One especially notable omission from Hanania’s case is any discussion of where the actual capitalists are throwing their support—which is mostly behind Harris because markets crave stability as an essential predicate to investment, and Trump being a gleeful chaos monster is the opposite of that.
The only thing I’d add to this essay is that the path for Trump to enact his tariff plan (which he doesn’t seem to understand affects US consumers) is much much easier than for Harris to enact her awful policies.
Harris will find her way barred by the Constitution and the Supreme Court. Which is a sometimes disappointing but largely cohesive force for conservatism only because Hillary Clinton was not elected. Harris will pick only the choicest of hard left liberal jurists, and then it will get a lot easier for her second term. I'm not at all trying to sound apocalyptic. I think what we are reaching now is the ending phases of the cycle, where there is some sort of climax. I highly highly doubt it will be Civil War sized drama, maybe something like one of the two parties actually withering like the Whigs, and new two party dynamic is established. Whatever form it will take, betting on Harris to be less able to enact her agenda is assuming a lot about the stability of the rules in place. Both candidates are fraught with danger and anyone who makes an argument that Trumps stupid nonsense is stupid and possible to achieve, I wont argue with them.
My profound sadness over the quality of choices on offer is upsetting.
The danger of Trump isn't that he could enact bad policies through Congress and the Supreme Court, as Harris might (or more likely, might not). Neither will have the power to legislate very much in a divided country. The danger is that Trump is an authoritarian who has already tried to wreck national institutions when they stood in his way.
I will also note that Harris getting a friendly supreme court is extremely unlikely. Conservatives are leading 6-3 in the Supreme Court. The oldest conservative Justice is 76, two would have to die or retire in the next 6-8 years for the Supreme Court to reach 5-4 in the Democrat's favor. And that assumes Democrats control the Senate, to get two very progressive nominees through.
Trump is proposing a massive increase in tariffs, across-the-board 10-20% tariffs on everything. No one in the Democratic party is proposing anything like that.
I don’t pay much attention to the tariffs stuff Trumps says but yeah this is bad. The democrats/leftists/media are not talking about adding more tariffs for now at least.
Hanania’s argument is facile and wrong. Markets, like munitions, work when they’re well-regulated. Most liberals aren’t communists or even socialists. They just don’t believe in a winner-takes-all, fend for yourself society.
I know it wasn't the focus of your essay, but I'd like to drill down, albeit shallowly, into Hanania's assertion that Capitalism is more fragile than Democracy.
This seems backwards to me. From my perspective, the universe slopes down towards Capitalism and away from Democracy, and it takes considerable effort to move uphill against the universe. If left to its own devices, the world becomes more capitalist (hence the need for regulation) and less democratic (hence... the need for regulation).
Also, even if we assume an equal propensity for breaking, capitalism is a lot easier to repair than democracy. If we get a little regulation happy (I'm looking at you, NIMBYs) we can repeal those regulations and everything's good, minus the opportunity cost of lost time. But if we lose democracy, good luck getting it back without a violent revolution.
If we accept Hanania's premise that one candidate is a threat to democracy and the other is a threat to capitalism, we should definitely back the candidate that's not a threat to democracy.
100% agree. Capitalism, even on a micro scale, happens even in totalitarian regimes. Democracy is much more fragile and requires strong institutions that take generations to develop. American constitutional documentary was only possible after the Glorious Revolution in England had started the trend toward democracy 100 years earlier.
In totalitarian regimes, markets are controlled by exclusive monopolies to your cronies, without regard to competition or prices. In totalitarian regimes, you get Tallredrider-mart, not Walmart, Target and a dozen others. If you don't like it, then you are SOL. And good luck in starting a DJ Codes Costco under a totalitarian regime.
The part where honest people disagree is when capitalism becomes so over-regulated that it becomes totalitarian. Judging by the number of businesses and people leaving California, they are heading that direction. The regulatory burden of operating in California is huge, just one example being that the computer I am typing on is known to the state of California to cause cancer.
"In totalitarian regimes, markets are controlled by exclusive monopolies to your cronies, without regard to competition or prices."
I agree, the lack of democracy is bad for capitalism. Another reason why the threat to democracy with worse than the threat to capitalism, since the threat to democracy is also a threat to capitalism, one that is much harder to solve.
Capitalism is an impressive tool for improving societies. But it has limitations, there are things it can't do well. It can't build lighthouses. It can't provide basic healthcare to poor, mentally ill people. There are many things worth doing that capitalism can't achieve. Part of caring about a thing is being honest about its limitations.
Additionally I think Hanania needs to spend a little time wrestling with the how oligarchs regularly emerge in capitalists societies and how these oligarchs act to undermine democratic society.
Capitalism not only CAN build lighthouses, it DID build lighthouses. Lots of them. The trick is that lighthouses are the MOST valuable to people who frequent particular dock/port areas which means a harbormaster can bundle lighthouse upkeep with port fees. Or even build the lighthouse FIRST as a marketing expense to make the port he’s building out more valuable.
(The economist who wrote a paper claiming *lighthouses* were a pure example of a public good hadn’t bothered to CHECK. See Coase’s _The Lighthouse in Economics_,)
There are many important things capitalism can’t do because *government prevents it from doing them*, eg: providing very cheap (albeit lower-quality) housing, transportation and medical care. There are also things it can’t do because not enough people care about those things being done…but that is also a limit on what *government* can do. That is to say: If *everybody* wants a problem solved there’s likely a clever way for the market (including charitable associations) to solve it; if *nobody* wants a problem solved then there’s no constituency for government to do so either.
