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Comment by morgante | Hacker News Reader

I'm genuinely curious what the rational for Thiel is in doing this. He's a smart guy, but I just don't see the ROI.

At this point, it seems very unlikely that Trump will get elected. So Thiel isn't getting access to a future President.

Plus, in addition to the monetary cost of the donation there's definitely a very real reputational cost. A lot of people in SV hate Trump and are completely mystified as to Thiel's support. (Personally, I'm also confused as to how a self-described libertarian would support a candidate who opposes freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and increased government control over the internet.)

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Has Thiel described himself as "libertarian" recently? Even if he has, I'm not sure he means it in the same sense as the general population.

I like Samuel Hammond's analysis. His shorthand for Thiel's political philosophy is "corporate feudalism":

https://medium.com/@hamandcheese/why-peter-thiels-endorsemen...

https://medium.com/soapbox-dc/peter-thiels-plan-to-become-ce...

Strange to be investing this late in the race though.

Neoreactionary(NRx). Dark Enlightenment.

Why doesn't someone just ask him why he's giving the money.

He's participating the democratic process, would be interested to hear his rationale rather than a bunch of speculations about what he may or may not believe.

You don't need to ask him - he already gave a speech at the RNC endorsing Trump.

Senate races? Enthusiasm for Trump is falling and if republicans don't show up to vote then it's very likely that democrats will get control of the senate.

Then there's Palantir. Even if Trump doesn't win, the "law and order" rhetoric is resonating with a lot of americans. Trump wants to ban muslims, put together a deportation force, bring back stop and frisk, more border control, nukes for everyone, boots on the ground to fight ISIS, more surveillance, more military spending. All of these would lead to more government contracts for Palantir.

> Then there's Palantir.

That's a fair point. Palantir is very well-positioned to be the IBM of Trumpism.

Am I meant to infer "do for Trump what IBM did for Hitler" from that?

Yes, though Trump is obviously not a carbon copy clone of Hitler.

I've always found the right-libertarian philosophy to be extremely confused. They want freedom to do whatever they want but they also want to base everything off of capitalism which by definition means you can't do whatever you want unless you're rich. It just doesn't make any sense (unless of course you're already a billionaire in which case your world is already quite libertarian in reality).

I have my problems with Libertarianism, but I don't understand what you don't understand. Libertarians think everyone should have freedom to do whatever one wants, but that says nothing of having power to do whatever one wants.

Freedom is not freedom without power to exercise said freedom.

The word 'freedom' has many different meanings.

Freedom in the Libertarianism context (and in most contexts) means lack of coercion or constraint imposed by government or other institutions. It doesn't refer to freedom from natural or physical constraints. That wouldn't make any sense to advocate for.

Does this clear it up for you?

Precisely. The inability of a person to choose their desired path because they need money to feed their family is textbook economic coercion. We've long passed the point where lack of resources (especially food) is a physical/natural constraint.

What does "choose their desired path" mean exactly?

What would a person who had a family that needed feeding do in the absence of government entirely? My guess is that they would perform some kind of activity in an attempt to feed them. You can take money and even capitalism out of the equation entirely and people would still work. That Russian family that cut themselves off from the outside for 40 years in the wilderness still worked to survive. The food didn't grow itself and then climb into their mouths to be eaten.

The lack of economic freedom experienced by many is a direct product of the economic policy enforced by government and advocated for by libertarians, ie, it's directly the result of government coercing people to adhere to its decisions and libertarians support sufficiently many of those decisions to be culpable.

Libertarians are nothing but outright hypocrites in arguing that government shouldn't be required to pay the economic damages of its coercing people to adhere to policy they favor (eg, maintaining a free-market, private-property based economy with courts enforcing contracts) while preaching about how people shouldn't be coerced.

Libertarians disagree with your assertion that the government has implemented free-markets, and therefore reject the idea that they support current policy.

My point isn't contained to the present system:

Even in theory, libertarians are hypocrites because they fundamentally advocate for failing to pay for the externalities of their coercive system, and all supposed benefits of libertarianism can be traced to temporary boosts caused by (inefficient) capitalization of that failure to pay for externalities. Libertarianism enriches a few by creating 0.9 units wealth for every 1.0 units of collective suffering it implements over the current system, but hides this fundamentally externality driven mechanism behind the spread of the suffering (not a lot to everyone) and calling it freedom for many to be allowed to suffer at the hands of others without the instrument of state to implement collective relief.

