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The Reasons Authoritarianism Is Growing – and How to Reverse It
- rokkamokka 2y agoA good read. I was a bit saddened while reading the election thread earlier here on HN - there were more authoritarian voices here than I would've hoped.
- resters 2y agoindeed! HN has gone way to the authoritarian right. Not just socially but also a lot of HN readers favor economically authoritarian policies like tariffs!
- cassianoleal 2y agoWhy do you call tariffs authoritarian? I would generally put them in the protectionist basket but I don't see how a country can be authoritarian towards another or either populations by simply imposing tariffs.
- mmooss 2y agoTariffs are at least anti-libertarian.
- brg 2y agoAbsolutely agree. The libertarian view of tariffs is that they limit free trade, and are often used for inefficiently for market manipulation than as a funding source. One question this US election cycle has brought up is how to best fund a government. Every reasonable person understands that a government needs funding to operate. But every mechanism employed has trade offs. But I have not found enough information to develop an informed opinion on under what conditions a flat tariff on imports be better than a progressive income tax, a flat income tax be better than capital gains, etc. Tax policy is adhoc, driven by a multitude of factors. If you or anyone can provide an interesting survey on some principle approaches to tax policy I would be grateful.
- mmooss 2y agoWe can ignore the reasons they give; they're well-established liars. Here are some patterns the tariffs fit afaict: They like to shift the tax burden away from wealthy constituents and onto everyone else: Republican states tend to use sales tax, which taxes everyone at an equal rate, rather than progressive income tax. Most/much wealthy income comes from capital gains, etc., which are taxed at a relatively low rate. Most of everyone else's income comes from wages, which are taxed at higher rates ('income tax' should be called 'wage tax', to avoid confusion), including welfare taxes like Social Security, etc. They are populist nationalists and want to increase nationalism and disrupt international institutions and cooperation. Tariffs ideologically do the first and practically do the second. > The libertarian view of tariffs is that they limit free trade, and are often used for inefficiently for market manipulation than as a funding source. Also, tariffs are like sales tax: They tax everyone at the same rate. > If you or anyone can provide an interesting survey on some principle approaches to tax policy I would be grateful. Sorry, not off the top of my head ...
- stonethrowaway 2y agoIf only you knew why my sweet summer child.
- fwip 2y agoI've been wondering a while, is your username a reference to the comic "stone toss?"
- ajross 2y agoMy guess is the tariff thing is just a fad and no one actually wants a trade war. It's something Trump personally thinks is a good idea, and that sounds good in a stump speech. But all the folks advising him, including the ones from our own subculture (Musk, Ackman, Sacks) know better. I'm choosing this moment to try to be optimistic: if Trumps turns over the reins of government to a bunch of technocrats... it's not the worst possible thing that can happen. The real question is who's going to restrain him from turning the DoJ into a revenge organ. The rule of law is historically very hard to get back once its lost.
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- jampekka 2y agoA major reason for the tariff thing is that free trade has a lot of losers, and those were left out to dry, and even ridiculed. Another reason is that being economically dependent on foreign countries can be quite risky. E.g. if China gets economically independent from the west but the west is still dependent on China, China will have immense power over the west.
- ajross 2y agoYeah, I get the arguments. They're just wrong. I'm not aware of a single time in history where a trade war worked to the advantage of the instigator. If you really want this, for the reasons you say, it's because we're already losing and cutting us off from the "enemy" just accelerates the loss. Trade makes everyone richer, and the cost is that some of the people you don't want to be rich get rich. But willfully choosing to be poor doesn't fix that.
- mmooss 2y ago> My guess is the tariff thing is just a fad and no one actually wants a trade war. It's something Trump personally thinks is a good idea, and that sounds good in a stump speech. But all the folks advising him, including the ones from our own subculture (Musk, Ackman, Sacks) know better. They aren't doing it for economic purposes but for political ones: They are nationalist authoritarians; tariffs are not only nationalistic policy, they undermine international institutions and cooperation. > if Trumps turns over the reins of government to a bunch of technocrats That seems like the opposite of Trump's behavior, campaign promises, and plans.
- honkycat 2y agoI realized HN was lost during a thread about having to provide identification to access adult websites. There we SO many voices in favor. I was shocked. Hackers historically cared a TON about their privacy, yet they were willing to throw it away for the sake of "the children." Ignoring that there is a huge suite of tools that would allow you to protect children WITHOUT having to register with the government and be tracked to visit a website.
- fwip 2y agoIt turns out that "hackers" and "rich boy startups" have much less cultural overlap than the latter would have you believe.
- skhunted 2y agoI’m very liberal and very much opposed to authoritarianism. I don’t see the problem with forcing online content to be different than offline content. You gotta show ID or otherwise prove age to buy alcohol and pornography offline. Why not for online as well?
