The cost disease

Some leftists and a PC libertarian have noticed that progress is not progressing: Education, healthcare, and infrastructure is getting much more expensive without improving in quality, and in many respects declining in quality. Doctors no longer make house calls. Education teaches ignorance and stupidity. Infrastructure has brutalist architecture. Naturally they are completely mystified about what is causing it because crimestop makes them stupid.

First world poverty – the inability to afford a wife and children – is as artificial as the Ukraine famine. It is not a natural result of technology. Rather it is a manifestation of ever escalating left wing repression. Parents are forced to pay ever higher prices to send ever fewer children to ever lengthier periods in institutions of left wing propaganda. Used to be that getting a school leaving degree at the age of twelve showed you were a smart hard working kid. Now getting a PhD in intersectional feminist basketweaving at the age of thirty shows you are an idiot.

The ever escalating suppression of jobs forces people to live ever closer to the revolving door between regulators and regulated. Anarcho tyranny destroys housing and prevents the creation of new housing. Credentialism intended to force people to attend ever lengthening lectures on leftism forces people to waste their youth.

Reverse degree inflation, children become profitable once more. Cut regulation, price of housing falls because people can get jobs without having to live next to the regulatory revolving door. Restore marriage 1.0. Marriage then gives you the security to produce children and invest in them.

In a previous post Fixing Housing Healthcare and Education, I address those fixes.

In this post I will also address the  problem of overpriced infrastructure spending.

The rise in education costs is runaway rule by priests. Most education is useless, and gets more useless at the higher levels. If you ask why we are giving more stupid people more useless education even though it costs much more than it used to, then you also have the answer to why it costs more. If you have priests in charge, they will make everyone go to church all the time. Our education system is the state church making everyone go to church and attend religious festivals. It is time for the Dissolution of the Monasteries. We need degree deflation.

Our education system is state church making everyone go to church and attend religious festivals. In other words, degree inflation To deal with this, needs a full on attack on priestly power. We need a revolutionary transfer of power analogous to the dissolution of the monasteries.

After crushing the priestly class, then we can deflate credentials.

The priests need to be subjected to the Bishop, the Bishops to the Archbishop, and the Archbishop to the King. The Dean of a university should be appointed by the board, the Dean should have the power to hire and fire professors, and all academic funding should go through university, which is to say through the dean. If the Pentagon wants a professor at MIT to research something, it should pay MIT, not the professor. I discuss disempowering the priesthood and dissolving the monasteries in Draining the Swamp and in The Cathedral Defined.

The problem with Healthcare is that a system of cross subsidies and transfers results in a non price system, where there is no competition on price and quality. They abolished the free market in order to provide hidden subsidies from men to women, from whites to blacks, and from the rich to the poor, resulting in socialist levels of efficiency. Compare and contrast with Singapore, India, and Thailand that have free market sectors in medicine.

When you regulate healthcare so that the husband of a woman with complications of pregnancy winds up subsidizing the services provided to half a dozen women getting abortions, the result is that both the facility providing pregnancy care, and the facility providing abortions are given regulatory immunity from price competition, resulting in socialist levels of efficiency.

For healthcare to be efficient, you cannot allow people for whom healthcare is free to go in by the same door and face the same triage nurse as people who pay for their healthcare. If you want people to pay for their healthcare, they had better not see a pile of drug addicts looking for free drugs and vagrants looking for free room and board in the queue ahead of them. And you will only get efficient reasonably priced healthcare if people do in fact pay for it themselves.

Infrastructure is inefficient to the extent that it is provided by socialist means.

If I hire some people to fix my privately owned road, they come in, fix it, are done in no time. Council workers fixing council roads take a little longer. If, however, a road is being done on a federal tourist development grant, being paid for by people far away, well, when the cat is away the mice will play. That road takes a couple of years to do. Socialism is bad for infrastructure costs, especially when Democratic Party Politicians start importing vote banks, and federal socialism is worse for infrastructure costs, even if Republicans are in charge.

Infrastructure costs reflect in varying degrees, socialism, Parkinson’s law, and Democratic Party vote banks: The subway systems tend to become welfare programs for blacks, employing large numbers of blacks for their votes without any real expectation of any useful work. The most egregious examples of outrageous infrastructure costs are Democratic party vote banks, where ever more people with a Democratic Party voter profile are employed to do ever less work.

Educational inflation, (degrees are inflated in the sense that even stupid lazy people get the degree these days, and they are also inflated in that they cost a hell of a lot more) is a reflection of priestly power. Priests need to be disempowered.

Medical inflation is a result of the non market economy, that medical facilities (doctors are mere cogs within a “facility”) do not compete on price and quality.

Housing inflation is a result of regulation, zoning, and ethnic cleansing.

Infrastructure inflation is Parkinsons law: Socialist production always gets more expensive over time – and Democrat politicians hiring Democratic Party voting blocks worsens this natural tendency.