There *might* be a list of “important” things capitalism can’t do even IF government gets entirely out of the way and allows it to try and stops actively making things worse (at least for some values of “important”); I guess I’m undecided on that. Me, I tend to divide tasks into (a) problem areas where we could benefit from privatizing/deregulating right away, (b) problem areas that might take longer to figure out but should be MUCH easier to solve after we’ve handled all the stuff in category A and therefore have an economy an order of magnitude more vibrant and flexible and we’re all wealthier. :-)
That is clearly stated. Thanks. My core point is that if we could be much more specific about the boundary between things capitalism can provide, and things it can't provide, then we can build a coalition of the sane. What are the qualities of those things it can't provide? You seem to suggest that if people care about a thing, if they value it, then capitalism will provide it. Thats a decent start to defining the boundary. I am not nearly as optimistic as you are how this will actually play out. But it is certainly an important part of the conversation. I am seeking agreement that having honest conversations about its limitations is valuable to both capitalists and those who are skeptical of capitalists ability to provide.
To return to the lighthouse question. I appreciate you pointing out that under some/many circumstances a free market can/will provide a lighthouse. If we went further down this path we might imagine the circumstances in which it can't/won't provide the lighthouse.
I’m a little more concerned with things the government provides TOO MUCH of than things capitalism provides too little of. For instance in a huge number of areas the government provides far too much “safety” or “environmental protection”in ways that make us all poorer and often - paradoxically - make us LESS safe and the environment LESS protected. Government quite often sets out to address a problem and in so doing makes it or related problems worse.
Private firms that fail to provide value to customers generally go out of business and get replaced but when regulators fail they often get rewarded with bigger budgets. Government has no self-correction mechanism, no way to check if they’re helping or whether the help is worth the cost, no way to decide some agency was a bad idea from the beginning and should be scrapped or some other agency has solved the specific problem it was created for so should declare victory and go home. Without that the government tends to just keep growing - like barnacles on a whale - until the whale (economy) can barely move.
Then you come along and see that this barnacle-covered whale isn’t doing very much and say “I guess whales can’t swim very far on their own - there are some important things whales can’t do - so we better add some more barnacles to help them out!”
There's an argument Maurer doesn't make but which I think is compelling:
Unpopular presidents tend to provoke a backlash from the opposition. Another Trump term may create another wave of wokeness and push a lot of people to the left. He may especially push young, educated people who influence our culture to the left. On the other hand, if Harris becomes president we may see a backlash to her. We would likely see wokeness continue to lose steam, just as it's receded more and more during the course of Biden's presidency. Trump would likely age out by 2028 and republicans could run a strong candidate against (presumably) Harris. If you look beyond this one election conservatives in the US may be better off with Harris winning.
Kamala winning= Wokeness encroaching institutions even more, consolidation of victories through expansion of civil rights law
Wokeness needs to be fought head on (republicans passings states law and actively monitoring what is going on, low iq gamers and marvel watchers « boycotting » against lame woke stuff)
There's significant and growing center-left and even left opposition to wokeness, because wokeness is stupid. Wokeness exploded during Trump's first term precisely because his divisive nature and character convinced the rational left that they should unite with the far left, at least to the extent of not criticizing the craziness in woke ideas. Absent that, the rational left has begun pushing back, and if we can keep Trump (or someone Trump-like) from gaining too much power, that will continue.
I don’t believe it. I don’t see anything like a 10th of a figure like Rufo on the democrat side, which is the kind of guy I believe effectively fights wokeness. Meanwhile, I see the Biden administration adding some transgender civil rights.
Wokeness was making constant and solid gains way before Trump. You already had the « 10 reasons why white people are racist and suck» kind of articles by different media during middle of Obama era. College were already woke before 2015-16. The gamergate chuds, alt-right and Trump fanboys was a response to wokeness. And like any form of organism (even if purely memetic), wokeness had a strong reaction when it gets attacked.
Also, transgender civil rights are good because civil rights are good. I support restrictions on medical transition for children, because kids don't know who they are or what they want, and I support keeping trans women who transitioned after going through male puberty out of women's sports, but trans people do actually exist, and they should have civil rights.
I read and I don’t see much stuff I didn’t know or understand. I basically said it first in my first comment. Trump winning means the wokes are getting excited and ofc the basic leftist liberal will give no pushback.
But where is the tangible evidence that Kamala and her administration won’t be a Biden 2.0? What will change? The pattern I predict is that wokes would get less excited and see less stupidity from wokes but they would win more real victories through laws?
Are you trying to tell me classic liberals are going to take back control of the Democratic Party and college campuses, repel DEI and fight back against the oppressor/oppressed framework? Just lol
DEI is already on the decline. Most companies are getting rid of their DEI programs. Many on the left are critical of the oppressor/oppressed framework... because it's obviously unworkable. Wokeness will quietly die if we don't reinflame it. It doesn't need to be fought, it needs to be laughed at, then ignored.
A resurgence of Wokeness is my ONLY concern if Trump wins. Our country and the Middle East was in MUCH better shape when the so called "idiots" got their man in the White House. Question: if "MAGGATS" are so stupid, why do they get what they vote for (the overturning of Roe, tough border policies, Middle East stability) while Dems get Lia Thomas, chaos at the border, inflation, and an unstable Middle East leading us dangerously close to WWIII (thanks to the simpering appeasement of Iran by the Biden administration).
The Dems have devolved into the Party of the Clueless, haplessly stomping on the essential worker class to the tune of "All She Wants To Do is Dance" (yes, I'm old).
I'm staying home on election day for the first time in my adult life (during which I have always voted for Dems).
I don't get this. Our elected officials are responsible for not just the laws passed but the execution of government. If Trump gets elected and performs Project whatever, government will be fucked for decades. All those useful programs that actually help real people will be driven into the ground. I can't understand staying home. At all. Vote, and then if you want change, lobby or get involved in some other way for the next election.
How familiar are you with Project 2025? It is available online for anyone's perusal, including the full, book-length extrapolation. I acknowlege that I haven't read the book -- but have you? I'm fascinated by the way many liberals seem to project their worst social and political fears onto it, but I don't see any of them actually pointing to the proposals which they want us to believe are so abominable. You didn't say this, but a poster on another Substack announced that Project 2025 detailed plans for a "theocratic dictatorship." Out of idle curiosity, I searched the document for "faith" and found mostly references to "good faith" and "full faith and credit", with a couple polite nods to "faith based organizations" that might show up in any moderate conservative document.
