Hacker News Reader

Comment by leodler | Hacker News Reader

Somehow we (the United States) accomplished generational projects that are currently out of the realm of possibility such as the interstate system without risking anything like a famine. I think a lot of people in America have been overly-empowered to stand in the way of the most modest progress through NIMBYism, litigation, local government, etc. To a lot of people it increasingly feels like a form of private authoritarianism over tiny fiefdoms for absolutely no benefit to a vast majority of people.

View on HN

"Somehow" we did that back when we believed in a strong federal government working for the benefit of the people. It's no wonder that we lost the ability after decades of anti-government propaganda and regulatory capture.

I don't believe we are capable of a strong government that will also work for the benefit of the people today. Anti government sentiment didn't just spring up from a vacuum.

It sprung up from capitalist propaganda and intentional sabotage of the government by conservatives.

> I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

Grover Norquist said the quiet part out loud in 2001, but conservatives have been running that playbook since the New Deal.

>*"conservatives have been running that playbook since the New Deal"

I think one of America's many failures is allowing a radically revolutionary right-wing (that is currently headed full speed to fascism) to keep calling themselves "conservatives" when that label is about as incorrect as can be. They don't "conserve" anything. They're not actually reactionary, although they often pretend to be. They are not trying to be defenders of Chesterton's Gate[1]. They're radicals, who want to reshape society to their own whims and prejudices. And they ought to be address and treated as such.

1. https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/

I agree. Of the two major US political parties today, one is primarily radical right with a small conservative branch that is struggling to stay in their party. The other is conservative to moderate with a small liberal branch that is fighting to make their party stand for something.

That liberals are the left wing in US is quite telling. In Europe and Latin America liberals are (center-)right.

The word "liberal" means different things in different places.

Maybe, although many policies by European liberal center-right parties are to the left of US liberals.

The main reason is probably that US never had the major socialist movements of 20th century Europe. Before those liberals were the left in Europe too.

For me it happened when I was growing up and I watched my family bankrupted and pushed to near homelessness with zero legal recourse due to a corrupt local government. There are countless others that have found themselves at the mercy of a large government, with unlimited money and resources.

....so you prefer a "small" government, which history has shown time and time again leads to corporations doing evil en masse, ruining all sorts of lives around them?

It's not that people turned against the government just randomly. Who was the last genuinely socially motivated President we had? I idealize JFK, but I think that's largely because of his charisma, how he ended, and obviously the space program. Yet how did he not just immediately condemn and completely dismantle the entire CIA when the proposal for Operation Northwoods [1] reached his desk, and was one signature away from execution? And that'll probably look benign as the actions from more recent decades are declassified in the future.

And after his assassination everything went downhill fast with divide and conquer, all alongside global self destructive geopolitical nonsense that continues to this very day. We have spent, just since 2000 upwards of a very conservative baseline of $10 trillion on war and military related expenses. That's a starting point of about $30,000 for every single man, woman, and child in America. Think about all of the amazing things we could have done with that money. Instead we just blew it on pointless wars and have literally less than nothing to show for it since they not only made the US far less safe, but made the world far less stable.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

LBJ made more progress on social issues than any President with the possible exception of FDR. Certainly dramatically more progress per year in office. Jimmy Carter was also socially motivated.

Reagan changed the game, Newt Gingrich destroyed cooperation, and now we're living in the world they created.

Modern politicians are really good at framing everything as being the most socially motivated thing in the world. And I think LBJ is the grandfather of this stuff. When you read of his private discussions, socially motivated is just about the last thing he was. He wanted absolute political power and understood that he could create systems of dependency to achieve it.

It just so happens that systems of dependency can also be framed positively as 'solving hunger' or whatever. The fact that 60 years later 'solving hunger' has translated to having more than 41 million people completely unable to feed themselves without government assistance is not a coincidence. It a third stanza of that old saying 'Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life. Give a man a fish every day and he'll do whatever you want to keep getting that fish.'

There's countless ways we could have spent that war money (no different during LBJ times with Vietnam) to help create ways for people to be able to genuinely provide for themselves. But I don't think this was ever the goal.

>Give a man a fish every day and he'll do whatever you want to keep getting that fish

This is complete nonsense. Certain demographics that depend the most on welfare oppose it the most. Mitch McConnell responded to concerns about the political impact of Medicaid cuts saying that voters would "get over it".

LBJ was certainly motivated by power, but he also genuinely cared about social issues as well. He knew that the Civil Rights Acts would overall cost him far more politically than he gained in terms of support from newly enfranchised black voters.

In the 60s the black population was rapidly increasing and groups like the NAACP were working to politically organize them into a cohesive force. There's endless quotations from the time about LBJ being concerned about them and fearing that they could become a major political force. From his exact quotes he was worried about losing the filibuster, so I assume that translates to him thinking they might be able to start winning Senate seats in states with high black populations.

