To contrast with Bernstein and Sinhababu...here's Aretae on politics.
Hayek-inspired:
0. Everyone is wrong a lot, independent of IQ. The more complicated the system, the more likely you are to be wrong. The bigger the system, the more complicated. The economy of a country is (the) ultimate big system.
1. Feedback determines the quality of the system. How many times you've fixed it.
2. The bigger the system, the more stability matters in the system.
3. Even if you could get the rules right at a point in time, the people gaming the rules have more money, time, and motivation than the people making the rules. Your rules will be effectively gamed...for all sets of rules.
4. THEREFORE...All top-down rule-sets are value-destroying...and the larger the polity it applies to, the more value-destroying.
Buchanan-inspired 1:
0. Political actors are just people. Treat them like people, not angels.
1. Political actors need to remain in power to accomplish objectives (just like people need to remain in power to accomplish objectives).
2. Therefore, in order to pursue ANY goal in politics, remaining in power becomes a major concern...usually eclipsing the long-term goal in short-term importance.
3. It's always the short term.
4. Political actors are ALL primarily concerned with staying in power. FWIW, this is true to a lesser extent of managers at any level of any organization. The option to jump to control in another organization mitigates this, but only slightly.
Buchanan-inspired 2:
0. For any policy, there are winners, losers, and deadweight losses.
1. Policies that have concentrated winners, and distributed losers are preferred in all political decisionmaking.
2. Monopoly-granting (Oligopoly, Monopsony, whatever...all the same thing), direct or indirect, is the best way to create concentrated winners, and distributed losers.
3. The government's primary activity is creating monopoly, and passing it off as consumer protection.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita + Falkenstien&Hanson inspired:
0. 90-odd percent of social value is status/envy value, not absolute goods.
1. Nominal political systems (Democracy or Moldbug) are irrelevant. The real question is the actual power-structure, that is not subject to design.
2. Real political systems are the question of what supporters are needed to actually control the country.
3. Long term political success comes from minimizing the number of people in the coalition you need support from to run the country...and screwing everyone not in the coalition.
4. Best known path to avoiding screwage by elites: Small states, direct democracy, near-zero executive power. See Switzerland.
Math inspired:
0. High income is positively correlated with all positive outcomes.
1. Income is exchangeable for all positive outcomes.
2. If you wish to make people better off, increase their incomes.
3. Increase incomes = improve GDP growth per capita = increase innovation
4. Known paths to increased innovation: Strong physical property rights, Low taxes, general low regulation. Low tariffs. Low transaction costs. Strongly suspected paths: low IP controls (innovation = ideas having sex).
5. Government can do nothing proactive more than protect property rights to increase growth. All other actions are (a) detrimental to growth and therefore (b) detrimental to general welfare.
Conclusion:
1. Government is necessarily incapable of solving problems.
2. Government will necessarily be about the people in government maintaining power, whether or not there are elections.
3. Government action will necessarily be primarily about monopoly privilege.
4. The ONLY path to good government is decreasing the size and power of central actors.
5. Government action that results in good outcomes for citizens is limited to property rights enforcement.
Snark:
Formalism: Democracy is a bad thing that results in bad outcomes. Neo-monarchism is better.
Aretae: Government is a bad thing that result in bad outcomes. There are NO POSSIBLE good choices inside the government paradigm. There are no possible paths of rolling back the government paradigm in existing states. Concentrated power solutions (Monarchy) tend to be even worse than distributed power ones.
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12 comments:
I do wish you would distinguish between government and the state. (Aren't you an AC?) Even in my wildest dreams I expect and want government, by which I mean, the actions of some men are governed. Murderers, for example, or more to the point: would-be murderers.
I do wonder that you assert Buchanan-inspired-1, and then advocate weak government (by which I assume you mean a weak state). Won't a small weak state attempt to become strong? What stops it?
BTW, the formalist would say why democracy has bad outcomes: it is irresponsible, ineffective, and insecure. (Modern democracy largely solves the security problem by means of propaganda and the removal of most of the state from democratic influence; but it grows apparently monotonically to become ever more irresponsible and ineffective.)
Historical monarchism was, at least, responsible. It was effective or not this depending on the person of the monarch. It was fairly secure, although obviously subject to democratic attack that it was ill able to defeat. The weak links were biology and the loyalty of the security forces -- and those are what neocameralism claims to improve.
Leonard,
Yes...AC here.
I continue to like an old quote from Cafe Hayek:
Do you want single world government? No? Ok. Good. Now that we've all agreed on AnCap, we can debate the level at which AC should apply.
My primary line this day is anti-monopoly. I want easy exit. If you have small states, and easy exit, states are in competition, and have effectively no power due to the competition. See: Switzerland's cantons.
That's James-Buchanan of public choice theory.
My preference is a set of profit-maximizing subscription-based crime-insurance programs, and NO state.
I know what the formalist says about democracy. I say that their notion is impossibly rosy about democracy, and a good read of BBdM should cure them of their fantasies.
As to Historical Monarchism...my claim is that it was hideous for everyone for 10,000 years...see Feudal China. The only thing that ever happened good in Historical Monarchism is that the Netherlanders threw off their King, and didn't establish a new one, and the infection of anti-kingery leaked to Britain, which spawned the industrial revolution.
All the positive cradles of the modern era (Athens, Roman Republic, and 1600s Netherlands/England) were either non-monarchic, or heavily constrained monarchy, limited 6 ways from Sunday.
Switzerland, of the direct democracy, is neither ineffective, irresponsible, nor insecure. But it relies on actual majority vote of the citizenry, not a proxy-majority of corruptables.
