184 Comments
Nov 3, 2022Liked by Richard Hanania

I agree with a lot of this, so why am I a Democrat?

1. I think the government is bad at lots of stuff and may be getting worse, but it is good at collecting taxes and writing checks. I genuinely mean that. The IRS collects ~$200 for every $1 it spends, way better than any charity (because it can throw you in prison). Programs like Soc Sec and Medicare have very low overhead. I think that taxing people to make sure that all old people get $2k a month so they don't starve is a net utility positive, even if it modestly reduces GDP. Security matters a lot to people. The whole "a dollar raises the utility of a poor person more than a rich person" justifies some redistributionist policies. Finally, government funded scientific research (essentially another form of check-writing) does a lot of good and no one has really come up with a plausible mechanism by which the private sector would fund unpatentable basic discoveries.

2. Most culture war issues don't matter that much, but access to abortion matters a lot to peoples' lives and unlike almost everything else, depends predictably on who controls government.

3. I think global warming is a serious issue that needs to be addressed. I think our best hope of solving it is innovation, largely in the private sector, in batteries and nuclear energy. I'm not 100% sure Democrats are the better party for this happening. But I'm noticing Democrats smartening up on stuff like nuclear/permitting reform etc. and government incentivization of green energy breakthroughs may still be important (and will only come from Democrats).

If you are not a utilitarian (1) or think abortion is murder (2) then you can totally disagree with me. But from my ethical beliefs, here's where I land.

Expand full comment

On choosing between the two parties I am reminded of what Henry Kissinger once said about the Iraq-Iran war: “Too bad they both can’t lose.”

Expand full comment

Thank you for a largely sensible perspective. In a "liberal democracy," especially our winner-take-all version, voting for the least bad option is what you're stuck with. Trying to be an "enlightened centrist" is silly and mostly motivated by a person's desire to maintain their self-image as an "independent thinker" who is not beholden to playing for a particular team (even though, inevitably, they do anyways, unless they just completely refuse to take any positions on anything at all). And I have no problem agreeing that the Republicans are indeed evil, just less evil than the Democrats, although probably for different reasons than yours.

The two minor things that stand out to me:

1. Is it true that Republicans are "stupider and more immoral" if they are, simultaneously, right enough about the things that matter to earn your vote? This seems like a contradiction.

2. I wouldn't underestimate how much the ruling regime can do to change the culture downstream, when it puts its back into it. You've written quite well on the ways in which "civil rights" transformed our society. I would venture to guess that, if the political battle feels like it's irrelevant to the cultural one, it is because right wingers have not truly held cultural power in the United States, not since the second world war at least. The institutions that matter most in this respect--government, media, university, etc.--have been firmly in the hands of the left since that time if not before.

If we imagine a counterfactual in which these institutions were controlled just as firmly by the right, I am pretty sure that we would not currently be dealing with the phenomenon of "trans kids" (some other bizarre or disturbing behaviors might emerge instead, but they'd be different from the sort of wild sexual deviancy being peddled by these entities today).

Expand full comment

Republicans also have better priors when it comes to how they treat people.

Democrats think the peons are inherently bad and need to be controlled (by enlightened and all-knowing Democrats) in order to have a civil society.

Parents cannot be trusted to treat their children well - so leftist schools have a policy to lie - to parents.

You cannot be trusted to save for your own retirement - so SS will be forced upon you. Etc

I vote Republican because Democrats embrace coercion (note Covid) and lying to the peons (note the censoring by recent DHS and denying of it) with the perpetual excuse that it is "for the peons own good".

Expand full comment

Since most of the money goes for entitlements, defense, and interest (over 1T for the latter in 2023), and neither party has much chance of cutting any of them, the only question is how far we fall and when it starts. Neither party is equipped to handle a real crisis. The leaders are too old, their replacements lightweights.

The rest of society is moving ever more quickly, while governance does the opposite. Something's gotta give, but it's hard to see what will replace it. Autocrats have troubles of their own, so don't see hope there.

If the Reps do get the legislature, what will they actually do. Slow walk appointments? What can they get past Biden beyond CRs?

Expand full comment

So 2000 new regulations... 1000 page bills that congress votes on without reading... so obvious that special interests and their lawyers are the ones running the show. I’m sure if we went through things one by one the amount of waste in government would make anyone sick. My GF is a public school teacher in a big city so I get to bear witness to the insanity within that domain. It’s so obvious that they can provide a better education at lower cost just by cutting some of the extremely low hanging fruit, such as “climate staff” who walk around collecting 6 figure paychecks doing absolutely nothing. Yet the democrats literally exist to grow this cartel they call “education”, along with several other useless interests they represent.

Yet republicans have to ruin literally the easiest decision ever by being not even slightly reasonable on abortion. The fact that there are actually republicans in power who would say that if my sister, gf, or daughter is raped, that they should be forced to carry the baby is just such an egregious violation of basic principles that I just can’t bring myself to vote for them. There is a non-0 chance of banning certain contraception. I mean it’s just so extreme. It sucks, but I think I’m just staying home this election.

