Michael Strong on stimulating young brains; me on Andrey Mir's latest book; Virginia Postrel on Trump and the Libertarian Party; Matthew Mittelsteadt on "critical infrastructure"
Maybe I misunderstood previous news stories, but I thought the Libertarian Party invited all three presidential candidates to come speak to them, but only Trump took them up on the offer.
That may say something about the candidates, but I don't see how it says anything about the Libertarian Party.
I consider myself a fan of Postrel, but it's hard to describe this as anything but political boilerplate. Maybe libertarians have figured out that their opponents aren't content to let them live and let live?
If I play "tit for tat" or even use a strategy of deterrence through "overwhelming response", it's not because I don't "WANT" to live and let live. It's because that's what's necessary to reach an equilibrium state of live and let live.
It's just so simplistic. Don't most Israelis want to "live and let live" with the Palestinians? Sure. But until the Palestinians are also willing to live and let live, that's not a choice.
Thankfully, here in the US we don't (yet?) have to go to those extremes. But when the guys on the other side are actively unwilling to let you "live", the only sensible response is to not meekly submit.
Nailed it. Libertarians want to fight the left for the same reasons Eastern Europeans who wanted to be left alone fought the Soviets: being left alone sometimes requires making those who would not leave you alone stop.
I lost any respect I used to have for Postrel when I came across her Substack piece advocating synthetic (lab-grown) meat. I agreed with the pushback from some commenters that proponents of synthetic meat would not be content to let people 'live and let live,' but would instead use the levers of government power to regulate the livestock industry out of existence and thereby force synthetic meat on everyone. I was also put off by her reasoning that involved her personal squeamishness about slaughtering live animals and more generally the cruelty of the meatpacking industry. If you are squeamish about animal slaughter, you are free to choose not to eat meat, but don't project your imagined 'tradeoff between conscience and appetite' on everyone else. Postrel's faith in the potential of technological progress to solve the world's problems is off-putting. She is just a wolf in sheep's clothing.
In my mind, at least, this is a key determinant between someone being libertarian and conservative. You are espousing a conservative view. It's certainly reasonable, given human history, to assume that the people who are for synthetic meat won't be content to live and let live.
But... it's hypothetical.
At the core, this belief is pre-supposing what unknown people might or might not do in the future in order to impose very real limits on our freedom now. In a way, it's the same argument that Postrel and the left makes about Trump. He's too likely to be authoritarian to allow anyone the freedom to vote for him.
To me, the libertarian has to weigh the certain freedoms we are giving up now more heavily than the potential of having to fight for them in the future. In my understanding, people shouldn't be giving up freedoms based on fear of what might happen.
On the other hand, it's completely reasonable for a libertarian to identify what is happening, freedoms are being taken away, and resist it.
My concern about government regulations being used to promote synthetic lab-grown meat at the expense of traditional agriculture is not hypothetical: https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/12/epa-seems-to-be-setting-up-u-s-to-join-the-globalist-war-on-meat/ , and certainly not nearly as hypothetical as Ms. Postrel's concerns about the 'instinctively authoritarian' Donald Trump. This is not the 'free-market' model Postrel claims to believe in. No, it is the same corporatist/rent-seeking model used to promote the 'green energy' transition: encourage the 'private sector' to invest in the development of alternative technologies (in this case, lab-grown meat) by imposing regulations designed to increase the cost and reduce the competitiveness of the existing meat industry, and then cover it up with some sour cream dressing ideology about saving the planet from methane emissions (or in Postrel's case, reducing animal cruelty). It is also analogous to green energy (or trans ideology, to take another example) in being divorced from physical reality. How can any intelligent adult believe that it is possible to replicate meat in a lab, in terms of health benefits as well as taste/texture? It reminds me of a Tablet Magazine article about the plant-based 'Impossible Burger' by an observant Jew who was excited at the possibility of being able at long last to eat a cheeseburger. As a non-observant Jew, I can testify from experience that they are not the same thing at all. I see nothing identifiable as libertarian in Postrel's worldview.
If we're being honest, the meet industry in the US is already heavily subsidized itself, so it's not exactly a poster-child for the libertarian way of doing things.
If true, then the appropriate libertarian solution would be to eliminate the existing subsidies, whatever they are, instead of tacking on a new layer of regulatory restrictions aimed at promoting the lab-grown meat industry. But since I am not a disciple of the church of libertarianism, I know the libertarian solution is unlikely to come about in our political system.
To me other people's meat consumption is astonishing large. I would basically be a vegetarian who ate a hamburger once a month to stave off brain fog, were I not married and needing to cook for someone else.
Also, I feel keenly as one of those modern life discontents, the lack of connection between what I eat and how it was grown/raised.
Also I grew up watching the Jetsons and as a child had little interest in food, so I was expecting we'd be eating food pills by now. Of course, you get old and food and other little creature comforts become one's all. It's not something to celebrate though ...
I see a field of cows and do not concern myself with the reason they are there, because their lives seem pretty pleasant. An enormous feedlot impresses me in the opposite manner.
I drive behind a truck full of chickens leaving their cages for the first and last time, though, and feel pity. I can't bear the thought of their little beaks being removed. I don't care for chicken myself, so those 99-cent packages of chicken parts that so thrill the rest of you do indeed depress me. In fact, so great is y'all's love for chickens that I think there should be a greater recognition of how much chickens do for the world, and appropriate reverence for them.