So then he passes the Civil Rights Act in July 1964, then the Food Stamps Act on August 31st 1964, and then there's the election. The black turnout for the election ended up being 58% with something like 94% of their vote going to him, giving him a landslide of an election victory. So what he was saying wasn't just trying to convince people, as it's often been reframed - he was simply being a realist and was 100% correct.

The guy was a massive racist and segregationist for most of his entire political career. But more than anything he was a professional politician who wanted power. And he did what he thought could get that power. This [1] Snopes article includes many of his 'greatest hits' and tries to conclude with an argument claiming that he wasn't mostly fixated on claiming the black vote, but it makes no sense. Apparently in reading the headlines about the Civil Rights Act he was found in a melancholy state and when asked why he said, "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come." That was obviously him being worried that his calculations might been wrong, but they weren't - he won 44 states in the election.

[1] - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-voting-democratic/

> The fact that 60 years later 'solving hunger' has translated to having more than 41 million people completely unable to feed themselves without government assistance is not a coincidence

Yeah it is a coincidence. The last 60 years also coincided with massive deindustrialization, job losses and reducing labor power, and multiple drug epidemics. I'm much more inclined to believe it was those factors, and not "welfarism".

>When you read of his private discussions, socially motivated is just about the last thing he was.

This isn't true. I cannot recommend Robert Caro's works on LBJ enough. Johnson had plenty of flaws, but he cared deeply about people, especially the poor. He taught immigrant schoolchildren and saw their plight. He grew up before the Hill Country had electricity and saw the reality of true poverty, and when he had power he used every bit of his skills and connections to get things like the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, Medicare, and Medicaid - and so many more.

You can't (and shouldn't) separate LBJ and his administration from atrocities in Vietnam, but if he had been able and willing to extract America from Vietnam, he would be without dispute the greatest president in history and it's not close.

And we're back to framing. LBJ didn't teach. He was immediately assigned as principal, with no relevant experience at all, as a gig to earn some cash for school. In other words - connections. And he was so moved that he quit after his first year never to return to anything education related ever again.

There's been a large effort to reimagine LBJ because having an exploitative racist as the progenitor of many of these things (which you mentioned) is kind of awkward, but reality is always so much more interesting than fiction, precisely because of such things.

---

In the future you'll see something similar with the Amish. There's about 400k Amish in America growing at about 2.5% per year, thanks to healthy fertility rates. And they do, when they see it as necessary, vote (as they did for Trump). As their population continues to swell, and election margins continue to narrow, they're going to be capable of deciding elections in the US in the foreseeable future.

And so you're going to see a Republican suddenly become a hero for everything the Amish care about. Is it because he cares about the Amish? No, but that's certainly how it'll be framed. As an aside, I find the idea of the Amish as kingmakers hilariously appropriate. I guess the meek truly will inherit the Earth!

FDR was not generally socially motivated. He was responsive to labor pressure and other organizing.

> literally less than nothing to show for it

That’s not true! Some guys got really really rich with it. So, working as indented.

There’s a good argument for America having been able to do all it did despite being a democracy without a strong central government, not because of it. Look around the world and see how many countries managed to achieve similar success using the same liberal principles? Most of Europe became rich under imperialist, authoritarian governments not with their current system. I would love to see a good counter argument that’s convincing since I find this realization extremely sad as for all my life I believed the propaganda about democracy and liberalism being the route to success just to see most countries that tried to emulate that fail miserably.

> Most of Europe became rich under imperialist, authoritarian governments not with their current system

Europe prospered under democratic governments after the second world war. My particular region of Germany was rural, agrarian and piss poor before the war. Now it is an industry hub and one of the richest regions in Germany, all thanks to a democratic government, which prioritised development of rural areas.

The wealth we now enjoy is incomparable to what we had under authoritarian rule before.

Let's also not forget, that the Cold war divided Europe in two halves, one with democratic governments and one under authoritarian rule, an A/B test so to say. The end result was, that they needed a wall in Berlin to keep the people from fleeing to the west.

> Look around the world and see how many countries managed to achieve similar success using the same liberal principles

Beside the whole of Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Uruguay and Taiwan come to mind. Taiwan has a per capita GDP 2.5x that of mainland China.

Sorry but I have to mention that Nazi Germany became incredibly prosperous, but it decided to use its wealth to obtain military power.

Also, Europe dominated the world for a couple of hundred years before the Great War. Some parts of Europe may have been poor during that time, but compared to the rest of the world I do think it was a whole lot better.

Japan was incredibly rich in the beginning of the 20th century - and it was definitely not a democracy. Australia, Canada and NZ are all part of the ex-British Empire and I would say that's what made them prosperous, not their political system.

South Korea rode on the back of US support, like Japan after the war, but I do agree they did that while being mostly democratic.

