The modern American version of the phenomenon of Anarcho-Tyranny was first noticed and written about by Sam Francis - who coined the term - in the old Chronicles Magazine starting way back in late 1992 in the long reflective aftermath of the LA riots. It was a theme he revisited and expounded upon repeatedly in subsequent years, his characteristic wit and attitude revealed in every paragraph, and his important insights into the mechanisms of its origin and various manifestations has been a frequent topic of discussion for the smarter set on the "edgy right" for a long time.
I say 'edgy' and I mean that not in the sense of "irritable", but "having a sharp or biting edge", though that still isn't quite what I'm getting at. I'm not talking about conservative intellectuals with necessarily "far" or "extreme" minority positions, but who have examined and analyzed political observations to see them as instances of broader patterns at higher levels of generality and abstraction, and thus to understand the true, terrifying depth and challenge of the root causes and underlying problems. You might call the set of beliefs shared by these people "structural leftism."
Where other conservatives might be annoyed by some circumstance or policy and make some surface-level complaint and erroneously imagine it could remedied by some equally minor fix or reform, those aware of the deeply entrenched nature of "structural leftism" are liable to respond that the solution to even a seemingly minor annoyance is nevertheless effectively a "regime-change complete problem." And anarchy-tyranny is one of those problems.
"Politicians and regulators act as if they do not understand this trade-off."
This sentence is even more true when reworded to: "Politicians and regulators act as if they do not understand trade-offs."
Apocryphally, Harry Truman said he wanted a one-armed economist. When asked why he said "so they can't tell me something and then say 'on the other hand...'"
I tossed much of my book collection in preparation for moving, but I made sure to keep my paperback copy of David Horowitz's classic autobiography Radical Son, which foreshadows much of the destruction inflicted by the influence of leftism on this country. It was thanks to Horowitz that I became aware of the problem of antisemitism on American college campuses, and accordingly stopped alumni donations, at least a decade before the recent pro-Hamas protests in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks. It was not news to me that Ben Horowitz is David's son. Listening to that podcast, I could well imagine David Horowitz rightfully saying "I told you so." Other commenters beat me to the punch in crediting Sam Francis for the term anarcho-tyranny. The Wikipedia blurb on Francis labels him a 'white supremacist.' It figures.
Because of his background, David Horowitz has truly been prescient regarding the goals, strategies, and tactics due to his upbringing and early political adventures. I didn’t fully understand that until I heard him speak at a book party to celebrate Radical Son being published. First met him in the 1990’s, have supported his efforts since then and am glad to count him as a casual friend. Also share the experience of surviving prostrate cancer with him, another subject which he wrote about.
Friedrich Hayek pointed out that laws need to be written so as to enable people to plan their productive activities. Bureaucrats and politicians on the other hand like uncertainty and ambiguity which gives them flexibility in administration that opens the door to grifting and discriminatory enforcement. This is part of the anarcho-tyranny which Sam Francis so eloquently described.
Re: Mastroianni article: the pithy reason why there are so many people pretending to cure cancer is because it is a convenient way to spend lots of money that would otherwise be taxed. If you and your corporations have income, the US gives you the option to spend the income down in various ways to avoid having to pay the government that same money. For many rich people, it's an easy choice between cutting a check to the Treasury Department or endowing a professorship or donating to some fund dedicated to pretending to cure cancer. And with the government it is rewarding friends all the way down, because government is just something that people do together (mainly stealing from other people).
So when the foundation for pretending to cure cancer produces papers and not cures, the papers are just the justification for the tax benefits.
The author's proposed solutions to the ostensible problem are insane and funny. Most authors who propose solutions to serious problems just say things like "what if we ended sin" and "I support good things happening, and I oppose all the bad things." In the alternative, I would propose giving the Treasury free reign to investigate scientific fraud both civilly and criminally and to keep the money that it claws back to roll back in to increasing its budget and to build more and larger prisons for academic grant fraudsters and their donors.
I'm no expert on business taxes but I'm pretty sure there is a massive flaw in your premise. Much like individuals, when a company funds research or gives money to a university, they get a deduction from their income at the marginal rate. In other words, their taxes go down by a tiny fraction of what they spend on these things. It's still an incentive but hardly the simple either-or that you suggest.
I love the irony of Mastroianni starting with covid to rant about how research isn't shooting for the moon. If the new technologies to map DNA and the use of an RNA vehicle to create a vaccine that targets the virus DNA don't qualify as moonshots, I'm not sure what he wants other than real moonshots.
No doubt how we decide what research to fund is chock full of bad decisions but what does he propose? Maybe a research project to improve the funding process?
Operation Warp Speed was certainly a moonshot. But it was a one-off, to deal with a new and very present problem. (Mapping DNA, on the other hand, is now normal science).