Vox, observing gigantic bureaucracies flailing incompetently, says

By the same token, while we know now that it’s certainly possible to set up a Healthcare.gov website that works as intended, we also know that on the launch date the Obama administration had not, in fact, built such a website. That embarrassing governance failure undermined the president’s signature policy initiative in serious ways, with crucial long-term repercussions.

But Vox was disinclined to wonder why the Healthcare.gov website failed.

It failed because women and minorities were in charge of setting it up. They threw ever more enormous amounts of money at it. Nothing worked until they brought in an emergency team that just happened to consist entirely of white males and east Asian males. This closely parallels the fact that Democratic Party administrations whose infrastructure building teams are full of people who profile as Democratic Party voters tend to produce Democratic Party majorities but not to produce very much infrastructure.

146 Responses to “The cost disease”

  1. Guiscard says:

    I like your idea Jim, I think it would be a good idea would to get rid of government student loans and government backed student loans. Not only will this cause tuition prices to drop rapidly, but it will force universities to cut costs and ultimately hurt those on the equalist spectrum that run the educational system. It would also mean less people getting degrees which in turn would result in degree deflation.

    Another thing that needs to be mentioned, is the griggs vs power case. Until private individuals, businesses and other entities are lawfully allowed to freely associate, employers will continue to use degrees as a way of filtering people out that they don’t want.

  2. Mister Grumpus says:

    (Like a lot of people, I’m itching to hear what you have to say about the Michael Flynn resignation situation.)

  3. Jack Highlands says:

    O/t re Flynn:

    Flynn went down awfully soon in the admin. He’s a neocon, a warhawk, a registered Dem and was Obama’s appointee to head Defence Intelligence, ie part of the intelligence hydra that is Trump’s number one priority.

    I think he was selected as a potential sacrifice in the first place. Turned out it didn’t take long. Trump is five moves ahead.

    It may embolden Dems to call for more heads. And they may eventually get some. Oh say, Reince or Haley. Real important stuff.

  4. Mister Grumpus says:

    Why in the ding-a-ling don’t teach this stuff in school?

    Uhh… oh wait.

    –Honor Roll Doofus

  5. Mr Curious says:

    Most paedos look like Justin Welby / ((Giless Fraser). No wonder they want all the TW rapefugees boys in their Cathedrals #LovelyGiles

  6. Alrenous says:

    Marriage in England died in 1753. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_marriage There were some death throes, so it wasn’t immediately obvious, that’s all.

    >”In medieval Europe, marriage was governed by canon law, which recognised as valid only those marriages where the parties stated they took one another as husband and wife, regardless of the presence or absence of witnesses. It was not necessary, however, to be married by any official or cleric. This institution was cancelled in England with the enactment of “Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act” of 1753, which required that, in order to be valid and registered, all marriages were to be performed in an official ceremony in a religious setting recognised by the state, i.e. Church of England, the Quakers, or in a Jewish ceremony.”

    The English were all like, “Okey dokey,” and thus handed over the keys to their destruction.

    >”Children born into unions which were not valid under the Act would not automatically inherit the property or titles of their parents.”

    No carrot, all stick. I expect improvements in communication and transportation allowed the State to start caring about everyone’s marriage, and did so at its earliest convenience.

    Bismarck implemented welfare largely to undermine the Churches, but Hardwicke’s little manoeuvre predates that substantially.

    See also: demotism is inherently totalitarian.

    See also: letting the State legitimize your titles.

    • pdimov says:

      Point taken.

      Counterpoint: under communism, the State didn’t destroy marriage. And the capital S is fully applicable in this case, as the state controlled Everything.

      • Alrenous says:

        >”The early Soviet state sought to remake the family, believing that although the economic emancipation of workers would deprive families of their economic function, it would not destroy them but rather base them exclusively on mutual affection. Religious marriage was replaced by civil marriage, divorce became easy to obtain, and unwed mothers received special protection.”

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_in_the_Soviet_Union

        Then they became so poor they couldn’t afford to virtue-signal anymore and had to stop.

        Then they got less poor, and,
        >”In 1981 the subsidy to an unwed mother with a child increased to 20 rubles per month; in early 1987 an estimated 1.5 million unwed mothers were receiving such assistance, or twice as many as during the late 1970s”

        In the West, destruction of the family has so far been continuing for 250 years. The USSR didn’t last long enough to know where its equilibrium is. Some setbacks are to be expected, but at the time of its fall the Soviet system was on track to become an America-style catastrophe for marriage-minded folk.

        • pdimov says:

          Well I didn’t live in the early Soviet state, so I don’t know how things were then. I’m talking about what I know, which is the so-called stagnation period, called ‘stagnation’ by western progressives because it had stopped progressing and ‘right-wing communism’ would’ve been kind of odd.