Overall, I'm not connecting with this debate, because I don't think Trump is a threat to democracy, and I don't think Harris is a threat to capitalism. What I fear from Harris is another four years of the Federal government pushing intersectional craziness, de-facto open borders, and hug-a-thug "criminal justice reform." I'm just incredibly frustrated that we don't have a lucid Republican candidate to call her out. Perhaps that role will fall to Vance.
The section on medical has additional abortion ban proposals and says outright the department of Health and Human Services should "maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family".
The overall goal is to replace career civil servants, who are supposed to be politically neutral (Hatch Act), with partisan hacks. The document also says the plan is to give the president "absolute control" over every aspect of the executive branch. There are a ton of historical examples why this is a bad idea. *coughcoughNixon*
Calling Harris hug-a-thug is so fucking ridiculous I can't even take you seriously any more. If you're going to engage in bad-faith propaganda The Free Press comment section is over that way. 👉
#notallvolleyballs. But Chuck built the fire, caught all the food, performed emergency dentistry, and built the raft while Wilson sat there losing air.
You’re spotting Hanania too many points as a good faith actor. Placing the specifics aside, how can capitalism, especially unfettered capitalism, thrive amidst the social, political and economic upheaval that a second Trump term would inevitably precipitate? As you point out, Hanania plainly accepts the appellation of Trump as a chaos agent (and a flagrantly corrupt one at that). No, I suspect Hanania needs cover for darker motivations.
Seriously? Who freakin' cares what someone wrote 16 years ago! People are allowed to change and evolve their views. We're all human beings!
There is not another writer on the political right who is more critical of the GOP and modern conservatism than Hanania. It is possible to agree with what Jeff says in his rebuttal without going down some bizarre adolescent-tinged hunt for "darker motivations" when Hanania's writing is literally right on this app to read.
In August 2023, Matt Yglesias tweeted the following about Hanania, “He’s clearly quite racist! But I also think he’s written some good pieces and it’s important to read conservatives”. So much for the bizarre adolescent tinged hunt. My point stands: Hanania doubtless harbors many of the racist views shared by Trump and his supporters. If you’re naive enough to think “it’s all about capitalism,” you do you but it’s pure bullshit. You really believe that Kamala is going to commandeer the means of production if elected? Gimme a fucking break.
I wouldn’t judge Hanania based on what he wrote 14 years ago or by what a lefty says; just as I wouldn’t judge Freddie DeBoer by an ancient piece or based on what some righty has to say. Read him first, then decide.
Exactly. He’s the guy who says his own side has “low human capital”. Among other things. Anyone who can criticize his in-group in such terms seems to have some insight and open-mindedness in my book.
It is interesting to sample what I consider reasonable conservatives, like Hanania, Jonah Goldberg, David French, and Andrew Sullivan, to see where they come down on the election. The common theme is hold-your-nose, and then a slight lean one way or another.
I think you are using dynamite to get the skunk out from under the porch here.
I understand your disclaimer: Hanania has "said some 'absolutely horrendous things", but has "also disavowed those things and is an influential person in our discourse."
But let's apply some sense of proportion here. This is a guy who has advocated forced sterilization of “low IQ” Blacks. Is there really a statute of limitations on this kind of assholery, or are there some things you can say that cause everyone else to ignore you with every fiber of their beings until the end of time?
And even if we now think it is acceptable to engage the present-day Richard Hanania because he has disavowed these things, I present in evidence his tweet from yesterday mocking Ella Emhoff. He manages to be vicious, simple-minded and vague in equal measure (no small feat), crafting the most ugly and pointless attack on a political daughter since Rush Limbaugh called Chelsea Clinton the "White House dog."
So I think you are wasting your talents by even taking him seriously. He is still an asshole, still an idiot, and I say to hell with him.
It's good intellectual exercise to pick apart points on their own merits instead of saying "the person making these points is an asshole". Even when the person making those points is, in fact, an asshole.
Hanania's voting for Trump, period, and offering post hoc justifications, but those justifications are still worth taking apart. For instance, I was not previously aware of Trump's plans for the federal reserve which, while hardly the worst aspect of his plans, seems worth keeping in mind. Especially if he wins the election.
Personally, I stopped reading after the first passage you quoted from Hanania, where he wrote "one side threatens democracy, the other threatens capitalism". How does this not qualify as "brain-melting stupidity"? First off, this end of capitalism schtick is the same one they've deployed in every election this century. Eight years of the Obama administration didn't end capitalism. Four years of Biden hasn't ended it, and if Harris wins, I guarantee you that we will still be a capitalist country at the end of her administration. The entire argument is based on a laughable premise.
Second, even if you stipulate for the sake of argument that the Democratic ticket "threatens capitalism", if you still have democracy you can recover capitalism. The reverse is not true; no amount of capitalism will allow you to come back to democracy once an authoritarian takes over. What's more, under authoritarians, capitalism invariably degenerates into crony capitalism, a twisted parody of the genuine article. So, Hanania's proposition, to vote for the authoritarian to save capitalism, will leave us with neither democracy nor capitalism, and no way back to either.
> Second, even if you stipulate for the sake of argument that the Democratic ticket
> "threatens capitalism", if you still have democracy you can recover capitalism. The
> reverse is not true; no amount of capitalism will allow you to come back to
> democracy once an authoritarian takes over
This, exactly. The core problem with Hanania's argument is that if you accept his premises the logical conclusion is the opposite of the one he reaches. Economic policy is just that, policy, and what one administration can do, the next one can undo if voters decide it's a bad idea. But once you lose democracy regaining it probably requires violence.
In principle, I agree with the debt ceiling - at some point your idiot brother-in-law should not be allowed to keep getting the limit increased on his credit cards because he only makes the minimum monthly payments while throwing money away on sports betting and otherwise living beyond his means.
Practically speaking, though, since both parties have abandoned fiscal conservatism it's probably time to eliminate the debt ceiling.
