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This is a remarkably sensible speech. The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctio

• mchusma 13y ago
  I think it was a good speech, but because it was so emotional, and not rational. In fact, he was dismissive of any arguments as anything other than his own. To call all other forms of thought juvenile, and simply say "we are either together or not" sounds like the content of a great political speech, not a well articulated debate.
  • thenmar 13y ago
    O, if only he had linked to the Mises Institute a few more times!
    • sanderjd 13y ago
      I'm not entirely sure what point you're trying to make, but for what it's worth, while agreeing with lots of the speech, I found myself thinking that it was pretty good opinion, but not a great argument.
• spindritf 13y ago
  The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing Is this idea actually being implemented anywhere? Isn't education, even in the US, almost wholly sponsored by the government? People talk about student loans but those are also guaranteed by the government, right? And then the government grants those loans special status by preventing you from ever discharging them in case of bankruptcy. I don't know if the market could remove divides but neither does anyone else because it's a completely untested hypothesis.
  • mooreds 13y ago
    Well, there's a rising number of for profit schools and colleges. These are different in that they still get government funding but are run by private companies (as opposed to private schools, which are funded by tuition). http://chronicle.com/article/Annual-Portrait-of-Education/127639/ http://chronicle.com/article/Annual-Portrait-of-Education/12...
  • touzen 13y ago
    In Sweden private for profit schools and schools run by the municipalities compete with each other. All of them are funded by the tax payers and they get a certain amount of money for every student. The system is a disaster, with a lot of for profit schools slashing costs to maximize profits regardless of what the consequences are for the students. And that's just one of the many failures of the system. Basically, the problem is that markets don't necessarily generate the best solutions from a social perspective, markets generate the solutions that create the largest profits. You have to some how get the markets to stop chasing profits, which is easier said than done.
    • sseveran 13y ago
      If you stop chasing profits then there is no incentive to produce a quality product. The US public schools are a great example of that.
• chongli 13y ago
  Can the Nordic model work in every country, though? All of the Nordic countries have trade surpluses, especially when you look at the per-capita numbers. How would this work in a country of large trade deficits like the US?
  • justincormack 13y ago
    Its not really to do with trade surpluses. They have not always had trade surpluses, indeed they mostly had huge banking and deficit crises a while back, the surpluses are more recent (Finland's started with Nokia, which at one point dominated the economy and trade).
    • chongli 13y ago
      I was talking about trade surpluses in real goods. Banking (and other financial activity) is just a form of rent-collection that masks this effect.
• eudox 13y ago
  >Are we all in this together or are we all not? Vague drivel capped by an appeal to emotion. 10/10.
• thaumasiotes 13y ago
  > The question - and only question - should be what David Simon asks: are we all in this together or are we not? I can't agree. This is just another way to tell the world at large "you're either with us or you're against us". Posing the question is a good way to convince me that I'm against you.
  • nickff 13y ago
    When the someone questions my resolve, I question their aims.
  • agilebyte 13y ago
    To me with us means whether I care about my extended families - city, state, nation, World - and how they are doing. Not just taking the view that everybody fends for themselves alone.
• jpttsn 13y ago
  > The question - and only question - should be what David Simon asks: are we all in this together or are we not? I don't understand: Do you mean that to be a rhetorical question, or do you actually want to debate whether we're "all in this together?"
  • nickff 13y ago
    I believe you were being rhetorical jpttsn; but in any case, Simon assumes no one would ever debate his collectivist query.
• avar 13y ago
  The libertarian and anti-government sentiments aren't saying that we shouldn't be all in this together, but that we shouldn't be forced to be all in this together. That difference is what the entire argument is about. Few people are saying saying "let's not do this" for some value of "this", they're saying "let's not force everyone to do this". That's a very profound difference, it's why having the government make anything its business anywhere in the world is always controversial.
  • bmelton 13y ago
    I just made a very long post that tried to say exactly that. Kudos for your more elegant and succinct answer that captures in four sentences what I'm not sure I did in eight paragraphs.