          It was official doctrine that the communist family is the basis of the glorious communist state, its fundamental building block, the state did nothing to destroy it, and if someone would have tried to destroy it, the state would have helicoptered him immediately. Being lefter than the state wasn’t good for your health.

          You have to realize that the communist state was totalitarian, not just merely inherently totalitarian. If it wanted to destroy the family, it would have done so in a matter of years, decades at most. There was nothing that could have stopped it. It exercised complete control over everything, everywhere.

  7. Steel T Post says:

    As Joseph Tainter argues in his text “The Collapse of Complex Societies” (Cambridge univ. Press, 1988,) complexity is subject to diminishing returns.

  8. Samson J. says:

    Jim, what do you suppose is all this bullshit about the Trump admin aiming at “ensuring that women enter and stay in the workforce”? 

    http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/news/blog.html?b=news.nationalpost.com/news/world/trump-and-trudeau-to-launch-joint-task-force-aimed-at-helping-women-in-the-workforce-white-house-official-says&pubdate=2017-02-13

    Is it one of the few missteps, that we should accept as an inevitable part of the overall package? (Does he just have too much of a soft spot for Ivanka?)

    Is it not really what it sounds like, and in fact designed to appeal largely to a small boutique constituency of career women?

    Where is the man whispering in Trump’s ear that this stuff makes women less happy in the long run, depresses wages for men, and sets fertility a-plummeting?

    I haven’t seen anyone I trust commenting on this sort of stuff.

    Maybe it’s just a Canadian newspaper desperate for something out of this administration that they feel reflects positively on the Liberal party.‎

    • jim says:

      His heart is in the right place. He is my president. Vivat Rex. He knows what he is doing. If he has to throw his enemies a few bones, I trust him to make sure there is very little meat on those bones.

      Look how he dealt with the Jews. Gave them Jerusalem, took away the holocaust. Pretty good deal. He is a deal maker not a war maker. It is what he does.

    • Alfred says:

      I agree that this is his soft spot. If the Jim program(c) is to be followed Trump will need to come down on career women. I don’t think he falls for feminist nonsense, but he does seem to admire his daughter’s entrepreneurship.

      Trump, being a natural alpha, just assumes women fall in line around him without him saying it out loud. In which he is correct. Problem is we’d like him to say that out loud for all men and women to hear and I’m not sure if he will.

      • Samson J. says:

        Aptly put, and I’m glad that you see the same things I see. For the record, I do believe that efforts to coerce the average woman into the career track are doomed to failure, in the same manner that an economy of low-skill migrants is doomed, w‎hich is why I’m surprised that people who see the one wouldn’t see the other.‎

        I must say that‎ to me, with all the talk about “bringing jobs back” and making wages great again, an implicit part of that is making *male breadwinner* wages great again. No point losing sight of the fact that “good jobs” are not an end in and of themselves; happy, stable family formation is the end and jobs/wages are a means.

        From a different angle: race. I care more about socio-sexual issues, personally, but if you’re into race, remember: right here, right now, already more brown babies in the USA than white. All the Walls, deportation orders, etc., make no lick of a difference if we don’t get white fertility on the rebound. Experience from around the world shows what happens when countries engage in “maternity benefit” tomfoolery: a tiny, practically insignificant bump in fertility, peaking maximally at much less than what is needed.‎

        • Cavalier says:

          You say deportation doesn’t work, but foreigner babies can be deported just the same as anyone else; and once they go back, we have the moral obligation to reunite their entire family, immediate and extended—under the one-drop rule, of course.

          • Samson J. says:

            I shouldn’t have said it doesn’t make any difference. It’s part of the solution, not the whole.

  9. orochijes says:

    Where can we see the transition between a woman/brown-people Obamacare website team to a male/white/east-asian team?

  10. Pseudo-chrysostom says:

    The public/private distinction is ultimately a groundless ephemerality anyways.

    • pdimov says:

      Pretty much. The question, as Humpty Dumpty says, is who is master. Whether he wears a public or a private hat is irrelevant.

      • jim says:

        Although private contractors often capture the government agency that is issuing them contracts, the ruler finds it easier to control private contractors. It is easy for Trump to threaten to cancel a contract, hard for him to threaten to fire an entire government agency.

    • jim says:

      Not that groundless, Trump is finding it a whole lot easier to pressure Boeing, than to take control of the FBI.

      • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

        I’d say that is largely to do with the power dynamics at work, the different flavors of power cohering around and springing from different kinds of power-sources. So if you’re talking about power, then one uses the language of power.

        Introducing extraneous terminological devices can sometimes end up distracting peoples thinking on the issue.

      • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

        Occasional discourse; in more civilized times, it was considered a matter of course for men of the ruling class to have profitable ventures of their own; it was only until the enlightenment that the idea of the ‘ascetic impecunious administrator’, the removed and rarefied bureaucratic ‘public servant’, divorced from all ‘earthly ties’, really started to gain traction.