A story I once read about the processing of the cheap turkeys that grace everyone's table at Thanksgiving, moved me to tears - for the people involved, not the turkeys:
My male relatives hunt and it certainly didn't bother me to eat what they brought home, growing up, except that like I said, I basically got all my nutrition from fortified flour.
I feel sad thinking about the milk cows being so soon separated from their calves, but I admit that's a stumper far outside my ken.
Just stating my biases and non-biases. If one can't have nuanced thoughts about something like the meat supply - well, that would be a freedom one should regret losing.
I'm guessing, given what I think I know about Postrel's writing, that she similarly views "industrial" animal husbandry as dystopian, in a world with 10 billion people. I expect the traditional farm activities and yes, the "local food" efforts to go back to something older, would not trouble her at all; and if they did, it would principally be because she had not grown up around animals and their slaughter [I assume, I don't know anything about her].
This sort of aversion, however honestly expressed, generally results in complaints that someone wants the world's population to starve. There is of course plenty of daylight - or perhaps we should say shadow - between just what the inhabitants of America eat on a daily basis, and starvation, given our overstuffed bodies.
I imagine the discomfort she feels is to do with population growth, but since that subject is off-limits, we find ourselves arguing about lab-grown meat instead, something utterly trivial.
Look, let me take this opportunity to say that I get a kick out of many of your comments and debates, but in this case you are just illustrating my point. As I understand the principles of libertarianism, if an individual has personal discomfort and aversion surrounding some product sold in a market, the proper response is along the lines of that old commercial for the original iPhone, namely, "if you don't like it, don't buy it." But using your personal feelings about animal cruelty to shill for lab-grown meat in a bastion of corporatism like the WSJ and wrapping it all up in a cloak of libertarianism rubs me the wrong way.
In fact, given the relentless humanism of our Party betters, I would assume the reverse is far more likely: as thinking about the consequences of our food supply - whether on grounds ethical (nice things are nicer than nasty ones, even if you are a lowly animal bred for food); environmental; or even aesthetic - belongs to such a very tiny percentage of the population - it is just such thinking, not even needing to amount to any effort to move away from the status quo - which would be deemed "threatening" and dealt with as crimethink --
*because it presupposes there might be - once were - values in this world that are contrary to the one overriding and remaining permitted value in the left's strange scheme, that the West (!) must continue to sustain as large a world population as possible, at all cost, there being nothing else to worship than people, the great mass of them, not the ones you know or are related to personally, of course, just that sheer number*.
To be honest, I haven't read the Postrel piece. The WSJ seems exactly the place for it, though, insofar as the WSJ has never met a consumer "innovation" or tech product (Best High-Tech Christmas Gifts for Your Pets and Pet-loving Friends Under $150! Or: "Increasingly high-end custom homebuyers are asking for things like bespoke toothbrushes designed to complement the architecture", &etc) it didn't want to include in its pages. Indeed, the WSJ is notable for its habit of writing anti-environmental screeds, while breathlessly urging its readers to buy some new "green"gewgaw in the lifestyle section. Almost daily.
I thus don't know Postrel's reasons for writing the piece, or how it/she touches on libertarianism - not being a libertarian, I don't filter stuff through that lens, and certainly would never contest the primacy of your feelings in that way. However, asked to imagine a scale balancing sorta "free things" and "not free things" - I find it strange that people should be enjoined from ethical discussion of consumption. Their conclusions may indeed be considered to tread upon considerations of "luxury" and "privilege" - but is not that the essence of doing what you like with your material surplus?
The turning off, and on, of populism - bothers me. That's nothing to do with what you wrote, just a more general problem I have with supposedly right-leaning media.
But I am a conservative, and I do understand it's not "meant for" me.
Of course, not having read the piece, I don't know anything about her saying that lab-grown meat must be mandated by the government.
I personally like beans and know how to cook them, and vegetables and grains and whatnot - I am fairly certain I will ever eat lab-grown meat! I'm with you on that! I can't imagine needing to. But then I don't totally understand substitutes for things to begin with.
Once upon a time, I knew people who conscientiously preferred to wear vinyl or pleather to leather. That confused me a little. Would you rather have a field of cows nearby, or a refinery? But I admit I didn't think about it too hard. I suppose pleather is going to be a byproduct of oil in just the same way that leather is going to be a byproduct of animal production.
To have your values, and be free to ponder them, and hope to see them enacted in the world - seems to me the important thing, more so than a homogenization that reduces to "let 'the market' decide".
Partly this is due to my conviction that while of course there are markets, a multitude of them, there is no such entity as 'the market'.
Arnold wrote: "So “critical infrastructure” is whatever the government feels like taking charge of on any given day. This undermines the whole idea: when you prioritize everything, you prioritize nothing." Yes, but the point isn't really to prioritize; rather it is to justify government interference in private activity and enhance bureaucratic power.
No doubt that is the intent. However, the Supreme Court is taking another look at the doctrine of judicial deference (known as Chevron deference) to agency determinations, and is likely to overturn or restrict the doctrine. This doctrine arguably allows the executive branch, i.e., the bureaucracy, to usurp the legislature. So for example, if all nine justices thought a different interpretation of a statute than that taken by an agency was better, i.e., more in accord with legislative intent, they would nevertheless accept the agency's. The relevant cases were argued in January, and we are awaiting the opinion which will issue before the end of term next month.