  • scarmig 13y ago
    That argument is tiresome. Many libertarians want to enforce a very particular and ahistorical version of property rights, one dictated from above and with a studied blindness for the reason we've invented the group of rights we think of as property. They want to subject everyone to a society where state violence is used for and only on behalf of people who in the past were granted monopoly access to some material good. Force seeps through everything we do in a society, because it's a good like any other. Many libertarians demand everyone be forced into a machine of their own invention. And that's not any more damning of them than of anyone else, but they should own it. They're not hoping for a world where people aren't forced into things, but a world where people are forced into their own narrow vision of what's moral and righteous.
    • avar 13y ago
      What I'm pointing out really has nothing to do with libertarianism, for what it's worth it's not a political position that I personally adhere to. I'm pointing out that whatever your political leaning you don't "just" get the government involved. Even if you think you should have a larger government than you have now the question is what kind of larger government, and once you make the wrong choice there's a huge inertia in the system that makes correcting that choice very hard. So even people that agree that government should do more aren't easily brought on the bandwagon of the something the government wants to do being the right version of that "more".
• bmelton 13y ago
  I upvoted you, but I think I disagree largely with the sentiment you expressed. As one of those wacky libertarians, I'd like to defend (what I think is) the default liberty-oriented position. Disclaimer, the following is a series of value judgements, and not necessarily steeped in fact. The argument isn't necessarily one based on 'more' vs. 'less' government, but 'Constitutionally prescribed' government size. The Constitution speaks of a small federal government, whose purpose it is to defend the rights of individuals from potentially abusive state governments. The Constitution places a higher value on individual liberty than efficiency of government. We see this reflected in separation of powers, an adversarial Congress, limited terms of office, etc., etc. For many, we see the Constitution as the central governing document of our nation. We don't see it as perfect, in any sense, and we will readily admit to its flaws and faults. Some of us (self included) will even concede that we aren't adept enough at examining social policy to be able to say assertively that a Nordic model of government wouldn't be objectively "better" at granting citizens the liberties they desire. What we can say, fairly definitively, is that we can't have a Nordic model of government with the Constitution as it exists. That isn't necessarily horrible, or untenable. We can get there from here. We can ratify, amend, and hell, even rewrite the Constution, using Constitutionally prescribed measures. There are, as I stated, many faults with the Constitution, but this is where it excels. Where public sentiment changes broadly enough that there is a clear consensus, it should be easy to ratify the Constitution to get us where we need to be. Where we don't have a clear consensus, it should be very hard -- and indeed it is. The faults we see with the existing government are generally the faults we see where they have deviated from adhering to the Constitution. The Constitution prescribes transparency in law-making, and to that end, we have a generally open Congress, whereupon we can interact with our legislators and make our opinions known. However, to circumvent that, the president has recently been exercising "Executive Order", and/or delegation to agencies, who have lawmaking authority, but without the same degree of transparency has. If the FDA decides that they want to impose a regulation, for example, they can do so without the passage of a law, despite the fact that the regulation may have _de_ _facto_ authority as a law. Similarly, executive order bypasses this process. That isn't to suggest it is inherently evil, as we've seen it used for both good and ill, and with varying effectiveness. Regardless, it circumvents (IMO) Constitutionally prescribed law-making procedures. I think that most people, left, right, center or fringe, that the bill of rights, generally, should be treated as sacrosanct, especially where those provisions relate to the first amendment, religious exercise, etc.. People disagree on others, and that's fine -- where there's a clear consensus, it should be easy for the second amendment to be repealed. There isn't, so it hasn't been, so the government has taken half-measures (again, IMO) in an attempt to side-step the bill of rights in lieu of ratification, to appease their political base. The other, major flaw, is that people's beliefs are fungible. They believe that freedom of speech is sacrosanct, and would point to the first amendment as evidence of that, but so often, they would turn around and suggest that the second amendment is outdated, or relegate its provisions to 'muskets', without similarly acknowledging that first amendments should then not be applicable to digital media, telephones, or whatever other implements did not exist in the late 1700s. As pertaining to capitalism, our stance is that true capitalism hasn't ever really been tried -- almost as certainly as we've had capitalism, we've just as readily had crony capitalism. In tech, we can readily speak to the abusive power of patents, and we all know for how long they've stifled