Expand full comment

Republicans are slightly worse on animals. If you care about animals at all that's a large cost.

Expand full comment

I agree with the reasoning process here, but want to explain a different method which may actually get results: deciding a priority, and voting based only on that. An example of results: we went from one state with constitutional carry(Vermont) to constitutional carry in half the states. Almost everywhere else is shall-issue, as well. This is because a substantial number of voters made gun rights the only issue they cared about. A secondary effect is that it's impossible to get elected as an anti-gun Republican, which is convenient because now the gun rights crowd can pick another priority(in theory) and influence the Republican party. Coordinating voters with a single priority can be very effective, although you have to vote in primaries, off-years, etc.

Expand full comment

"If one party could snap its fingers and make the kids less gay, it would be worth taking that into account"

Ugh. Repugnant.

Not to mention -- election results denial founded on false claims of widespread fraud? That poison is endemic to Republican candidates now (and apparently infects some of the nuthatches on your comment thread). That doesn't factor in to your 'priors'?

Expand full comment

The LBGT crowd is the most intolerant, anti-Liberty group in our society and has captured the Libertarian movement. The KKK had more compassion and tolerance. How evil do you have to be to not understand that people might have an objection to grown men in dresses reading to children. The filter in parents who object to this needs to be encouraged, not discouraged. This filter prevents a lot of other evil practices from happening. Racist and homophobic men created the greatest society in history. They did this by protecting values of liberty. You guys are destroying those values and making the Jim Crow South look reasonable.

Expand full comment

"Those who generally support allowing the market to set labor conditions suddenly take a different view when it comes to hiring Mexicans"

Those who generally understand supply-and-demand cannot comprehend why wage-labor-suppliers might not want lower wages.

"just as how people who wish American women would have more babies start talking like Malthusians when the topic of immigration comes up."

Reducing immigration relieves competition for scarce resources, the increasing costs of which depress native fertility.

I challenge you to make a purely economic case for open borders -- no morality, just explaining how it on-net puts dollars in the pockets of every native. Bryan Caplan certainly couldn't do it in his risible comic book. I don't think anybody can.

Expand full comment

I agree that being pro market in areas where that makes sense -- most ordinary business -- is a good rule. That still leaves the very importunate of externalities, specifically the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere. And although neither party is ready to impose Pigou taxation on emissions, I can see Democrats coming to that position before Republicans. Another pure market distortion is the restriction of US employers hiring the best of the world's talent becasue of immigration restrictions. Again, I can see Democrats favoring immigration reform to recruit high value immigrants before Republicans. The other big issue is trade. Before Trump, I would have given Republicans the nod on that, but now I think they are even more restrictive than Democrats. Finally in macroeconomics, I see Democrats as more likely to increase taxes to decrease fiscal deficits than Republicans to reduce expenditures enough to do so.

So on pro-market/growth I think Democrats, though very far from ideal, are better

Expand full comment

What about an alternative strategy where you basically vote to prevent either the Republicans or the Democrats from owning both the Presidency and Congress, on the principle that preventing the government creating new programs is the best result for the country?

Expand full comment

This line surprises me:

> Finally, I am very hopeful about the prospects of humanity making use of embryo selection and genetic engineering, and would consider any attempts to stop progress in this area to be another existential threat to our species.

It seems like getting that right would be very hard, with downstream effects at least as unpredictable as the civil rights laws you're not crazy about. Is your thinking that it wouldn't be a centralized effort, so we wouldn't need to worry about getting things wrong?

Expand full comment
Nov 11, 2022·edited Nov 11, 2022

Voting on the base of ideology? Stupid. How do you know that markets are the superior solution in the 99% of cases where you have no policy expertise?

Instead, vote on the basis of raw, stupid, self-interest. Even the dumbest person can tell when their personal self-interest is negatively impacted, since their life becomes measurably worse. The total averaged out result of this, across the whole population, is that the government will favor policies that benefit the whole. Yes, there may be cases where, e.g., the long-term externalities are obscured from the individual voters, but guess what? That's also the case for markets. If every X of pollutant kills off n% of the future population, then the market includes literally no mechanism whatsoever to reduce the pollutant load.

This, incidentally, is why I will never vote Republican for the forseeable future: when I was at my financially worst, literally below the poverty line, the Republican party had fought tooth and nail to prevent me from accessing the Medicaid expansion, and I had to pay $3,600 for health insurance that year. The Democrats may refuse to back M4A, meaning that I had to pay $2000 out of pocket after I was bit by somebody else's dog, but $2,000 < $5,600.

Expand full comment

"Republicans do make one major exception to their greater trust of markets, and that’s in the areas of immigration and sometimes trade. Many seem to believe that the laws of economics are different depending on whether one is interacting with someone born in the United States or another country. "

Partly yes, and indeed they are because economic 'laws' only kick in when you have things like private property and aa currency, which are creations of political orders. However, the main reason is that the laws of economics change when the items being bought and sold are sentient and have agency. Example: sudden drop in demand for lemons ---> stores of lemons rot in warehouse, whereas sudden drop in demand for Mexicans ---> someone robs your house.

Expand full comment