As an accountant, I have an intense dislike of the debt ceiling, because it’s fundamentally a way for congress to avoid responsibility by sending contradictory instructions to the treasury department and acting like that’s the same as solving the problem.
“I want you to raise $100 in revenue & I want you to spend $120. But also don’t let our debt increase!”
If you want the debt to go down, you’ve gotta set up your budget for a surplus. The ceiling’s an irrelevant anachronism. Get rid of it.
Can Jeff make a post on what exactly the debt ceiling is, and why it should be increased (and why, if it's unambiguously good, that there is even a ceiling at all?).
I try to only get my information from political adjacent comedians.
Thanks for reminding me - Jeff actually did during the last debt ceiling crisis, back in 2023, there's an audio 2-pack and an article. (Nice to see that Substack has a search function that works well!)
I sometimes don't like pieces that hinge on the meaning of one word for just this reason. What do you mean by "fragile"? The word means so many possible things on a global scale. How about "Democracy"? Do we mean it as a noun and specific system, a la a selectable government type in Civilization IV or do we mean it in a fuzzier sense about "People vote for stuff"?
I spent my high school years doing Debate as well and I so wish people wrote these columns, and up top put their value and value criterion.
Really I just wish there were better candidates. Splitting between these two choices is so profoundly depressing on some level. I cant feel intensity for either political party as much as I can feel it for the things I believe in. I think a lot of people are honestly voting because "this mob of incompetent thieves and hacks will slightly inch things in the direction I would like them to go", and any specific policy they claim Harris or Trump will advance, they are probably kidding themselves.
Even more depressing that only seven "non-crazy, non-aligned voters" are out there, is that those 7 must also live in a state that's actually in play for the electoral college.
> Hanania and I agree that the capitalism has proven to be outstanding at generating wealth, while capitalism’s only modern competitor — socialism — has proven to be outstanding at generating starving peasants who are nonetheless driven like sled dogs by a cloistered elite.
The problem here is that both you and Hanania are creating a straw man version of socialism, and although you walked it back a bit later, he at least sees every intervention by government as socialist. Even your description of socialism doesn’t work for Europe , didn’t work for Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and is way off with China. Hanania, if not you, would put all of these equally in the statist or socialist camp.
Also since Hanania is an apologist for neo liberalism he doesn’t deal with the empirical evidence that the Keynesian post war era was much more successful than today, nor that Trump’s tariffs were actually too late to curtail the rise of China, a rise driven by the neoliberal ideology of globalisation. This is why neither side of political divide right now are pro markets in the same way as Paul Ryan was.
If your ideology has failed to increase living standards in the way that it claimed, if manufacturing is driven away, if statist China is eating your lunch on many fronts , if the supply lines are more fragile than before - as seen during Covid - then it might be time to review your ideology.
That said he writes pretty well, and no doubt he would warrant a B in a econ 101 course in 1997.
"...he doesn’t deal with the empirical evidence that the Keynesian post war era was much more successful than today, nor that Trump’s tariffs were actually too late to curtail the rise of China, a rise driven by the neoliberal ideology of globalisation."
I'm not sure what kind of empirical evidence you're referring to here; though we could probably have an interesting discussion on the ways the 1950s and '60s were "more successful than today." But ultimately it's a moot point. The Old Keynesian macroeconomic and policy settings were a response to a particular version of the world. and that version simply doesn't exist anymore. Following WW2, Europe was rebuilding and the rest of the world was still developing. The US had something like half the world's manufacturing capacity. This didn't change because of bad policy, it changed because the rest of the world caught up.
Also, your comment reflects an idea that's widely-held on the internet, that in post-WW2 era, the US had the perfect policy setting to support the middle class but chose to radically alter those settings in the Thatcher-Reagan area for ideological reasons. It's a compelling narrative, but completely ahistorical. Those policy settings changed because they had to change, because they no longer reflected the underlying economic reality. The traditional Keynesian approach to demand management stopped working, hence the reason left-leaning economists today are self-described New Keynesians.
There is no “had to change” in history. Political actors make political and economic decisions. The supposed failure of Keynesian economics was largely due to clear external shocks, shocks of a kind that today don’t really see economists questioning present day orthodoxy - there was some attempt at humility post 2008 but it lasted at most 2 months.
Prior to the “markets solve everything” mantra prevalent since thatcher and Reagan and amplified at the end of the Cold War, both conservatives and liberals saw the State as a useful actor in economics, in building out infrastructure, technology, the space race. The military industrial praxis is all that’s left of that for most republicans.
(This despite the clear success of the internet in the late 90s, the fact that it largely started as a government project - multiple government projects in fact, and mostly American - was overlooked).
Anyway there are seeds of change, perhaps, with new industrial policy, tariffs and government support for green technology.
Hanania could benefit from a reading, or rereading, of Hayek's "Road to Serfdom". One of the most eye-opening parts of that book is Hayek's argument that there is no such thing as a market free of regulation, but the true question is not more or less regulation, but whether legislation is against or for competition. If one has decided that markets and economics are the be all and end all of social policy, then the question is which party is promoting competition in all aspects of production and which would suppress competition.
One especially notable omission from Hanania’s case is any discussion of where the actual capitalists are throwing their support—which is mostly behind Harris because markets crave stability as an essential predicate to investment, and Trump being a gleeful chaos monster is the opposite of that.
who are the "actual capitalists" you're referring to?
Probably he means Fortune 100 CEOs. There was an article about it circulating a few weeks (months? time is a blur) ago.
I don’t know about that. Yahoo Finance tells me the investment community is “freaking out” about Harris.
Spot on
The only thing I’d add to this essay is that the path for Trump to enact his tariff plan (which he doesn’t seem to understand affects US consumers) is much much easier than for Harris to enact her awful policies.
Good point. Josh Barro touched on this on the podcast this week.
