Here is my honest belief: having spent more time than 99.99% even of those who are interested in politics testing my views against opposition, I have more defensible views than virtually anyone I COULD meet on the internet, or elsewhere. It is like building a castle, then asking someone to attack it. You take that feedback, then do it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, for up to four hours a day for years. The result at the end is defensible.
I mentioned David Brin. He is wonderful and brilliant (just ask him or one of his fawning acolytes). Best selling author, futurist, savant, bon vivant, and the inspiration for the Dos Equis commercials.
What is about to follow will be a bit lengthy, but I will summarize it here: the best and the brightest on the left have been reduced to repetition of tired talking points, and the on-going invention of lies which WOULD be true if their version of reality had any validity, but which DON’T because their worldview rests upon misunderstandings compounded by long habit.
Here is a repeat of the crux of a longer Peter Bauer quote:
In academic study unwarranted claims are apt to inhibit the
advance of understanding. Attempts to justify unfounded claims, or to
mask the failure to live up to them, encourage the proponents of such
claims to shift their ground. For example, when certain policies widely
canvassed by development economists as necessary for raising living
standards, such as large-scale public investment, domestic production of
capital goods, or the collectivization of agriculture, fail to bring
about the expected results, the policies themselves come to be regarded
as the very stuff of progress rather than as what they are, unsuccessful
instruments for its promotion.
The policies themselves become the object of veneration, even idolatry. I would further submit that one of these ideals, one of these idols with feet of clay, is the very notion that the Left CARES about the poor. They don’t. “By their fruits ye shall know them”. Their fruits are “fleurs du mal”.
As I now realized, even sybaritic leftists are prone to the necessity of groupthink that defines Cultural Sadeism. They are pre-zombies, who have rejected in principle the Enlightenment pursuit of rational discourse, and the idea that all minds are equal, if they pursue reason dispassionately.
But they have not rejected the IDEA that they are rational. On the contrary–Dr. Brin. Let me quote you this eminence grise:
we may have a chance to
create a fantastic new civilization on this planet, by returning to and
enhancing the Enlightenment methods that brought us to this party.
Methods like transparency and reciprocal accountability and divided power and pragmatic negotiation that
have nothing whatsoever to do with “left” or “right” but that are
deeply threatened by one side in our current culture war.[note that he says they have nothing to do with “left” or “right”, except that the “right” is by definition wrong. Irony is apparently above his intellectual capacity, a common enough affliction among such savages.]
Again: one wing of
American political life — the same one that was wrong in all the
previous stages of civil war — has veered away from the logical,
courteous, cautious, pragmatic and intellectually cogent conservatism of
giants like Goldwater and Buckley, into fevered fact-aversion
unparalleled in the U.S. since the pre-1861 Know Nothing party. I’d love to see a mature conservative or Libertarian movement present at the negotiating table, standing up sensibly for the role of competition in a mixed and agile civilization.
These are nice ideals, are they not? But does he practice them? Of course not. Here is one response from him, his last one which even attempted lucidity:
Mountain Goat, you are just as crazy on the right as Akra is on the
left. You declaim counter-facts with blithe assuredness that is simply
astonishing. But it is flat out nonsense.Tax rates are at near
their lowest levels in 70 years. That is a flat-out fact. It is a fact
fact fact and no armwaving you do can even remotely make actual real
facts go away.Supply siders have said repeatedly that lowering
taxes on the wealthy would result in investment in plants and equipment
and productivity that would result in increased tax revenues and thus
lower public debt. NOT ONE OF THESE THINGS EVER EVER EVER EVEN REMOTELY
CAME CLOSE TO HAPPENING. The rich, especially, do not invest tax
largesse in plants and equipment and productive assets. They… do….
not.You appeal to nonexistent facts. You appeal to authority.
You make grand declarations about your superiority as a debater… all
of which are cheap tricks of high school freshmen and I tell you now,
you are a very bad debater.I CHALLENGE YOU AGAIN with money
behind it. If you cannot come up with one counter-example to my broad
accusations, then you leave those accusations on the table as the
assumed leading hypotheses.I have defined terms perfectly well.
I have asked you to name ONE clade of intellect not under attack by
Fox. ONE unambiguous metric of national health that improved under
Republican rule. Name one. Name it now.Start with Clinton’s
surpluses and debt payback. Now subtract the iraq and Afghanistan wars
and Bush’s tax cuts. That leads directly to precisely the debt you are
now screaming about. Show us how the math comes out any different in
your world. Show us.Show us now. I offer you $100 to show us. Do the math. (I can. I have. You’d lose.
This is 100% a GOP deficit.)
I responded substantively. You can read the full thread here. Even now, if anyone reading this who wants to challenge anything I said, have at it, here. I take all comers and always will. My claim to want to learn, to be rational, is quite sincere, as I show over and over and over.
I won’t summarize all my responses (I will note in passing that I am using I a lot. Since I am talking about me, it is hard not to), and post his contribution to show in his own words his attitude and overall tone, which are not at all consistent with civil discourse, or respect for Enlightenment ideals, or even the concept of FACT. I offered him sundry facts, and he didn’t respond AT ALL.
I will note, first, that I asked him at least 4 times to define “Progress”, since he self defines as a “practical/pragmatic progressive”. He refused repeatedly, then falsely claimed he had done it. I came up with what I felt and feel was a good set of definitions–one per cultural activity–which I posted in the last week or two under “Progress”, I think.
The details are boring. They amount, among other things, to pointing out that Fox, per se, includes dissenters like Alan Colmes, and that calling every news story on every day an assault on the intellect is ITSELF an assault on the intellect. All you have to do with leftists is wait for them to accuse you of something, and you will know what moral or cognitive norm they are violating.
