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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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A lot depends on what is at stake, too.
Hard-core libertarians are naïve about many things, not just foreign policy.
And you don’t know how to write cogently.
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.
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.
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.
Every regulator is “captured”. Act accordingly. In fact, try to make money off of it.
Government Is How We Steal From Each Other™
On this, you and I are very much in agreement.
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.
You can say that again!