My understanding is that the voucher schools experiment in Sweden was a failure due to the corporations prioritising distributions over investment after various rounds of M&A. Which is similar to what happened with Thatcher’s privatisations of various bits of transportation infrastructure?
The voucher schools experiment in Sweden, where I live, has been a success. Whenever you read something about it failing, you can rest assured that it comes from the Social Democrat Party or the federation of teachers unions. They're *always* saying that things should go back to the way that they were before.
There have been some notable failures in the school choice model. For a very long while, the Social Democrats thought that letting Muslims open Muslim schools where they could educate their Muslim children would produce better results than having them attend mixed schools. There has been an abrupt turn face on this one. A good number of religious schools were caught providing nothing but religious education. Worse, some became recruitment centres for ISIS. They were shut right down. Other schools have been criticised for providing lousy education and taking rather more of the money that the state provided per pupil in profit to the education corporations, rather than out to the students, as was the intent.
This sort of thing you can fix with better accounting rules.
However, none of the above are going to appease the Social Democrats who worry much, much more about inequality in education than bad quality. It's intolerable to them that some schools perform better than others in terms of educating, and that people who care the most about education see that their children go to such schools. They cannot imagine a system of school choice where everybody came out the same, which is why they want to take the choice away. (It's not that they can get the everybody-comes-out-the-same result, either, but this sort of slight of hand is their meat and potatoes.)
The for-profit school corporations have a problem in that they too aren't being allowed to fail. So a corporation could have 3 schools that perform very well, 1 that is average, and two that aren't doing a good job of educating their students. This creates a problem in that it is hard to know if the problem is that the two that are doing a poor job should be allowed to fail and replaced by a competitor that does a better job -- or if the problem isn't with the school but with the students. The current (right wing) government is working on a big report about this due later this year. In the meantime, mandatory extra Swedish teaching for 6 year olds who don't speak Swedish well is about to be rolled out. We will see if it makes a difference.
Always, of course, the people on the left point at bad school results in certain schools as evidence that the system has failed. They don't mention that the state schools also have some high performing and some dismally performing schools.
On the other side of the 'school voucher' disagreement are those who say that school choice hasn't gone far enough. The state, worried that some schools would not do a good job of teaching (as was shown to be a legitimate worry) set all sorts of rules on what had to be taught, and how. This has limited the schools' ability to produce curricula which are targeted on the students which they have, as opposed to the 'average student'.
The other large factor which most people think has a lot to do with the recent decline was that we got rid of the system of final nation wide exams, graded externally and let the teachers just grade the students based on their work, and some exams too. So, naturally enough, you get grade inflation. You only find out about such things once they get measured in some sort of external test, like Pisa.
Can you explain how Sweden's school vouchers have been a failure.
I googled "voucher sweden" and three articles with titles about its failure or trying to evaluate it.
Most can't seem to decide what exactly is failing about school vouchers. Some say there isn't a "problem" at all, only that they didn't improve scores (which I would expect, schooling doesn't change IQ). Articles seem to claim both that voucher schools take the best and the worst students.
Others said that Swedens PISA scores declined during this period, but that could just be that they have a lot more Muslim test takers.
Apparently the government sends "inspectors" to make sure that private schools are doing a good job. Look at this amazing advice they give:
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First, inspectors found that the 340-student school needed to do a better job linking its after-school activities to its curriculum, and should set goals for both. Second, the school needed to do a better job incorporating discussions about career paths into the curriculum from first grade on. Neither finding was surprising, said principal Jenny Wahlström.
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The horror. They let elementary school kids just play after school instead of being educated more!
The failure is that someone might be making a profit in the private schools. Obviously socialism leads to better outcomes than capitalism so this must end.
I think it would be better if you thought about the implications if the reasoning behind the comment were true rather than approximating an ad hominem?
"The horror. They let elementary school kids just play after school instead of being educated more!"
It was pretty sad to watch the end-of-day line following the kindergarten or first grade teacher - those getting to go home following her to the front door, those staying for extended-day care peeling off to head to the cafeteria. They looked like condemned men. Yet our "affluent" district was able to attract nice young people, camp-counselor-like, to work the after-school program, instead of crabby middle-aged women.
Little kids just get tired of being at school. Even 2:45 is deeply inhumane for them. But that sweet daycare that is public school ...
The only way it could possibly be worse for them, would be if there were more "lesson"-like activities.
After a half hour or so of "doing homework", the kids were set free to play outside or in. The most organized thing they did was to occasionally take big group bike rides.
By the time the kids got older, they were so used to it, and had made friends there. For instance, a friend of mine switched to working from home, and told her boys they could now just walk home instead of going to after-care.
After a week of that, they asked if they could go back.
" I think that if we had vouchers, government schools would fade away within a decade."
A voucher and isn't likely to cover the costs for special needs students.
Your prediction also raises two supply and demand questions: (1) Most private schools pay teachers much less than public schools because there is a supply of teachers who don't want to deal with public school bureaucracy. What happens when the demand for private school teachers is something like an order of magnitude more? (2) Private schools also have a supply of teachers who don't want to deal with unmotivated or problem students. What happens when those students are in private schools?