Harris will find her way barred by the Constitution and the Supreme Court. Which is a sometimes disappointing but largely cohesive force for conservatism only because Hillary Clinton was not elected. Harris will pick only the choicest of hard left liberal jurists, and then it will get a lot easier for her second term. I'm not at all trying to sound apocalyptic. I think what we are reaching now is the ending phases of the cycle, where there is some sort of climax. I highly highly doubt it will be Civil War sized drama, maybe something like one of the two parties actually withering like the Whigs, and new two party dynamic is established. Whatever form it will take, betting on Harris to be less able to enact her agenda is assuming a lot about the stability of the rules in place. Both candidates are fraught with danger and anyone who makes an argument that Trumps stupid nonsense is stupid and possible to achieve, I wont argue with them.
My profound sadness over the quality of choices on offer is upsetting.
The danger of Trump isn't that he could enact bad policies through Congress and the Supreme Court, as Harris might (or more likely, might not). Neither will have the power to legislate very much in a divided country. The danger is that Trump is an authoritarian who has already tried to wreck national institutions when they stood in his way.
I will also note that Harris getting a friendly supreme court is extremely unlikely. Conservatives are leading 6-3 in the Supreme Court. The oldest conservative Justice is 76, two would have to die or retire in the next 6-8 years for the Supreme Court to reach 5-4 in the Democrat's favor. And that assumes Democrats control the Senate, to get two very progressive nominees through.
Biden is keeping and adding to the tarifs trump has made against China? Aren’t tarifs a « both party » thing in 2020+?
Trump is proposing a massive increase in tariffs, across-the-board 10-20% tariffs on everything. No one in the Democratic party is proposing anything like that.
I don’t pay much attention to the tariffs stuff Trumps says but yeah this is bad. The democrats/leftists/media are not talking about adding more tariffs for now at least.
Hanania’s argument is facile and wrong. Markets, like munitions, work when they’re well-regulated. Most liberals aren’t communists or even socialists. They just don’t believe in a winner-takes-all, fend for yourself society.
What Al said!
I know it wasn't the focus of your essay, but I'd like to drill down, albeit shallowly, into Hanania's assertion that Capitalism is more fragile than Democracy.
This seems backwards to me. From my perspective, the universe slopes down towards Capitalism and away from Democracy, and it takes considerable effort to move uphill against the universe. If left to its own devices, the world becomes more capitalist (hence the need for regulation) and less democratic (hence... the need for regulation).
Also, even if we assume an equal propensity for breaking, capitalism is a lot easier to repair than democracy. If we get a little regulation happy (I'm looking at you, NIMBYs) we can repeal those regulations and everything's good, minus the opportunity cost of lost time. But if we lose democracy, good luck getting it back without a violent revolution.
If we accept Hanania's premise that one candidate is a threat to democracy and the other is a threat to capitalism, we should definitely back the candidate that's not a threat to democracy.
100% agree. Capitalism, even on a micro scale, happens even in totalitarian regimes. Democracy is much more fragile and requires strong institutions that take generations to develop. American constitutional documentary was only possible after the Glorious Revolution in England had started the trend toward democracy 100 years earlier.
In totalitarian regimes, markets are controlled by exclusive monopolies to your cronies, without regard to competition or prices. In totalitarian regimes, you get Tallredrider-mart, not Walmart, Target and a dozen others. If you don't like it, then you are SOL. And good luck in starting a DJ Codes Costco under a totalitarian regime.
The part where honest people disagree is when capitalism becomes so over-regulated that it becomes totalitarian. Judging by the number of businesses and people leaving California, they are heading that direction. The regulatory burden of operating in California is huge, just one example being that the computer I am typing on is known to the state of California to cause cancer.
"In totalitarian regimes, markets are controlled by exclusive monopolies to your cronies, without regard to competition or prices."
I agree, the lack of democracy is bad for capitalism. Another reason why the threat to democracy with worse than the threat to capitalism, since the threat to democracy is also a threat to capitalism, one that is much harder to solve.
What I mean is that even in a totalitarian regime people create their own private economy for barter and trade. Even North Korea has a black market.
Democracy, by comparison, doesn't just spontaneously happen. It requires building trustworthy institutions.
Capitalism is an impressive tool for improving societies. But it has limitations, there are things it can't do well. It can't build lighthouses. It can't provide basic healthcare to poor, mentally ill people. There are many things worth doing that capitalism can't achieve. Part of caring about a thing is being honest about its limitations.
Additionally I think Hanania needs to spend a little time wrestling with the how oligarchs regularly emerge in capitalists societies and how these oligarchs act to undermine democratic society.
Capitalism not only CAN build lighthouses, it DID build lighthouses. Lots of them. The trick is that lighthouses are the MOST valuable to people who frequent particular dock/port areas which means a harbormaster can bundle lighthouse upkeep with port fees. Or even build the lighthouse FIRST as a marketing expense to make the port he’s building out more valuable.
(The economist who wrote a paper claiming *lighthouses* were a pure example of a public good hadn’t bothered to CHECK. See Coase’s _The Lighthouse in Economics_,)
💯 percent.
Thanks. I will take lighthouses off the list of things it can't build. I don't want to walk into that one again.
Can we agree that there is a list of important things it can't do?
There are many important things capitalism can’t do because *government prevents it from doing them*, eg: providing very cheap (albeit lower-quality) housing, transportation and medical care. There are also things it can’t do because not enough people care about those things being done…but that is also a limit on what *government* can do. That is to say: If *everybody* wants a problem solved there’s likely a clever way for the market (including charitable associations) to solve it; if *nobody* wants a problem solved then there’s no constituency for government to do so either.
There *might* be a list of “important” things capitalism can’t do even IF government gets entirely out of the way and allows it to try and stops actively making things worse (at least for some values of “important”); I guess I’m undecided on that. Me, I tend to divide tasks into (a) problem areas where we could benefit from privatizing/deregulating right away, (b) problem areas that might take longer to figure out but should be MUCH easier to solve after we’ve handled all the stuff in category A and therefore have an economy an order of magnitude more vibrant and flexible and we’re all wealthier. :-)
That is clearly stated. Thanks. My core point is that if we could be much more specific about the boundary between things capitalism can provide, and things it can't provide, then we can build a coalition of the sane. What are the qualities of those things it can't provide? You seem to suggest that if people care about a thing, if they value it, then capitalism will provide it. Thats a decent start to defining the boundary. I am not nearly as optimistic as you are how this will actually play out. But it is certainly an important part of the conversation. I am seeking agreement that having honest conversations about its limitations is valuable to both capitalists and those who are skeptical of capitalists ability to provide.
