Tag: George Will

Links 2018-07-09

My new series focusing on policy summaries made me realize that while the political world and Twittersphere may not discuss policy much, there are groups of people who research policy professionally and have probably covered some of what I want to do with my “Policies in 500 Words or Less” series.  So after looking around, I found that the Cato Institute has an excellent page called the Cato Handbook for Policymakers. It contains a ridiculous 80 entries of policy discussions including a top agenda of important items, a focus on legal and government reforms, fiscal, health, entitlement, regulation, and foreign policies. I will definitely be pulling some ideas from that page for future policy summaries.

I recently found the YouTube channel of Isaac Arthur, who makes high quality, well researched, and lengthy videos on futurism topics, including space exploration. I’d like to take a moment to highlight the benefits of a free and decentralized market in the internet age. Adam Smith’s division of labor is incredibly specialized with the extent of our market. Arthur has a successful Patreon with weekly videos on bizarre and niche topics that regularly get hundreds of thousands of views (24 million total for his channel), and they are available completely free, no studio backing necessary. Such an informative career could not have existed even 10 years ago.

The 80000 Hours Podcast, which was recently mentioned in our top podcasts post, had Dr. Anders Sandberg on (broken into two episodes) to discuss a variety of related topics: existential risk, solutions to the Fermi Paradox, and how to colonize the galaxy. Sandberg is a very interesting person and I found the discussion enlightening, even if it didn’t focus much on how to change your career to have large impacts, like 80000 Hours usually does.

Reason magazine’s July issue is titled “Burn After Reading”. It contains various discussions and instructional articles on how to do things that are on the border between legal and illegal, such as how to build a handgun or how to make good pot brownies or how to hack your own DNA with CRISPR kits. It’s an impressive demonstration of the power of free speech, but also important to the cyberpunk ideal that information is powerful and can’t be contained.

George Will writes in support of Bill Weld’s apparent aim to become the 2020 Libertarian Party nominee. I admit I wasn’t hugely impressed with Weld’s libertarian bona fide’s when he was running in 2016, but I thought his campaigning and demeanor was easily better than Gary Johnson’s, who was already the LP’s best candidate in years, maybe ever. I think a better libertarian basis paired with Weld’s political skills would be an excellent presidential candidate for the LP.

Related: last week was the 2018 Libertarian Party National Convention. I don’t know if it’s worth discussing or whether it’s actually going to matter, but I have seen some good coverage from Matt Welch at Reason and Shawn Levasseur.

I read this very long piece by Democratic Senator (and likely Presidential hopeful) Cory Booker at Brookings. It was a pretty sad look at current issues of employment, worker treatment, and stagnant wages. There was a compelling case that firms are getting better at figuring out ways to force labor to compete through sub-contracting out labor to avoid paying employee benefits. This leads to monopsony labor purchasing by large firms, squeezing workers who don’t have the same amount of market bargaining power. He also mentions non-compete clauses and growing differences between CEO pay and average pay for workers. I don’t have good answers to these points, although his suggestion of a federal jobs guarantee seems very expensive and likely wasteful. His proposed rules about stock buybacks also seem to miss the point. Maybe stricter reviews of mergers would work, but perhaps larger firms are more efficient in today’s high tech economy, it’s hard to know. Definitely a solid piece from a source I disagree with, which is always valuable.

Somewhat related: Scott Alexander’s post from a couple months ago on why a jobs guarantee isn’t that great, especially compared to a basic income guarantee. Also worth reading, Scott’s fictional post on the Gattaca sequels.

Uber might have suspended testing of self driving automobiles, but Waymo is going full steam ahead. They recently ordered over 80,000 new cars to outfit with their autonomous driving equipment, in preparation for rolling out a taxi service in Phoenix. Timothy B. Lee at Ars Technica has a very interesting piece, arguing the setbacks for autonomous vehicles only exist if you ignore the strides Waymo has made.

Augur, a decentralized prediction market platform similar to Paul Sztorc’s Hivemind (which I’ve discussed before), is launching on the Ethereum mainnet today. Ethereum has its own scaling problems, although I’d hope at some point sharding will actually be a real thing. But for now, transactions on Augur may be pretty expensive, and complex prediction markets may remain illiquid. That may mean the only competitive advantage Augur will offer is the ability to create markets of questionable legality.  Exactly what that will be remains to be seen, but this is an exciting development in the continuing development of prediction markets.

 

Links 2017-1-12

As we approach the time when free trade is the heretical advice rather than the obvious logical one, it’s time to brush up on our free trade arguments. Here’s an interesting one: would you ban new technology to save the jobs tied to the technology it replaces? Would you ban light bulbs to save candlemakers? Cars to save horsebreeders? It’s a ridiculous proposition to freeze the economy at a certain point in time. Well, there’s no economic difference between new technology and free trade. In fact, we can treat international trade as a fancy machine where we send corn away on a boat and the machine turns the corn into cars.  

And speaking of free trade, this is the economic modeling for why a tariff is unequivocally inefficient. One of the impacts of a tariff, by the way, is an increase in the market price of a good. Anyone saying that a tariff won’t have negative effects on consumers is just plain wrong.

The excellent open source encrypted messaging app Signal is so useful, it has to avoid having its application servers blacklisted by oppressive regimes. It uses a workaround of having encrypted connections through content delivery network, in this case, Google itself. Moxie Marlinspike, the creater of Signal says “Eventually disabling Signal starts to resemble disabling the internet.”