Postrel's comments about authoritarianism are based on hearsay. I would like to see somebody make the case against Donald Trump based on what he *did* while President, not what he (supposedly) *said*.
"Live and let live" is a fine aphorism but doesn't take you very far.
For instance, I was just reading about some flooding that filled tons of houses* the other week, and a county judge complained about the counties to the north not doing anything to mitigate flooding, when all the water that falls on them comes through his county.
He specifically singled out a particular "rogue" development (understand, something has to be pretty damn "rogue" to be so described in Texas; most of you who live other places would have no conception of the freewheeling attitude, which is to say utter sloppiness, that is the built environment down here). The reporter obliquely acknowledged the change in land use that contributed to the flooding, noting that the land had been timberland and "hunting grounds", now cleared without regard for erosion or that hapless dream "water retention" or the consequences of heavy rain that that once would have little trouble as part of a bottomland system.
They showed a picture of a flooded house in the affected county, in the path of all that water, itself a house built probably in the last 2 decades as "development" overtook every acre.
The rogue development is little better than a colonia, marketed expressly and solely to recent illegal immigrants.
But maybe that guy will turn around and say, well, maybe you shouldn't have built so extensively in the path of the water from my county.
Your libertarian is maybe mad about his property taxes, the bulk of which go to funding all the identical ugly red-brick schools they must build for these new arrivals. But then he also thinks we should and must import these people.
When they run into him at a red light and turn out to have no insurance, because they're living a blissfully "illegible" libertarian dream of an existence - I don't know what Mr. Live and Let Live thinks.
And when he posits that everyone should do "whatever they want" with their land: like those "bad actor" development bubbas. What then about the fact that the authorities will now be proposing hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of flood mitigation stuff that the libertarian will be compelled to pay for, that he would not have had to pay for in the counterfactual where land use was considered thoughtfully and with some nod toward environmental concerns about the disruption of the bottomland hardwood habitat and the role of open space as a sink or slowing-down of water?
*I mean, yeah, everything's an opportunity for somebody, and this will be great for the guys who come out and remediate your wet carpet and baseboards and drywall, if you go that route. There's always $ to be made. But you have to wonder: do we really want to live like this?
You say: "I think that if we had vouchers, government schools would fade away within a decade."
I'm looking at my local public-school budget proposal for 2024-25 and they want a 4.81% increase over this year's amount. I can't envision the administrative blob allowing the diversion any of that revenue towards vouchers; they depend on it too much, my local public-school district has become a "growth industry". I'm sceptical that widespread implementation of vouchers can happen.
I'm sceptical that the sort of grifters - water-hustlers first among them - who pounce on the government gravy train, will have any useful ideas about education. It will just be more indirect. So far, the charter school operators down here just have that whiff of phoniness.
Government needs to get out of primary and seconday education altogether.
And the daycare aspect is too great an attractant at this point.
David McCullough's "1776" made me a fan of Henry Knox, who never came up in my limited history education at school - the world's most heroic bookseller?
"Fat, stupid and completely content to be carted around by robots while we endlessly scroll"
Call me crazy but that doesn't seem to be sustainable. Who's going to create all that food? All those electronics and electricity? All that content? All the easy chairs and heated dwellings?
Not to mention, who's going to protect from those who are still living in the physical world?
I think there's a libertarian case to be made that Trump represents the lesser evil, when compared to Biden, or indeed to any of the Democrats who might step up to replace Biden should he be unable to run.
First, let's note Trump's conduct in office compared to his conduct on the campaign trail in 2016. I'm sure you'll recall that chanting "Lock her up!" was a significant part of many of his rallies. But once in office, did he attempt to wield the Justice Department against Clinton? We're assured that this time, he'll be more effective, which might be the case; but in his first term, did he even try?
Second, Trumpism is all about Trump. The man himself has no loyalty to any cause or principles beyond himself—which is a good thing, because it means he's not going to try to leave a changed world for his successors. Most of the evils that he does in a second term will be interred with his bones. Contrast this with Biden, who's all about creating new entitlements, subsidies, and regulations, which will be nearly impossible to kill, whoever might succeed him. Trump might give us an unpleasant four years, but the encroachments that Biden makes on our personal and economic liberty will be permanent.
Obviously, libertarians need to support the party that locked down thier society for two years and blew up the currency with trillions in party line vote spending.
Maybe I misunderstood previous news stories, but I thought the Libertarian Party invited all three presidential candidates to come speak to them, but only Trump took them up on the offer.
That may say something about the candidates, but I don't see how it says anything about the Libertarian Party.
[Libertarians] "don’t want to live and let live."
I consider myself a fan of Postrel, but it's hard to describe this as anything but political boilerplate. Maybe libertarians have figured out that their opponents aren't content to let them live and let live?
If I play "tit for tat" or even use a strategy of deterrence through "overwhelming response", it's not because I don't "WANT" to live and let live. It's because that's what's necessary to reach an equilibrium state of live and let live.
It's just so simplistic. Don't most Israelis want to "live and let live" with the Palestinians? Sure. But until the Palestinians are also willing to live and let live, that's not a choice.
