an all-or-nothing battle of Good versus Evil. Because of this, both sides are increasingly willing to countenance anything if their side does it, and (especially) if it causes the other side to Lose. This will, should it not be toned down, inevitably lead to someone who isn't a fumbling idiot like Trump making a serious attempt to continue in power (one way or another) beyond their elected terms. This is what kills democracies, and it's been seen in other countries.
Sorry but this is bad analysis. And it's superficial. It requires no deeper investigation to assert "both sides are equally bad." Coincidentally, it also allows you to set yourself up as truly above the fray.
"We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach."
Only 6% of scientists self identified as Republicans. In contrast to 55% who identified as Democrat and 36% as other or none. These are not social scientists. This polling was exclusively the natural sciences -- biology/medicine, chemistry, physics and geology. And not just university professors but private sector scientists as well.
And these trends have all worsened since these original warning signs became present. The Trumpist Republican party is more anti-science and more "unmoved by conventional understanding of facts" than it was. And I'm exhausted with completely unhelpful and self-serving take of "both sides". No one is saying the Democratic party is perfect and its perfection should not be a requirement.
The most serious threat to American democracy is that both sides consider the other an implacable threat to everything they hold dear, and consider every election an all-or-nothing battle of Good versus Evil. Because of this, both sides are increasingly willing to countenance anything if their side does it, and (especially) if it causes the other side to Lose. This will, should it not be toned down, inevitably lead to someone who isn't a fumbling idiot like Trump making a serious attempt to continue in power (one way or another) beyond their elected terms. This is what kills democracies, and it's been seen in other countries.
Sorry but this is bad analysis. And it's superficial. It requires no deeper investigation to assert "both sides are equally bad." Coincidentally, it also allows you to set yourself up as truly above the fray.
"We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach."
Only 6% of scientists self identified as Republicans. In contrast to 55% who identified as Democrat and 36% as other or none. These are not social scientists. This polling was exclusively the natural sciences -- biology/medicine, chemistry, physics and geology. And not just university professors but private sector scientists as well.
And these trends have all worsened since these original warning signs became present. The Trumpist Republican party is more anti-science and more "unmoved by conventional understanding of facts" than it was. And I'm exhausted with completely unhelpful and self-serving take of "both sides". No one is saying the Democratic party is perfect and its perfection should not be a requirement.
I'd go so far as to say the general consensus and unifying principle of most liberals who vote for Democrats is "holy christ I wish they were better on these issues, and they need to grow a backbone, but the other side left the reservation completely about 30 years ago." All we want at this point is basic competence and someone who gives a shit.
I may be wrong, but is that the Mann and Ornstein article you linked?? Because guess what happened to those two after they made that assertion (or the exact same one if it is different)?? They were both basically completely blackballed from the Sunday Morning shows and cable news to this day.
They are rich despite the socialism, not cuz the socialism.
They are rich, their people are happy, and they have the world's highest quality of life.
But let's instead focus on what you said: so you are acknowledging that, at least in some cases, socialist policies do not prevent a country from being economically successful, correct? They are not actually incompatible?
Imagine a father to his son "you should't spend half of your salary into prostitutes and cassinos"
And he say "but the billionaire X does that and he is very happy"
Is a silly argument, since the rich guy can do that because he is rich. He din't become rich by spending awfully his money; The same logic applies to an single guy, to an family, a neighborhood, a city, a state, a country or a continent. Spending half of your salary a single month in awful things will not bankrupt you. It damages you mostly on long run.
Back to USA. I an pretty sure that if Trump loses this time after all legal battles, he will return in 2024.
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This has been the rallying call for social welfare spending for my entire life. Unfortunately, happiness is only moderately linked to economics. Things like health, self esteem and identity, family and friends are more important. You can have wealthy and unhappy populations, without a doubt. Recreating an economic model isn't a magic pill for solving the deep issues the U.S has.
The generals will follow orders, but only if they are legal. This is what got Esper fired as Trump wanted to use the military against protestors, Esper went to the generals with the orders and the generals said no.
My biggest concern was the courts and the senate siding with Trump in his attempt to steal the election. It looks like neither are going to help him so he’s gone by the end of the year.
I do hope the courts actually order his team to start the transition however.
Also:
The article you link goes something like this:
- up to 1932 = amazing growth
- up to 1950 = some socialism creeping in, so growth slowing
- up to 1976 = massive socialist expansion, leading to
- stagflation in 1970s and 1980s
- economic downturn in early 1990s
- 1992 reforms restore more free market enterprise allowing partial recovery up to 2005, without really tackling structural problems in economy
- article written in 2006 and predicts the artificial boom will come to an end and the Swedish economy will crash once more
Now let's do a sanity check on that picture. All countries have ups and downs in their economy, but this information shows Sweden's relative performance in per capita GDP from 1950 (when the mises article suggests they were at their relative peak) to 2020.
