Has there ever been "too much democracy"?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Has there ever been "too much democracy"?

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Xander77 posted:

As far as I understand things - "professional" politicians, who are wealthy, well educated, (to an extent) well informed, or at least capable of quickly getting the necessary information about any subject, are by definition better at making any and all policy decisions than the general public. The problem is that any political "class" will - again, by definition - worry more about its own interests than about the interests of the public at large. Democracy is just a means of "kicking the bums out" should that happen - making sure that every politician has to keep in mind the public interest (or at least the appearance thereof).

Any democratic institution that tries to have "more democracy" than that - having the general public actively making decisions they are incapable of understanding - is "too much".

This is a good summation of my views as well.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2014 16:55

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 00:01

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

rudatron posted:

For me, it's an issue of conflation: people conflate governing with the technical details of governing. The truth is that politicians aren't informed decision makers, but that's not what their power is. Their power was in setting objectives and goals, for the bureaucracy blew them to fulfill. That's not as dependent upon expertise as actually solving the problem, moving the people, etc. When you conflate the two, you would of course end up at this kind of system where experts rule everything or whatever: but it's not actually possible to be an expert in the 'right thing to do': ethics is not and has never been a techne.

That is the fundamental delusion of elitism, it's unproven assumption. Every single anti-democratic idea has this at its core, yet it is completely irrational. If you were to create a state and a people from nothing (with magic), is that the ideal to you? How naive would you have to be to think that that wouldn't be a terrible idea? Of course the subset identity with more power is going to use it to advance its own interests, at the expense of everyone else! Are you insane? Yet people seem to keep ignoring that lesson, keep trying to convince themselves that 'this time will be different'.

Now obviously, not everyone can be an expert in climate science. But 'what should we do about global warming' is a political question. You cannot 'solve' that kind of question, the answer is going to depend upon in-built assumptions about what you, the person in power, wants. You have to create another question, with those assumptions, for society as a whole to find the answer to. The people who are deciding what those built-in assumptions are are those 'experts', and the people they rely on for their power. It is they, and only they, who are deciding what the future should be. It is in this domain, the domain of the ideal, of the utopia, where rule-by-experts inflicts its terrible cost. Possible futures are denied based on the self-interest of the ruling class, or their prejudices.

The desire to change our society to be perfectly suited to cars has already been mentioned, and its important to note that that was not a natural process. It's actually an incredibly expensive kind of society, and it occurred because it fit the self-interest of the rulers. So society devoted itself to the answering the question "how best should we design cities for cars", and not "should we design cities for cars".

When you confuse the kind of system where experts answer questions, to the one where 'experts' create the questions to be answered, you end up in a broken and fundamentally undemocratic society. This is society today, and I maintain that we will never have 'too much democracy', until it is the public in general, which creates the future that society aspires to.

I'm not clear on functionally what you actually want. Direct voting on every issue? I doubt it. So before considering a much longer response I'd like to be clear.

Obviously a representative system with reasonably short term limits (most in the U.S. are 2-6 years) offers a combination where leaders get some time to become familiar with leadership in general as well as specific issues while holding them accountable to the voters who need to re-elect them. These term limits can (and are) varried to provide differing levels of responsiveness to public sentiment.

I'd also be careful throwing examples around. For every example of leaders doing something unpopular and destructive there is a popular policy that was equally bad. The war in iraq was the "right decision" 72 to 22 when it started.

And the car example is bad because that's a trend that was generally supported by the people (The U.S. averaged 1 car per household on average in 1950 - building out highways etc made plenty of sense).

# ¿ Aug 1, 2014 00:28

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Spatula City posted:

Direct voting on every issue would be terrific, if implemented correctly. Every voter would get a little electronic device, and every time an issue came up for a vote, the device would beep, and for the next 24 hours people could use their device to vote yes or no. The people would, however, elect people to set the voting agenda, but these lawmakers would not vote on any of the laws they create. In order to ensure this system works, the government would provide far stronger civics education than it is currently doing, though. Seriously, every kid ought to have a Civ/American Government class starting from middle school every other year, maybe even every year.

^^
A perfect example of too much democracy.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2014 02:22

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Glenn Zimmerman posted:

The primary advantage of going directly to the populace is that a political class (using the US as an example) benefits from the constant revolving door between the private and public sector. Secondly, direct democracy would obviously be more responsive and not have the "campaigning politician" vs "actual politician" dichotomy that frequently occurs.

It would also be impossible to buy politicians if they didn't exist, of course...

..instead lobbyists will now fill media with arguments tailored for individual voters instead of politicians.

Aaand that's probably as specific as I can get without writing my own constitution.

EDIT: spelling

Whether more responsiveness is a good thing is actually half the debate here.

And there are always going to be people in power so you can never prevent them from being bought off entirely.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2014 00:13

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Nintendo Kid posted:

Some states HAVE gotten rid of county governments either in full or almost completely, but they're also states that are geographically small.

In the NE counties pretty much arn't a thing.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2014 05:15

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

rudatron posted:

But my point wasn't just about mistakes of judgement or whatever, it was about what they want. The general public and the ruling class want very different things from society. They desire different outcomes because they are their own group, separate from society as a whole. When you give them power, you give them the opportunity to deny the outcomes the public wants, in favor of the ones they want. A rule-by-experts is not an objective system, because there is no such thing as an objective governing system. It's an oligarchy, and it inherits the same kind of problems you see in oligarchies everywhere.

Representative democracy as we know it is an improvement, but incomplete. The people making decisions in a representative democracy are not the same kind of people as the public in general, they have different goals. The system remains undemocratic until those goals align with those of the public. In most countries today, it is the rich whose interests are over-represented, simply by the expense of running an election campaign.

Direct democracy involving everyone, on every issue, undermines the point of having a government that takes care of its issues for the people. Only a very small number of people want to be politically motivated all the time, most (rightly) see politics as something that gets in the way of them living their lives. So that's not feasible, people aren't going to get on board with that. You have select a subset, and we know from statistics that a simple, random sample is likely to be representative of a population. This, I claim, is the more democratic system, the one were representatives are chosen by lottery.

If your immediate reaction to that is 'they're too stupid', then you reveal your elitism. Political representatives today are morons, they rely on a bureaucracy below them to actually do work, they themselves aren't that clever. The average person is more than capable of fulfilling that role.

First no, I don't think people are stupid. Not thinking people are stupid is a prerequisite to supporting democracy in my opinion. And more broadly, society in general is dependent on on it's members similar to how a recipe is dependent on the quality of its ingredients. Both can be greater than the sum of their parts, but can't make up entirely for spoiled ingredients.