Thankfully, here in the US we don't (yet?) have to go to those extremes. But when the guys on the other side are actively unwilling to let you "live", the only sensible response is to not meekly submit.
Nailed it. Libertarians want to fight the left for the same reasons Eastern Europeans who wanted to be left alone fought the Soviets: being left alone sometimes requires making those who would not leave you alone stop.
I lost any respect I used to have for Postrel when I came across her Substack piece advocating synthetic (lab-grown) meat. I agreed with the pushback from some commenters that proponents of synthetic meat would not be content to let people 'live and let live,' but would instead use the levers of government power to regulate the livestock industry out of existence and thereby force synthetic meat on everyone. I was also put off by her reasoning that involved her personal squeamishness about slaughtering live animals and more generally the cruelty of the meatpacking industry. If you are squeamish about animal slaughter, you are free to choose not to eat meat, but don't project your imagined 'tradeoff between conscience and appetite' on everyone else. Postrel's faith in the potential of technological progress to solve the world's problems is off-putting. She is just a wolf in sheep's clothing.
In my mind, at least, this is a key determinant between someone being libertarian and conservative. You are espousing a conservative view. It's certainly reasonable, given human history, to assume that the people who are for synthetic meat won't be content to live and let live.
But... it's hypothetical.
At the core, this belief is pre-supposing what unknown people might or might not do in the future in order to impose very real limits on our freedom now. In a way, it's the same argument that Postrel and the left makes about Trump. He's too likely to be authoritarian to allow anyone the freedom to vote for him.
To me, the libertarian has to weigh the certain freedoms we are giving up now more heavily than the potential of having to fight for them in the future. In my understanding, people shouldn't be giving up freedoms based on fear of what might happen.
On the other hand, it's completely reasonable for a libertarian to identify what is happening, freedoms are being taken away, and resist it.
My concern about government regulations being used to promote synthetic lab-grown meat at the expense of traditional agriculture is not hypothetical: https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/12/epa-seems-to-be-setting-up-u-s-to-join-the-globalist-war-on-meat/ , and certainly not nearly as hypothetical as Ms. Postrel's concerns about the 'instinctively authoritarian' Donald Trump. This is not the 'free-market' model Postrel claims to believe in. No, it is the same corporatist/rent-seeking model used to promote the 'green energy' transition: encourage the 'private sector' to invest in the development of alternative technologies (in this case, lab-grown meat) by imposing regulations designed to increase the cost and reduce the competitiveness of the existing meat industry, and then cover it up with some sour cream dressing ideology about saving the planet from methane emissions (or in Postrel's case, reducing animal cruelty). It is also analogous to green energy (or trans ideology, to take another example) in being divorced from physical reality. How can any intelligent adult believe that it is possible to replicate meat in a lab, in terms of health benefits as well as taste/texture? It reminds me of a Tablet Magazine article about the plant-based 'Impossible Burger' by an observant Jew who was excited at the possibility of being able at long last to eat a cheeseburger. As a non-observant Jew, I can testify from experience that they are not the same thing at all. I see nothing identifiable as libertarian in Postrel's worldview.
If we're being honest, the meet industry in the US is already heavily subsidized itself, so it's not exactly a poster-child for the libertarian way of doing things.
If true, then the appropriate libertarian solution would be to eliminate the existing subsidies, whatever they are, instead of tacking on a new layer of regulatory restrictions aimed at promoting the lab-grown meat industry. But since I am not a disciple of the church of libertarianism, I know the libertarian solution is unlikely to come about in our political system.
To me other people's meat consumption is astonishing large. I would basically be a vegetarian who ate a hamburger once a month to stave off brain fog, were I not married and needing to cook for someone else.
Also, I feel keenly as one of those modern life discontents, the lack of connection between what I eat and how it was grown/raised.
Also I grew up watching the Jetsons and as a child had little interest in food, so I was expecting we'd be eating food pills by now. Of course, you get old and food and other little creature comforts become one's all. It's not something to celebrate though ...
I see a field of cows and do not concern myself with the reason they are there, because their lives seem pretty pleasant. An enormous feedlot impresses me in the opposite manner.
I drive behind a truck full of chickens leaving their cages for the first and last time, though, and feel pity. I can't bear the thought of their little beaks being removed. I don't care for chicken myself, so those 99-cent packages of chicken parts that so thrill the rest of you do indeed depress me. In fact, so great is y'all's love for chickens that I think there should be a greater recognition of how much chickens do for the world, and appropriate reverence for them.
A story I once read about the processing of the cheap turkeys that grace everyone's table at Thanksgiving, moved me to tears - for the people involved, not the turkeys:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/03/09/us/the-boys-in-the-bunkhouse.html
My male relatives hunt and it certainly didn't bother me to eat what they brought home, growing up, except that like I said, I basically got all my nutrition from fortified flour.
I feel sad thinking about the milk cows being so soon separated from their calves, but I admit that's a stumper far outside my ken.
Just stating my biases and non-biases. If one can't have nuanced thoughts about something like the meat supply - well, that would be a freedom one should regret losing.
I'm guessing, given what I think I know about Postrel's writing, that she similarly views "industrial" animal husbandry as dystopian, in a world with 10 billion people. I expect the traditional farm activities and yes, the "local food" efforts to go back to something older, would not trouble her at all; and if they did, it would principally be because she had not grown up around animals and their slaughter [I assume, I don't know anything about her].
