What Happens When a State Is Run by Movie Stars?

Your assumption that he would not use a comparable term for the opposite situation, say "a liberal hit piece about Texas" in fact reveals a much more obvious lack of objectivity.

You wouldn't criticize him for thinking, "Maybe the next thing that growls will bite too."

And, BTW, I am not only pointing the finger at the US political system. This is true almost everywhere. The particularly nasty examples are in most of Latin America, where the ruling parties (all leftists, socialists) play the masses like finely tuned violins, keep getting voted into office and all the get in return is more misery. Every single politician walks away rich, entitled, protected from legal repercussions. Talk about the 1 percent.

Despicable.

Comparing to other countries and looking at a ranking system in Wikipedia is also a mistake. We are not the same. You are not comparing the same things. There are societal, cultural and historical differences that have a huge impact on the results of any given policy. Also, our economy is much, much larger and diverse, in absolute terms, than that of most countries.

The Nordic countries tend to be used as a model to support distributive socialist positions. The problem is that you just can't draw parallels between these nations and the US. Our system, our people, our politicians, our industry, our geography our social construct is very different from theirs.

Here's an interesting paper from MIT discussing some of their challenges:

http://economics.mit.edu/files/5726

Here's an excerpt:

"The two phenomena taken together imply a tendency for total spending on welfare services to rise faster than GDP over time. As long as the production of these services remains in the public domain, or as long as they are tax-financed, the tax burden must also exhibit a tendency to rise continuously with GDP. This is a problem of the welfare state that we have been living with for decades now. However, starting from an already high tax burden, the efficiency cost of further increases in tax wedges will at some stage rise steeply, and high taxes will eventually cause serious harm to employment and growth. It seems to us that we may be close to a critical point where the deadweight losses due to high tax wedges and, particularly, their effect on labour force participation rates start to bite seriously. This is particularly so in view of some of the consequences of globalization and demographic change."

And that's the problem. You can make it work for a while in some societies, but it is not a sustainable long-term model. Greece being a bad example of this.

An almost trivial exercise using Excel can easily demonstrate how flawed these ideas tend to be.

The Nordic countries can, to a large extent, live the way they live thanks to a lot of what has come out of "the west". Look around your home or office. All of what you see is the result of capitalism at work. From your clothes to your furniture, watch, phone, computer, car, etc. The life saving devices the Nordic countries use to treat their population would not have existed had the entire world operated as they do. They are all the result of capitalism. In other words, socialist societies, could be argued, have been able to keep the status quo thanks to capitalism.

That's one view. The other is purely mathematical (the Excel spreadsheet model).

I find that anyone who's run a non-trivial business for many years eventually gains an understanding that seems impossible to get as an employee or as a government worker. When you run a business you very quickly understand that income distribution is a formula for disaster. It is not sustainable and it does not, despite how it is being sold by the left, result in a better society.

If you want a better society to live in you owe it to yourself to truly and objectively look at what the welfare state has done to our country. The war on poverty is decades old and our poor as more miserable than ever. The war on education, same thing. All of these government programs create more misery than wealth.

Look at the contrast between a SpaceX and traditional aerospace contractors. Amazing! And, frankly, you don't get the full sense of the difference until you actually walk through SpaceX --as I have-- and see how different things are when compared to traditional government contractors. It's almost the difference between being motivated and being brain-dead.

If you want a better society then you should want more freedom, more entrepreneurship, more SpaceX's and less of anything that has to do with the government controlling your life and your business. We want them to manage our country, maintain roads, enforce reasonable laws and regulations and create solid and productive relationships with other countries. If you truly want a better society you ought to demand results, efficiency, compassion, fairness, frugality, stability and a whole host of things out of our government that we have not had for over 50 years, regardless of which party has been in power.

To be sure, the topic is complex, perhaps well beyond our comprehension. All I can ask is that you don't form your opinion based on what they tell you and a single world view. Look at what they have actually accomplished. I am not a Reagan fan-boy but the question he asked in a debate way-back-when is powerful and should be applied to any ideology from any party: Are you better off today than you were <insert date>. Look at Democrat and Republican promises and ideology and see what they've accomplished after decades and decades of being in power. Are poor people really better off today than fifty years ago due to government programs or due to progress created by a mostly free capitalist society. I think the answer is obvious, just remove everything they have and can do today that is a result of capitalism and you have the USSR.

Just think. Don't follow. Lead.

Moral authority over conservatives, and cleansing of the sins of racism and other -isms and damage against Mother Earth by voting properly (and possibly some targeted donations).

I'm not sure how to do a good Google search for this but you can find some science on how people who perform token acts of environmentalism or race consciousness then often account to themselves some "moral capital" which they immediately spend, e.g. "Yeah, I flew to the mountains to ski but I recycle my trash so it all works out."