I'm someone who also argues that money isn't a controlling factor in our current system for the same reason: people aren't entirely stupid and marketing can't convince them of anything. This relates to our current debate in the sense that you think the political class, despite being accountable to the populace via elections is essentially able to deceive/ignore them. I don't think this happens to the extent you do, and I think my belief is also consistent with people not being stupid.

In general I just want to make it clear that this is something of a sliding scale. What you're proposing isn't government directly by the people, it sounds like you're suggesting that our current legislative systems get replaced by a body of random appointments. These random appointments will presumably have a similar dependence on experts to advise them and many layers of management to execute those goals. This is like our current system, with with one significant layer removed, though one layer of many.

I think the realistic goal is to change the type of influence that the experts have, perhaps change their incentive structure and hold them more accountable. But there isn't much room to realistically diminish the role of experts in actually guiding and executing policy.

Who here understands the electric grid and the reliability, security and efficiency problems facing it? Clearly good energy policy requires being informed on this. Not only does good execution depend on it, but even setting the goals to begin with depends on it. So I'd also be careful trying to draw a line between the experts and the goal setters, I don't think there is a clear one there. Good goals also requires good information, and the more the better.

So if I'm right I think you're outlining a different point on the scale where the people have "more" direct control, but I don't necessarily see this as being drastically different.

The next question would be whether your randomly selected body would actually function well (challenges that come to mind: getting people to show up - it seems like burden 1000X worse than Jury duty today, and not letting the random appointments get manipulated by the permanent class of advisors that will roughly mimic lobbyists today). This is a somewhat seperate debate.

rudatron posted:

You're assuming that knowing 'the right thing to do' is a skill or craft. It's not, it's an opinion. An opinion that is often a result of self-interest, which is then justified after the fact. Human beings tend to do this! If you create a society governed by a technical elite, you will create a oligarchic dystopia. If you think that's an improvement, or a good society to have, then I'm sorry you're just insane. If you think technicians are somehow immune to acting from self-interest, then that is naive elitism!

You probably wouldn't make a good carpenter either, but you're missing the point. You keep thinking that politics is a craft, it's not. Inter-twinned in the political process are assumptions about what society should be, that is, opinions. You can't prove that one opinion is objectively better than another, because each ordering of political positions must itself make assumptions that certain kinds of opinions are better than others: that is, embedded into any ordering of subjective statements is a subjectivity, a morality. If you grant control over societies' morality to the rich (for example), then society (as a system) will respect the wishes of the rich over and above all others. That leads to terrible outcomes, and it stands against the ideal of a fair and equal society.

So while the activities of the surgeon general often do require specific medical knowledge, the political side of his tasks do not. But, here's the catch: the surgeon general gets their position through nomination and confirmation. They may be a political creature, but the kind of political creature they are is under the direct control of politicians. The surgeon general is a member of the bureaucracy, people chosen to fulfill someone else's political goals (in this case, the president and the senate).

Politics is the process of making group decisions. There are ways to be good at this. Knowing how to prioritize conflicting and competing goals, being good at generating consensus and crafting compromises that get the most for everyone involved. It's not a scientific process where we can look at polls and know what the best policy is. Being attune to those goals and knowing how to set out to achieve them is certainly a craft. Again, there is no bright line between the experts and the goal setters, part of what makes a good politician is the ability to bridge that gap.

Though note that the above doesn't automatically mean we need a professional political class because it's possible for the negatives to outweigh the positives. But I think it's wrong to pretend that there isn't a craft to good politics.

asdf32 fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Aug 2, 2014

# ¿ Aug 2, 2014 16:32

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

rudatron posted:

If you despise the common person, as you clearly do, then democracy is not favorable to you. For myself, it's unfair to deprive the common person of political power, or create a system where their interests are not recognized.

The proposition system has problems, that are not a result of being 'too democratic' or whatever. It's direct voting, but it's not compulsory. It has the same issues as representative voting, such as the need for advertising just for exposure and to get the signatures necessary. Because of that expense, they're usually a case of one rich group vs. another rich group. If anything, it's not democratic enough.

So you're sure you want to rest your argument on rights and fairness?

I don't think the world is a better place because bob the nazi has "a say".

I think the world might be a better place despite granting bob te nazi a say if the rights granting him a say happen to work.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2014 16:44

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

If you're going give an example of too little democracy leading to bad things please be clear on why it's bad and why it's the result of too little democracy.

Democratic states can build dumb ships and stand by and watch famines too.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2014 18:56

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Gantolandon posted:

How many neo-Nazi governments have you seen since 1945? Hell, even in Germany 1933 popular support wasn't enough to put Hitler into power, he needed von Papen and Hindenburg to appoint him as Chancellor.

Actually, a democratic state would have serious problems with starving a large chunk of their population. The Irish could do poo poo, because the ones poor enough to starve didn't have enough property to even vote. The people important for the British Parliament were the wealthy landowners who were interested in keeping the price of crops high.

Both these examples, however, were meant to disprove the idea that educated specialists make balanced decisions, while democracy leads to more stupid outcomes because of the need to appeal to stupid people. In the first example, the Whigs didn't want to hear anyone who didn't have uttermost respect for lessez-faire solutions. In the second one, the experts made stupid decisions because they feared to tell their king he won't get his bombastic ship right now.

I don't think it's possible to get workplace democracy before getting more democracy in government first. But yeah, this would be a good idea.

Nazi is a stand-in for idiot. Literal nazis are rare, racists are not if you'd prefer that.

There is zero debate that all forms of government can and will make terrible damaging decisions. But trading annecdotes of 17th century ships isn't that useful. And democracy has allowed slavery and segregation. It certainly can't guarantee that a majority won't let a minority starve.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2014 21:10

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

rudatron posted:

Any non-democratic system will eventually result in rampant corruption, where those in power service their interests before the public interest. This is still the case in the united states and other liberal democracies, because its the rich that run the show. The only way to avoid this is to grant more power to the public, and deny power to individuals or 'special interest' groups.

The winner in american representation is the side with the most money & power. With both, you're able to spread misinformation and lies that much better than your opponent. If your honestly believe this simplistic analysis of 'heh dumb sheeple', then you're just naive. You're ignoring the power dynamics at play. The public is well aware of their interests, they're not stupid. Worse, you have bipartisan support for a lot of issues in the US, so you can't even vote for another person to represent another view on that (foreign policy is a good example). Why? Because both sides need to pander to those with money, in order to be in the running at all. The US isn't democratic enough.
I've never made that assumption, but I dunno if you're referring to me here as well as others. You deal with the people you have now. In fact, it's the people advocating expert-rule who are claiming some mythical cultural shift that will solve their problems for them: the idea that experts will no longer act in their own interests, and this time everything will work out wonderfully, is nothing but special pleading. Yet people still fall for it. Over and over again.