Even though I don't think the article gives an objective view of what's happened, I think it is at least possible that Swedish GDP would have gone up by more if they had maintained the lack of regulation there was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, that would certainly also have meant a far more unequal society. As @WarChiefZeke says above economic success is a relatively minor criteria when assessing how happy citizens are likely to feel. I think it's really no surprise that a society where the socio-economic model values it's population (for instance by providing universal health care, education, maternity and retirement benefits) is likely to produce happier people than a society that does not.
This needs a promote.
Socialism takes time to ruin the country. The socialism started to ruin this countries some time AFTER 1950.
And note that USA is no longer the richest country in GDP per capita like was in 1950. This of course, according to your own sources... Argentina was above Norway and Germany in 1950. Then Peronism ruined the country... Venezuela appears ABOVE Canada in 1950.
Both countries had far more socialist policies than any Scandinavian country and hence, failed hardly.
Venezuela was the 4th most developed country in the world in GDP per capita and now, not even Haitians wanna life there.
Hans Hermann Hoppe said in the book Democracy: The God That Failed that historically monarchists had way more prosperity, stability and granted far more propriety rights of the general population.
Imagine an farm. If you own the farm, you wanna the farm to prosper and to give the lands to your heirs. If you are only in the farm for few years as a "temporary owner", you don't care about the farm future, you wanna take more and focus only on short therm. Democracies also are very prone to legal bribing aka lobbing, short therm focus, mass manipulation and the state expanded far more during a democracy.
One metric to see how a State is tyrannical is how much he wanna to disarm the population. For eg, North Korea establishes death penalty for illegally owning an firearm. USA has some gun legislation but not that harsh cuz it is not tyrannical as North Korea. On ancient China, peasants could own repeating crossbows with poisoned bolts. An really nasty weapon. In modern China, they are disarmed. People also could "vote with their feet", when the laws was extremely decentralized, which is the best form of ""democracy"", since people tend to vote for socialism and then ran away to live under capitalism[note]. Kings are also prepared since the childhood to be kings. They receive the best education possible.
In other words, monarchy is like a private ownership of the government. Democracy is susceptible to the Tragedy of the commons.
Note : - You can see it on USA, when people vote for a big semi socialist government on California and then, start to leave to Texas and other "red" states. You can see it when Venezuelans voted for socialism, ruined the 4th most prosperous country in the world and now prefer to ilegally live in French Guiana, or when Bolivians mass migrate to Chile to vote for Barchelet and new constituition. Mexicas fleeing to USA. There are a lot of times where people vote for the left but then do everything that they can to not live under the government of the left.
Plus, how would monarchies even function today for countries like Australia and the United States? Should they go back to being colonies of the British Empire? Or should USA have it's own king? If the argument is that Donald Trump should be the King of the United States, not metaphorically, but literally, then I can't continue to be part of this conversation. Everyone has their own limit to what they're willing to seriously discuss, this would be mine.
Monarchies did not allow the peasantry to be armed. I don't know where you're getting your information from but whoever is filling your mind with this nonsense is wearing rose-tinted glasses...
I an not saying that monarchy should be a world wide solution.
Only that Brazil and other countries would be better under monarchy. There are rumors that the guy who would be the Prince if we become a monarchy will be a candidate to presidency. If he wins, that would be the first step of a long road towards monarchy.
Wrong. Completely wrong.
Some Kings on the medieval Britain required that the population practiced with a longbow at least once a day. Except by Slaves and Freed slaves, everyone could own firearms during the empire of Brazil.
Russians only lost the right to bear arms under the revolution after the monarchy fell.
Here is an article explaining how Russians lost their right to bear arms "In 1918 the Bolsheviks initiated a large scale confiscation of civilian firearms, outlawing their possession and threatening up to 10 years in prison for concealing a gun." https://www.rbth.com/history/326865-guns-rifles-russia-revolution
Well the mises article says that problems in the late 70s were directly attributable to the socialist measures taken prior to that. It also says that all the harmful measures were taken prior to 1992 (at which time they were partially reversed). I agree that you need to look over a reasonable length of time to assess effects, but saying that the Swedish economy is due to tank at some future point as a result of changes made 30+ years ago is stretching that argument a bit too far I think.
I certainly do note that the US has had a relative decline over time (significantly more so than Sweden) - to me though that's just more evidence that moderate socialism is not the problem. One of the problems in the US in the last generation has been the increasing inequality of wealth. That can be a social problem, but just in pure economic terms, the richer you are the lower the proportion of your wealth you typically spend and invest, i.e. the richest proportion of the population becomes steadily less productive. At some point that effect will outweigh the incentive people have to accumulate more wealth - and I suspect the US passed that point a while ago.
The South American countries had high levels of inequality linked to their high GDP and that was one cause of problems. Corruption was another major cause, but I agree with you that the actions of the governments were bad mistakes. However, their attempts to micro-manage foreign-owned industries through regulation, have very little similarity to the economic model practiced in Western and Northern Europe.