        Id est, the idea that formal rulers should become divorced from sources of power.

  11. […] This is the asexual take. This is the sexual take. […]

  12. Simon says:

    M, what do you mean “taking shape”? This is what was always going to happen.

  13. M says:

    The shitlib multi-faceted, multi-front anti-Trump strategy is taking shape, and it’s a pretty strong one:

    MSM: Scream at top of lungs that Trump is a Hitler racist facist for every move he makes. Also call him mentally ill/insane (echoes of what was done w/ Goldwater).

    Government: Endless amount of leaks from unelected civil service so Trump can’t get anything done. MSM blows each leak out of proportion, calls Trump Hitler racist facist.

    Courts: Challenge every nationalist/anti-GC court order using shitlib judges on the west coast, which will be affirmed by the 9th circuit.

    Protests: MSM attention on Soros-paid protests in GC cities, vastly overestimating the size and impact of the crowds.

    Congress: Obstruct Trump maximally on everything, regardless of the issue. Push for impeachment.

    Censorship: Use Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc to censor conservatives more and more.

    Attack Trump family/allies: You see their attacks on Ivanka brand now and also on Barron, also on Bannon and now on Flynn. Expect these attacks to expand. Echoes of how Pablo Escobar was taken down (if you can’t get at Pablo, destroy his allies and friends).

    This strategy appears to be working, at least so far. Trump has been very quiet and hasn’t done anything over the past week (except get Sessions and DeVos confirmed).

    • peppermint says:

      So basically, their strategy is to use everything they have against Trump immediately and have nothing left for when he actually has an opening they could exploit.

      Their people have pissed off everyone who isn’t totally on their side and burned out a bunch of people who are. I’ve been seeing surrender documents floating around on facebook:

      1. Don’t use his name;
      2. Remember this is a regime and he’s not acting alone;
      3. Do not argue with those who support him–it doesn’t work;
      4. Focus on his policies, not his orange-ness and mental state;
      5. Keep your message positive; they want the country to be angry and fearful because this is the soil from which their darkest policies will grow;
      6. No more helpless/hopeless talk;
      7. Support artists and the arts;
      8. Be careful not to spread fake news. Check it;
      9. Take care of yourselves; and
      10. Resist!
      Keep demonstrations peaceful. In the words of John Lennon, “When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight! Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor.”
      When you post or talk about him, don’t assign his actions to him, assign them to “The Republican Administration,” or “The Republicans.” This will have several effects: the Republican legislators will either have to take responsibility for their association with him or stand up for what some of them don’t like; he will not get the focus of attention he craves; Republican representatives will become very concerned about their re-elections.

      Earlier they were explicitly trying to drive a wedge between Him and the Royalist Party while saying they would never accept His Majesty since that would mean normalizing naziism which makes them as individuals worse than Hitler. Being worse than Hitler is tiring on them.

      The Boomer womem on my normiebook are actually angrier about Betsy “Common Core Implosion” DeVos than they are about Jeff “KKK in the DoJ” Sessions.

      They’re more interested in talking about the bravery of Fauxcahontes than how racist Sessions is.

      And Fauxcahontes did that against something that was inevitable instead of keeping it in reserve for a time it would be useful to the dhimmicrats.

      • jim says:

        Could you give me some links to the surrender documents – I would like to see if I can understand what they are thinking.

        What I am seeing is them working themselves up into a frenzy preparatory for war.

        “Do not argue with those who support him” sounds like “No Platforming” – they are cutting themselves off from crimethoughts, which tends to result in demonization of the enemy, leading to war, and refusal to understand the enemy, leading to defeat.

        But “Remember this is a regime and he’s not acting alone;” and “Focus on his policies, not his orange-ness and mental state;” is sort of close to accepting that he is in fact powerful and far from ridiculous and impotent.

        Accepting that he is the Republican candidate and is backed by the Republican party is on one hand a move towards accepting his legitimacy, and on the other hand a move towards classifying Republicans as fascists and preparing to kill them all should Democrats win an election.

        The optimal strategy for the left would be listen respectfully and yield ground for eight years, and then murder every badwhite, with even cuckservatives and cuckstains counted as badwhites, when they win an election. But I have hopes that they will not follow the optimal strategy.

        • Cavalier says:

          If they burn out, tire out, surrender, and accept His legitimacy, they are naturally and organically following the first half of the optimal strategy. The second half, for when the God-Emperor is no more, is laid by “do not argue with those who support him”.

          In other words, “surrender documents” are bad news.

        • peppermint says:

          Optimal for us right now is for them to stop seeing any difference between Royalists and Trump, because Trump needs those Royalists not to countersignal or oppose Him.