innovation, been used to discourage new competitors and free market competition. Why we aren't all able to agree that most regulations imposed by government are done to similar effect is always slightly baffling to me, because they absolutely are. An early entrant to a new market is often able to transfer some of their economic might into political sway, making it harder and harder for new entrants to take either from them, widening the income disparity as well as the ability to narrow it using the free market. That isn't to suggest that we shouldn't all act more communally -- we absolutely should, and it should be encouraged at every step, though never forced. I recently co-established a 501c3 charity to help mitigate the out-of-pocket spending that our teachers often undergo so that they can ensure their children have supplies. They're already underpaid, more often than not, and on average, they spend, out of pocket, up to $2000 a year on supplies that aren't being provided by parents or the school systems. In researching this, I've found what seems to be common advice that "the government is required to provide supplies, so you shouldn't buy any of them," and while that's said, I'm able to see both sides of this argument -- if the government is taxing us, and that taxes goes towards the foundation and operation of schools, then we've already paid our part, and weren't given much of a say in the matter. Contrarily though, I'd want to encourage more voluntaryism in ensuring that teachers aren't operating at a loss in order to educate our children; we should free them from as many burdens as we're able to enable them to be more effective at educating, which is their job, not procurement. So, what's the answer? Clearly, we should be more communally minded, but many feel that since that communality has been mandated, and that their contributions to society have already been forcibly taken, that they are contributing, whether they like it or not. Probably, the answer is somewhere in the middle, and I don't claim to know where it is. I agree that we don't currently have it, and our politicians (on both sides) pandering to their political bases isn't actually making us any progress. I don't know that necessarily a reversion to a smaller government gets us there either, nor do I know that a Nordic model does -- both have worked in isolated instances, but I haven't seen anything convincing that either would work well for us, here, with the people that we have. So, to the libertarian, what we're left with, generally speaking, is the Constitution... the rule book for how the nation is supposed to run, and it isn't being followed, and things are poopy. If we want to change the rules, the Constitution lets us, but instead, politicians on all sides are just cheating instead, and that clearly isn't working.
• clarkm 13y ago
  > The question - and only question - should be what David Simon asks: are we all in this together or are we not? To me, the answer is blindingly obvious. It's demonstrated by what societies are flourishing - with high economic and social equality, healthy democratic government, protected personal liberties, well-cared-for populaces, and resilient economies - and what societies aren't. And the blindingly obvious answer is? Here's my simple model: large, diverse countries are more unequal than small, culturally homogeneous countries. Just like densely-populated, cosmopolitan regions are more unequal than bland suburbs. Just like world is more unequal than the US.
  • jkn 13y ago
    Then don't look at different countries but at the evolution of inequality in a particular country. The rise of inequality in the US since the 1980's is an indictment of the current system. Here's an animated map showing this evolution: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/19/watch-the-growth-of-u-s-income-inequality-with-this-animated-map/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/19/w... And this article has a chart illustrating the inverse relationship between inequality and well-being in the US: http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/peter-turchin-wealth-poverty/ http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/peter-turchin-wealth...
• rmc 13y ago
  Nordic model works if you have a ton of oil.
  • ersii 13y ago
    I assume you're referring to Norway, when you speak of tons of oil? Norway is the sole proprietor and large extractor of oil amongst the Nordic countries for what I know. Neither Sweden, Denmark or Finland extracts any oil - or so little, that it's almost none.
• squozzer 13y ago
  I think we are all in this together, whether we acknowledge it or not. Bombs fall on enemy and sympathizer alike. To me the question is, "Who decides the allocation of the burdens and benefits?" That answer is obvious. And it's not impartial.
• bananacurve 13y ago
  We have that in the US, its called Massachusetts. Ever notice how no one argues for the European model?
• SiVal 13y ago
  Sensible? He points at miles of Baltimore housing projects where "fathers" consider themselves responsible only for impregnating women and the state to be entirely responsible for the child after that as the fault of libertarians. Neighborhoods where everyone assumes from birth that they are permanently exempt from any responsibility for supporting themselves, because that is and always will be the state's responsibility, and are free to spend every day doing what they feel like, are blamed on libertarian ideas.
  • justincormack 13y ago
    You are talking about areas where often the only (semi) viable form of income is the drugs trade, and the education system does not work.
