ideas are lies

Economies of Scale · always

Yeah, agree with Pat, agree with Glen.

I will say it in a way that seems inevitably to be ruder, though I don’t wish to be rude.  I find libertarian thinking, in any forms I have encountered that have agency in the world, to be willfully disingenuous about the things that actually cause problems.

A lot of this would not occur in a world where people have to build something that operationalizes whatever they say in words.  Nod to Marcus’s comments about the virtue of cashing out thoughts in algorithms.

For years I wanted to write a paper called “There’s no such thing as a free market”, but I couldn’t find anything new to say that wasn’t already quite well said, and deliberately ignored, in extant discourse.  Define a “free market”, with the intended Chicago-economists’ notion of “free of coercive or more generally intrusive power”, which I will hold them to since they want to invoke Arrow’s and Hahn’s and Debreu’s existence proofs of optimal allocations.  Build me the social algorithm by which every action that I take, in each small moment of any day, that will ever have effects on me or anybody else anywhere, has all those consequences fully known to us all, and fully and fairly negotiated, before the next action I take (turn on the tap, throw a piece of plastic in the trash, start the engine of the car, eat food produced in a way that degrades land, use a battery with materials mined in Mongolia.)  The absurdity of the concept is so overwhelming that I can’t help but respond to people who treat it as existing as if they mean to be dishonest.  Everything else that isn’t within that perfect-costless-contract model is “externalities”.  Those include, ignorance, power, non-responsibility for consequences, non-existence or unenforcibility of laws, and on and on and on.

That, to me, is where the problems occur, and a good-faith conversation engages with all the clarity we don’t have to deal with them.

I also think Adam Smith’s name is taken in vain, again in a sleight of hand that switches intents of words that sound the same.  One can read his arguments, made in the context of his time and the power structures most active then, as an argument that decentralized optimization can do many things that centralized planning can’t, or that deliberately oppressive power structures such as churches or church/state complexes actively degrade.  As I understand it, Smith made all sorts of conditions about morally grounded societies, some kind of mechanism for regulation against abuses, etc.  Not to mention it was mostly agrarian, pre-financial, and the power all but the fewest people could accumulate was extremely limited.  Much of Smith’s argument has a similar flavor, as a problem-solving analysis, to Walter Bagehot’s later writing in Lombard Street, about the better performance of decentralized banking with fractional-reserve lending.  In context, they make a lot of sense.  Quoted as scripture in contexts where the words would represent quite different choices, they can be given all sorts of meanings that a counterpart to Smith, suffering under today’s abuses, would not espouse.

I bother to write that because, with the question of how to handle the Coney Barrett appointment, there is a thing I don’t know how to A) think through, or B) express properly, and I don’t know which of those it is.

By the accounts of people who follow such things professionally, she is a capable jurist and a decent person.  I can believe that.  Interestingly, having had some of the old interviews of Scalia and Ginsburg played for me in the past week (great watching if you want to hear an advocacy of originalism and living-text made by people with skin and brain in the game), Scalia seems to stand for many not only sensible, but even decent positions.  

However, in the creep that destroys the world, what are the arguments about how it should play out and how it does?

I can see one argument for “originalism” as being that those who ratified the constitution in 1788 had suffered more, risked more, and thought more, than an average modern judge, and what they intended things to mean should not lightly be discarded by whoever comes along in each new generation.  I think that would be Scalia’s argument, to the effect that the power of judges to re-architect the country should be limited by the constitution, which it is the job of congress to amend (come back to that in a minute).

But then how does that work?  There was all kinds of stuff that didn’t exist in 1788.  So how does it work out that the right-aligned jurists consistently come down on the side of rulings that give those who have excessively concentrated power the collaboration of the law in concentrating that power — I take this to be Pat’s assertion, and I agree — no matter how destructive the means (here I mean citizens united, nullification of the pre-reporting requirement in the voting rights act, whatever that was, but probably lots more that I would know if I knew this area), while those who do not have concentrated power do not have the law as protection from oppressive use by those who do have it?  I don’t see how one gets from “originalism” to Citizens United.  

And to the extent that ACB is considered a studious adherent to Scalia’s originalism, but with less than Scalia’s originality in recognizing important times to deviate, she is expected to be more mechanical in driving the style of decisions people expected from him.  But the mismatch between the rhetoric, and the cumulative effects on the role of law in the society, seem drastic after these many decades.

Which brings us to the wider question (which a scientist would not pursue, knowing that he needs to focus on refining the accuracy of one point of data):  What the hell is taking place in the large-scale play of power in this country around this period? 

Here are some things I have heard that seem valid, granting that I don’t have expertise to judge.

1.  For a party to control congress requires the coordination or coercion of some 260 or so people, which even the more corrupt and authoritarian societies can struggle to achieve.
2. An organ like SCOTUS has 9 people and votes by majority.  The control role may be more limited, but the numbers are certainly a lot smaller.
3. I heard yesterday from Durbin that the senate passed 22 pieces of law last year.  Certainly none of them addressing important ways in which our society has changed since 1788 that would reflect a new role for law.  I think the big one was the tax cut for the rich.  There were probably also some farm bill things, which from my reading of the farm columns involve some extraordinary debt-financed bailouts to try to buy republican votes for this election.  MMcC calls himself “the grim reaper”, to boast that he allows nothing to be done.
4. So it seems to me not unfair to say that the R position these days is to do no work themselves, and to block any work the Ds try to do, so that the congress does as close to nothing as possible.
5. This means that legislating has now been bounced to the courts, with SCOTUS as the court of last appeal.  Rather than write laws to address needs, the judges are asked to issue “interpretations” of ancient law for modern problems, and thus de facto define what the modern law is, bypassing congress.
6. No wonder it is such an ultra-high priority for Rs to stack every court they can, and perhaps also explicable that it is less of a priority for Ds, since they wouldn’t mind using the congress to do things, and so are not so exclusively focused on SCOTUS as a locus of control.   What “the voters” think is not something I find organic, as there is a highly sophisticated machinery to install what “the voters” think.  

So if one wanted a senate hearing on the ACB appointment that meant no disrespect to the person, but was about the substance of both her judicial method, and the context of power dynamics in which it will be applied, the above list seems to me to be where the causality lies.

Even if there were politicians who could speak plainly (rather than in the ultra-sterilized talk that is required these days), I can’t imagine a conversation’s being transacted in that frame.  Yet, short of that frame, I don’t see what else meaningfully addresses important sources of near-existential problems for the governance of the US.

I guess that wandered off the strict thread.

Eric

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Libertarianism Is Not Fundamentally Nonsense . . . but It Usually Is as Applied in Conventional Political Discourse

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deductive fidelity (was Re: ideas are lies)

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