This sort of aversion, however honestly expressed, generally results in complaints that someone wants the world's population to starve. There is of course plenty of daylight - or perhaps we should say shadow - between just what the inhabitants of America eat on a daily basis, and starvation, given our overstuffed bodies.
I imagine the discomfort she feels is to do with population growth, but since that subject is off-limits, we find ourselves arguing about lab-grown meat instead, something utterly trivial.
Look, let me take this opportunity to say that I get a kick out of many of your comments and debates, but in this case you are just illustrating my point. As I understand the principles of libertarianism, if an individual has personal discomfort and aversion surrounding some product sold in a market, the proper response is along the lines of that old commercial for the original iPhone, namely, "if you don't like it, don't buy it." But using your personal feelings about animal cruelty to shill for lab-grown meat in a bastion of corporatism like the WSJ and wrapping it all up in a cloak of libertarianism rubs me the wrong way.
In fact, given the relentless humanism of our Party betters, I would assume the reverse is far more likely: as thinking about the consequences of our food supply - whether on grounds ethical (nice things are nicer than nasty ones, even if you are a lowly animal bred for food); environmental; or even aesthetic - belongs to such a very tiny percentage of the population - it is just such thinking, not even needing to amount to any effort to move away from the status quo - which would be deemed "threatening" and dealt with as crimethink --
*because it presupposes there might be - once were - values in this world that are contrary to the one overriding and remaining permitted value in the left's strange scheme, that the West (!) must continue to sustain as large a world population as possible, at all cost, there being nothing else to worship than people, the great mass of them, not the ones you know or are related to personally, of course, just that sheer number*.
To be honest, I haven't read the Postrel piece. The WSJ seems exactly the place for it, though, insofar as the WSJ has never met a consumer "innovation" or tech product (Best High-Tech Christmas Gifts for Your Pets and Pet-loving Friends Under $150! Or: "Increasingly high-end custom homebuyers are asking for things like bespoke toothbrushes designed to complement the architecture", &etc) it didn't want to include in its pages. Indeed, the WSJ is notable for its habit of writing anti-environmental screeds, while breathlessly urging its readers to buy some new "green"gewgaw in the lifestyle section. Almost daily.
I thus don't know Postrel's reasons for writing the piece, or how it/she touches on libertarianism - not being a libertarian, I don't filter stuff through that lens, and certainly would never contest the primacy of your feelings in that way. However, asked to imagine a scale balancing sorta "free things" and "not free things" - I find it strange that people should be enjoined from ethical discussion of consumption. Their conclusions may indeed be considered to tread upon considerations of "luxury" and "privilege" - but is not that the essence of doing what you like with your material surplus?
The turning off, and on, of populism - bothers me. That's nothing to do with what you wrote, just a more general problem I have with supposedly right-leaning media.
But I am a conservative, and I do understand it's not "meant for" me.
Of course, not having read the piece, I don't know anything about her saying that lab-grown meat must be mandated by the government.
I personally like beans and know how to cook them, and vegetables and grains and whatnot - I am fairly certain I will ever eat lab-grown meat! I'm with you on that! I can't imagine needing to. But then I don't totally understand substitutes for things to begin with.
Once upon a time, I knew people who conscientiously preferred to wear vinyl or pleather to leather. That confused me a little. Would you rather have a field of cows nearby, or a refinery? But I admit I didn't think about it too hard. I suppose pleather is going to be a byproduct of oil in just the same way that leather is going to be a byproduct of animal production.
To have your values, and be free to ponder them, and hope to see them enacted in the world - seems to me the important thing, more so than a homogenization that reduces to "let 'the market' decide".
Partly this is due to my conviction that while of course there are markets, a multitude of them, there is no such entity as 'the market'.
Arnold wrote: "So “critical infrastructure” is whatever the government feels like taking charge of on any given day. This undermines the whole idea: when you prioritize everything, you prioritize nothing." Yes, but the point isn't really to prioritize; rather it is to justify government interference in private activity and enhance bureaucratic power.
No doubt that is the intent. However, the Supreme Court is taking another look at the doctrine of judicial deference (known as Chevron deference) to agency determinations, and is likely to overturn or restrict the doctrine. This doctrine arguably allows the executive branch, i.e., the bureaucracy, to usurp the legislature. So for example, if all nine justices thought a different interpretation of a statute than that taken by an agency was better, i.e., more in accord with legislative intent, they would nevertheless accept the agency's. The relevant cases were argued in January, and we are awaiting the opinion which will issue before the end of term next month.
See https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/relentless-inc-v-department-of-commerce/
You have to fight the people wanting to take your freedom- if you don't, then they will take your freedom. I can't make it any simpler than this.
My understanding is that the voucher schools experiment in Sweden was a failure due to the corporations prioritising distributions over investment after various rounds of M&A. Which is similar to what happened with Thatcher’s privatisations of various bits of transportation infrastructure?
The voucher schools experiment in Sweden, where I live, has been a success. Whenever you read something about it failing, you can rest assured that it comes from the Social Democrat Party or the federation of teachers unions. They're *always* saying that things should go back to the way that they were before.
Pisa scores are pretty hard to interpret.