Could you or Helsing talk about the actual policies you think would be different if we had more democracy right now?

I think existing democracies do a decent job tracking public will.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2014 13:36

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Ddraig posted:

Tracking public will: in the uk we were involved in a decade long pissing match, the consequences are still being felt with more Radical groups taking over the helm of the groups we spent a decade subjugating. That was a worthwhile endeavour and a shining bastion of the public will being represented. Oh wait, we never got a say and the public was overwhelmingly against the war. Guess that was just a fluke.

Our public services are being cut and gutted, ridiculous sums of money are being spent on vanity projects like the new high speed railway to the north that nobody wants. We spent billions bailing out banks that were too big to fail and they're repeating the same mistakes. I could go on and on. Of our interests are being represented it's not easily apparent how.

The war in Iraq was a closer call in Britain but I see 47/43 support in 2003 for Blair's handling of the war.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2014 17:20

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Helsing posted:

Yeah, but you seem to define this in a tautological way. You start out with the assumption that our voting system is good at representing the popular will, ergo you assume any outcome of the system must by definition be representative of the popular will.

No, polls. Polls are the best we have for judging public will and broadly speaking I don't think polls differ from actual policy that much.

quote:

I don't consider 'voting' to be synonymous with democracy. Democracy is a system where political power is very widely distributed amongst the population rather than being concentrated in the hands of a small elite. Voting on things is just a tool for achieving that goal, it shouldn't be confused with the objective itself.

Personally I think the most obvious democratic reforms toward that goal would be a guaranteed minimum income, universal union membership for all workers (or some equivalent in situations where workplace or industrial unions don't make sense), guaranteed and generous retirement pensions, a guarantee of dignified and useful work for anyone willing to take the job, universal and comprehensive healthcare including dental and mental health, nationalization of finance and other major utilities. On the other end I think there should be extremely high income taxes, 90% or more on the top brackets, and more broadly speaking, a government genuinely dedicated to tackling and limiting anything but the most superficial economic inequality.

If I had to pick one of those policies I'd probably focus on unions. All workers should be guaranteed some form of collective representation that is actually effective and comprehensive. I'd also be in favour of substantial union reforms: no one in a union should earn substantially more than the actual workers of the union, and union officials should be easy to recall so that the bureaucracy doesn't become disconnected from the rank and file workers.

I think these policies would have the effect of redistributing political power more widely and therefore would be a good place to start. Note most of them have only a limited connection voting. I think the key here is to empower citizens to be better able to take care of themselves and their interests. Once we'd reached that baseline we'd be better positioned to think about whether specific areas of policy like policing, urban planning, economic policy, international affairs, etc. could or should be opened up to more popular participation.

I see you're talking from the perspective of what you think we'd need to be a more democratic society, but I was intending to ask "If society was perfectly democratic today, what differences do you think there would be". I think it's safe to say that in the U.S. anyway, a perfect implementation of public will today wouldn't result in a move towards the types of reforms you're describing.

The conclusion you assume: that power is in the hands of the elite requires some evidence and I'm saying that evidence would show up as differences between what the public actually wants and what it gets.

I know there are a couple common responses. The first is that there are differences and I think Rudatron posted a study above showing that policy follows the wants of the rich more than the poor. It's probably the most interesting study on this topic though I haven't dived all the way into it. On the other hand academic consensus on the influence of money on elections and policy has generally been the opposite: very little.

A second response is that media controls what people want. Even assuming this is true (again, consensus is that it generally isn't), once we reject people's own assessments of their wants we're left with no other objective measures. There may always be better ways to judge what people "actually" want, but at the end of the day it rests on what they tell us. Undermining this puts you at risk of circular reasoning.

asdf32 fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Aug 9, 2014

# ¿ Aug 9, 2014 16:51

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

SirKibbles posted:

The entire field of marketing existing kind of disproves his point about media having little effect on people's decisions. People aren't naturally rational (in the Rationalism sense) it is a skill that has to be learned and refined.

No, marketing is the perfect analogy to what I was saying - marketing doesn't determine everything. It's an influence but not a terribly strong one and works much better in instances where people don't actually care that much, I.E. nearly identical sneakers. And actually marketing is more complicated because often what people are buying is the brand image.

And just to be clear, Helsing's last post is primarily about a separate issue: do elected officials listen to the people that voted for them. This isn't the same as figuring out the extent to which marketing influences people's votes and opinions.

# ¿ Aug 9, 2014 23:29

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Snipee posted:

I haven't reread the Princeton paper on the influence of money in American politics since May, but from what I remember, one of the key reasons why it is so difficult to isolate the impact of money in decision-making behavior is because the public at large often share the same policy preferences as the elite. If we observe that both the rich and the poor want lower taxes in the US and that politicians later lowered taxes, then it is hard for us to discern if "democracy" "works". I fail to recall the methodology, but the conclusion was the obvious "money matters". If we tried to isolate for just the lowest 80% of the income brackets, then their opinions basically do not show any impact on legislation.

Regardless of regime type, I think it is important that legitimacy for the current American style of government is abysmal. I haven't heard of a presidential approval rating above 50% in months, and Congress has been stuck under 25% for years. I admit that the standards for leaders are much lower in authoritarian countries and that their statistics are clearly cooked, but Xi Jinping and Putin regularly enjoy approval ratings well over 80%. From personal experience in China, I would guess that the real number is probably no less than 70%. Even if we are more "democratic", the people certainly aren't any more happy about what they're getting. To be entirely fair, Westerners tend to be much more ideological and political than most other people I have talked to.

Here are my questions:

1. If democracy fails to be seen as legitimate, then why is it worth having over what is popularly perceived by the locals as "efficient" dictatorships?

2. How should we draw the boundaries for democracies, and what goals should these lines reflect? The American South is a different animal from the American Northeast or even the American Southwest. Political geography have been touched upon in this thread, but I would love more discussion.

But bear in mind that "approval ratings" for just about everything are in decline including issues where factual evidence runs to the contrary. People have lower approval for corporations, government, the president, republicans, democrats, unions and the church. And they think violent crime is going up when we know it's actually going down.

So while I made an appeal to polls earlier on I roll my eyes at these types of approval ratings.