At the end of the article, Mastroianni actually makes three proposals for improving things. I don't know if they will work but he's not just leveling criticisms.
Link #1: I was interested in that goiter story and just read that mountain soil is typically low in iodine. But I wonder what would have caused a sudden appearance of goiter in the mountain Swiss. Like, seems like if 90% of their children had goiters all along, or they were constantly giving birth to developmentally disabled children, we would not have heard much out of the Swiss. Very strange.
Maybe people had formerly moved up and down the mountain more so that part of the year they ate food from different soil? Or maybe had not tried to grow food on the upper slopes in earlier times? Maybe population pressure had moved people into more remote mountain locales?
Lots of places have soils low in iodine and if the population doesn't get some sort of natural or artificial iodine supplement then goiters become pretty common. This was a problem in the upper Midwest US as well and IIRC it's where the Mayo Clinic got started with the Mayo brothers performing goiter surgery. I don't think there was a sudden occurrence of goiter that was noticed, it was a slow process of identifying iodine in the early 1800s, suspecting a link between iodine deficiency and goiter from the mid-1800s but it wasn't confirmed until almost 1900. The issue then became getting widespread availability of iodine supplements with the first iodized salt available in the US in the mid-1920s thought mandates didn't come in for another two decades. His timeline is kinda fast and loose with how the process worked and makes it sound like nothing was done for 100 years.
I will read that, thanks. I guess I was thinking of something similar, sort of: pellagra - which the indigenous people of Mexico and I guess the southwest had worked out the mixtalization process to deal with. People have been in the Alps a long time.
It seems obvious that a16z is talking its book, but so what? Everyone talks their book. Talking your book is not prima facie evidence against whatever argument you're putting forth.
One may distinguish general prohibitions and selective permissions.
A law that specifies a speed limit on a highway is a prohibition. However, enforcement is quite selective because comprehensive enforcement would be impractical. Note that a private motorist (as distinct from, say, an ambulance operator) may not apply for special permission to speed. Sometimes, fairness issues — for example, disparate impact on racial minorities — arise around selective enforcement. Illicit vice markets are another set of prohibitions that exhibit selective enforcement. Is selective enforcement, too, anarcho-tyranny?
By contrast, an immigration visa is a special permission. Anarcho-tyranny arises if (a) permission involves arbitrary discretion, corruption, and/or opaque bureaucracy, but (b) many persons flout the law, which requires special permission to immigrate. Moreover, it seems that most people who seek a visa would not attempt to circumvent the law even if the authorities do not grant a visa. It seems that people who wish to migrate mostly self-sort into separate categories.
In practice speed limit enforcement is not that selective and any traffic lawyer in your state or a friendly cop will tell you what their protocols are.
Selective enforcement is illegal in the US when it is done for some forbidden purpose e.g. racial discrimination. There are lots of defenses against it, so it's not just a matter of showing disparate impact (you have to also show that the act was for an illegal discriminatory purpose).
However, with a lot of bad and arbitrary/capricious governance, the people most impacted do not have standing to bring a complaint, or really the courts would not consider them to have standing. If you're a company, you can bring an unfair competition claim against a competitor of yours for doing various naughty things. But if you are a worker displaced by immigration or even a union that lost out in bargaining because of illegal immigration, you do not have a claim that any right of yours has been violated.
There's Supreme Court precedent on the point that no one has a fundamental right to protection from law enforcement, so e.g. for under-policing no citizen has standing to bring a lawsuit. If your state allows open air drug markets in your neighborhood due to overly selective enforcement, you have no standing to sue for the ensuing damages. Even when the state is under a legal duty to enforce a protective order, it is not liable for harms that result from failure to enforce that protective order.
"When they observe a few years where defaults are low, they say that lenders are being too strict. Then, after the risky loans they have leaned on lenders to make go sour, they say that lenders were engaged in fraud and abuse."
They are probably right in both cases, but what is the best way to deal with both problems at the same time?
But all this misses the big picture. If the Fed had been more on the ball (enough that inflation expectations never fell much below target), no financial institutions would have needed bailing out and few mortgages would have been foreclosed.
The Fed and regulators certainly exacerbated the problem, but there are many mismanaged financial institutions - due to a combination of incopenve. , greed ,lawless activity and pushing for growth. A bigger problem is the socialization of risks when the state deposit insurance cap was raised significantly and she in addition that gradually the view wax adopted that no depositors should suffer loss, only debtholders and equity owners. Otherwise SVB could never have grown so fast - plenty of blame yo go around among management, their depositors and lenders and the borrowers.