Budget: no President before Obama has spent $3 trillion. What else do you need to know to falsify the farcical claim that Bush even now is the cause of our deficits?
Etc. The details are there, and include an 11 page refutation of Keystone Cops Economics, aka Demand Side, aka Keynesian, aka Anti-Rationalist economics, which I also linked on a post in the last week or two. Net tax revenues went up under Bush AFTER the tax cuts, which the Demand-Siders claim, counter-factually, is impossible. We know what income tax receipts are. There is no need for theoretical speculation.
Again, the story here is not another failure of a high-IQ, highly educated leftist to fail to defend their ideas. It is common. I just want to emphasize that what you see here represents ALL THEY HAVE. There is NO argument that they make which withstands scrutiny.
When you look at modern China or the Soviet Union, or Cuba, what you see is the physical expression of intellectual psychopathology. The question is not whether or not leftist ideas work or not: they plainly do not. The question is why sane people continue to advocate them, and the answer is that either they are not sane–the core meme generators–or they are complacent, and never actually ask hard questions about the doctrines they are taught from an early age.
Oh: the task of the rational is a hard one. You have to face down frothing hatred with equanimity–which often fails me, as in the Brin “debate”–and do far more research and thought. On the left, they are handed talking points at school, and merely need to repeat them.
Finally, I will note that the right also has talking points. The LARGE difference is that the talking points of the right survive under a microscope, and leftist ideas cannot. They die in the light.
That’s enough for now.
3 replies on “David Brin, conclusion”
I believe you to be a peddler of misinformation, and a creator of straw-men.
You claim, "Net tax revenues went up under Bush AFTER the tax cuts, which the Demand-Siders claim, counter-factually, is impossible. We know what income tax receipts are. There is no need for theoretical speculation."
First of all, I know of very few "demand-siders" who would make the claim that net tax revenues could never go up after a tax cut. This is because technological advances and inflation are both drivers of GDP and therefore net tax revenue. Tax revenues have doubled or almost doubled in every decade from the great depression up through the 1990s largely for this reason.
What actually matters is the relative growth of tax receipts. The real growth in individual income tax receipts was 5.77% from 1998 to 2008 and -19.36% from 1999 to 2009. These are real growth receipts, so we wouldn't expect them to double every decade, but the fact remains that these growth rates are the lowest of any of the 60 ten-year spans from 1940 to 2009. The important takeaway here is that tax revenues almost assuredly would have been far higher had the Bush tax cuts not taken effect. These tax cuts are strong evidence AGAINST supply-side theory, and you are using them to argue in favor of such a theory.
http://www.econdataus.com/recgro8y.html
Why does the relative growth of tax receipts matter? I personally believe the relative growth, at least at the Federal level, should be negative, since I think our government, at the Federal level, is roughly twice as big as it ought to be. Whatever things the Federal government does now that States want to keep, they should.
The argument made by people who believe that it is both moral and economically prudent to allow producers to keep as much of their wealth as is consistent with basic infrastructural requirements (our highways, by the way, are not within the top 10 or even 20 reasons for diminished economic performance), is that by NOT taking money in the first place, it will encourage investment and following economic growth.
I believe the relevant metric to judge that is absolute receipts. No anti-Keynesian would ever suggest that the goal is more or less to facilitate the growth in the tax base and thus the growth of the government of tax base plus X percent (roughly 40% under Obama).
The number that matters with regard to Bush is spending. He, like Reagan, fully funded and supported any number of more or less Democrat proposed social programs. This is why it confuses me that leftists heap such scorn on him: in my taxonomy he, like Fox, is center left, at least with regard to domestic policy.
For his part, Obama has not put forward a budget that could pass the House since 2011 and did not put one forward at all when Democrats controlled the Senate and House. He is the first President to spend $3 trillion, and he plans to keep upping the ante, as I linked in the tax documents.
When given a choice, he expanded the scope of the war in Afghanistan, rather than diminish it, which I personally was calling for even as a hawk.
There are areas of ambiguity, and plenty of people to blame for many things. The primary reason I decided to post on that site was that I saw an apparently erudite man dealing in the most shallow of caricatures while accusing OTHERS of it. It was and is silly. Stop dealing in categories and start dealing in facts.
And the salient fact here is that spending is up tremendously, and that if we try and raise taxes again, we are just rationalizing and forgiving it. We need to shrink the goverment. Neither Medicare nor Social Security will be solvent 15 years from now.
I was reading about Japan, in one of Niall Ferguson's books. Part of how they balanced their social budget is the parents lived with their kids when they got old, rather than asking the government to pay for a shitty retirement home. Crazy idea.
That's enough for now. Your response was a substantive, and if you do not feel I have addressed it please say so, and why.
I will add that David Brin made this comment: "Supply siders have said repeatedly that lowering taxes on the wealthy would result in investment in plants and equipment and productivity that would result in increased tax revenues and thus lower public debt."
Tax revenues did in fact increase, which falsified this statement. Debt went up for the simple reason that spending increased faster than the tax revenues did.
I will say finally that we ASSume that the GDP will increase forever. There is no reason to believe this. History, of course, has shown that it does, but that history does not include interventions like Obamacare.
It is my sincere belief that if we are stupid enough to reelect Obama, and if Obamacare gets implemented, that we will enter a Depression, and for the same reason as in the 1930's: scaring the crap out of the actually productive, taxing the crap out of them, and making it hard or impossible to make money and thus employ people.