Helsing posted:

The thing about lobbying and marketing more generally is that it's only the tip of the spear. They certainly play a role, sometimes a large role, in determining policy, but corporate influence goes deeper.

The infamous Koch brothers are an instructive example here. Of course they engage in a lot of direct lobbying but they also make longer term investments, like de facto purchasing entire university departments:

Then, in addition to this, you have the support of a small number of people, such as the Kochs, for most of the major conservative think tanks:

Then you have the bankrolling of conservative books and TV shows. There's also Fox News, which essentially provides an entire network of conservative programming.

The effect here is much greater than the sum of the individual parts. Each of these individual elements feeds off the others. Fox News can cite economists from these think tanks, the think tanks can cite economists from the bought and paid for economics programs, etc. etc.

Individual advertisements are rarely intended to change people's minds. However a multi-decade campaign that integrates academics, media personalities, politicians, TV show personalities and even regular folks is going to be much more effective at changing people's opinions.

You present this as if it's a new development. It's not.

The rich and upper classes have been pulling the strings forever, it's better today than probably any other time in history.

P.S. I intend to make a longer response to your previous post at some point. But no time now.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2014 03:27

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

TheDeadlyShoe posted:

That's not true. The reason people have been beating the drums on class issues in the US is that the balance has tilted overwhelmingly towards the ultra-rich in recent decades. In the US at least, something has changed.

While influence peddling is a big thing, ultimately it takes money to get elected. Politicians spend a HUGE portion of their time and their staffs time raising that money. There is a direct and obvious link there with corruption and responsiveness to someone or some group willing to donate large sums. Public financing is not a magic built but it seems inarguably to me that the less a politician has to sweat blood over every cent the less responsive they will be to fat wallets.

And what does that mean in terms of political power and when do you think things were actually better?

Cash spending on elections isn't that useful and probably hasn't been going up (Source (2003)).

On the other topic (Rudatron/Helsing's studies), if it turns out politicians just don't listen to poor people I can assure you it's not a new development (and much harder to solve too).

# ¿ Aug 14, 2014 00:24

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Decent Atlantic peice on the subject of transparency.

The Atlantic posted:

The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to lament that his beloved New York City had lost the ability to get things done:

In the dear old days of Jimmy Walker, we could build the George Washington Bridge in four years and one month, and think far enough ahead to make it structurally capable of carrying a second deck when the traffic grew. When Mayor LaGuardia�s plane was forced to land in Newark because Floyd Bennett Field [New York City�s first municipal airport] was fogged in, he took out his ticket and said, �Mine says Floyd Bennett Field; what am I doing in a place called New Jersey?� Twenty-four months later, LaGuardia Airport opened.
It�s a grim but fitting irony that the New York railway terminal intended to be named in Moynihan�s honor has already fallen six years behind its scheduled 2008 opening, with no completion date in sight.

Moynihan was being sardonic when he referred to the �dear old days� of Jimmy Walker. New York�s mayor from 1926 to 1932, Walker resigned in the wake of a corruption scandal in which one of the players was found strangled to death. The point, though, was this: as bad as he was, Walker built things. The more honest government of today cannot.

Moynihan�s career coincided with many reforms of the structures and institutions of American government. Americans used to say, �You can�t fight city hall.� That was long ago. Today, there�s almost nothing a city hall might do that could not be appealed in a court somewhere.

If it cannot be argued that a city has breached a federal or state environmental law, then surely it�s committed some form of discrimination. If discrimination cannot be plausibly alleged, well, federal and state constitutions are full of words and promises that might have been violated.

We have had campaign-finance reform, and reform of the seniority system in Congress, and endless rounds of anticorruption measures in the federal government. Calls for �transparency� and �accountability� have meant more administrative and judicial supervision. In turn, power flows to impersonal institutions (agency review boards, courts, and so on) and away from elected leaders who can get things done�and who can be punished at the ballot box for delay and disappointment.

Since the 1980s, courts have become more conservative, without ceasing to be activist. They have, to take one example, persistently struck down restrictions on guns�most recently in Illinois�so that now the laws of every state in the union grant some sort of right to carry concealed weapons. Who decided that Illinois should have concealed carry? A panel of judges whose names most citizens have never heard. If things go wrong, there are few means to correct their decision, and only the most wonkish voters will know whom to blame.

And yet, when government seems to fail, Americans habitually resort to the same solutions: more process, more transparency, more appeals to courts. Each dose of this medicine leaves government more sluggish. To counter the ensuing disappointment, reformers urge yet another dose. After Speaker Tip O�Neill retired from Congress, in 1987, an interviewer asked him how the House of Representatives had changed over his 35 years of service. He memorably answered, �The people are better. The results are worse.� His answer might be generalized across the American system of government: the process is better (at least as better is conventionally defined: more transparent, more participatory), but the results are worse.

Here�s a real-world example from the executive branch. Throughout most of American history, presidents and their staffs have been able to hold confidential meetings in the White House complex. The independent counsels who investigated the Clinton White House jolted this traditional understanding by demanding�and getting�access to White House visitor logs. Thanks to these logs, investigators gained such indispensable pieces of information as the fact that Eleanor Mondale visited President Clinton alone for 40 minutes on a Sunday morning in December 1997.

The George W. Bush administration attempted to restore the traditional confidentiality of White House visitor lists. (Vice President Dick Cheney went even further, demanding that his office�not the Secret Service�keep custody of the list of all his visitors.) This attempt to restore the historical norm enraged Democrats and liberals. They accused the White House of holding �secret meetings� with energy executives. Administration foes sued to gain access to visitor logs. As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama promised to publish logs of all visitors to his White House. In office, he�s kept his word.

It hasn�t made any difference. Do you see any less lobbying in Washington? Do fewer lobbyists visit the White House? No and no. In fact, transparency is a useful tool for lobbyists�it enables them to keep better track of their competitors, and to demand equal access for themselves. The next most immediate beneficiaries of this particular policy are probably the coffee shops on Pennsylvania Avenue, where White House staffers are known to meet visitors so as to avoid generating a public record.

Reformers keep trying to eliminate backroom wheeling and dealing from American governance. What they end up doing instead is eliminating governance itself, not just in the White House but in Congress, too. Robert Caro�s biography of Lyndon Johnson tells a story that illustrates how the system used to work. Immediately upon becoming president, Johnson worked to pass President Kennedy�s stalled tax cut. He did so by wooing the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Harry Byrd, a conservative Virginian gripped (in Caro�s words) by a �fixation on frugality.� Byrd demanded that Johnson produce a budget of less than $100 billion. Caro details how Johnson insisted that officials in the White House�s Office of Management and Budget drive the figure down, to $97.9 billion. Byrd was satisfied; the Kennedy economic program passed.