Conservatives are of course selling purity (a concept that actually goes quite deep; google "disgust" for some recent and fascinating research on this human characteristic) and tradition, and feeding into outrage about various changes going on.

Libertarianism (disclaimer: I mostly identify here) sells on the idea of secret understandings that few people have, invoking the ancient "mystery religion" [1] psychological programs that are actually surprisingly absent in the modern world. Many variants also have more than a whiff of "if we just did this ONE THING all our problems would be solved", offering an appealing unified theory of why everything sucks so hard that has the advantage of near-unfalsifiability since the realistic chances of any major libertarian polity rapidly approaches zero as its size grows, while being very appealing simplified. (See also gold-buggery... "one simple thing" that would fix our whole economy.)

All the political positions are selling emotional appeals.

Oh, and in the middle of this tumult there's some policy things too, but who really votes for those? Policies are tied together in really weird ways, and there is a far greater of cohesion of beliefs into "blocs" than you'd expect with a naive model of beliefs. Either our understanding of human psychology is still really limited and there's some good reason that the various beliefs are tied together, "team" voting is vastly disproportional in power vs. what it theoretically should be, or some combination of both, as I could argue both pretty well with various science results that have been coming out over the past 10 years.

[1]: This is a technical term, BTW; you may have a fun time googling it if you've never heard of it before.

Now, about your left-leaning tech friends. There are probably multiple answers to this question.

The first answer is simple: Nothing.

Politicians need massive numbers of people to vote for them in order to win. This is done by giving to the masses, not to highly paid tech workers. This is why the rich are easy targets in political speeches. They don't represent a large voting block. There are enough rich people supporting each party to keep the cash coming in. I have yet to see one politician, regardless of affiliation, not take a single dime from the rich people they vilify in public.

Politicians get votes from giving to the masses. It's a simple formula really. I don't think tech workers fit that category. What's interesting is that this sort of talk on HN will result in vicious down-voting yet nobody stops to think and understand that what people like me are saying is supported by massive amounts of evidence, not just in the US but all over the world. The very article that started this thread talks about it being common in India. I speak about Argentina because my family lived there for a number of years and I came to learn about just how fucked-up and manipulative their politics are.

And so, when one sees American (or any other for that matter) politics with the benefit of years of exposure to other cultures and the blatant use and abuse of the masses for political gain, well, it's only natural to want to alert others. The emperor has no clothes. Yet nobody wants to stop and think.

The explanations for the left-leaning of your tech worker friends would require knowing each of them personally. If I am to generalize I'll say that it is very likely there was a degree of indoctrination at home. BTW, this is true of any political bend.

It is also no secret that our universities are permeated with far-left-leaning professors. And it is no secret that a degree of indoctrination goes on in many classes. My own son often tells me about experiences he is having in college with militant left-leaning professors consuming class time to indoctrinate. It's sick.

In a lot of cases there's a situation of not having enough life experience and cultural exposure outside the US. I know people in the US that have almost never ventured outside their city. Young 20-something tech workers simply don't know what they don't know when it comes to political reality. They just know what makes them feel good and what their friends and bosses might think. And they fall right in line with them.

Note that I am not favoring Republicans when I speak ill of Democrats. I think both parties have degenerated into ugly piles of manure. They are collectively doing more damage to this country than we can probably quantify today.

All I ask is that people stop to really think about these things because, in the end, they will really affect your life in massive ways. And the lives of your children. I know that to a 20-something rocking it in Silicon Valley this might be hard to connect with (the idea of thinking about children you don't have) yet, it is the way you need to start thinking if you want things to get better rather than worst.

More government isn't the solution because it is giving more control to people who think it reasonable to spend a billions dollars (or whatever it was) to build a website or billions of dollars bombing the shit out of people we should have nothing to do with or a joke of a high speed train to nowhere.

More government is NOT the solution. Leaning left or right in a mindless manner, or just to be part of the group you associate with is exactly what you should not be doing. You need to look at every piece of manure that comes out of politicians mouths with huge skepticism and cast your vote in favor of what, in the long term, will be best for your children and their children.

I mean, look at the various wars and tell me how effective they've been: War on Poverty. Fail. War on Drugs. Fail. War on Education. Fail. War on Terror. Fail.

The only war we are winning is that being waged by bad politics against ourselves. And it is going to cost us our country.

That's why, again, I say: Since politics isn't going away any time soon, perhaps we ought to give a moderate Libertarian approach a shot. Extreme Libertarians are just as crazy as the extreme's of any other party. I find that a reasonable Libertarian position where government is small, taxes are low, regulations are sensible, foreign relations are based on respect, people's freedom and privacy are truly respected might just be the right approach.

Will it be perfect? Of course not.

I hope that clarifies my position.