Libertarianism is nothing but a sham political and economic movement that is wholly and fundamentally dishonest about its benefits and costs, by design, deeply self-inconsistent in its models and policies, and is intended to trick people in to accepting serfdom in a return to feudalism by calling it "freedom".

Libertarians, as a rule, just seem to have not thought very hard about their position or be selling you something (usually that you should be a serf because they fancy that they won't be a serf too in the new system).

Is there any economical system you disagree with but don't consider dishonest?

Sure, lots of them. Now, many of them are still hypocrites, in that very often a model will claim to address something as a top priority, but not actually address it. (Ed: not a hypocrite to propose a model that doesn't work out; hypocrite to continue to claim it will work when errors are discovered or it can't help, even in theory.) Which is why I called Libertarians so -- they bark about externalities when their model is fundamentally about not being accountable for externalities of coercing others to obey your model.

However, the dishonesty of American Libertarians stems from something further than that. Namely, American Libertarians are neo-feudalists in practice, but won't own up to being neo-feudalists.

I find this to be dishonest: they, so far as I can tell, have done this purely because they want to advocate neo-feudalism and its benefits without having to justify the benefits in terms of the costs, so they use terminology where it's harder to find the costs in academic literature and deny that any such costs exist. Nothing different than creationism rebranding as "intelligent design" or anti-abortion as "pro-life".

most of them also have a very narrow view of "coercion", though, and will hotly deny that economic coercion is a valid concept

It is simultaneously amusing and frustrating how completely wrong this is. Coercion and constraint imposed by government (or similar institutions) is absolutely central to libertarianism! The whole point of property rights is to constrain people from doing things. E.g., you own a beachfront property? You get to constrain other people from swimming there, and the government is there to help if necessary. And so on.

Saying that libertarianism isn't about coercion and constraint is like saying that the GPL or copyleft in general isn't about copyright. Both are equally wrong: the GPL absolutely requires copyright law in order for it to work, and similarly libertarianism absolutely requires coercion and constraint.

It's just that there's this sleight of hand where for some reason, most people are so used to property right that they don't even notice it anymore. Talk about successful framing!

This is pedantic. The clause, "except when necessary to prevent the violation of one's rights" is understood by most, and isn't relevant to this conversation.

There is no law preventing me from doing 100 pushups right now. Yet I also find myself powerless to do it.

Does that mean I'm not free to do pushups?

Libertarianism isn't about doing whatever you want. It's about protecting your rights and the rights of others. This means you can do what you want, as long as you are not infringing on the rights of others.

That last clause is often overlooked or misunderstood, but it is critical.

> Libertarianism isn't about doing whatever you want. It's about protecting your rights and the rights of others. This means you can do what you want, as long as you are not infringing on the rights of others.

It is, however, "do whatever you want" in that it implies no non-negative social duties, ie, it doesn't require you proactively do anything to be part of society or that you seek to help others in society -- merely that your harm to them come through passive actions or side-effects of legally permitted actions.

It might be better to explain libertarianism as "rights over duties", in that it essentially asserts you have no social obligation which is more fundamental than your rights.

Others disagree, obviously.

But but...that is what communism is about too, just with a different set of rights. Making "rights" some abstract thing means you end up saying nothing at all.

> you end up saying nothing at all.

Any discussion can devolve to reductio-ad-absurdum if one is determined to do so.

'… base everything off of capitalism which by definition means you can't do whatever you want unless you're rich. '

Capitalism is of course not an -ism at all. No one invented it. It's that freedom in the context of democratically agreed regulation whereby we can all trade goods and our labor with others and thereby generate value, usually monetary but by no means exclusively. We can even trade kind words and actions - they too contribute value.

Over the last century, billions of people have had the repertoire of 'things they can do' dramatically extended by the extension of an environment which allows people at all levels of income to take part in this productive exchange of items (abstract or physical) of value.

>It's that freedom in the context of democratically agreed regulation whereby we can all trade goods and our labor with others and thereby generate value, usually monetary but by no means exclusively.

The very idea that people can have exclusive control of some goods and then have to trade for other ones is capitalism. Property is not the default state of the universe, it had to be invented and enforced before it meant anything.