    • SiVal 13y ago
      Yet several million people born far away in Mexico with even less education have managed to find viable forms of income in the US without resorting to the drug trade. They didn't have the same welfare system, though. Before the welfare system made housing entire communities in Baltimore the permanent responsibility of the state, the residents of those neighborhoods worked in construction and built homes for each other. Before the state made feeding themselves and their families from cradle to grave the job of state, they cooked for each other, worked in grocery stores, ran restaurants, drove delivery vans, repaired appliances, did the plumbing. Before the state permanently eliminated the need to find ways to support themselves and provide for their offspring, the residents of those neighborhoods spoke of hard workers with admiration not derision. Before preparation for supporting themselves was made completely irrelevant, they didn't hold teachers and school work in contempt. Parents used to paint their small schoolhouses and do what they could to scrape together money for schoolbooks that their kids would need to share. Now, painting the much larger school is job of the state, and the kids amuse themselves by destroying the books that nobody they know had to pay for. This is said to be the fault of the "system" for not taking even more responsibility for the community, without a hint of irony. Yet back when the state did even less and the community supported themselves, they had fewer smart phones but more loving fathers, had fewer schoolbooks but better readers, had less financial stability but far more physical safety. Yet the article proposes that it is post-war libertarian influence that produced "the horror" of these blighted Baltimore neighborhoods, as if the decades since have been characterized by a rapidly shrinking government.
• jrmenon 13y ago
  Not just the Nordic model, but even the achievements of some European countries (notably Germany) and Japan, would have been possible without US security guarantees? Essentially the US/Nato is the main protector of Western interests, and American taxpayers ( + deficit financing ) essentially props up these 'regimes' - granted they are more democratic, and there is a great deal of autonomy than a traditional vassal states arrangements.
  • Zigurd 13y ago
    That is a remarkable interpretation of what, in reality, is a situation where the US demands tribute in the form of onerous intelligence tie-ups that lost their purpose when the Soviet Union dissolved and treaties that spread bad US IP laws to places that have no desire to be screwed up that way. We now pimp the "Global War on Terror" as a substitute, but some guys in caves with a few kilos of explosives just isn't as compelling as an industrial superpower with h-bombs.
  • mogrim 13y ago
    Alternatively, NATO provides legal and moral support to the centuries old concept of buffer states - the US provides military support to stop the spread of communism, which is left unchecked would have reached the US isolated in a hostile world. As a European (with a keen interest in history) I'm not ungrateful for US aid, but to suggest that aid was entirely selfless is incorrect. (You may wish to draw parallels with the French support that made the American revolution a success, a similar situation...)
• mudil 13y ago
  I am not in this together. I am here for myself and my family. To use the famous example of a pencil: no one knows how to produce a pencil. It takes expertise (and infrastructure, i.e. private property) to cut and process wood, to mine graphite and iron for a band, etc etc etc. If some social engineer like David Simon comes in and says "we need to produce pencils together", nothing is going to be done. Because inevitably social engineering means that he (or the bureaucrats that share his ideology) will decide how to shift resources and someone's private property to better produce pencils. Let's also not forget that founder fathers consistently looked at this and came to the conclusion that an attack on private property is an attack on liberty. That's the reason for a limited gov't. The big question is why at a time when we have unprecedented size and reach of gov't, and liberty is tramped, we hear these desperate calls that things are not working well?
• AndrewKemendo 13y ago
  The question - and only question - should be what David Simon asks: are we all in this together or are we not? I think this question is frankly naïve. Humans have functional limitations on how much we can care about other people, aka Dunbar's number. This is not something you can improve (maybe by .0001%) or create policy around, it's a hard limit. The fact that, at least in the United States, virtually everyone lives in a place with more than a few thousand people in it, ensures that there will be a conflict between the needs of the group of people around us and our own reactions to those needs. Add on to that the reality of scarcity of both needs and desires and you have a clear answer: No we are not all in it together.
  • thenomad 13y ago
    That's not what Dunbar's Number means. Dunbar's Number is "a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships." Having a social relationship with someone != caring about their fate.
    • AndrewKemendo 13y ago
      Having a social relationship with someone != caring about their fate. I think you aren't understanding the mechanism of the theory - which goes beyond the original paper. It has less to do with being able to "be social" (a broader function) than it does with being able to empathize with someone. Empathy is directly related to size and activity within the neocortex. [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/100/9/5497.long http://www.pnas.org/content/100/9/5497.long
  • gress 13y ago
    Dubar's number not remotely established as a factual 'functional limitation on how much we care about other people'.