To return to the lighthouse question. I appreciate you pointing out that under some/many circumstances a free market can/will provide a lighthouse. If we went further down this path we might imagine the circumstances in which it can't/won't provide the lighthouse.
I’m a little more concerned with things the government provides TOO MUCH of than things capitalism provides too little of. For instance in a huge number of areas the government provides far too much “safety” or “environmental protection”in ways that make us all poorer and often - paradoxically - make us LESS safe and the environment LESS protected. Government quite often sets out to address a problem and in so doing makes it or related problems worse.
Private firms that fail to provide value to customers generally go out of business and get replaced but when regulators fail they often get rewarded with bigger budgets. Government has no self-correction mechanism, no way to check if they’re helping or whether the help is worth the cost, no way to decide some agency was a bad idea from the beginning and should be scrapped or some other agency has solved the specific problem it was created for so should declare victory and go home. Without that the government tends to just keep growing - like barnacles on a whale - until the whale (economy) can barely move.
Then you come along and see that this barnacle-covered whale isn’t doing very much and say “I guess whales can’t swim very far on their own - there are some important things whales can’t do - so we better add some more barnacles to help them out!”
There's an argument Maurer doesn't make but which I think is compelling:
Unpopular presidents tend to provoke a backlash from the opposition. Another Trump term may create another wave of wokeness and push a lot of people to the left. He may especially push young, educated people who influence our culture to the left. On the other hand, if Harris becomes president we may see a backlash to her. We would likely see wokeness continue to lose steam, just as it's receded more and more during the course of Biden's presidency. Trump would likely age out by 2028 and republicans could run a strong candidate against (presumably) Harris. If you look beyond this one election conservatives in the US may be better off with Harris winning.
Trump winning= wokeness turbo-charging,
Kamala winning= Wokeness encroaching institutions even more, consolidation of victories through expansion of civil rights law
Wokeness needs to be fought head on (republicans passings states law and actively monitoring what is going on, low iq gamers and marvel watchers « boycotting » against lame woke stuff)
There's significant and growing center-left and even left opposition to wokeness, because wokeness is stupid. Wokeness exploded during Trump's first term precisely because his divisive nature and character convinced the rational left that they should unite with the far left, at least to the extent of not criticizing the craziness in woke ideas. Absent that, the rational left has begun pushing back, and if we can keep Trump (or someone Trump-like) from gaining too much power, that will continue.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/145864150
I don’t believe it. I don’t see anything like a 10th of a figure like Rufo on the democrat side, which is the kind of guy I believe effectively fights wokeness. Meanwhile, I see the Biden administration adding some transgender civil rights.
Wokeness was making constant and solid gains way before Trump. You already had the « 10 reasons why white people are racist and suck» kind of articles by different media during middle of Obama era. College were already woke before 2015-16. The gamergate chuds, alt-right and Trump fanboys was a response to wokeness. And like any form of organism (even if purely memetic), wokeness had a strong reaction when it gets attacked.
You should read the link I provided.
Also, transgender civil rights are good because civil rights are good. I support restrictions on medical transition for children, because kids don't know who they are or what they want, and I support keeping trans women who transitioned after going through male puberty out of women's sports, but trans people do actually exist, and they should have civil rights.
I read and I don’t see much stuff I didn’t know or understand. I basically said it first in my first comment. Trump winning means the wokes are getting excited and ofc the basic leftist liberal will give no pushback.
But where is the tangible evidence that Kamala and her administration won’t be a Biden 2.0? What will change? The pattern I predict is that wokes would get less excited and see less stupidity from wokes but they would win more real victories through laws?
Are you trying to tell me classic liberals are going to take back control of the Democratic Party and college campuses, repel DEI and fight back against the oppressor/oppressed framework? Just lol
DEI is already on the decline. Most companies are getting rid of their DEI programs. Many on the left are critical of the oppressor/oppressed framework... because it's obviously unworkable. Wokeness will quietly die if we don't reinflame it. It doesn't need to be fought, it needs to be laughed at, then ignored.
A resurgence of Wokeness is my ONLY concern if Trump wins. Our country and the Middle East was in MUCH better shape when the so called "idiots" got their man in the White House. Question: if "MAGGATS" are so stupid, why do they get what they vote for (the overturning of Roe, tough border policies, Middle East stability) while Dems get Lia Thomas, chaos at the border, inflation, and an unstable Middle East leading us dangerously close to WWIII (thanks to the simpering appeasement of Iran by the Biden administration).
The Dems have devolved into the Party of the Clueless, haplessly stomping on the essential worker class to the tune of "All She Wants To Do is Dance" (yes, I'm old).
I'm staying home on election day for the first time in my adult life (during which I have always voted for Dems).
How rotted is your brain that your *first* concern to come to mind is a transwoman in collegiate swimming? Please go outside it’s wonderful out there.
I don't get this. Our elected officials are responsible for not just the laws passed but the execution of government. If Trump gets elected and performs Project whatever, government will be fucked for decades. All those useful programs that actually help real people will be driven into the ground. I can't understand staying home. At all. Vote, and then if you want change, lobby or get involved in some other way for the next election.
How familiar are you with Project 2025? It is available online for anyone's perusal, including the full, book-length extrapolation. I acknowlege that I haven't read the book -- but have you? I'm fascinated by the way many liberals seem to project their worst social and political fears onto it, but I don't see any of them actually pointing to the proposals which they want us to believe are so abominable. You didn't say this, but a poster on another Substack announced that Project 2025 detailed plans for a "theocratic dictatorship." Out of idle curiosity, I searched the document for "faith" and found mostly references to "good faith" and "full faith and credit", with a couple polite nods to "faith based organizations" that might show up in any moderate conservative document.