Uruguay has just very recently become a nice place due to basically a single guy! That president, Jose Mujica, was such a legend! And a big critic of capitalism , by the way.

Taiwan was what we used to call the "Asian Tigers" that became rich in an incredibly fast manner... I don't know that you can attribute that to a political system at all: Singapore was and is a dictatorship and is perhaps the best example of Asian Tiger - it became richer than Australia in like 20 years!

All in all: you do not convince me. You do not seem to understand what made those countries rich in my opinion and you haven't really reflected on it if you really think that democracy was the common theme.

EDIT: Taiwan is a tiny island, China is a huge country. The GDP percapita of Shanghai and Beijing is about the same as Taiwan... Hong Kong and Macau, also part of China, have much larger GDP/pc still.

> To a lot of people it increasingly feels like a form of private authoritarianism over tiny fiefdoms for absolutely no benefit to a vast majority of people.

that is what it means to have property rights.

It prevents your interests from being usurped by someone else without first consulting you. Of course, like anything, it can be taken too far, but getting the balance right is important.

If it tips too far towards gov't authoritarianism, the people who are not connected tends to suffer silently (while the majority who gets told these "nation building" projects benefits them).

If it tips too far towards the private individual, then you get nimby-ism and such.

America's elevation of individuality and property rights above everything else, its inability to work together collectively to achieve a goal, and its citizen's infighting, distrust of and belligerence toward each other, are the main reasons it is incapable of doing big things anymore.

The minute we had a huge health emergency that should have united the population, it was immediately politicized such that half the country was trying to fix it, and the other half were trying to prolong it and grief the fixers.

We're done for if we can't stop pitting half the country against each other over literally every issue.

More and more I think the mistake is seeing it as a tradeoff between "property rights" and "government authoritarianism". First, because authoritarianism is not much better when it happens to be non-government authoritarianism (i.e., when corporations become more powerful than government). And second, because it treats "property rights" as a single fixed notion, rather than recognizing that we can have property rights that are not independent of the amount of property owned. Just because "property rights" means that Paul the Peon has absolute dominion over his hovel, there's no particular reason it also has to mean that Oliver the Oligarch has absolute dominion over his dozens of mansions, factories, private security forces, etc. We can have a system where your rights over property decrease the more of it you have, so that in the limit there is effectively a maximum on how much property can be owned or controlled by a single individual (and therefore by a group of individuals).

Presumably many of the people who currently attribute China’s ability to build infrastructure to authoritarianism would also attribute America’s past ability to build infrastructure to authoritarianism. They would presumably also decry any future attempts to build ambitious infrastructure in America as authoritarianism.

Yeah lets talk about them tax rates at the time of these accomplished generational projects (comment is in support of them)

Actually, the US didn’t have a famine, it had the opposite. Automation like combines and tractors obviated the need for oxen and farmhands to plow and reap manually. The farmers competed in a race to the bottom (depleting the soil and causing the dust bowl). They fired most farmhands and still had a surplus. Food prices plummeted while giant dust storms became the norm.

The government had to step in and pay farmers NOT to plant, to extricate them from the downward spiral / race to the bottom that the “free market” had producted in the face of automation / massive supply shocks.

Meanwhile, the laid-off farm workers (20% of USA used to be employed in farm-related jobs) migrated to cities but it would be a decade before the manufacturing base was built up to employ them. They lived in Hoovervilles and shantytowns set up to house them. A third of the country’s banks failed and the money supply shrank. The fed sat that one out. You can read books by John Steinbeck and others describing life at that time (eg Grapes of Wrath).

So eventually, projects like the Interstate Highway System, and even weapons manufacturing and mobilization for WW2 caused mass employment. At a time when people needed jobs, this was a good thing for the economy and didn’t need communist propaganda to attract workers. Capitalism’s race to the bottom created the desperation the workers needed for undertake large state projects. And it is about to happen again.

Ironically, around the same time the US had a massive surplus, Russia and China were experiencing massive man-made famines under collectivization. Whether that horrific economic experiment ultimately led to more prosperity through 5-year plans is a contentious question (ideological leftists like Noam Chomsky have told me, quoting Amartya Sen, that supposedly China had less deaths from malnutrition afterwards than India, but that’s hardly a high bar considering their population density).

PS: I don’t mean to pick on communism alone for extreme ideological economic system enforcement leading to famines. The Irish Potato Famine could probably be squarely put into the ideological capitalism column (landlords and property rights trumping people’s lives), or how Britain (a capitalist country) exploited India and the famines in Bengal were also largely due to requisition of grain, similar to the Volga famine during the Russian civil war.

The interstate was for the military. The new deal was in part thanks to left wing communists/unionists voicing for the gov to do more for the people. Then came McCarthyism.

I'm a yimby but to be fair the welfare system is so broken in the US that it's kind of a de facto ongoing famine

Reply on news.ycombinator.com