Congress has no more Harry Byrds, single figures who can make things happen. In 1963, a committee chairman was an awesome figure. Committees could under certain circumstances convene in secret, their proceedings known only to a handful of insiders. The chairman�s power was mighty, tempered in the Senate only by the need to show courtesy to the ranking senator of the other party. House chairmen didn�t need to do even that. They had to worry only about a few other barons whose jurisdiction overlapped with their own: notably, the chairman of the Rules Committee, who wrote the �rule� that determined whether amendments to their handiwork would be allowed on the House floor. Chairmen weren�t elected. They attained their position by seniority. At which point pretty much nobody except the Angel of Death could pry away their gavels.

It was an almost crazily unrepresentative way to run a legislature! By the time a member of Congress gained a chairmanship, he was so old that he had lost touch with the country he helped govern. Harry Byrd, for example, was 76 in 1963�a man born during Grover Cleveland�s administration, trying to make sense of budgeting concepts introduced by the Keynesian revolution in economics. Johnson-era committee chairmen were drawn disproportionately from the white South, and used their power to defend racial segregation and uphold white supremacy. They were not admirable figures by any means. They harassed women, did favors for lobbyists, and got drunk during working hours. (This behavior has not disappeared from Congress, but now it�s scandalous; then, it was just how things were done.) They did pass budgets on time, however. Modern Congresses cannot be counted on to pass budgets at all.

Journalists often lament the absence of presidential leadership. What they are really observing is the weakening of congressional followership. Members of the liberal Congress elected in 1974 overturned the old committee system in an effort to weaken the power of southern conservatives. Instead�and quite inadvertently�they weakened the power of any president to move any program through any Congress. Committees and subcommittees multiplied to the point where no single chair has the power to guarantee anything. This breakdown of the committee system empowered the rank-and-file member�and provided the lobbying industry with more targets to influence. Committees now open their proceedings to the public. Many are televised. All of this allows lobbyists to keep a close eye on events�and to confirm that the politicians to whom they have contributed deliver value.

In short, in the name of �reform,� Americans over the past half century have weakened political authority. Instead of yielding more accountability, however, these reforms have yielded more lobbying, more expense, more delay, and more indecision. The irony is that Americans still think of theirs as a uniquely limited government. It isn�t.

By the International Monetary Fund�s reckoning, American government spent about 40.65 percent of the national output in 2012. That�s somewhat, but not radically, less than what Germany�s government spent (44.93 percent), only slightly less than what Canada�s spent (42.02 percent), and more than either Australia (36.4 percent) or New Zealand (34.24 percent) spent. These raw numbers overstate the difference between the United States and other countries, however. The U.S. government tends to route its subsidies through the tax code�with child tax credits and deductions for state and local taxes�rather than by issuing mother�s allowances and aid to local governments, as other countries do. This mode of doing business makes both spending and taxes look lower in the United States, even when the country is doing nearly the exact same thing as its European counterparts.

Yet somehow these spending levels don�t seem to buy as much in the United States as they do elsewhere. Health care is the obvious example: America�s per capita public expenditure on health is more than 60 percent higher than the developed-world average, and yet the U.S. ranks toward the bottom of the list on measures ranging from life expectancy to user satisfaction.

What is true of health care is true throughout federal, state, and local government: low levels of public services at high cost. It�s the story of the still-incomplete Moynihan station over and over again. For 50 years, Americans have reformed their government to allow ever more participation, ever more transparency, ever more reviews and appeals, and ever fewer actual results.

I think the bold is the strongest point here.

Somewhat related, the argument gets made that eliminating earmarks has caused problems as well. Earmarks used to be a source of compromise and a source of power for party leadership. Without them there is little you can offer Joe Tea-Party to pry him off his ridiculous position. Earmarks were an obvious source of waste, and tool for backroom deals right that should obviously be eliminated right? - it's not that simple.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2014 13:09

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

computer parts posted:

Though this is because we bombed the world to hell and back 30 years prior.

Historically the US has had a lot of foreign competition for goods.

Not really. Prior to containerized ships trade volumes were comparatively lower. Most stuff had to be made locally.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2014 21:12

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Helsing posted:

This makes no sense. Trade regimes are political. The decision to enact "free" trade was clearly biased against working class people in a way that was not inevitably determined. For instance the protection of many professionals such as doctors and lawyers remains basically intact whereas factory workers must now compete with people in China.

If you want a really blatant example of this just look at how free trade has tended to reinforce and extend expensive Intellectual Property "rights". Plenty of countries like India and China could be mass producing very cheap drugs, which would translate into big savings for society. But instead free trade always seems to make this harder and lets pharmaceutical companies extract high rents from their "intellectual property".

If the increase in global trade had been regulated differently then there's no a priori reason to assume that we'd see the same effect on inequality or wages.

How is a foreign doctor supposed to compete with a local one? This doesn't make any sense. There are real differences between a factory worker and a doctor in terms of the ability of foreign workers to compete.

And why would you expect IP laws to not be applied globally? Yes it's possible. But all the reasons that cause IP laws to exist domestically apply to foreign companies as well.

The possibility that things could have been done differently doesn't mean that there arnt signifiant underlying reasons for why they ended up the way they did.

asdf32 fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Aug 14, 2014

# ¿ Aug 14, 2014 21:27

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Nessus posted:

The foreign doctor comes to America and opens a medical practice, that's how.

And yes, the difference is that the doctor has more money and is therefore more valued by the government.

So they have money so that's why the have money?

Sorry, factory workers had some of the most powerful unions and it didn't stop them from getting the rug swept out from underneath them by foreign competition when foreign competition became a possibility. If factory workers were only in competition with highly educated immigrants they would also still be fine.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2014 22:22

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Helsing posted:

The postwar era from the 40s to the 70s was certainly capitalist though.

Capitalism is not a monolithic system. In the 18th century we had merchant capitalism, in the 19th century we've had industrial capitalism, in the 20th century we had all sorts of variations on capitalism from the welfare state to fascism. There's German capitalism and Japanese capitalism and American capitalism.

The idea that national capitalism requires the sort of trade regime we currently have isn't supported by the evidence. History shows us that capitalism at the national level can co-exist with many different global trade regimes.

I've offered a number of explanations that you've seemingly ignored. You're the one who seems to be saying "based on my abstract idea of what capitalism is, option x or y must occur" and then failing to elaborate on why.