          They are standing down and preparing to Resist!, which means acknowledging Him and while clearly stating that they disagree with His populist policies, ensuring their future electoral defeat. The Russia hoaxes were designed to ensure SJWs remain in control of the dhimmicrat party, which also ensures their future electoral defeat. Now is not the time to call all Royalists or Whites racist, they must create a channel for Whites who see themselves as partially dependent on their largesse like union members and public sector employees to see themselves as good goys.

          Anyway, I just quoted the whole document that I got from someone’s normiebook status. The faggots have started saying copy and paste this instead of sharing it because it has more impact that way – because when people go to normiebook they really really want a political rant instead of stuff about your personal life, this devalues normiebook as a platform – probably because sharing would ensure that I would know who came up with that post, but if it comes from nowhere like some tl;dr essay version of a meme it isn’t subject to anything but the most generic ad homs or intelligence gathering. So they did learn from the meme war.

          We need to get people to understand that the tl;drer a text is, the more lies it probably has, and really stigmatize book reading and essay writing. Which means getting rid of that as a way to gain status, which means beating scholars with sticks and suppressing college degree requirements in the workplace.

      • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

        There are three kinds of memery in discourses: regenerative, and exhaustive.

        Regenerative memery is a gift that keeps on giving; participating in dank memes is not merely a duty, but a form of *play*; it is something that gives life to a community, sustain it as a thing in of itself. Regenerative memes are not merely a means, but are themselves an *objective*. The very act of participating in the meme, of helping it spread far and wide, nourishes the participator. Not merely means, but *meaning*.

        On the other hand, participating in exhaustive memery often feels more like a job, that is carried out regardless due to some extenuating imperative that demands the effort (such as kantian ideological autism). Without an outside source of motivation, exhaustive memery cannot be participated in beyond a given level before burn out, and even then, stresses mount.

        Why do people pay shills? Because they won’t do it for free.

  14. Simon says:

    OT, but:

    Why is Pompeo awarding Saudi prince’s awards for efforts against terrorism? Why is Trump trying to start a war with Iran? What is going on? Why is no one talking about this?

    • Alrenous says:

      Pompeo, like the peace prize, is perverse. You get peace prizes for warmongering, and anti-terrorism prizes for terrorism. (And Nobel Lit prizes for aggressive troll-level trash.)

      The Obama-metaphor government’s conciliation of Iran is how you get wars. Trumps’ Tit for Tat behaviour is how you prevent wars, especially if you have negotiation skill to back it up with. Indeed I can personally show you how to get folk to calm down by being aggressive in microcosm, though admittedly I have to wait for an opportunity to arise.

  15. “Used to be that getting a school leaving degree at the age of twelve showed you were a smart hard working kid. Now getting a PhD in intersectional feminist basketweaving at the age of thirty shows you are an idiot.”

    These two lines are great, and comprise one of the central themes of my life. My whole life, until college, I got very bad grades because I was too interested in all the stuff I was learning and doing to pay any attention to school (and in college my straight a’s were meaningless to me, even though I did learn quite a bit, because they were handed out to everyone alike). In elementary school I would ignore the worksheets and read books I brought from home. Some of the bitchier, bitterer teachers would take them from me, in which case I would stare at the wall and think about stuff. After school I would disappear into the desert near my home and stay lost in it until I heard the coyotes howling and it was almost too dark to see. My mother would ask, “didn’t you have any homework?” “Not really,” I’d say. The same kind of stuff went on in higher grades – I taught myself Greek in English class, was always reading next year’s Spanish book in Spanish class, etc. There would be many tears and fights over this, as teachers started summoning my parents for “serious conferences” with long, somber faces about how I was never doing any of my work. On and off, for several years, my parents would try to do the “right thing” at the teachers’ request, and would force me to sit at the dining room table and do my homework. When they heard that I still wasn’t doing it even though I was sitting at the table for two hours every night, I told them that I refused to do busy work when I already understood the topic. It seems petty now, but given the confines of my knowledge and maturity at the time, refusing to budge even an inch, despite all the drama thrown my way over it, was the crucible that formed important virtues and qualities later in life.

    One of the dangers of being young, male and cerebral, I suppose, is a potential for sociopathy. I didn’t understand until my mid-twenties, why so many girls had fallen in and out of love with me before I had any real idea who they were. I wasn’t aware of them, which got them all hot and bothered, and then I kept not being aware of them, which infuriated them. The sociopathy was benign on my part. I didn’t wish ill towards anyone, but I didn’t fully grasp the reality of their separate existence, motives and thoughts until I was quite a bit older. It would be some years before I could get out of my head, and understand why a young man who was competent without sitting at their feet, and who was confident and content enough in himself to scorn their participation points and mandatory group work, would bother a bunch of academic dykes so much more than all of the serious educational crises and classroom disruptions that plagued their indoctrination camps.