  • penguindev 13y ago
    >Add on to that the reality of scarcity of both needs and desires Yes! And when people have more than 2.1 children, thus increasing global population, things get even scarcer. So no, your 19 children are clearly not 'all in it together' with my 2, to whom I would like to feed grass fed beef as God - not Monsanto - intended*. But lets all overlook population growth. [1] Actually I would prefer fish, but lets be realistic - the oceans are now a mercury filled shithole.
• dobbsbob 13y ago
  To defend the free market position though I don't agree with it, an evil party can be elected in those countries who could purposely mismanage the welfare state and destroy it. Then they point to the ruins and say look this doesn't work adopt our new evil system. Canada and UK try to do this whenever an ultra conservative local or national gov is elected. They can purposely fuck it all up with a wave of the hand which is why relying on government is risky. Nordic countries also have strict speech controls and censorship which is why a lot of artists leave those countries. Banning films and literature is common
  • gnaffle 13y ago
    Huh? When was the last film or book banned in a Nordic country?
    • dobbsbob 13y ago
      2011 a serbian film. They only reversed 300 film bans in 2003. It is illegal to 'insult' religion there so if you're a critical cartoonist or author expect to go to court and defend your art from censors. The last book censored was Flemming Rose’s book “The tyranny of silence" and in 2009 they censored a stand up comedian for what was silly satire.
      • gnaffle 13y ago
        Did that cartoonist ever get to court? And how was "The tyranny of silence" censored?
• yetanotherphd 13y ago
  Replace "juvenile" with "a straw man" and you get a much more accurate statement. I believe in redistribution of wealth, but I call it what it is: redistributing money from rich people to poor people. The author dresses it up in fancy sounding (though completely outdated) concepts of "labor" and "capital". Economists also believe in Labor and Capital, they are the variables L and C in macro models. However, we don't believe that there is some eternal battle between the two, because, while people who only own labor would like a better deal for labor, and people who mainly own capital would like a better deal for capital, there is no "deal" to be had. Labor and Capital receive their marginal products, because at the highest level we live in a free market and there is almost nothing the government can do to prevent this. What the government can do is redistribute money from rich to poor. But this probably sounds a bit too socialist for some, so people come up with ways to dress it up in outdated economics. So I would tentatively answer "yes" to the question "are we in this together...?" but with the condition that answering yes does not imply I support the author's bogus economics.
• mortyseinfeld 13y ago
  I see a lot of libertarian and anti-government sentiments expressed on HN. And I see a lot of leftists on HN that are surprised that this is the case. Why is that? The question - and only question - should be what David Simon asks: are we all in this together or are we not? Because all of 310+ million are not in this together. We, as individuals, all have our own dreams, ambitions, interests, and goals. I see a lot of leftist sentiment expressed on HN - sentiment for the same old failed ideas that was the cause of the so much misery in the last century and to this day.
  • g8oz 13y ago
    >>Because all of 310+ million are not in this together. We, as individuals, all have our own dreams, ambitions, interests, and goals. And as a society you have roads, schools, hospitals, public safety, public health etc. Acknowledging common interests in public goods and following through on the implications of that acknowledgment is not the road to Stalinism that you seem to think it is. Life is not an XOR gate.
  • saraid216 13y ago
    > And I see a lot of leftists on HN that are surprised that this is the case. Why is that? Heightened expectations of intelligence, probably. I wasn't surprised that it was the case, but I used to be a libertarian programmer until I got an education, so unfair advantage there.
• dllthomas 13y ago
  Incidentally, I think a lot of those questions are missing the trees for the forest - speaking in broad terms like "more government or less", "more regulation or less" is not terribly useful. There are tremendously bad ways to add more government and more regulation, and tremendously bad ways to remove them. One may have some bias in one direction or the other, but policies and proposals should be considered, and implemented or scrapped, on their merits. If we're going to be speaking in vague platitudes, then it probably makes sense to stick to a high enough level that it's not divisive, but it's not terribly useful for making decisions either way.