Forgive me, but today we will be talking about politics. I will be speaking in hyperbole. Note that for every broad generalization that I make there is bound to be a counterexample, and for every simplification an elaboration. But this is, for the most part, what I believe. I am open to argument in good faith.
America was founded by and run by the Puritans. Religious freedom was very very important to them, because they were exiled to and subsequently branded as heretics by multiple different countries before they were essentially kicked off the continent. They rightfully believed that nobody should have to experience that. That religious freedom should be a fundamental right.
But once they got to America, at some point things changed. Once they established their own society, suddenly there were religious in groups and out groups again. They enforced their way of life, and at one point even hunted their own as witches. Is religious freedom for all really what they wanted? Or did they just want freedom for themselves?
There are innumerable examples of this. Maybe it's the nature of societies. Maybe it's the nature of individuals. Perhaps new generations are in general worse at acting upon the ideals of the previous, even if they are adept at enforcing the inherited cultural norms and policies. I don't know. Whatever the case, it seems like we never learn this lesson.
It seems that, as they gain control of the cultural narrative, the previously downtrodden don't genuinely want to reform the system so that nobody gets stepped on. They just don't want to be stepped on themselves. If possible, they may even like to wear the boot one day. Nothing changes structurally, and so the stepping continues.
From time to time, I've been astonished by the foresight of the founding fathers. Other times less astonished. A lot of them owned slaves, after all. The deepest hypocrisy imaginable. But perhaps the Declaration of Independence says it best. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The duty of government is to ensure the right to for all citizens to maximize these things. Failure to allow for the optimization of these things is, in my mind, a failure to commit to the American cultural ideals. There should be no boot.
All of what I've said so far is, I feel, fairly incontrovertible by our cultural standards. Now let's get controversial. I think that those three objectives, life, liberty, and the right to pursue happiness, are a philosophical razor which cut to the core of many social issues today. I don't think that this makes me a libertarian though. It makes me a pragmatist. These three are a means of measuring what policies actually work.
Gender is perhaps the most obvious application of the new (old) razor. People need the liberty to figure out (or save) their life and pursue their happiness. Therefore we should be supportive. Or at least not unsupportive and mean. The thought of passing a law for the explicit purpose of preventing certain people from acheiving happiness seems very unamerican to me. We've tried it before with Jim Crow laws, and many more laws before that. No such law has ever been on the right side of history.
On the other side of the political spectrum, I think it's naive to dismiss the fact that an entire culture has grown up around the idea of gun ownership. These people want to maximize their happiness too, and like the queers of today they fear the destruction of their subculture.
The root of the fear in both cases is the same. But neither party understands the culture and motivations of its counterparty. That's a problem. For this reason and many others, I hate the culture war. I wish more people could see that we're more alike than we realize.
Housing is another application of the razor. Zoning rules and red tape make it difficult and expensive to build new housing units, especially the sort of low cost high density ones which could bring down the cost of living in the areas where they're needed most. This pushes people out onto the street, leading many kill themselves rather than go homeless. I feel as though life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not being maximized here. Therefore, these laws are bad. It's a shame that nobody in a position to actually change things wants to bring down the cost of living.
Many fortunes have been made over the past twenty years in real estate. "Investors" (speculators) buy houses, prices go up, and now the houses are worth more. Often they rent them out, then take out loans against the value of these houses, and rinse and repeat until they have a ridiculous amount of both real estate and debt. They get laws passed to prevent more houses from being built. The price increases. Banks, understanding what's going on and wanting a piece of the action, start lending to those who they know will default. Suddenly the price goes down. Oh no. That's not supposed to happen. Panic ensues, the government steps in to bail out the grifters, and still nothing of value has been produced. The whole thing smells suspiciously like a pump and dump, just with "accredited investors" and houses instead of NFT profile pictures on Twitter and digital coins with dogs on them.
So why bring the gravy train to a halt? That would make the entrenched interests angry. You might not get reelected. Why not just keep riding it?
I'm left wondering why we put up with this. Capitalism has to pick winners and losers, and nobody wants to lose. But still, it would be nice if everyone could live a life of dignity. It's relatively cheap to do the bare minimum to keep people alive. Just because some people win doesn't mean that everybody else has to lose. I wish that it wasn't such a zero sum game.
Capitalism is not supposed to be zero sum. In "The Wealth of Nations," Adam Smith argues that greed does societal good, even more so than trying to help society directly. Growing the business is supposed to grow the economy, which raises the standard of living. A story we've all heard before.
This probably used to be the case, and there are lots of examples throughout history of it working. It's how just about every nation got wealthy. But looking around, it's getting harder and harder to believe blind greed is what we need more of. We need to figure out how to change some incentive structures.
Greed is only good if you stand to benefit more from creating net value than destroying it. It turns out that creating real lasting value is hard. It's much easier to grift, or to skim off the top, or to squeeze a monopoly. A lot more efficient too. And capitalism rewards efficiency.
What bothers me so much is not the moral issue of ordinary people getting screwed. It's that the grifts have gotten so elaborate, and yet still nothing of value is created.
More sophisticated investment vehicles do not do the world any modicum of good either. I'm not referring to just mortgage-backed securities. Finance makes up 8% of the US economy. Why? Surely finance has a place, but this is ridiculous. It doesn't directly produce anything. How many talented students have left promising fields to toil in this bottomless pit? Even Warren Buffet has commented that this is a gargantuan waste of talent, and society would be better served if their talents were directed elsewhere.
How many advancements have we given up on for the privilege of shuffling money around? How many cures? Does it really matter who exactly holds onto the pile of money if nothing ever changes structurally? How many people have had to say goodbye to their family members early because of innovation that didn't happen?
Don't even get me started on the perverse incentives in healthcare. I don't need to elaborate, you already know what the problem is. More grifters. They're killing people, and we can't seem to do a thing about it. Serial killers. UHC is still grifting just as hard as before their CEO was put down in the streets like a dog. It's unfortunate that shooting serial killers of CEOs is not a long term solution.
I feel like, if we Americans still believed in our founding ideals, we would not stand for this zero sum thinking. We would recognize what's happening, awaken whatever's left of our political consciousness, oust the grifters, and maximize the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for all Americans. Ideally, for all people in general. The current system deprives us of these rights, or at least doesn't enable us to pursue them to the extent that it could. It seems that we're no better than the Puritans. And sadly, grifting for campaign money is a prerequisite for getting into office. We're so fucked.
I'm getting out from under the boot, and I hope you do too. But once you're in a position of power, don't put on the boot. Don't hate, don't grift, and don't try to regulate your competition. That would make you a truly detestable and pathetic human being. I'm looking at you, Sam Altman. If you're complicit in this grifting behavior, and you have the choice not to be, then don't be. Go do something that actually produces value of some sort, any sort. Even if you make less money. If it meant that the world would be a structurally better place, I would live under a bridge. Actually though, it works the opposite way. To change the world, I first need to obtain power.
What's the easiest way to gain power? Ah yeah, to grift. Fuck.
