Where’s My Flying Car?

This week on The Big Show, we attempt to return to some sense of normalcy (while of course maintaining social distancing by at least 1,000 miles). Yes, we talk about that thing we’re all doing and what our new lives are like now. But then, we shift gears to visit with our good friend Ross Douthat, NYT columnist and podcaster (The Argument, which Ross co-hosts is one of our favorites) on the occasion of his new book., The Decadent Society. It’s a meditation on what happens when a rich and powerful society stops advancing  and how the combination of wealth, technology, economic stagnation, political stalemates, and demographic decline (among other things) creates a “sustainable decadence” that could stick around for a long time. Needless to say, it’s a provocative conversation that we’d like to get your take on in the comments. Finally, we do round of What Are You Watching,  and do a deep dive on toilet paper, courtesy of the Lileks Post of The Week.

Music from this week’s show: I.G.Y by Donald Fagen

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There are 163 comments.

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  1. Miffed White Male Member
    Miffed White Male
    @MiffedWhiteMale

    kedavis (View Comment):
    Yes, but my point – or one of my points, anyway – is you can’t just do that in a vacuum, as it were. As the saying goes – I don’t remember who may have come up with it first – if you find a wall in a forest or whatever, you don’t just take it down without finding out why it was put there in the first place. And so much of what is now regulated I would say, is not just because some people “like” regulation. It’s actually more of a response to something else. So just removing the regulation, without otherwise addressing the reason it was done in the first place, is probably more foolish than wise.

    An analogy:  In our ERP system at work, we have occasional “glitches” in processing of a transaction.  One of our analysts always wants to put in a”check” to watch for the same condition to happen again – and they’ll set it up to check every 30 minutes or an hour, even if the particular cause happened once in a year.

    You do that enough, pretty soon your system is spending all it’s time looking for these issues instead of doing actual work.

    • #151
  2. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Miffed White Male (View Comment):

    kedavis (View Comment):
    Yes, but my point – or one of my points, anyway – is you can’t just do that in a vacuum, as it were. As the saying goes – I don’t remember who may have come up with it first – if you find a wall in a forest or whatever, you don’t just take it down without finding out why it was put there in the first place. And so much of what is now regulated I would say, is not just because some people “like” regulation. It’s actually more of a response to something else. So just removing the regulation, without otherwise addressing the reason it was done in the first place, is probably more foolish than wise.

    An analogy: In our ERP system at work, we have occasional “glitches” in processing of a transaction. One of our analysts always wants to put in a”check” to watch for the same condition to happen again – and they’ll set it up to check every 30 minutes or an hour, even if the particular cause happened once in a year.

    You do that enough, pretty soon your system is spending all it’s time looking for these issues instead of doing actual work.

    A lot depends on what is at stake, too.

    • #152
  3. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    RufusRJones (View Comment):

    The government has to stop force and fraud.

    Hard drugs are very complicated. Don’t ask me how to Google this, but when you hear a libertarian explanation of the fiscal dynamics of enforcing hard drug laws, it’s absolutely jaw-dropping. You are wasting money while you empower organized crime and the Mexican cartels etc.

    Hard-core libertarians are naïve about many things, not just foreign policy.

    • #153
  4. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    kedavis (View Comment):

    RufusRJones (View Comment):

    The government has to stop force and fraud.

    Hard drugs are very complicated. Don’t ask me how to Google this, but when you hear a libertarian explanation of the fiscal dynamics of enforcing hard drug laws, it’s absolutely jaw-dropping. You are wasting money while you empower organized crime and the Mexican cartels etc.

    Hard-core libertarians are naïve about many things, not just foreign policy.

    And you don’t know how to write cogently.

    • #154
  5. Taras Coolidge
    Taras
    @Taras

    kedavis (View Comment):

    And if you decide that it’s better to let people work that out for themselves without regulation, do you then regulate how much insurance they must have in case they cause such damage? If not, then what? Do you go back to having Debtor’s Prisons if someone injures someone else beyond their ability to pay for it? What about indentured servitude as a means of payment?