Overall, I'm not connecting with this debate, because I don't think Trump is a threat to democracy, and I don't think Harris is a threat to capitalism. What I fear from Harris is another four years of the Federal government pushing intersectional craziness, de-facto open borders, and hug-a-thug "criminal justice reform." I'm just incredibly frustrated that we don't have a lucid Republican candidate to call her out. Perhaps that role will fall to Vance.
The section on medical has additional abortion ban proposals and says outright the department of Health and Human Services should "maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family".
The overall goal is to replace career civil servants, who are supposed to be politically neutral (Hatch Act), with partisan hacks. The document also says the plan is to give the president "absolute control" over every aspect of the executive branch. There are a ton of historical examples why this is a bad idea. *coughcoughNixon*
Calling Harris hug-a-thug is so fucking ridiculous I can't even take you seriously any more. If you're going to engage in bad-faith propaganda The Free Press comment section is over that way. 👉
I think your description of volleyballs as "deadbeats" is a bit unfair.
They bring much joy and attract scantily clad women.....
#notallvolleyballs. But Chuck built the fire, caught all the food, performed emergency dentistry, and built the raft while Wilson sat there losing air.
You’re spotting Hanania too many points as a good faith actor. Placing the specifics aside, how can capitalism, especially unfettered capitalism, thrive amidst the social, political and economic upheaval that a second Trump term would inevitably precipitate? As you point out, Hanania plainly accepts the appellation of Trump as a chaos agent (and a flagrantly corrupt one at that). No, I suspect Hanania needs cover for darker motivations.
Damn. From his Wikipedia profile:
Between 2008 and the early 2010s Hanania wrote for alt-right and white supremacist publications under the pseudonym Richard Hoste.
Lol. This guy is more Trump than Trump.
Seriously? Who freakin' cares what someone wrote 16 years ago! People are allowed to change and evolve their views. We're all human beings!
There is not another writer on the political right who is more critical of the GOP and modern conservatism than Hanania. It is possible to agree with what Jeff says in his rebuttal without going down some bizarre adolescent-tinged hunt for "darker motivations" when Hanania's writing is literally right on this app to read.
In August 2023, Matt Yglesias tweeted the following about Hanania, “He’s clearly quite racist! But I also think he’s written some good pieces and it’s important to read conservatives”. So much for the bizarre adolescent tinged hunt. My point stands: Hanania doubtless harbors many of the racist views shared by Trump and his supporters. If you’re naive enough to think “it’s all about capitalism,” you do you but it’s pure bullshit. You really believe that Kamala is going to commandeer the means of production if elected? Gimme a fucking break.
I wouldn’t judge Hanania based on what he wrote 14 years ago or by what a lefty says; just as I wouldn’t judge Freddie DeBoer by an ancient piece or based on what some righty has to say. Read him first, then decide.
Exactly. He’s the guy who says his own side has “low human capital”. Among other things. Anyone who can criticize his in-group in such terms seems to have some insight and open-mindedness in my book.
It is interesting to sample what I consider reasonable conservatives, like Hanania, Jonah Goldberg, David French, and Andrew Sullivan, to see where they come down on the election. The common theme is hold-your-nose, and then a slight lean one way or another.
I think you are using dynamite to get the skunk out from under the porch here.
I understand your disclaimer: Hanania has "said some 'absolutely horrendous things", but has "also disavowed those things and is an influential person in our discourse."
But let's apply some sense of proportion here. This is a guy who has advocated forced sterilization of “low IQ” Blacks. Is there really a statute of limitations on this kind of assholery, or are there some things you can say that cause everyone else to ignore you with every fiber of their beings until the end of time?
And even if we now think it is acceptable to engage the present-day Richard Hanania because he has disavowed these things, I present in evidence his tweet from yesterday mocking Ella Emhoff. He manages to be vicious, simple-minded and vague in equal measure (no small feat), crafting the most ugly and pointless attack on a political daughter since Rush Limbaugh called Chelsea Clinton the "White House dog."
So I think you are wasting your talents by even taking him seriously. He is still an asshole, still an idiot, and I say to hell with him.
It's good intellectual exercise to pick apart points on their own merits instead of saying "the person making these points is an asshole". Even when the person making those points is, in fact, an asshole.
Hanania's voting for Trump, period, and offering post hoc justifications, but those justifications are still worth taking apart. For instance, I was not previously aware of Trump's plans for the federal reserve which, while hardly the worst aspect of his plans, seems worth keeping in mind. Especially if he wins the election.
"... also disavowed those things..."
If you read his "disavowal" it's mostly nothing of the sort, fwiw.
Personally, I stopped reading after the first passage you quoted from Hanania, where he wrote "one side threatens democracy, the other threatens capitalism". How does this not qualify as "brain-melting stupidity"? First off, this end of capitalism schtick is the same one they've deployed in every election this century. Eight years of the Obama administration didn't end capitalism. Four years of Biden hasn't ended it, and if Harris wins, I guarantee you that we will still be a capitalist country at the end of her administration. The entire argument is based on a laughable premise.
Second, even if you stipulate for the sake of argument that the Democratic ticket "threatens capitalism", if you still have democracy you can recover capitalism. The reverse is not true; no amount of capitalism will allow you to come back to democracy once an authoritarian takes over. What's more, under authoritarians, capitalism invariably degenerates into crony capitalism, a twisted parody of the genuine article. So, Hanania's proposition, to vote for the authoritarian to save capitalism, will leave us with neither democracy nor capitalism, and no way back to either.
> Second, even if you stipulate for the sake of argument that the Democratic ticket
> "threatens capitalism", if you still have democracy you can recover capitalism. The
> reverse is not true; no amount of capitalism will allow you to come back to
> democracy once an authoritarian takes over
This, exactly. The core problem with Hanania's argument is that if you accept his premises the logical conclusion is the opposite of the one he reaches. Economic policy is just that, policy, and what one administration can do, the next one can undo if voters decide it's a bad idea. But once you lose democracy regaining it probably requires violence.