    Looking back on it, what still smolders in me, is a hatred for how much energy and pathos was put into the attempt to break my spirit, waste my time and distract me from the many wonders of life. A huge waste of time, energy and resources, for a worse than worthless goal – exactly as you describe here, in your post. So much sound and fury and idiocy, at an ever higher cost and with ever more repugnant results. A bunch of withered dykes bothering children rather than having children; perverting their minds rather than brightening and gladdening them, like mothers used to do, once upon a time. Men completely absent from anything important in a boy’s life, even though their contribution is the most essential, especially past the age of 12 or so. There is a burning anger in me, when I think of how we were a folk of geniuses, but now all of our civilizational energy is poured into the prickling sense of inferiority amongst women and brown folk. Literally everything I learned, I taught myself (my parents did me the solid of reading to me every night; I surprised them at the age of four by suddenly being able to read on my own, and took it from there); literally everything that was presented to me in grades K-12, apart from higher math, could have been mastered by grade 6. And, what if I had actually been handed over to some men, then, and been given the chance to study Greek and Latin and higher Math, and philosophy from the pre-Socratics onwards, rather than only really getting into such things in my twenties? What could our best young men be, by the time they are 16, if we used our resources on them, rather than on nursing the connatural resentment of women and lesser peoples?

    I hear and see the same righteous indignation in the men around me – there will be fury enough and to spare, at the incompetence, the profligacy, the futility, the obfuscation, the vanity and narcissism, the entitlement and oblivious delusions of adequacy from those who have pulled us off the heights to admire their belly-button lint with them, and charged us ten times the rate for the privilege. I’m sure war will be more horrible than I imagine it could be; but worse still is this paralysis of the soul and of all noble qualities in public and private life, whilst asshats fart around in the English Gothic halls that our great grandfathers built. Let it burn, even if many of us will choke to death on the smoke of the ruin.

    • Equalism means ceding any concept that systems should serve the best. So outliers, especially male outliers come to be regarded as a threat to the system rather than an asset. And so it is by design, I assume. In the short term, those born into power and prominence have less bothersome competition from the lower ranks if they keep them pinned down and forced to struggle for survival in their critical formative years.
      I’ve come to accept as well, k-12 is just public daycare for big kids so their parents can produce more numbers on an economic spreadsheet. As most things in this backwards society, the elders eat the young so they may feast a bit more today.

      My background is not so different than yours complete with desert and coyotes. Got kicked out of private school early on because I would ignore the teacher to go off and read books and barely avoided having to spend my childhood on ritalin. Then in public school long years of watching mediocrity rewarded and the kid that reads ahead, punished by both the system and “peers.”
      Truly, the average of the majority sets the limit one can aspire to and be appreciated and understood. It’s a built-in problem of mob rule.
      What you call “sociopathy” I think is just the entire mindset that comes with the realization very early in life that society and most people in it are inimical to your interests, or at best, utterly unhelpful.

      I share your rage. I barely made it out of my young life and it took me years to recover. Like you I wonder what my life might have been had it begun with anything less than adversarial bare subsistence.

    • Jack Highlands says:

      The older I get and the more I reflect, especially on the civilizational cycle, the more I figure you can summarize the ascendant phase in one word – masculinization – and the descendant phase with the opposite word.

      And misogynistic though I am, this does not blame women themselves, it blames behavioral suites that apply to both sexes. Civilizational decay is as much about feminized men as about female appropriation of power.

    • Anony-maus says:

      …And, what if I had actually been handed over to some men, then, and been given the chance to study Greek and Latin and higher Math, and philosophy from the pre-Socratics onwards, rather than only really getting into such things in my twenties?..

      Alas, even in the past, you would likely be beaten for not conforming and be told to show the correct attitude. While the customs and mores were different, the past was very large into playing a role.

      I don’t think its a bad thing, but its worth noting.

  16. Alrenous says:

    Nonprogressive government involvement in education, healthcare, and architecture would be just as bad.

    Coercion reverses the incentives. Instead of competition to maximize quality and minimize prices, there’s competition to maximize prices and minimize quality. High prices let you pay your friends off, low quality gives you Impact, and coercion suppresses competition or forces the subjects to buy outright.

    E.g. Singapore’s health system works because the government is as hands-off as they can manage.

    You’ve accurately described all the ways progressive coercion works in these areas. Nonprogressive coercion would do something different, but would also manifest exponential decay.

    • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

      Non-leftist coercion is nowhere as bad as leftist coercion although obviously libertarianism is far superior to both. The average Singaporean SOE is far superior to efficiency to some heavily regulated American private companies, compared United Airlines to Singapore Air.

      • Alrenous says:

        Non-leftist coercion often decays by moving left.

        • jim says:

          Does it? Give examples. Is it more prone to move left than non leftist lack of coercion?

