51–52 of 52 posts
The premise is a really strange one to set up. I think he tries to motivate it somewhat later on in the article: > You can see it in stark, comic terms. What are Bezos and Musk doing? Trying to flee to Mars. What’s Gates doing? Recommending you books to read, and trying to save the world with charity. LOL — how ironic. These are different forms of freedom from capitalism I would argue, that especially in case of Musk…
Capitalism is not a choice. Given the nature of the human mind and the material state of the world, the equilibrium state of human economies is capitalism. To see what I mean, consider any complex system. There will be certain patterns and processes that naturally unfold in that system, while other patterns and processes do not manifest without external energy. The reason is because the former states are closer to th…
The evidence suggests the complete opposite: It is harder to repeal regulations (including bad ones) than to introduce them. By default, the number of regulations on the books will tend to increase over time. In particular [0]:
> America’s underlying regulatory problem long predates the 44th president. Between 1970 and 2008 the number of prescriptive words like “shall” or “must” in the code of federal regulations grew from 403,000 to nearly 963,000, or about 15,000 edicts a year, according to data compiled by the Mercatus Centre, a libertarian-leaning think-tank. Between 2008 and 2016, under Mr Obama, about the same number of new rules emerged annually.
> The unyielding growth of rules, then, has persisted through Republican and Democratic administrations (see chart). Several factors explain it. First, Congress has neither the staff nor the expertise to write complex, technical laws. So lawmakers happily let experts in government agencies fill in the blanks. What Congress does write itself, it writes sloppily. In 2015 the Supreme Court found “more than a few examples of inartful drafting” in the Affordable Care Act. One such error nearly saw the court strike down crucial parts of law; only semantic gymnastics saved it. The “Chevron deference”, a doctrine from a 1984 court ruling, gives agencies wide latitude to interpret laws when they are vaguely written. (Neil Gorsuch, Mr Trump’s nominee to the court, is not a fan.)
> Second, America’s division of powers makes it easy for interest groups to defend any one regulation, tax break or policy. That forces administrations to solve problems by taping yet more rules onto whatever exists already, rather than writing something simple from scratch. Over time, this gums up the system, resulting in what Steve Teles of Johns Hopkins University has dubbed a “kludgeocracy”. This explains, for instance, why over half of Americans have to pay a professional to fill out their tax return for them (in Britain, for comparison, most people need not even complete one).
[0] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2017/03/02/too-much-...