And while it can be called a freedom in a certain sense, property is also a restriction. In order for me to own something, you have be denied the right to use it without my permission.

Which is not to say property rights are not a good thing on the whole, but they should be compared as one economic system, in terms of their outcomes, alongside the alternatives.

Libertarianism is basically about negative rights - not so much about "do what you want", but more about "nobody is going to force you to do something you don't want". As an ethical system, think of it as utilitarianism which assigns infinite value to freedom from violent coercion. Everything else follows from that.

Unless it's violent coercion used to enforce the property system, which libertarians seem to like to ignore.

That would be capitalist libertarians. There is also such a thing as libertarian socialists and communists.

But yes, that is the next most important division. Right libertarians believe that there is a natural right to property ownership. Therefore, infringement on that right is an aggression, and using violence to protect it is simple self-defense. Left libertarians believe that private property is a social construct, and that it has negative social effects at large scale (a few would even say that it has them at any scale), and so reject it, and the use of violence to protect it.

There are two notions of freedom to consider: One is the notion of a liberal society in which the collective notion of rights lead to freedom from slavery. This notion underpins modern liberal society.

The other notion of freedom developed in the late Roman empire which came to mean a lord's right to do whatever he wants with his property, including his slaves. This notion of freedom, indistinguishable from power, lies at the heart of the Neo-Reaction movement.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/openeconomy/david-graeber/two-...

> Capitalism means you can't do whatever you want unless you're rich.

You're conflating laissez-faire or free market capitalism with a plutocracy (society ruled by the wealthiest). They're diametrically opposed systems.

Small chance of making it to the Supreme Court? http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_57d80d57e4b09d7a687f9b03/a... ?

> Small chance of making it to the Supreme Court?

That honestly does not seem like a very compelling reason. I think Thiel can easily have a bigger impact on the world outside the Supreme Court.

If Trump became president and nominates Thiel I expect it would be one of the rare times that the Senate rejects the nomination -- considering this donation and relative lack of experience.

I would support Thiel, or really, any engineer or tech-related person, being on the supreme court. It is absurd that we have fossils that do not have email accounts making decisions on laws touching on the technological future of the country for the rest of their natural lives.

Well, at least those fossils dedicated their lives to studying the law and whether or not they have email accounts doesn't mean squat. Decisions about technology are made with input from many who are well versed in technology.

> I'm genuinely curious what the rational for Thiel is in doing this. He's a smart guy, but I just don't see the ROI.

I personally see him more of a cunning guy than just smart because I find his actions disturbing.

Seems like the kind of questions Twitter was designed for no? Has anyone asked?

It's the Stagnation Hypothesis.

More precisely it is the high level implications of the Stagnation Hypothesis. You won't know it from HN or a survey of typical developers but the people who really run Silicon Valley have a set of beliefs about the world which are very different to the people who work for them.

Watch this all the way through.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMpmfaE9bII

I'm not talking about typical developers.

Lots of top technology leaders have come out vehemently against Trump, [0] including Sam Altman, who I would definitely include in "the people who really run Silicon Valley." [1]

To be clear, I'm not disputing Thiel's politics. I think he's right about a lot of things. They have near-zero overlap with Trump's policies. Trump is easily the least libertarian Republican presidential candidate in recent history.

[0] https://shift.newco.co/an-open-letter-from-technology-sector...

[1] http://blog.samaltman.com/trump

I believe you're missing a puzzle piece. Take the time out to watch a few of his Youtube videos. They are long and have very low view counts but they're important.

Sorry, but the priors on a random Internet commentator insisting that the only way to understand his farfetched, radical theory is to watch hours of videos are not very positive.

It would be helpful if you could provide a rational and concise summary here. I'd genuinely like to learn more.

Short answer: globalization hurts the developed world in the absence of real technological breakthroughs (energy too cheap to meter, something we use a lot gets can now be made for half the price, etc.). A richer world just means more competition for scarce things. The rational policy for a self-interested superpower might be to ease up on globalization.

Thanks. That somewhat makes sense, I think. Kind of ironic though. Most of the underdeveloped world didn't want globalization to begin with!

Yeah, I'm with you. From the article:

A source close to [Thiel] says the investor feels the country needs fixing, and Mr. Trump can do it.

The first part I completely get: there are a lot of things that need fixing. It's the second part that has me scraping my jaw off the floor.

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