    A lot of this sounds very pie-in-the-sky Libertarian compared to the real world. Laissez-Faire sounds pretty cool in certain dorm rooms, but if you’re the guy whose family becomes destitute because a drunk driver kills YOU and there’s no or insufficient restitution, it sounds different. And that’s even assuming your family would be okay with a pile of money rather than YOU.

    The hard-core libertarian answer is not that there are no rules, but that the property owner — in this case, the owner of the road or turnpike — makes the rules.  

    The profit motive would lead the owner to give drivers what they want:  speed limits and/or licensing, vs. after-the-fact sanctioning of dangerous behavior and/or banning irresponsible drivers.

    To some degree, this process operates even today, with most roads owned by the government.  Or, I should say, a government.  Compare traffic laws in the various states of the U.S. with, for example, Britain and Germany.

    • #155
  6. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    Public goods only. When the government goes beyond actual public goods, bad things happen. Every single government actuarial system is a disaster. All of them.

    It’s OK to have a central bank as long as it simply backs up the financial system in a punitive way. No supposed “helping” the economy. This obviously doesn’t work, all you have to do is look around.

    It’s too late now, but the government should have sold hard drugs at cost to anyone that wants them in certain select areas. We should have done it 40 years ago. Now the Mexican cartels have so much money they can go into all kinds of other crime if we legalize hard drugs. 

     

     

     

     

    • #156
  7. Kevin Inactive
    Kevin
    @JaredSturgeon

    kedavis (View Comment):

    Kevin (View Comment):

     

    Most, if not all, of those mechanisms are after the fact. Most people would prefer not to be hit by a drunk driver to start with, rather than sue for being seriously injured or killed and perhaps not be able to collect anything in the end because the driver had insufficient insurance or none at all. that’s one reason for having police on the roads, rather than insurance agents.

    Do we give tickets to people before or after they drive drunk?  Laws are punishments for crimes committed.  However, despite this example, your point is good and one that is a reasonable way of assessing these problems – courts are for redressing wrongs, regulations can often be used for preventing them.  That should definitely play a role in when “we” “choose” to implement one or the other.  

    • #157
  8. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    Every regulator is “captured”. Act accordingly. In fact, try to make money off of it.

    Government Is How We Steal From Each Other™

    • #158
  9. Henry Racette Member
    Henry Racette
    @HenryRacette

    kedavis (View Comment):
    Hard-core libertarians are naïve about many things, not just foreign policy.

    On this, you and I are very much in agreement.

    • #159
  10. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Kevin (View Comment):

    kedavis (View Comment):

    Kevin (View Comment):

     

    Most, if not all, of those mechanisms are after the fact. Most people would prefer not to be hit by a drunk driver to start with, rather than sue for being seriously injured or killed and perhaps not be able to collect anything in the end because the driver had insufficient insurance or none at all. that’s one reason for having police on the roads, rather than insurance agents.

    Do we give tickets to people before or after they drive drunk? Laws are punishments for crimes committed. However, despite this example, your point is good and one that is a reasonable way of assessing these problems – courts are for redressing wrongs, regulations can often be used for preventing them. That should definitely play a role in when “we” “choose” to implement one or the other.

    People are only caught “after” (or while) driving drunk, but hopefully – and usually – before they actually injure or kill someone.  Ditto for people who drive the wrong way on roads, also usually because they’re drunk or otherwise impaired…  It’s the same with high-speed, weaving in and out of traffic, etc.  It’s not possible to scan someone’s brain and stop them because they were ABOUT TO do it.  But still, as much as possible, the goal is to avoid the damage/injury/death, not try to make up for it after it happens.  Again, this is why we put police out on the streets, not insurance agents.

