Links to Consider, 4/12

Lorenzo Warby on misplaced faith; Tove K on high-tech society vs. the family; Moses Sternstein on health care as the leading sector; Two views of Mr. Trump from a libertarian perspective

Lorenzo Warby writes,

The Dialectical Faith is seeking to occupy the space left by a retreating Christianity. It is in no sense an improvement. On the contrary, the Dialectical Faith is much nastier, stupider, and more conceited than Christianity. This explains the horrific consequences when it’s in power. The Dialectical Faith took mere decades to kill more people than all religions had across millennia.

He says that human nature seems to abhor a status-hierarchy vacuum.

We are such a status-driven species—with prestige in particular being a currency of social cooperation—that human societies cannot stand too much equality. As soon as some sense of moral or social equality becomes broadly established, new (or refurbished) inequalities emerge.

Religious or quasi-religious faiths create status hierarchies. You may not like the status hierarchy that goes with Christianity, but Warby points out that other faiths tend to do worse.

Tove K writes,

Cultural evolution is about overcoming human nature. Or rather, it is about encouraging certain aspects of human nature and suppressing other aspects of human nature. Without civilization, humans tend to organize into small, slightly polygynous groups that fight each other over women and resources. Civilizations evolved because they could form bigger and more efficient armies than small-scale societies. And then civilizations sparred against each other, with the most militarily efficient of them as winners. 

Large-scale society has to overcome self-interest and family loyalty.

Basically, corruption means furthering the interests of one's own family at the expense of society. ... Cultural evolution has taken us to a point where society and the family are separated, and where the family is supposed to be inferior to society. 

I say that humans play social games at three levels: individual, group (below the Dunbar number of about 150), and society (above the Dunbar number). The group requires loyalty, even if it is against the interest of the individual. Society requires obedience to laws and norms, even if it goes against group loyalty.

She argues that the advent of high-tech society creates a new conflict between society and family.

Moses Sternstein writes,

the number of people who will want-healthcare-but-don’t-expect-to-pay-for-it is growing, and Uncle Sam’s tab is already maxed out.

The post includes a lot of data. It notes that over 1/4 of workers in some health care categories that serve the elderly are immigrants.

The government role in health care is generally to subsidize demand, restrict supply, and try to control prices. I am not optimistic about how that will turn out.

Concerning the controversy over whether the President should be able to fire bureaucrats in order to be able to control policy, Cato’s Thomas A. Firey writes,

how would Trump find people to fill Schedule F positions during a second presidency? The likely answer is that, for the most part, he wouldn’t. As previously noted, presidents now can fill some 4,000-plus positions throughout the federal government with loyalists to push their agenda. Yet Trump came nowhere close to taking advantage of that ability. Nearly a third of the 1,200 or so top‐​level jobs were unfilled at any given point in his administration, and the numbers were likely worse for the rest of the positions. Moreover, many of the people who he did install did not last long or proved to be not up to the job. If he cannot fill 4,000 currently exempted positions, it’s hard to imagine him filling an additional 5,000—or 50,000.

You may recall that I was contacted in June of 2020 to see if I would be interested in being on the Council of Economic Advisers. That wound up with me being ghosted and the positions remaining vacant.

Firey concludes,

Reforming the bureaucracy and rewriting statutes and regulations is hard work, requiring careful policymaking and consensus‐​building. It is not the product of gimmicks like Schedule F and databases of inexperienced people. That’s why a Trump remake of the federal bureaucracy would prove disastrous—especially for people who truly want to see the bureaucracy downsized.

On the other hand, John Goodman writes,

Although he rarely talks about it, the most significant gift Donald Trump bequeathed to economic prosperity was deregulation. And the one sector that was deregulated more than any other was health care.

…President Trump used an executive order expanding people’s opportunity to buy “short-term” insurance. These plans look very much like the insurance that was popular before there was Obamacare. They often sell for as little as half the price of Obamacare insurance; they typically have lower deductibles and broader provider networks; and they offer much better protection for anyone who experiences a costly medical problem.

…The vision behind the Trump agenda can be found in Reforming America’s Healthcare System Through Choice and Competition. This 124-page Health and Human Services document from 2018 argues that the most serious problems in health care arise because of government failure, not market failure.

I suspect that most libertarian intellectuals struggle with the issue of their standing with other intellectuals. Support Mr. Trump and you risk losing standing (if I had been offered and accepted a job on the CEA, I would have been embarrassed by Mr. Trump’s post-election behavior). But if you are not willing to live with the disapproval of other intellectuals, you are confining yourself to the sidelines this year.

There may be non-selfish reasons for wanting to maintain one’s standing with other intellectuals. The center-left was once reasonably libertarian on some issues. President Clinton allowed the Budget to be balanced by high economic growth and pre-impeachment was considering working with Republicans on entitlement reform. If this center-left were to regain some of its vigor, you would not want to have burned your bridges to it.

substacks referenced above:

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Society has defeated the family

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The Progressive Revolt Against Equality: II