I think the president has much more leeway to harm democracy than the economy. Congress are in charge of destroying the economy.
In principle, I agree with the debt ceiling - at some point your idiot brother-in-law should not be allowed to keep getting the limit increased on his credit cards because he only makes the minimum monthly payments while throwing money away on sports betting and otherwise living beyond his means.
Practically speaking, though, since both parties have abandoned fiscal conservatism it's probably time to eliminate the debt ceiling.
As an accountant, I have an intense dislike of the debt ceiling, because it’s fundamentally a way for congress to avoid responsibility by sending contradictory instructions to the treasury department and acting like that’s the same as solving the problem.
“I want you to raise $100 in revenue & I want you to spend $120. But also don’t let our debt increase!”
If you want the debt to go down, you’ve gotta set up your budget for a surplus. The ceiling’s an irrelevant anachronism. Get rid of it.
Can Jeff make a post on what exactly the debt ceiling is, and why it should be increased (and why, if it's unambiguously good, that there is even a ceiling at all?).
I try to only get my information from political adjacent comedians.
Thanks for reminding me - Jeff actually did during the last debt ceiling crisis, back in 2023, there's an audio 2-pack and an article. (Nice to see that Substack has a search function that works well!)
Edit: Direct links: https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/debt-ceiling-two-pack-audio?utm_source=publication-search
https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/debt-ceiling-idiocy-shows-the-dangers?utm_source=publication-search
CGP Grey has a good video on the debt ceiling.
https://youtu.be/KIbkoop4AYE?si=54Whc9xt2yqttCdo
I sometimes don't like pieces that hinge on the meaning of one word for just this reason. What do you mean by "fragile"? The word means so many possible things on a global scale. How about "Democracy"? Do we mean it as a noun and specific system, a la a selectable government type in Civilization IV or do we mean it in a fuzzier sense about "People vote for stuff"?
I spent my high school years doing Debate as well and I so wish people wrote these columns, and up top put their value and value criterion.
Really I just wish there were better candidates. Splitting between these two choices is so profoundly depressing on some level. I cant feel intensity for either political party as much as I can feel it for the things I believe in. I think a lot of people are honestly voting because "this mob of incompetent thieves and hacks will slightly inch things in the direction I would like them to go", and any specific policy they claim Harris or Trump will advance, they are probably kidding themselves.
Even more depressing that only seven "non-crazy, non-aligned voters" are out there, is that those 7 must also live in a state that's actually in play for the electoral college.
> Hanania and I agree that the capitalism has proven to be outstanding at generating wealth, while capitalism’s only modern competitor — socialism — has proven to be outstanding at generating starving peasants who are nonetheless driven like sled dogs by a cloistered elite.
The problem here is that both you and Hanania are creating a straw man version of socialism, and although you walked it back a bit later, he at least sees every intervention by government as socialist. Even your description of socialism doesn’t work for Europe , didn’t work for Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and is way off with China. Hanania, if not you, would put all of these equally in the statist or socialist camp.
Also since Hanania is an apologist for neo liberalism he doesn’t deal with the empirical evidence that the Keynesian post war era was much more successful than today, nor that Trump’s tariffs were actually too late to curtail the rise of China, a rise driven by the neoliberal ideology of globalisation. This is why neither side of political divide right now are pro markets in the same way as Paul Ryan was.
If your ideology has failed to increase living standards in the way that it claimed, if manufacturing is driven away, if statist China is eating your lunch on many fronts , if the supply lines are more fragile than before - as seen during Covid - then it might be time to review your ideology.
That said he writes pretty well, and no doubt he would warrant a B in a econ 101 course in 1997.
"...he doesn’t deal with the empirical evidence that the Keynesian post war era was much more successful than today, nor that Trump’s tariffs were actually too late to curtail the rise of China, a rise driven by the neoliberal ideology of globalisation."
I'm not sure what kind of empirical evidence you're referring to here; though we could probably have an interesting discussion on the ways the 1950s and '60s were "more successful than today." But ultimately it's a moot point. The Old Keynesian macroeconomic and policy settings were a response to a particular version of the world. and that version simply doesn't exist anymore. Following WW2, Europe was rebuilding and the rest of the world was still developing. The US had something like half the world's manufacturing capacity. This didn't change because of bad policy, it changed because the rest of the world caught up.
Also, your comment reflects an idea that's widely-held on the internet, that in post-WW2 era, the US had the perfect policy setting to support the middle class but chose to radically alter those settings in the Thatcher-Reagan area for ideological reasons. It's a compelling narrative, but completely ahistorical. Those policy settings changed because they had to change, because they no longer reflected the underlying economic reality. The traditional Keynesian approach to demand management stopped working, hence the reason left-leaning economists today are self-described New Keynesians.
There is no “had to change” in history. Political actors make political and economic decisions. The supposed failure of Keynesian economics was largely due to clear external shocks, shocks of a kind that today don’t really see economists questioning present day orthodoxy - there was some attempt at humility post 2008 but it lasted at most 2 months.
Prior to the “markets solve everything” mantra prevalent since thatcher and Reagan and amplified at the end of the Cold War, both conservatives and liberals saw the State as a useful actor in economics, in building out infrastructure, technology, the space race. The military industrial praxis is all that’s left of that for most republicans.
(This despite the clear success of the internet in the late 90s, the fact that it largely started as a government project - multiple government projects in fact, and mostly American - was overlooked).
Anyway there are seeds of change, perhaps, with new industrial policy, tariffs and government support for green technology.
Hanania could benefit from a reading, or rereading, of Hayek's "Road to Serfdom". One of the most eye-opening parts of that book is Hayek's argument that there is no such thing as a market free of regulation, but the true question is not more or less regulation, but whether legislation is against or for competition. If one has decided that markets and economics are the be all and end all of social policy, then the question is which party is promoting competition in all aspects of production and which would suppress competition.