The modern American version of the phenomenon of Anarcho-Tyranny was first noticed and written about by Sam Francis - who coined the term - in the old Chronicles Magazine starting way back in late 1992 in the long reflective aftermath of the LA riots. It was a theme he revisited and expounded upon repeatedly in subsequent years, his characteristic wit and attitude revealed in every paragraph, and his important insights into the mechanisms of its origin and various manifestations has been a frequent topic of discussion for the smarter set on the "edgy right" for a long time.
I say 'edgy' and I mean that not in the sense of "irritable", but "having a sharp or biting edge", though that still isn't quite what I'm getting at. I'm not talking about conservative intellectuals with necessarily "far" or "extreme" minority positions, but who have examined and analyzed political observations to see them as instances of broader patterns at higher levels of generality and abstraction, and thus to understand the true, terrifying depth and challenge of the root causes and underlying problems. You might call the set of beliefs shared by these people "structural leftism."
Where other conservatives might be annoyed by some circumstance or policy and make some surface-level complaint and erroneously imagine it could remedied by some equally minor fix or reform, those aware of the deeply entrenched nature of "structural leftism" are liable to respond that the solution to even a seemingly minor annoyance is nevertheless effectively a "regime-change complete problem." And anarchy-tyranny is one of those problems.
"Politicians and regulators act as if they do not understand this trade-off."
This sentence is even more true when reworded to: "Politicians and regulators act as if they do not understand trade-offs."
Apocryphally, Harry Truman said he wanted a one-armed economist. When asked why he said "so they can't tell me something and then say 'on the other hand...'"
I tossed much of my book collection in preparation for moving, but I made sure to keep my paperback copy of David Horowitz's classic autobiography Radical Son, which foreshadows much of the destruction inflicted by the influence of leftism on this country. It was thanks to Horowitz that I became aware of the problem of antisemitism on American college campuses, and accordingly stopped alumni donations, at least a decade before the recent pro-Hamas protests in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks. It was not news to me that Ben Horowitz is David's son. Listening to that podcast, I could well imagine David Horowitz rightfully saying "I told you so." Other commenters beat me to the punch in crediting Sam Francis for the term anarcho-tyranny. The Wikipedia blurb on Francis labels him a 'white supremacist.' It figures.
Because of his background, David Horowitz has truly been prescient regarding the goals, strategies, and tactics due to his upbringing and early political adventures. I didn’t fully understand that until I heard him speak at a book party to celebrate Radical Son being published. First met him in the 1990’s, have supported his efforts since then and am glad to count him as a casual friend. Also share the experience of surviving prostrate cancer with him, another subject which he wrote about.
Friedrich Hayek pointed out that laws need to be written so as to enable people to plan their productive activities. Bureaucrats and politicians on the other hand like uncertainty and ambiguity which gives them flexibility in administration that opens the door to grifting and discriminatory enforcement. This is part of the anarcho-tyranny which Sam Francis so eloquently described.
Re: Mastroianni article: the pithy reason why there are so many people pretending to cure cancer is because it is a convenient way to spend lots of money that would otherwise be taxed. If you and your corporations have income, the US gives you the option to spend the income down in various ways to avoid having to pay the government that same money. For many rich people, it's an easy choice between cutting a check to the Treasury Department or endowing a professorship or donating to some fund dedicated to pretending to cure cancer. And with the government it is rewarding friends all the way down, because government is just something that people do together (mainly stealing from other people).
So when the foundation for pretending to cure cancer produces papers and not cures, the papers are just the justification for the tax benefits.
The author's proposed solutions to the ostensible problem are insane and funny. Most authors who propose solutions to serious problems just say things like "what if we ended sin" and "I support good things happening, and I oppose all the bad things." In the alternative, I would propose giving the Treasury free reign to investigate scientific fraud both civilly and criminally and to keep the money that it claws back to roll back in to increasing its budget and to build more and larger prisons for academic grant fraudsters and their donors.
I'm no expert on business taxes but I'm pretty sure there is a massive flaw in your premise. Much like individuals, when a company funds research or gives money to a university, they get a deduction from their income at the marginal rate. In other words, their taxes go down by a tiny fraction of what they spend on these things. It's still an incentive but hardly the simple either-or that you suggest.
25-37%, depending on bracket, is not small, much less tiny. But it is only a fraction.
I was referring to the corporate rate, which is 21%. As I reread the previous comment, he seems to refer to corporate and personal federal tax.
Call these rates what you want, they're a long way from the 100% credit Pick implies.
I love the irony of Mastroianni starting with covid to rant about how research isn't shooting for the moon. If the new technologies to map DNA and the use of an RNA vehicle to create a vaccine that targets the virus DNA don't qualify as moonshots, I'm not sure what he wants other than real moonshots.
No doubt how we decide what research to fund is chock full of bad decisions but what does he propose? Maybe a research project to improve the funding process?
Operation Warp Speed was certainly a moonshot. But it was a one-off, to deal with a new and very present problem. (Mapping DNA, on the other hand, is now normal science).
