Hacker News Reader

Comment by Frieren | Hacker News Reader

To some extend I hope that the Republican party wins the next election. They should be the ones fixing the economy, raising taxes, and doing something responsible for once.

If Democrats win they are going to be blamed for being the "bad guys" for increasing taxes, controlling inflation and trying to get the economy back to shape.

For Republicans to burn down the economy during their mandates has paid of as the next government needs to focus on firefighting instead of doing the good that it could have been done.

View on HN

> To some extend I hope that the Republican party wins the next election. They should be the ones fixing the economy, raising taxes, and doing something responsible for once.

Why would you ever think they’d be interested in doing any of that? A non-insignificant fraction of the gop wants to collapse the US entirely.

And then nobody will vote for them ever again, and it'll be a utopia after the rebuild. Playing the long game.

> And then nobody will vote for them ever again, and it'll be a utopia after the rebuild. Playing the long game.

(Sarcasm noted.) There was a bitter joke about Islamist takeovers by elections after the Arab Spring: "One man [literally], one vote, one time."

Trump floated that trial balloon a few months back, though currently the administration is proceeding with the much more American plan of widespread voter suppression, intimidation, and bribery, if in the most ham-fisted and unconstitutional way possible.

Genuine question: I think making things worse to motivate later making them better is a relatively common idea. Are there any historical examples of it actually working well?

To me, it seems more likely to concentrate power among people who don't want to make things better and make it easier for them to resist ever changing.

The Republican plan appears to be to run the de jure government into the ground so that the corporations can occupy more and more governmental roles, eliminating what little shreds still remain of our Constitutional/natural rights. So no, I wouldn't assume that there will be some clean collapse, nor that said collapse will leave a power vacuum in which a democratic government could be rebuilt.

The current GOP plan is “if you can’t best them, join them.” So it’ll be a game of both sides buying votes from their constituencies until we need an Argentina-like reset.

You really do seem to love this type of "Democrats made them do it" excuse. At a certain point you've got to ask yourself if you're trying to convince others or mainly just yourself.

Throwing money at recent immigrants in return for votes was a pillar of the FDR coalition and it’s a core pillar of the Obama coalition. It’s simply inevitable as the culture of the United States converges to be similar to those of the other countries in the hemisphere. There is no constituency for fiscal responsibility in any of these countries.

Your game here seems to be throwing out simplistic partisan tripe, to either prompt an equally-inflammatory opposite-partisan response that will leave you feeling vindicated, or you can always fall back to arguing the shreds of truth in it while continuing to ignore the big picture.

I would ask you to "do better", but the whole problem is that once you've bought into the contradictions of destructionism, there is no doing better without coming to terms with what you're actually advocating. Talking about an "an Argentina-like reset" you're closer than most, but I suspect that's due to a better ability for rationalization.

In other conversations of ours, you've gone on about the need to preserve American culture in the face of immigration. So once again I will implore you personally, to do your part by working to adopt our culture rather than proudly championing the exact zero-sum politics you're bemoaning (regardless of having changed the color of the partisan flag you're waving). A core tenet of American culture is personal responsibility (for better and for worse), and so these types of choices right here are where the rubber meets the road.

> Your game here seems to be throwing out simplistic partisan tripe

It's not a partisan point at all, it's an observation about how immigration and changes in the polity interacts with politics. Left-wing parties rely on immigrants for votes all over the developed world. And the larger topic of how foreigners influence a democratic system is one Aristotle was writing about even in 350 BC.

> do your part by working to adopt our culture rather than proudly championing the exact zero-sum politics you're bemoaning

You should read up on game theory. It doesn't matter what I do, the millions of other immigrants that come to the U.S. will change its culture to be more like their homelands'. Your only choice is whether you want the left-wing version of those countries' politics, or the right-wing version? Both result in fiscal disaster, followed by an Argentina-style correction. (We should be so lucky--Javier Milei seems to be doing a pretty good job.)

Truthfulness does not imply that something is not partisan. That it's brought up as a talking point to motivate a certain line of thinking is what makes it partisan.

> You should read up on game theory. It doesn't matter what I do

How does this differ from "I might as well drop my trash on the ground in the park, because everyone else is going to do it anyway" ?

You're fallaciously excluding the middle - there will always be some people who drop their trash on the ground. So a clean park must employ groundskeepers to pick it up. But such centralized action can never make up for mass distributed behavior, so it behooves us all to adhere to and propagate good culture that keeps most people from throwing their trash on the ground. And the same dynamic applies to basically every societal construct.

So no, I do not buy your [self-serving] argument that the culture you're simultaneously bemoaning and also engaging in is inevitable.

> To some extend I hope that the Republican party wins the next election. They should be the ones fixing the economy, raising taxes, and doing something responsible for once.

The last small-government Republican was Herbert Hoover. Reagan paid lip service to the concept, but he maintained high spending levels to keep former FDR democrats in the fold.

They'll just say economy was doomed because of Biden anyway, and that it's not their fault.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com