          The destruction of marriage started by removing the coercion on women to fulfill their marriage vows, then followed escalating left wing coercion on men to support badly behaved women. The initial left rhetoric was that women were so saintly and naturally virtuous that they did not need coercion, which during the twentieth century became rhetoric that female misbehavior was OK and corresponding male misbehavior was supposedly OK, which soon became a crackdown on corresponding male misbehavior.

          • Alrenous says:

            >The destruction of marriage started by removing the coercion on women to fulfill their marriage vows,

            The slaves were not freed. They were forced to pick cotton, and then they were forced to stop. (And then forced to start again.) This also is simply another application of coercion.

            First, the coercion removed the option of a flexible marriage contract. Then the coercion removed the option of a faithful marriage contract. This is an example of coercion morphing into leftist coercion.

            If marriage enforcement had never been turned over to the State, the State would have been unable to destroy it. If folk could have privately enforced their marriage contracts, they would have done so, and the State would have as much trouble disrupting that as it has had disrupting gun ownership in America. See also: outlawing booze.

            Once marriage was turned over to the State, it was inevitable that it would be destroyed, because Impact. They could, and folk didn’t want it, so they did. And quite plausibly also your elites-sleeping-around hypothesis, which explains why this Impact first and not something else. Legalizing divorce because they have someone in particular in mind they want divorced.

            • pdimov says:

              America is destroying the marriage all over the world without enforcing the marriage contract there. And the less the foreign state resists, the easier the destruction. Private is not always better, The State is not always the source of all evil.

              Education is similar. A government-run university when the government is right wing will be less leftist than a private university.

              • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                All right-wing regimes in 20th century as far as I know still end up funding universities that were leftist and wanted to overthrow them. See Franco’s Spain, Park Chung-Hee’s South Korea, modern HK, etc. If you have state education, the educators tend to become leftists since this is the way to maximize their power.

                Hard to call any modern university private given that 50+% of their funding probably comes from government research grants and they have to follow a curriculum set by the government. Same with private schools etc. I doubt genuinely independent private schools would teach leftism.

                • pdimov says:

                  Harvard?

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  Harvard was founded as a priest training school and basically stayed that way. If state funded priesthood did not exist (or did not employ Harvard graduates), they would be toast. Doubt anyone is going to Harvard for the quality of the instruction versus the connections you’re getting for being close to government power.

                  I know a few Chinese Harvard graduates and they always talked about how every course had A- average, people spent most of their time socializing, etc. this is not the mark of a school that is succeeding because people are learning stuff instead of signaling.

                • pdimov says:

                  That’s a bit of a no true Scotsman argument, because each time a leftist private university is brought up, it will turn out to not have been genuinely private.

                  Harvard was private; I don’t see how it could have been more genuinely private. And it’s the source of all leftism.

                  Stanford during WW2/cold war was pretty much government-run, basically a military research center, and it’s the least leftist.

                • jim says:

                  Harvard was, officially and formally, the headquarters of the state church of Massachusetts, the center of the State Religion back in the days when states admitted to having state religions. Being “private” is just a proforma pretense, because in becoming the state church of the US, it pretended to be abolishing state churches.

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  Dude Harvard was never private. They were literally established by an act of the Massachusetts legislature for the explicit purpose of training tax-funded clergy. http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~hua10011

                  In order to find an example of a private university encouraging leftism you’d literally have to find a university that was established by a private group for a purpose other than political influence that eventually became a center of leftism over time, as opposed to going leftist due to law or something (20th century universities are basically required to teach leftism due to curriculum regs).

                • pdimov says:

                  Can you give me an example of a university more private than Harvard?

                • pdimov says:

                  OK, so Grove City College was created by Grove City, whereas Harvard was created by Massachusetts. More private?

                  “As World War II began, Grove City College was one of six schools selected by the United States Navy to participate in the highly unusual Electronics Training Program (ETP).”

                  What an interesting coincidence.

                  Selecting colleges by their refusal to accept federal funds will obviously give us the rightmost ones, and holding them as examples of the most private is exactly the sort of cherry-picking about what I was talking earlier. Since the federal government is frothing at the mouth leftist, it’s obvious that a right wing college must be independent of the government. This does not tell us anything about independent colleges when the government is frothing at the mouth rightist.

                  In the present situation, we can only observe that there are private colleges that are not only to the left of the federal government, but moving leftwards. The government does not pull them towards itself, they pull the government to the left.

                  But forget that. My point is better stated in the abstract. Conquest’s second law says that organizations, when left to their own devices, drift toward the left. So an independent university, being an organization, will do so unless there is a force preventing this leftward movement.

                  What is this force?

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  From Wikipedia:

                  “Founded in 1876 by Isaac C. Ketler,[6] the school was originally chartered as Pine Grove Normal Academy. It had twenty-six students in its first year. In 1884, the trustees of Pine Grove Normal Academy in Grove City amended the academy charter to change the name to Grove City College.[7]”

                  Grove City College was not founded by Grove City, but by a private individual, reinforcing my point that a genuinely private school will likely be more rightist. If you look at that list of schools I gave you I would guess that 100% or close to 100% of them will have similar origins to Grove City College and not Harvard.