- honkycat 2y agoYes clearly ISPs, OSs, and everyone involved who is making money should provide easier and better tools for protecting kids from adult content. But a state mandated thing associated with my ID is... iffy. People have perfectly good reasons for wanting to protect their privacy.
- skhunted 2y agoFrom the perspective of wanting less waste and less pollution tariffs are a good thing.
- mmooss 2y agoWhy do you say that? Without tariffs, the most efficient producer makes the good or service. With them, someone less efficient may make them. Efficiency includes, but isn't only, waste and pollution.
- naveen99 2y agoYou could say the same about progressive taxes. Without them, the most efficient do the work. With them, less efficient people below taxable income threshold will do more work.
- mmooss 2y agoThat's the first valuable, novel insight I've heard about taxation in a long time. While I support progressive taxes for other reasons (fairness), I'd be interested in the economic impact. (The research would have to use overall tax rate, not just 'income' tax (i.e., wage tax).)
- naveen99 2y agoThere was a time before income tax… and there maybe a future without income tax. Or you can think of income tax as profit sharing with everyone’s required partner big brother. Remember corporate tax and payroll taxes are flat. the progressive part of income tax is really more targeted at consumption. so it’s really more of a progressive consumption tax. It’s easy to arrange a delay in taxes if you don’t need to consume, and are willing to run a business.
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- Yizahi 2y agoWell off people are pulling ladder behind them, a tale as old as mass migration become possible.
- brightball 2y agoAny examples? Most of the voices I saw were people who wanted to the government to leave them alone.
- skhunted 2y agoAlmost no one really wants government to leave them alone. Everyone looks to government after a disaster. People rely on government for policing and most people for providing their children education. People rely on government to ensure the food supply is safe. These things are largely forgotten about by the people saying they want less government. There are contradictory views held by the people who say they want government to leave them alone. They have bought into a fantasy narrative that they are under attack by government and liberalism.
- tim333 2y agoA lot of people would like quite limited government that does the basics but otherwise leaves them alone.
- skhunted 2y agoCan you give some examples of this “leave me alone” that they want to see enacted?
- tim333 2y agoA sort of example might be Hong Kong when I was there thirty or so years ago under British colonial control. The tax rate was about 15% and the government was active in some areas like maintaining the roads, building housing and basic education and health care but otherwise left things mostly to the market. It did pretty well up until the takeover by China which wasn't due to any desire by the population to have China control things, but due to China wanting to take over and having a large military.
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- philosopher123 2y agoAuthoritarianism isn't when your opinions don't align with others. Authoritarianism is the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom. I think we are moving away from this kind of Authoritarianism, and embracing the freedom of diversified opinions.
- verdverm 2y agoTrump has said multiple times that certain media orgs should lose their broadcast license and specific people should be put in jail, because they said things he did not like. MAGA has also cancelled many of their own, or Republicans, for speaking out against Trump. These sorts of things are where the authoritarian associations come from
- JohnFen 2y ago> I think we are moving away from this kind of Authoritarianism, and embracing the freedom of diversified opinions. I think the exact opposite.
- mwkaufma 2y agoAI generated banner image: immediate skip.
- stonethrowaway 2y agoUpvoted because rest of the article is nonsensical as well.
- veidelis 2y agoThe article mentions "immigration due to climate" - could someone give an examples of such occurrences?
- CalRobert 2y agoCrop failures in Syria contributed to their civil war which led to a migration crisis in Europe. Subsistence farmers in Central America can’t grow in a drought and often try to emigrate to US I left California because it will look like baja in due time.
- hulitu 2y ago> Crop failures in Syria contributed to their civil war I'm sure the US tanks are there to plow the fields, not to guard oil fields. /s
- rented_mule 2y agohttps://sdgs.un.org/partnerships/pacific-climate-change-and-migration https://sdgs.un.org/partnerships/pacific-climate-change-and-...
- niam 2y agoSome easy US examples would be the literally destroyed homes from wildfires and floods. Updated insurance rates are pricing people out of neighborhoods after a history of underpricing insurance. Surrounding less-risky areas receive surges in prices after disasters that prompt buying/selling. Sometimes landlords sell property and pull the rug from underneath renters, further displacing people. Adding to costs: FEMA's "50% Rule" requires that it's not enough to simply repair damaged homes in flood zones--you're mandated to tear down the home and rebuild to modern standards at raised elevation if the damage exceeds 50% of the home's value. Some people ignore this and rebuild anyways.
- mmooss 2y agoIn addition to the other responses ... it's long been predicted and isn't hard to grasp: Global warming changes many local climates. What was wet is dry, cold is warm, etc. For 10,000 years, humans have invested in the current locations of productive farmland. They build infrastructure, economies, societies, and grew populations to what the farmland could support. Now that farmland can't produce as much, so people start becoming poor and starving. They aren't going to sit there and starve and become impovrished; they will move to where there is food and income.