One of the biggest problems with Trump I pointed out last year was the total unknown of his policies. He keeps changing his mind on almost every issue, and when he does speak, he wanders aimlessly, using simplified language that is more blunt and less precise. Fitting right into this pattern, Trump has taken to Twitter for much of his communication, even since winning the election. Twitter is a short and imprecise tool for communication, and this New York Times article shows just how much uncertainty Trump creates with his tweets.

Related: Bill Perry is terrified of increased nuclear proliferation. The article is a little alarmist, but it’s worth remembering that nuclear war was a real threat just 30 years ago. It should not be taken for granted that nuclear war will never occur, and Trump seems the most likely of the post-Soviet presidents to get involved in a confrontation with a major nuclear power.

Scott Alexander reveals his ideal cabinet (and top advisers) if he were president. It’s not only remarkably better than Trump’s, it’s probably better than any cabinet and appointees we’ve ever had (Bernie Sanders notwithstanding). Highlights include: Alex Tabarrok as head of the FDA, Scott Sumner as Chairman of the Fed, Charles Murray as welfar czar, Peter Thiel as Commerce Secretary, and Elon Musk as both Secretary of Transportation and Energy.

Speaking of cabinets, George Will details just how out of touch soon-to-be-Attorney General Jeff Sessions is, recounting his 2015 defense of unlimited civil asset forfeiture, a procedure by which the government takes cash and property from civilians who have been convicted of no crime and therefore have no recourse or due process protections. Don’t buy into the story that all of Trump’s appointees are horrific and terrifying; there is a gradient of his cabinet appointments depending on their authoritarian tendencies and the importance of their department, and unfortunately Jeff Sessions as Attorney General is by far the most concerning.

Missed this earlier last year, and worth keeping in mind as BuzzFeed gets hammered this week over their publishing of an unverified dossier: apparently the FBI already has daily aerial surveillance flights over American cities. These seem to be for general investigative use, not vital national security issues: “But most of these government planes took the weekends off. The BuzzFeed News analysis found that surveillance flight time dropped more than 70% on Saturdays, Sundays, and federal holidays.” 

Speaking of BuzzFeed and the crisis of “fake news”, which itself may not even be anything compared the crisis of facts and truth itself, Nathan Robinson has an excellent take on the matter (very long read). With the lack of facts in the election, the media and Trump’s critics generally have to be twice as careful to rebuild trust in the very concept that objective truth exists and can be discussed in a political context.

Government regulations have hidden, unexpected costs. These regulations hurt people regardless of their political affiliations, as a Berkeley professor found out when trying to evict a tenant that refused to pay rent. California’s rather insane tenant laws mean that serial rent-cheaters can go from place to place staying rent free for months at a time.

I’ve often thought about the right ordering of presidents from best to worst, taking into account a libertarian, liberty-promoting approach. One difficulty is the non-comparability of presidents separated by centuries. However, this blog post from 2009 actually does a nice job of scoring the presidencies. I don’t agree with each one, but it’s a rough categorization that makes sense. It even gave me an additional appreciation for Ulysses Grant, who I figured was mostly president by the luck of being the general in charge when his army won the Civil War. Other highlights include William Henry Harrison scoring 11th, thus beating over three quarters of the competition despite only being in office for a month. I feel like I could have found more worse things on Andrew Jackson, and in general I feel like I agreed with the list more the closer I got the end.

Jeffrey Tucker at FEE has a nice article about the difference between spreading ideas and actual economic production of goods. His thesis is that we have much less control over the developing of ideas than we do of developing normal rivalrous goods. And since libertarians are pretty solid at grasping the idea that the production of goods cannot be controlled from the top down, we should also acknowledge that top-down approaches to developing ideas are even more preposterous, especially in the digital age of decentralized information. I’ve thought about this a fair amount considering I like I blogging but I’m well aware few people read this blog. The simplest way to restate Tucker’s point is that you have to have good ideas more than good distribution. I don’t know if that’s an accurate take, but certainly good ideas are the single most important part of spreading your ideas.

There’s a saying on the internet that “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch”. The 2016 election is excellent demonstration of just how poorly democracy can fail, but what our all alternatives. How about Futarchy? This is Robin Hanson’s idea to improve public policy: “In futarchy, democracy would continue to say what we want, but betting markets would now say how to get it. That is, elected representatives would formally define and manage an after-the-fact measurement of national welfare, while market speculators would say which policies they expect to raise national welfare.” Let’s hold a referendum on it; those seem to work out.

Bitcoin has been on the rise in recent months. So have other cryptocurrencies. But rather than focus just the price of the cryptocurrency, why not look at the total market valuation of those currencies? Sure, you might have heard that Bitcoin was up to $1000 again recently, but did you know that its total market cap is ~$13 billion? At the very peak of the Bitcoin bubble in 2013, all Bitcoins together were valued around $13 billion, but only for a matter of days. This time Bitcoin has kept that valuation for over 3 weeks. With more markets and availability, Bitcoin is becoming a real alternative for people whose national currencies have failed them. 

Postlibertarian throwback: When Capitalism and the Internet Make Food Better. A reminder that the despite the ongoing horrors of government we are witnessing, the market is still busy providing better products and cheaper prices.

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