Government protection of property rights would seem to include protecting intellectual property.
Government protection of property rights could be spun to include all of current gov't activity.
RSF,
1. That's sloppy thinking. In the post, I mentioned property rights thrice. In the first two cases, I was specifically talking about impact on growth, and while physical property rights have strong positive impacts on growth, current evidence inclines me towards the position that IP rights reduce growth.
2. "could be spun to include". Then the concept "property rights" that I'm talking about is different from the concept "property rights" that you're talking about. I'm pretty clearly talking about evidence based growth inducing stuff, and you're talking about what people can bullshit about.
Aretae, of course I agree about AC, and I like that quote of yours. Of course, the international system is anarchic in important and interesting ways, but nonetheless, no patchwork of states is anarchy. At least not as an AC sees it.
I am unclear on how formalists are "impossibly rosy" about democracy. Formalists are one of the few that oppose democracy; if we are rosy about it then the mainstream view must be positively delusional. (Well, it is.)
As for historical monarchism: I think your view is too presentist. I don't think these societies were "hideous", but to the degree they were, it was largely because they were poor. I also think you give too much credit to societies that were geographically lucky, in escaping war. England has her moat; Switzerland has her mountains. Surely any governmental system works better when it does not have to worry too much about invasion (that is, it is naturally secure). And also when, for whatever reason, it is not actually invaded very much. War is the health of the state; as such, any easily-invaded area should be expected to be very statist (in whatever flavor), and thus unfree.
Generally, I find the security via happenstance to be suspect. I want a system that does not depend on details like "be on an island" or "there are many states", unless it can somehow guarantee that. As we see, the current international system shows every sign of gradual merging. Obviously this doesn't work too well with states of very disparate wealth (current problems in EU being obvious example). But the long-term trend is clear enough.
Neocameralism has the nice property that the interests of ruler and ruled are mostly aligned. Thus, even a world-scale neocameral state would have the incentive to be fairly "nice" to its serfs. (A nice long MM article on the topic.)
AC has an even better alignment (that of business to customer), so long as it stays competitive. But it cannot be guaranteed to stay competitive. Of course, even then we might it hope that it "only" degenerates to neocameralism, and not something more nasty. But I see nothing in anarchy that guarantees a "nice" failure.
Leonard,
Quibbling:
It's AC from the POV of the state...and non-AC from the POV of the citizens. The question is what level of AC do we want? Large-state level, small state level, city-level, or citizen level.
Responses:
1. If I suggested that formalists were impossibly rosy about democracy, I misspoke. I intended to say that formalists are impossibly rosy about government.
2. Hideous = crushingly poor, and massivly unfree. China's rulers instead of England's. With me being a freedom valuing AC, with my other primary (social) value being wealth...when a country is crushingly poor and massively unfree, I think that hideous is a fair adjective.
3. I should top-level post this... but if that's all MM has, he's just wrong.
The core issue in states is that there is no POSSIBILITY of omnipotence for the ruler. Power maintenance is as much of an issue for kings as for dictators...and it's all faction-balancing. Perhaps fnargl could manage MM's "good" state. however, BBdM has effectively proven that no mere human can. It's all faction- balancing all the time...which makes MM's solution pure fail. Does MM have anything better? I've read a lot of MM.
Hence, Seasteading.
QED.
Thanks for doing my work :)
Excellent set of premises.
If you combine "Buchanan 2.0" with "Math 3" - Growth trumps everything, in the long run winners and losers matter much less than deadweight losses.
In a system without inherited privilege, all practical political gains become marginal, as competitive rent-seeking erodes the profit. All that is left is deadweight loss.
Therefore there is an irresistible force of political entrepreneurship: the production of new political profits, which in due course become new centres of deadweight loss.
Contemplationist,
Heh. Happy to help.
AMcGuinn,
I'll buy a Math 3 premise for $200. (Personally...I morally object to the premise...I want to put freedom in the same space...but freedom is, in reality, just another value that can be purchased).
I object to ONLY one part of the statement you made:
"without inherited privilege".
I believe that is an error.
If you strike that, and say instead, "in a political system, all practical politcal gains become marginal...", then I am in complete (99%+) agreement.
Our difference seems to be that I accept the BBdM hypothesis with data that the only practical difference between a monarchic system and a democratic system is that the democracy cannot afford to immiserate its citizens AS MUCH. If you recognize that envy wins over greed 100 times out of 100...this is an obvious conclusion. Moldbug forgets this.
If I'm trying to improve your phrase...then I rephrase it "in a system where the property rights of the producers (read citizenry) are not secure, all practical ...".
But no political system (we've ever seen) has secure property rights.
Closest we've seen to long-term secure property rights (800 years?) of the producers is Switzerland, home of direct democracy in tiny (1/2 Mil) Cantons. Which is hyper-secure in the mountains, hyper-conservative, and hyper-ethnically uniform.
AMcGuinn,
"
If you strike that, and say instead, "in a political system, all practical politcal gains become marginal...", then I am in complete (99%+) agreement.
"
FWIW...This is Mancur Olson's core insight. The system doesn't matter...all known political systems have this problem.
2 answers:
Jefferson: Tree of Liberty, etc.
Romer/Freidman III: Ministates.
A small canton probably does make much more difference than precisely how it is governed, but external security costs weigh heavily on smaller units.
Switzerland "hyper-ethnically uniform"? So was all of Europe for most of the last millennium, while the swiss speak three different languages. I would consider "living in a string of isolated fertile valleys way up a mountain range" as being the true determinant there.
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