And technology changed vastly over that time period. It's really hard for me to swallow the idea that politics is the primary driver of events that are so intertwined with rapidly changing technology.

As you pointed out we've always had trade. And as you know we have a capitalist system. Combine those things with containerized ships and tellocummincation suddenly allowing far flung manufacturing and supply networks and it's easy to see how momentum, not some deliberate long term class concious planning lands us basically where we are. We have free trade and IP domestically after all, it's really not a leap to apply it globally.

Not to mention that it's really hard to accept that people had a clue what the long term consequences of globalization would be in 1968 (it was initially assumed that containerized ships would facilitate domestic trade). Were the planners deliberately trying to wipe out sections of the automotive, electronics and steel industries? Or empower China? Because those things were consequences too.

If anything, at the time, increasing trade could easily have been seen as a way to boost demand for superior US manufactured goods, not wipe out manufacturing jobs, and this shows up in the shock and fear that accompanied the success of Japanese cars, steel and electronics in the 80's.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 18:12

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Nessus posted:

I suppose I have two objections to this thesis.

One is political, or if you like, opinion based, and can easily be dismissed on those grounds, but I think it's fair to say anyway. If we say that the current situation is the automatic result of the prevailing conditions, this can easily be read as 'it is inevitable, and therefore there is no reason to change it.'

The other I think is more general, which is the statement that it is somehow the natural and automatic order of things. "There's X now, and Y and Z were contributors to X; therefore, if Y and Z exist, X follows and is inevitable." Or to use another analogy, Hitler's army used motor vehicles and aircraft; therefore, aircraft and motor vehicles will automatically cause world wars.

There is nothing about a prediction that implies some broader inevitably. All predictions are: "because a, b and c I predict z". That doesn't mean z is a cosmic inevitability.

In this case I'm not arguing that capitalism is inevitable. That's a discussion I don't want to have and it doesn't matter, because we have the capitalism we have. Given that, it makes sense to predict within that context.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 20:55

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Helsing posted:

A copy right or patent is literally a government granted monopoly. The only justification for these things is that they are supposed to foster innovation. Current IP law has gone far beyond any reasonable standard and I think it's pretty easy to understand why: the people who benefit from IP are well organized and have very deep pockets. IP is a particularly blatant example of how, in the midsts of the 'free trade' era, the government has actually been creating and extending monopolies for some interest groups.

The net result is a huge loss to society. Most of the cultural heritage of the 20th century remains in private hands long after it should be public domain. Billions of dollars spent on drugs that should be free by down (and which were often developed with extensive government assistance). It's an insane and cruel system that is perpetuated because it benefits the right people despite blatantly violating our supposed commitment to free trade.

Well if I had it my way we'd pick a number and not move it every time Micky Mouse was about to hit the public domain.

IP is well entrenched in our notion of domestic free market. You seem to be defining "free trade" in a logically pure way that's basically yours alone. We get it, patents and IP are government creations, the market as we know it didn't spring out of the laws of physics alone. But it remains that extending our own domestic notion inter-state trade globally has obvious logic behind it and the reasons for doing it are the same in both places, even if the outcomes may end up somewhat different.

quote:

I don't think that a cabal of rich men gathered together in a smoke filled room in 1968 and precisely planned out the next forty years of global history. I think events were much more reactive and improvisational than that. I do think there was a consciously planned effort to crush the labour movement domestically and free trade ended up being a very important part of that but this doesn't mean everything that has happened over the last four decades was a conscious plan.

"Ended up" hurting labor or was deliberately intended to hurt labor? The "ended up" part I'm agreeing with.

Again, the idea that Japan would be hurting U.S. steel, auto and electronic industries in the 1980's would have been nearly unbelievable to Americans in 1968. U.S. manufacturing dominance was taken for granted and the idea that factories could be outsourced wholesale didn't exist yet. Not to mention the fact that this hurt plenty of rich owners as well as workers.

People have been afraid of threats to jobs for centuries but the actual materialization of this problem is recent. At the outset of the 20th century people feared assembly lines but it turned out their fears were premature and technology ushered in what you consider to be the golden age of labor in the 50's and 60's, where standards of living were high because technology has succeeded in wiping out labor intensive and costly jobs, freed up people to work in factories instead of the farms and then increased their productivity there.

Eliminating labor intensive jobs and moving people into more productive ones had/has been the story of economic growth in general - economic growth which had created remarkably significant and widespread benefits to the population until then and empowered workers into unions to begin with. Hurting jobs only actually hurts people when they can't just move up the ladder to the next productivity rung, a process which had actually worked reliably until then. Some people, like always, would have feared both technology and foreign competition, but actual evidence backing up their fears wasn't there at the time.

So I don't think you've defended a case for intentionality here at all. Plus, remember that computers and automation in general have wiped out similar numbers of jobs as foreign competition. Somehow I don't see you arguing that spreadsheets were deliberate attempts by the elite to undermine labor. They're nearly identical in the way they eventually caused outcomes no one planned or was able to see at the outset yet are easy to understand in hindsight.

quote:

US companies got a reprieve from the government in teh 1970s and 1980s. There was a great deal of government assistance given to those industries to provide them with breathing space so that they could get themselves on a more competitive footing, but for whatever reason these companies decided to focus on reducing labour costs.

I can try to make a larger effort post with more specific examples of that at a later date (though ideally I'd like to know before making that kind of effort that I'm speaking with people who are open minded enough to consider changing their positions) but for now I'll just leave you with a hypothetical: why haven't free trade deals been predicated on better labour standards for third world countries? If the motivation behind free trade was to raise living standards rather than depressing domestic wages in the manufacturing sector then why was so little effort put into creating free trade deals that prioritized worker's rights rather than just investor rights?

This is what I mean when I point to the highly political factors behind free trade. Obviously technological and social changes created new opportunities for trade but the specific content of trade deals can't just be explained away with appeals to technology. The container revolution didn't somehow make it inevitable that trade deals have tended to contain incredibly stringent protections for investors while ignoring worker rights.

Because their competitors had cheaper labor is one reason they did that. Many U.S. brands went down the drain in the 80's, 90's and beyond as a direct result of foreign competition. "Free Trade" wasn't an automatic benefit to U.S. corporations or all rich people by any means.

I don't need to speculate much on your hypothetical because I personally don't support the U.S. imposing working standards on other countries. The U.S. isn't in a position to determine when poor single mother in Indonesia should or shouldn't be working. Indonesians and their government can work that out. Western morality as it relates to poor third world workers typically amounts to little more than selfish guilt avoidance - in this case the west can keep its morality to itself.