2013 -- Sweden does poorly in the results. Everybody panics. https://www.thelocal.se/20131203/sweden-slides-in-global-education-rank-pisa-students-schools
2016 -- Sweden's scores recover. Everybody cheers. https://www.thelocal.se/20161206/sweden-recovers-in-global-school-rankings-pisa
2019- Scores improve, but immigrants are being left behind. https://www.thelocal.se/20191203/how-do-swedens-pisa-school-results-compare-to-other-countries
https://www.thelocal.se/20191203/what-do-the-pisa-rankings-tell-us-about-swedish-schools
2023 -- scores drop again. https://www.thelocal.se/20231205/swedish-students-maths-and-reading-scores-plunge-in-pisa-world-rankings But this is part of a general trend in all of europe, so how worried should we get?
There have been some notable failures in the school choice model. For a very long while, the Social Democrats thought that letting Muslims open Muslim schools where they could educate their Muslim children would produce better results than having them attend mixed schools. There has been an abrupt turn face on this one. A good number of religious schools were caught providing nothing but religious education. Worse, some became recruitment centres for ISIS. They were shut right down. Other schools have been criticised for providing lousy education and taking rather more of the money that the state provided per pupil in profit to the education corporations, rather than out to the students, as was the intent.
This sort of thing you can fix with better accounting rules.
However, none of the above are going to appease the Social Democrats who worry much, much more about inequality in education than bad quality. It's intolerable to them that some schools perform better than others in terms of educating, and that people who care the most about education see that their children go to such schools. They cannot imagine a system of school choice where everybody came out the same, which is why they want to take the choice away. (It's not that they can get the everybody-comes-out-the-same result, either, but this sort of slight of hand is their meat and potatoes.)
The for-profit school corporations have a problem in that they too aren't being allowed to fail. So a corporation could have 3 schools that perform very well, 1 that is average, and two that aren't doing a good job of educating their students. This creates a problem in that it is hard to know if the problem is that the two that are doing a poor job should be allowed to fail and replaced by a competitor that does a better job -- or if the problem isn't with the school but with the students. The current (right wing) government is working on a big report about this due later this year. In the meantime, mandatory extra Swedish teaching for 6 year olds who don't speak Swedish well is about to be rolled out. We will see if it makes a difference.
Always, of course, the people on the left point at bad school results in certain schools as evidence that the system has failed. They don't mention that the state schools also have some high performing and some dismally performing schools.
On the other side of the 'school voucher' disagreement are those who say that school choice hasn't gone far enough. The state, worried that some schools would not do a good job of teaching (as was shown to be a legitimate worry) set all sorts of rules on what had to be taught, and how. This has limited the schools' ability to produce curricula which are targeted on the students which they have, as opposed to the 'average student'.
The other large factor which most people think has a lot to do with the recent decline was that we got rid of the system of final nation wide exams, graded externally and let the teachers just grade the students based on their work, and some exams too. So, naturally enough, you get grade inflation. You only find out about such things once they get measured in some sort of external test, like Pisa.
Can you explain how Sweden's school vouchers have been a failure.
I googled "voucher sweden" and three articles with titles about its failure or trying to evaluate it.
Most can't seem to decide what exactly is failing about school vouchers. Some say there isn't a "problem" at all, only that they didn't improve scores (which I would expect, schooling doesn't change IQ). Articles seem to claim both that voucher schools take the best and the worst students.
Others said that Swedens PISA scores declined during this period, but that could just be that they have a lot more Muslim test takers.
Apparently the government sends "inspectors" to make sure that private schools are doing a good job. Look at this amazing advice they give:
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First, inspectors found that the 340-student school needed to do a better job linking its after-school activities to its curriculum, and should set goals for both. Second, the school needed to do a better job incorporating discussions about career paths into the curriculum from first grade on. Neither finding was surprising, said principal Jenny Wahlström.
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The horror. They let elementary school kids just play after school instead of being educated more!
Maybe this is helpful? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/10/swedens-schools-minister-declares-free-school-system-failure
Nothing in the article indicated to me what has "failed" in Sweden's free schools.
The failure is that someone might be making a profit in the private schools. Obviously socialism leads to better outcomes than capitalism so this must end.
Just from the headline, a government bureaucrat who thinks a private enterprise doesn't work is another day ending in -y.
I think it would be better if you thought about the implications if the reasoning behind the comment were true rather than approximating an ad hominem?
Or you could find better critiques yourself.
Haha. Yikes. I didn’t offer any critique. I love the voucher concept. I just asked a question! So sensitive!
Yes. The inspectors haven't gotten around to understanding the value of self-directred play. Shame that.
"The horror. They let elementary school kids just play after school instead of being educated more!"
It was pretty sad to watch the end-of-day line following the kindergarten or first grade teacher - those getting to go home following her to the front door, those staying for extended-day care peeling off to head to the cafeteria. They looked like condemned men. Yet our "affluent" district was able to attract nice young people, camp-counselor-like, to work the after-school program, instead of crabby middle-aged women.
Little kids just get tired of being at school. Even 2:45 is deeply inhumane for them. But that sweet daycare that is public school ...
The only way it could possibly be worse for them, would be if there were more "lesson"-like activities.
After a half hour or so of "doing homework", the kids were set free to play outside or in. The most organized thing they did was to occasionally take big group bike rides.
