David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

>> Generally, improvements and occupation make it your home. Somebody coming in to take land containing a house you built, a barn you raised, cattle you bred on a crop you are growing, are taking what's yours.

So nobody should be able to own land they aren't using for anything and I should be able to just go and occupy it? Cool.

>> Take this away and nobody would use land at all. Been done in history again and again; result always the same : collapse of farming, which means collapse of the govt.

And now we've moved onto a pragmatic rather than moral absolutist argument, which I agree with entirely.

Now that we're in this territory, let's talk about a bunch of other human-friendly pragmatic moves we could make as a society that might improve everyone's lives, eh?

I was already building a reply to that. What it seems to boil down to is "I know that I can't define my terms and I know that we don't agree about morality but god-dammit my one moral principle should still be the basis of everything".

Needless to say, I disagree.

> One, market transactions are voluntary, so they are generally speaking "positive-sum games".

Nope. Suppose a robber puts a gun to your head and demands your wallet. You give it to him because you value your life more than your wallet. According to naive market theory, this is a positive sum transaction with consent from both parties! Obviously you didn't consent to getting held up, but it wasn't a market transaction. Restricting your attention to market transactions is the ridiculous simplification that allows markets to trivially triumph in thought experiments.

Generally speaking, "create the sickness, sell the cure" is a perfectly good business model. We make the obvious ones illegal (pointing guns and demanding money), but more sophisticated versions riddle our economy. For instance, the Goldman Sachs Artificial Aluminum Shortage applies the same basic principle.

> markets tend to flatten [power] out in the long run.

Are you kidding me? This is almost objectively untrue (unless you cherry pick "long run" or invoke timescales over which attribution to democracy vs capitalism is impossible). Are you sure you didn't mean to make the "rising tide lifts all boats" argument instead? It's a base rate fallacy, but at least it sounds reasonable.

> Who is the market? It's everyone. Who is the government? A select few.

The market is "everyone" in name only, just like a democratic government. The reality is that the biggest players get to make the rules. Sometimes they do it via regulatory capture, which you can correctly blame on the government. Sometimes they do it by collusion, undercutting, or some other anti-competitive practice that must be attributed to market failure. Sometimes they do it by taking advantage of arbitrary existential facts (we have an excess of workers -> workers can, collectively, be paid less). Nobody consented to their need to eat, breathe, and house themselves, nobody consented to have a certain amount of competition, yet the market has historically had no problem exploiting these facts to extract obscene concessions from people, even when the fundamental resources were abundant. Whatever the market does represent, it's certainly not the free will of the people.

Look, I generally agree with you that markets are usually more flexible and better at self-regulating. I think that most sectors of the economy function better under market control than state control. But I also think there are glaring exceptions (healthcare) and that libertarians jump too quickly and eagerly to the point of view that deregulation is the answer, even in the presence of abundant historical or comparative evidence to the contrary. They like to pretend the free market's shit doesn't stink (it's a feature, not a bug that unskilled labor consistently gets the crap beaten out of it at the negotiation table due to the fact a single person creates marginally more labor supply than demand). They don't take responsibility for messes the market creates (they are convinced it's not the market's fault our healthcare is 2x as expensive as in single-payer countries), and instead of basing their decisions on comparing strengths and weaknesses of different systems (markets are good at X, bad at Y, governments are good at Y, bad at X) they trumpet facile arguments from the rooftops.

> Capitalism is about capital; that is, investment with the goal of profit.

Arguably, "investment with the goal of profit" is a basic process of human nature (in all human activities). It's not restricted to capitalism, this is how we humans operate generally.

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.