- bbor 2y agoWell the start isn’t great, just from a scientific perspective: Before we get into the politics of this argument, let's first go back in time, way back before agriculture, and think about a small band of humans that includes you and me. Evopsych is a vibe, not a science. All the talk about what “predisposes people to be authoritarian people” is, thus, complete vibes, and probably best mostly ignored. The rest is spot on and well written, but I was confused about the tone until the end: this was written before the election, assuming that Trump would lose. It’s all moot now. UBI? Hah, no. RFK Jr is now in charge of “foreign and domestic policy”, even just keeping a few of the consumer protections we have would be a huge surprise; building ones is a fantasy. There’s only two proven strategies for defeating large authoritarian nations in the modern era, IMO: Cold War and hot war. I recommend anyone who’s read history act accordingly, and choose a place to live unlikely to be targeted by nuclear weapons.
- amelius 2y agoThe "increasing complexity" angle is interesting. I didn't think of it before, but I see a lot of ostrich behavior in other authoritarian political groups.
- zzzbra 2y agoTLDR; libertarian take that misses a lot of structural and historical factors. save yourself wasting the fifteen minutes on this high school grade evolutionary psychology postulating
- Hizonner 2y agoI don't see any reason to believe that authoritarians particularly value equality or absolute sameness. I think that's wishful thinking colored by the desire to think they can easily be made into UBI supporters. What authoritarians want is a limited number of well-defined roles and scripts for the way thing are to be done. They don't want to have to deal with figuring out every situation anew. In fact that seems to terrify them. But it's OK if there's not just one role, so long as it's clear where everybody stands. In fact, they usually seem to prefer there to be a strong leader role that's obviously way different from everybody else... either because they see themselves as being that person, or probably more frequently because they want that person to come in and make everything all right for them. Authoritarians also really seem to want the just world fallacy to not be a fallacy, and seem very willing to accept inequality if they can convince themselves that the people who are getting the better deal "deserve" it.
- Animats 2y ago> A big, strong, middle class is reassuring. That's what's disappeared - a strong middle class. Not what the WSJ calls the middle class - they mean people with enough money to invest - but what was called the middle class through the 1970s. People who had a secure job, and could afford a house, a car, a family, and a retirement. Those people had a stake in maintaining the status quo. What we have now is called "the precariat", from "precarious" and "proletariat". There's a job, but you could lose it at any time. You can't afford a house. You can't afford to save for retirement. Just paying the bills is tough. This is the new American normal. A friend in banking who has access to retail numbers points out that, for most customers, the account balance after they pay rent is at most a few hundred dollars.
- _zagj 2y agoBecause progressives refuse to make any concessions, even reasonable ones. The border is perhaps the best example. They won't simply concede to having a secure border, with or without comprehensive immigration reform (i.e., amnesty). Meanwhile, the American people see stuff like this, and rightly get angered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7TNP2OTY2g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7TNP2OTY2g These are people flying commercial from another continent, and coming from a country, China, that is not only a geopolitical adversary of ours, but is projected to economically overtake us, and are coming here only because their economy has seen some recent slowdown. Purely economic migrants taking advantage of us.
- JohnFen 2y ago> They won't simply concede to having a secure border, with or without comprehensive immigration reform This simply isn't true at all.
- xg15 2y agoI don't think it's a good article, honestly. It falls into the same trap that, I believe, Democrats have fallen before - which is to assume that their strategy is perfectly rational and aligns with objective truth, while everyone who disagrees must necessarily suffer some cognitive failure. Therefore it's enough to analyze the disagreement from a psychological or emotional level and the solution is to simply frame the existing agenda in some way that it is more psychologically palatable for the target demographic. This misses that there may be a lot of completely rational, fact-based reasons to reject incumbent policy: If your statistics tell you that the economy is fine, but a significant part of the population doesn't know how to pay the bills, then this isn't some psychological error of that population group, it means your statistics suck. From the perspective of one of the affected, the statement "the economy is fine" will also be understood quite differently: It means that whoever said it obviously doesn't include you in their definition of "the economy" and so is unlikely to alleviate your situation. Of course you then won't vote for them. As a leftist, I also find the "diversity vs sameness" divide quite superficial. A lot of progressives and left-wing types are promoting cultural diversity while demanding strong economic regulations, while conservatives advocate deregulation and laissez-fair economics but have no problem directly interfering with people's private lives. The ultra-libertarians and ancaps who are so in love with freedom that they would like to abolish the state completely nevertheless have no problem with all-encompassing dystopian megacorps, as long as those megacorps are private enterprises. Who exactly is the authoritarian and who is the libertarian here?