By the time the kids got older, they were so used to it, and had made friends there. For instance, a friend of mine switched to working from home, and told her boys they could now just walk home instead of going to after-care.
After a week of that, they asked if they could go back.
"School" should be a few hours a day only. If they stay for daycare, let it be extended recess all afternoon.
" I think that if we had vouchers, government schools would fade away within a decade."
A voucher and isn't likely to cover the costs for special needs students.
Your prediction also raises two supply and demand questions: (1) Most private schools pay teachers much less than public schools because there is a supply of teachers who don't want to deal with public school bureaucracy. What happens when the demand for private school teachers is something like an order of magnitude more? (2) Private schools also have a supply of teachers who don't want to deal with unmotivated or problem students. What happens when those students are in private schools?
Postrel's comments about authoritarianism are based on hearsay. I would like to see somebody make the case against Donald Trump based on what he *did* while President, not what he (supposedly) *said*.
"Live and let live" is a fine aphorism but doesn't take you very far.
For instance, I was just reading about some flooding that filled tons of houses* the other week, and a county judge complained about the counties to the north not doing anything to mitigate flooding, when all the water that falls on them comes through his county.
He specifically singled out a particular "rogue" development (understand, something has to be pretty damn "rogue" to be so described in Texas; most of you who live other places would have no conception of the freewheeling attitude, which is to say utter sloppiness, that is the built environment down here). The reporter obliquely acknowledged the change in land use that contributed to the flooding, noting that the land had been timberland and "hunting grounds", now cleared without regard for erosion or that hapless dream "water retention" or the consequences of heavy rain that that once would have little trouble as part of a bottomland system.
They showed a picture of a flooded house in the affected county, in the path of all that water, itself a house built probably in the last 2 decades as "development" overtook every acre.
The rogue development is little better than a colonia, marketed expressly and solely to recent illegal immigrants.
But maybe that guy will turn around and say, well, maybe you shouldn't have built so extensively in the path of the water from my county.
Your libertarian is maybe mad about his property taxes, the bulk of which go to funding all the identical ugly red-brick schools they must build for these new arrivals. But then he also thinks we should and must import these people.
When they run into him at a red light and turn out to have no insurance, because they're living a blissfully "illegible" libertarian dream of an existence - I don't know what Mr. Live and Let Live thinks.
And when he posits that everyone should do "whatever they want" with their land: like those "bad actor" development bubbas. What then about the fact that the authorities will now be proposing hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of flood mitigation stuff that the libertarian will be compelled to pay for, that he would not have had to pay for in the counterfactual where land use was considered thoughtfully and with some nod toward environmental concerns about the disruption of the bottomland hardwood habitat and the role of open space as a sink or slowing-down of water?
*I mean, yeah, everything's an opportunity for somebody, and this will be great for the guys who come out and remediate your wet carpet and baseboards and drywall, if you go that route. There's always $ to be made. But you have to wonder: do we really want to live like this?
You say: "I think that if we had vouchers, government schools would fade away within a decade."
I'm looking at my local public-school budget proposal for 2024-25 and they want a 4.81% increase over this year's amount. I can't envision the administrative blob allowing the diversion any of that revenue towards vouchers; they depend on it too much, my local public-school district has become a "growth industry". I'm sceptical that widespread implementation of vouchers can happen.
I'm sceptical that the sort of grifters - water-hustlers first among them - who pounce on the government gravy train, will have any useful ideas about education. It will just be more indirect. So far, the charter school operators down here just have that whiff of phoniness.
Government needs to get out of primary and seconday education altogether.
And the daycare aspect is too great an attractant at this point.
David McCullough's "1776" made me a fan of Henry Knox, who never came up in my limited history education at school - the world's most heroic bookseller?
"Fat, stupid and completely content to be carted around by robots"
I imagined that in the voice of John Vernon.
Both of those movies should have won the Oscar for best picture!
"Fat, stupid and completely content to be carted around by robots while we endlessly scroll"
Call me crazy but that doesn't seem to be sustainable. Who's going to create all that food? All those electronics and electricity? All that content? All the easy chairs and heated dwellings?
Not to mention, who's going to protect from those who are still living in the physical world?
I think there's a libertarian case to be made that Trump represents the lesser evil, when compared to Biden, or indeed to any of the Democrats who might step up to replace Biden should he be unable to run.
First, let's note Trump's conduct in office compared to his conduct on the campaign trail in 2016. I'm sure you'll recall that chanting "Lock her up!" was a significant part of many of his rallies. But once in office, did he attempt to wield the Justice Department against Clinton? We're assured that this time, he'll be more effective, which might be the case; but in his first term, did he even try?
Second, Trumpism is all about Trump. The man himself has no loyalty to any cause or principles beyond himself—which is a good thing, because it means he's not going to try to leave a changed world for his successors. Most of the evils that he does in a second term will be interred with his bones. Contrast this with Biden, who's all about creating new entitlements, subsidies, and regulations, which will be nearly impossible to kill, whoever might succeed him. Trump might give us an unpleasant four years, but the encroachments that Biden makes on our personal and economic liberty will be permanent.
Obviously, libertarians need to support the party that locked down thier society for two years and blew up the currency with trillions in party line vote spending.