    • #160
  11. Henry Racette Member
    Henry Racette
    @HenryRacette

    kedavis (View Comment):

    Kevin (View Comment):

    kedavis (View Comment):

    Kevin (View Comment):

     

    Most, if not all, of those mechanisms are after the fact. Most people would prefer not to be hit by a drunk driver to start with, rather than sue for being seriously injured or killed and perhaps not be able to collect anything in the end because the driver had insufficient insurance or none at all. that’s one reason for having police on the roads, rather than insurance agents.

    Do we give tickets to people before or after they drive drunk? Laws are punishments for crimes committed. However, despite this example, your point is good and one that is a reasonable way of assessing these problems – courts are for redressing wrongs, regulations can often be used for preventing them. That should definitely play a role in when “we” “choose” to implement one or the other.

    People are only caught “after” (or while) driving drunk, but hopefully – and usually – before they actually injure or kill someone. Ditto for people who drive the wrong way on roads, also usually because they’re drunk or otherwise impaired… It’s the same with high-speed, weaving in and out of traffic, etc. It’s not possible to scan someone’s brain and stop them because they were ABOUT TO do it. But still, as much as possible, the goal is to avoid the damage/injury/death, not try to make up for it after it happens. Again, this is why we put police out on the streets, not insurance agents.

    When talking about appropriate degrees of regulation in a free but non-anarchistic society, we should acknowledge that laws (regulations) must create a safe framework within which free people can act. It’s pretty easy to argue that allowing drunks to drive deprives people of a safe framework within which to act. Allowing theft, or gross misrepresentation, or violation of contract would be other examples of a failure to create a secure space within which commerce and life can flourish.

    I think two things are true. First, that all sensible people occupy a continuum of regulatory preference, in favor of some regulation, but not in favor of all possible regulation. Secondly, that on that continuum, conservatives tend to cluster on the low-regulation end, and progressives on the high-regulation end.

    Talking about drunk driving in the context of regulation doesn’t seem particularly useful to me, given that I suspect everyone other than a handful of outliers agrees that there should be laws (regulations) against drunk driving. So it doesn’t have a lot of discriminatory power.

    • #161
  12. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Henry Racette (View Comment):

    kedavis (View Comment):

    People are only caught “after” (or while) driving drunk, but hopefully – and usually – before they actually injure or kill someone. Ditto for people who drive the wrong way on roads, also usually because they’re drunk or otherwise impaired… It’s the same with high-speed, weaving in and out of traffic, etc. It’s not possible to scan someone’s brain and stop them because they were ABOUT TO do it. But still, as much as possible, the goal is to avoid the damage/injury/death, not try to make up for it after it happens. Again, this is why we put police out on the streets, not insurance agents.

    When talking about appropriate degrees of regulation in a free but non-anarchistic society, we should acknowledge that laws (regulations) must create a safe framework within which free people can act. It’s pretty easy to argue that allowing drunks to drive deprives people of a safe framework within which to act. Allowing theft, or gross misrepresentation, or violation of contract would be other examples of a failure to create a secure space within which commerce and life can flourish.

    I think two things are true. First, that all sensible people occupy a continuum of regulatory preference, in favor of some regulation, but not in favor of all possible regulation. Secondly, that on that continuum, conservatives tend to cluster on the low-regulation end, and progressives on the high-regulation end.

    Talking about drunk driving in the context of regulation doesn’t seem particularly useful to me, given that I suspect everyone other than a handful of outliers agrees that there should be laws (regulations) against drunk driving. So it doesn’t have a lot of discriminatory power.

    Maybe so, but remember how different the drunk-driving situation was just a few decades ago, when it was largely considered “not a big deal.”  Those regulations didn’t always exist.  And a lot of people back then did argue against making the laws more strict and the consequences more harsh.

    • #162
  13. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Henry Racette (View Comment):
    Rob doesn’t understand conservatives.

    You can say that again!

    • #163
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