It is the social issue of our time and has a variety of manifestations. One of the worst ways in which is does is in the nearly unimaginable levels that the price of the necessities of life have skyrocketed. Education could be paid for by a part time job, houses bought and families raised on one income. Now it takes two incomes just to afford rent and bills for many, and education is paid for with a lifetime with the benefits uncertain at best.
A lot of contributing factors but to name a few, the gutting of entire industries in manufacturing and service offshores, low levels of unionization, citizens shooting themselves in the foot by supporting all sorts of nutty political policies that ignore and hurt American workers.
And you could be forgiven for thinking this is an Onion article. Guess someone isn't happy it turns out office space isn't really necessary after all:
Quantitative easing and other things. After so many government interventions, this will gonna be the FIRST generation with less purchasing power than the previous one.
As for inequality, every heterogeneous society is unequal. Not due the racist fallacies but due the fact that different groups has different cultures. People in north america tends to see all latin americans as a homogenous blob when even among the native amerindian population, an Fuegian and an Aztec are completely different just like a Cherokee and a Aztec are different. You have a lot of completely different groups, from East Asians to Western Africans living here.
And micro managing companies via regulation is "light socialism" IMO. The state is owning the means of production. And worse, the state is not responsible for the negative effects of the crippling regulations approved by the state.
And the government taxing the richer regions and giving money to poorer regions is only making everyone more equally poor. There is no short therm solution.
When you have a extremely decentralized government, it can work.
But sadly, people wanna the same law everywhere with everything.
For eg, gun control obviously has a different and higher impact on the less dense region of Alaska than in the most populous city of California. But people wanna a central government determining laws for an continental country. So gun control will not only ruin only Chicago, will ruin the entire country.
I'm in a state where where the train has gone off the rails. The state next to us has an estimated 1 in 54 people infected. Neither Governor will so much as issue a mask mandate. It's been 9 months. And we're worse off now than we were in April. This should be inconceivable, yet it was almost predictable. Fix problems?? Make things better?? The current Administration abandoned the entire country to mass death. I'd go so far as to say they encouraged it.
And I'm sorry, but the idea Hilary Clinton ever did anything that is even in the same ballpark (or sport) as using the White House podium to claim she had won an election she lost, much less continue to do so multiple times a day for WEEKS afterward while making shit up out of thin air is ludicrous. It absurd to even mention it in the same sentence. But since she made some comments about her feelings about the Russia investigation in some podcast two years later, it's all the "both sides" brigade needs to make a completely ridiculous false equivalency. Even mentioning them in the same breath is a dishonest take on the difference.
FOX will only ever be center-right if we continue moving the Overton Window towards their side, which we've been doing pretty much constantly since 1980.
I believe I addressed this just yesterday. Why should the ATTEMPT be shrugged off just because it's doomed to fail?? 90% of elected leaders in the GOP are entertaining it out of fear of Trump's voters. The people who aren't are Mitt Romney and a couple others you can count on one hand. And Romney is only doing it because Utah is a unique landscape electorally and he's a human wind-sock.
Sorry but this is bad analysis. And it's superficial. It requires no deeper investigation to assert "both sides are equally bad." Coincidentally, it also allows you to set yourself up as truly above the fray.
But it's wrong.
From a prescient 2012 op-ed, by two long-term, bipartisan observers of US politics: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the-republicans-are-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_story.html
"We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach."
The entire essay is worth reading in full.
I'll add one more point of evidence, from the pre-Trump era. In this case, 2009. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2009/07/09/section-4-scientists-politics-and-religion/
Only 6% of scientists self identified as Republicans. In contrast to 55% who identified as Democrat and 36% as other or none. These are not social scientists. This polling was exclusively the natural sciences -- biology/medicine, chemistry, physics and geology. And not just university professors but private sector scientists as well.
And these trends have all worsened since these original warning signs became present. The Trumpist Republican party is more anti-science and more "unmoved by conventional understanding of facts" than it was. And I'm exhausted with completely unhelpful and self-serving take of "both sides". No one is saying the Democratic party is perfect and its perfection should not be a requirement.
I'd go so far as to say the general consensus and unifying principle of most liberals who vote for Democrats is "holy christ I wish they were better on these issues, and they need to grow a backbone, but the other side left the reservation completely about 30 years ago." All we want at this point is basic competence and someone who gives a shit.
I may be wrong, but is that the Mann and Ornstein article you linked?? Because guess what happened to those two after they made that assertion (or the exact same one if it is different)?? They were both basically completely blackballed from the Sunday Morning shows and cable news to this day.
Imagine a father to his son "you should't spend half of your salary into prostitutes and cassinos"
And he say "but the billionaire X does that and he is very happy"
Is a silly argument, since the rich guy can do that because he is rich. He din't become rich by spending awfully his money; The same logic applies to an single guy, to an family, a neighborhood, a city, a state, a country or a continent. Spending half of your salary a single month in awful things will not bankrupt you. It damages you mostly on long run.
Back to USA. I an pretty sure that if Trump loses this time after all legal battles, he will return in 2024.