My hypothetical for you: why does every nation have essentially free trade within its borders? The answer applies globally as well.

What I've accepted is that trade undermined the relative power of manufacturing workers in the U.S. relative to other workers in the U.S. This isn't the same as accepting that it decreased their standards of living or that it's a net loss for humanity as a whole. Far from it. Ignoring the massive benefits to 3rd world workers for a moment (which isn't a small thing at all), trade probably hasn't decreased U.S. standards of living in absolute terms. Because even the poorer manufacturing workers benefit from cheap appliances and electronics. If the U.S. still had to manufacture essentially all our goods because of protections we'd collectively have much less stuff. Many people, including many you think have been harmed, wouldn't necessarily see this as a good trade-off.

Helsing posted:

See below.

Because IP laws are terrible, verging on evil in some cases, and because they are literally the opposite of 'free trade'. They're a very blatant example of how 'free trade' deals expose some segments of society to much harsher global competition while going ridiculous lengths to shield other groups, such as pharmaceutical companies.

Yeah, one of the primary reasons being that a section of the ruling class launched a multie-decade effort to break the labour movement.

I strongly disagree. Doctors and lawyers both have elaborate certification systems that reduce their competition and therefore increase their wages. Like I said, we have the specific precedent of doctors successfully lobbying the government to slow the intake of foreign practicioners into the USA during the 1990s, the height of free trade mania.

This is problematic on multiple levels.

"Importing an iPhone is the same as literally importing foreign workers. The only reason we do one but not the other is favoritism" - this is the basic argument being made.

This argument would have a chance only if we were actively recruiting low skilled workers - we're generally not and resistance to immigration exists across the board. Note the complexity of immigration - many pro immigration people try to argue that immigration doesn't drive down wages, while many anti-immigration people argue the opposite. Some companies do succeed at getting imported workers, but this happens on farms as well as the tech industry. The bottom line is that immigration and free trade are distinct issues and it's not inconsistent to broadly peruse one but not the other. Trying to conflate them is dubious at absolute best.

Besides that, the reasons why doctors are highly regulated are also obvious - they're dealing with people's lives. U.S. doctors do succeed at using this to hold down their numbers to an extent, but one effect this has had is to boost the hiring of NP's and PA's which can do most of their job with fewer restrictions. Shockingly, they command pretty decent salaries themselves despite their comparative lack of protection, and doctor salaries have held up as this has happened.

It's just generally odd that in trying to play up the importance of protections you chose a profession which would have high wages under almost any circumstance. Low supply (because of high education) and high demand are the same ingredients that produce high wages in the tech sector, finance industry and every other type of less organized profession across the entire economy. Doctors have these things.

asdf32 fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Aug 16, 2014

# ¿ Aug 16, 2014 16:41

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Helsing posted:

First of all I'm far from the only person to raise a stink about the state of IP law. Many economists, not to mention many people in the IT sector, have made similar complaints.

Second of all I think its extremely naive to believe that the state of IP law is based on any kind of "obvious logic". IP law reflects the power of special interests who have lobbied to protect their sources of profit, so arguing that it would be 'logical' to extend these regulations globally makes no sense unless you're simply saying that the logic of globalization is to extend and entrench the power of concentrated wealth.

I'm not going to go to bat for drug IP here. That's not my thing.

But my point was that we chose to enforce drug IP domestically, therefore it makes sense to try and extend it globally for similar reasons (whatever they might be). You're over-thinking things by searching for some special motive behind enforcing IP globally when obviously we like it enough to have it domestically.

quote:

Outsourcing is a way of reducing labour costs. That is, almost by definition, going to hurt the position of labour.

Yes and no. You missed the point in my following paragraphs.

The immediate intent of outsourcing is certainly to cut costs, but that's the intent of deploying technology too.

I think you're still making a mistake of driving a wedge between outsourcing/globalization and technology. They're identical in terms of this debate in regards to their effect on the domestic economy. If society throws X resources at a machine that produces Y, it's the same as trading X resources and getting Y back (don't confuse X as money that "circulates", I'm talking about actual costs/losses).

So outsourcing has the same exact productivity improving potential of technology. One thing that happened though is that outsourcing came later, after waves of technology had hit the same workers, and was something of a final blow. Plus, it feels different because of the foreign workers involved. So this explains part of the negative connotations.

But outsourcing doesn't have special properties here where we can classify the intent of one as being different than the other regarding its impact on "the position of labor". And it's no accident that they effect the same types of workers - jobs that can be outsourced heavily overlap with jobs that can be replaced by machines.

You need out be consistent on how you see these two things fitting together. Like I said, I doubt you'll argue that the database was created by the business class to undermine labor - but it, and other technologies we take for granted have wiped out more jobs than outsourcing.

quote:

There was an extended and conscious effort by businesses to retake control of society in the 70s and 80s. You can see that playing out in several ways. For instance, businesses began to pool their funds into Chambers of Commerce and other collective organizations so that they could lobby together and therefore increase their influence. Movement conservatives took control of the Republican party and instituted a hard shift to the right under Reagan. Huge sums of money were made available to fund a constellation of right wing think tanks that began to push right wing policies into the media. Extensive public relations campaigns were conducted - men like Milton Friedman were given prominent public roles as columnists, TV hosts and book writers and then tasked with defending the Free Enterprise system. This is all well documented.

Probably the most clear cut example of this offensive to retake control of society (not that they'd ever truly lost control, but the perception was that their influence was being diminished), however, was the extended union busting campaign:

Here's an analysis of those efforts

There was an extensive, conscious and coordinated effort to break the back of the labour movement in this period. Globalization was a part of this. You can find a number of stories where a company would build a factory in another part of the world and then use this factory to extract concessions from their domestic workforce by threatening to move production overseas if the workers didn't accept wage and benefits cuts.

Bold: No kidding. And the thing that's new in this entire section isn't business's desire to cut costs, or get control, it's the ability to build that factory overseas. That's the difference and that's the root cause of much of the course of the next couple decades in terms of labor power.

quote:

You can say this but the underlying data doesn't support your argument. The share of GDP going to wages has decreased and the share of GDP going to profits has increased. Economic inequality has also risen substantially.

Yeah, there's always going to be some rich person or firm that losses in any major economic shift, but as a group it's very clear who benefited from these changes.

Globally, without question, it's the poor who have benefited the most from globalization (specifically the 10th to 60th global percentile). Literally it's not even close if you factor in the marginal utility of money. Globally poverty has been plummeting and inequality has stayed basically the same.