At the end of the article, Mastroianni actually makes three proposals for improving things. I don't know if they will work but he's not just leveling criticisms.
Link #1: I was interested in that goiter story and just read that mountain soil is typically low in iodine. But I wonder what would have caused a sudden appearance of goiter in the mountain Swiss. Like, seems like if 90% of their children had goiters all along, or they were constantly giving birth to developmentally disabled children, we would not have heard much out of the Swiss. Very strange.
Maybe people had formerly moved up and down the mountain more so that part of the year they ate food from different soil? Or maybe had not tried to grow food on the upper slopes in earlier times? Maybe population pressure had moved people into more remote mountain locales?
Lots of places have soils low in iodine and if the population doesn't get some sort of natural or artificial iodine supplement then goiters become pretty common. This was a problem in the upper Midwest US as well and IIRC it's where the Mayo Clinic got started with the Mayo brothers performing goiter surgery. I don't think there was a sudden occurrence of goiter that was noticed, it was a slow process of identifying iodine in the early 1800s, suspecting a link between iodine deficiency and goiter from the mid-1800s but it wasn't confirmed until almost 1900. The issue then became getting widespread availability of iodine supplements with the first iodized salt available in the US in the mid-1920s thought mandates didn't come in for another two decades. His timeline is kinda fast and loose with how the process worked and makes it sound like nothing was done for 100 years.
This link has more US history of goiter and iodine https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3509517/
I will read that, thanks. I guess I was thinking of something similar, sort of: pellagra - which the indigenous people of Mexico and I guess the southwest had worked out the mixtalization process to deal with. People have been in the Alps a long time.
It seems obvious that a16z is talking its book, but so what? Everyone talks their book. Talking your book is not prima facie evidence against whatever argument you're putting forth.
Re: Anarcho-tyranny
One may distinguish general prohibitions and selective permissions.
A law that specifies a speed limit on a highway is a prohibition. However, enforcement is quite selective because comprehensive enforcement would be impractical. Note that a private motorist (as distinct from, say, an ambulance operator) may not apply for special permission to speed. Sometimes, fairness issues — for example, disparate impact on racial minorities — arise around selective enforcement. Illicit vice markets are another set of prohibitions that exhibit selective enforcement. Is selective enforcement, too, anarcho-tyranny?
By contrast, an immigration visa is a special permission. Anarcho-tyranny arises if (a) permission involves arbitrary discretion, corruption, and/or opaque bureaucracy, but (b) many persons flout the law, which requires special permission to immigrate. Moreover, it seems that most people who seek a visa would not attempt to circumvent the law even if the authorities do not grant a visa. It seems that people who wish to migrate mostly self-sort into separate categories.
In practice speed limit enforcement is not that selective and any traffic lawyer in your state or a friendly cop will tell you what their protocols are.
Selective enforcement is illegal in the US when it is done for some forbidden purpose e.g. racial discrimination. There are lots of defenses against it, so it's not just a matter of showing disparate impact (you have to also show that the act was for an illegal discriminatory purpose).
However, with a lot of bad and arbitrary/capricious governance, the people most impacted do not have standing to bring a complaint, or really the courts would not consider them to have standing. If you're a company, you can bring an unfair competition claim against a competitor of yours for doing various naughty things. But if you are a worker displaced by immigration or even a union that lost out in bargaining because of illegal immigration, you do not have a claim that any right of yours has been violated.
There's Supreme Court precedent on the point that no one has a fundamental right to protection from law enforcement, so e.g. for under-policing no citizen has standing to bring a lawsuit. If your state allows open air drug markets in your neighborhood due to overly selective enforcement, you have no standing to sue for the ensuing damages. Even when the state is under a legal duty to enforce a protective order, it is not liable for harms that result from failure to enforce that protective order.
Thank for your helpful outline of relevant issues, especially "standing."
Any time.
"When they observe a few years where defaults are low, they say that lenders are being too strict. Then, after the risky loans they have leaned on lenders to make go sour, they say that lenders were engaged in fraud and abuse."
They are probably right in both cases, but what is the best way to deal with both problems at the same time?
But all this misses the big picture. If the Fed had been more on the ball (enough that inflation expectations never fell much below target), no financial institutions would have needed bailing out and few mortgages would have been foreclosed.
The Fed and regulators certainly exacerbated the problem, but there are many mismanaged financial institutions - due to a combination of incopenve. , greed ,lawless activity and pushing for growth. A bigger problem is the socialization of risks when the state deposit insurance cap was raised significantly and she in addition that gradually the view wax adopted that no depositors should suffer loss, only debtholders and equity owners. Otherwise SVB could never have grown so fast - plenty of blame yo go around among management, their depositors and lenders and the borrowers.