Also, again it needs to be pointed out that the rich benefiting from something doesn't mean the rich got together and planned it. And it's less likely when you can see that a decent chunk of them didn't benefit.

Just as an aside you probably don't appreciate how different my tone would be regarding globalization/capitalism if it weren't for the large broad hill in that graph above. We need to be aware that we exist in that valley. Everyone except us and our first world middle class friends are benefiting economically at rates that have rarely been seen in history, and never for as many people. Personally I doubt that increased GDP or increased technology are going to make the next generation of the first world much better off than us today, and there is a chance that it will make them worse. But such isn't the case for the poor. So I'm somewhat indifferent to the need for capitalism in the first world (though I do think others still want the growth it's supposed to provide, and most alternatives suck), but not for developing countries.

quote:

Uhh, the entire premise of globalization has been to entrench investor rights, enforce the mobility of capital, and to force other countries to enact specific policies on trade, government size and numerous other areas.

It's rich that you'd simultaneously decry setting global standards for labour rights and yet say that it is "logical" to extend IP laws that make basic medicine unaffordable for millions.

[quote]
They don't? Here in Canada there are huge barriers to inter provincial trade. You often can't sell specific items like wine across provincial barriers, quite a lot of our dairy and farming industry is controlled by a system called supply management, there are often different licensing requirements in different provinces, etc. etc.

In the US there are also barriers to inter-state trade. Professionals often have their own accreditation systems, for instance.

If you're not willing to apply your definition of "free trade" to U.S. interstate trade then your definition doesn't come close to existing on the global stage. As you know, interstate trade is more open than any actual international trade, where despite the notion of "free trade" we have byzantine protections anyways.

I'd like you to expand on what you'd actually like to see. I find it utterly implausible to imagine how the first world throwing up protections is expected to benefit poor people. Because it's inevitably the first world whose going to get the better end of these types of negotiations. Developing countries actually depend far more on imports from the first world (irreplaceable medical/industrial/computing equipment) than the other way around.

quote:

Free trade (plus union busting and a number of other factors that can't be taken in isolation) didn't just hurt the power of manufacturing workers, it hurt the power of workers vis-a-vis owners. That's why labour's share of GDP is decreasing.

I don't even want to get into the other arguments you make here because we have enough ground to cover already.

First of all immigration as it de facto exists in the US obviously drives down wages in many places, especially illegal immigration. I think it should be common sense that when labour intensive activities like fruit picking or janitorial work or meat packing are being conducted by people with no legal rights that this will obviously put downward pressure on wages.

Second of all immigration and trade are clearly related because both of them influence wages and profits.

The weather is linked to wages and profits too, but has no businesses in this discussion. I'm not denying that immigration is linked, but I'm pointing out that it's an utterly distinct issue, with a political landscape entirely its own. Therefore it's not instructive of anything that we push "free trade" without simultaneously pushing to import truckloads of foreign doctors. This isn't a thing that's inconsistent, especially given where immigration currently stands.

I'll just expand on previous arguments by noting that doctors aren't even instructive of a general trend because most professionals that aren't involved in local licencing, which is most, are under the exact same type of foreign competition as low skilled workers - and sometimes as a direct result of IP.

IP helps domestic companies only to the extent that the U.S. has valuable IP. But the potential for foreign companies to compete on IP is right there all the time (See Apple vs Samsung). This effectively puts U.S. scientists, engineers, designers etc under direct foreign competition. Independent of IP, there is nothing preventing domestic companies from contracting foreign marketing firms, design firms and engineering firms to replace high paid U.S. professionals in those fields (without getting into H1B's) and this literally happens all the time.

So it's borderline disingenuous to call out fields which are entangled in local licensing all over the globe (not to mention the necessity of highly local knowledge in some cases like lawyers) as instructive of general trends protecting the professional class. Generally speaking those protections just don't exist.

quote:

I don't think you've actually addressed the underlying argument here. If we're better off opening up international competition in the manufacturing sector then why are we simultaneously making it harder to globalize professional services like medicine?

Keep in mind that American doctors make substantially more than doctors in other first world countries (i.e. Europe or Canada). Doctor's wages tend to be high but they aren't automatically as high as they are in the USA. The same logic that shows gains from greater trade in manufacturing also shows gains from reducing barriers to the immigration of highly skilled professionals.

I already addressed this. We do make it very easy for foreigners to compete in almost all professional fields from the engineer right on up to the chief executive.

So what's the difference then? The difference is that the majority of new workers the U.S. found itself competing with were low skilled - like about 1.3 billion Chinese people who at current levels of education are competing almost entirely with our low skilled workers, but not our professionals.

asdf32 fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Aug 24, 2014

# ¿ Aug 24, 2014 15:20

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

rudatron posted:

Maybe if working class people stopped blaming each other, and focused their sights on the people with actual power, we wouldn't be in this mess.

That's an internal error.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2014 16:12

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

rudatron posted:

Not at all, the failure to galvanize is not from an internal fault or failure in a core concept, it's an external attack from those vested interests. It's a weakness induced from years of siege against working class interests. Capitalism is swallowing democracy up, I'm arguing for the opposite, that democratic power structures must supersede capitalism as a whole. You're correct in that that must come from a situation where existing conditions are overturned (ie a revolutionary situation), but it's not because democracy is intrinsically 'weak' or that capitalism is intrinsically 'strong', it's that the game is rigged in favor of capitalism and the capitalist class. Any power structure can succeed when everything is already in its favor, when it already has hegemony

How can you say the economic system is external to the democratic political structure? It's constitutionally internal to it.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2014 16:49

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 00:01

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Nessus posted:

"Capitalism" in the sense of the efforts of various owners of capital hunting a return exist trans-nationally. Even the most powerful states such as the US do not have anywhere near the decisive influence in other nations that they do in their own territory, and what is more they may get bought off and so forth. Perhaps if democracy has a weakness, it is this: capital, like Dracula, is very powerful and very hard to uninvite.

I'm not sure that's what Rudatron was saying. It's very much supposed to be the case that the economic system operates as a component of the larger political structure with the government controlling the market through laws and regulations from every angle.

More broadly the point of government is to protect against threats both internal and external. If it can't do that against categories of threats that will inevitably pop up then that's a fundamental problem with the structure - a boat that capsizes in any wave isn't a stable boat.

The case that needs to be made is that blocks of power like the ones that arise from pooled capital can be completely eliminated. I think that's a hard argument to make. And it's far harder to make if, as you suggest, democracy can't even stand up to external capital (though I think it can).

# ¿ Aug 28, 2014 17:10

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Has there ever been "too much democracy"?