                • pdimov says:

                  A genuinely free and independent university will teach leftism for the same reason a genuinely free and independent drug store will sell heroin.

                  If they don’t, one can infer the presence of evil coercion.

                • jim says:

                  Not seeing this at all. Why should it be true? Obviously there is demand for heroin. Not seeing any demand for leftism. It gets shoved down people’s throats.

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  There is a market demand for heroin and nothing wrong with legalizing it. It was legal in Victorian England (http://io9.gizmodo.com/5896669/when-opium-was-for-newborns-and-bayer-sold-heroin). There is no market demand for leftism.

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  Old South did not persecute leftists. Can you find an instance of leftism spreading in a country with no state education system, no democracy and freedom of speech? I’ve been to rural China and I’m pretty sure these people would not think feminism is a good idea even if you give them another 2000 years without the state dragging them into school for 8 years and periodically persecuting the old clan structure.

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  Oops above post is wrong thread. Please ignore.

                • pdimov says:

                  “Not seeing this at all. Why should it be true? Obviously there is demand for heroin. Not seeing any demand for leftism.”

                  If the university’s customers are the students, it will teach them leftism, because that’s what young people want, “Impact”.

                  But if the customers are their parents, it won’t, which is probably closer to the truth in the ideal genuinely private system.

                • jim says:

                  Ah, yes, “impact”. Leftism is the promise of power, and if you are a young man just starting out, sounds good. Yes, there is demand.

                • peppermint says:

                  The disgusting slander of the dark ages is that the level of scholarship is the way to determine how good a society is. In reality an explosion of scholarship is a sign of decadence and theough the mechanism of undermining traditional values precedes the collapse of a society.

                  There is no reason to have universities. They were founded to provide legal services to visiting scholars. Scholars are scum and deserve to be beaten at the slightest provocation.

                • Donald T. Bagdasarian says:

                  In an ideal society, most people would be steered roward a hands-on productive career long before the age of ten, and there would be apprenticeship systems in place to ensure that people had the skills necessary to work productively.

                  There will always be a need for a certain number of dedicated “thinkers.” But we honestly have far too many, and they are allowed far too much leeway. Once again, in an ideal society, there would be constraints placed on their work and research–if it was deemed appropriate to the good of society, it would be allowed to continue, if it defied natural social order and established precedent, it would be be stopped and that researcher prohibited from further work. A dedicated council should exist that would perform periodic audits and regularly review the work of researchers to determine if it constitutes a net public “good” or if it should be stopped–or even allowed to begin in the first place. The threat of censure would provide strong incentive to researchers and inventors to confine their work to practical, useful matters instead of airy-fairy, feel-good “progress” that wastes resources, time and money and endangers the stability of civilization while providing no tangible benefits. Progress for its own sake, technological or otherwise, benefits no one.

              • Alrenous says:

                >America conquers world
                >World starts behaving as America wants it to

                Weird. Must be the private sector’s fault!

                • pdimov says:

                  Doesn’t have to be the private sector’s fault. The point is that America is destroying marriage in other countries via soft power and cultural influence, not by becoming the enforcer of those other countries’ marriage contracts.

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  That soft power is only strong because
                  1) allowing that soft power is a precondition of getting US and EU foreign investment / aid otherwise you get sanctioned
                  2) Most of these foreign countries had their own mini-cathedrals running things that were too happy to adopt the latest “innovations” from America.
                  3) Internal, right-wing forces opposed to these mini-cathedrals can’t use their most effective methods, death squads, because doing so would trigger American intervention.

                  If the American empire reverted to libertarianism tomorrow almost every third world country would have a military coup right away. I think you would be surprised at even what Hispanics can accomplish when they don’t have to do New Deal democracy.

                • pdimov says:

                  My point is rather different – that the division between capital-S State and “private sector” for the purposes of assigning blame is as misguided as are the Marxist and quasi-Marxist distinctions present in “it’s not the fault of the proletariat”, “it’s not the fault of women”, “it’s not the fault of people of color”. It creates a class, the private sector.

                  The classification in all these cases fails forcing people to consider portions of the proletariat not really proletarian, some women not really female, some people of color not really colored, and yes, some private actors as actually being part of the State.

                  In this case, specifically, the destruction of marriage using soft power only requires soft power, not controlling the marriage contract; and while controlling the marriage contract is a prerogative of the capital S and not a tool available to private actors such as for instance Soros and the Ford Foundation, soft power is.

                  And therefore, absolving the private sector as a class from blame requires for us to consider Soros and the Ford Foundation part of the capital S.

                  Whereas it’s really a matter of having power and using it for evil. Doesn’t matter if you’re State or not.

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  If a private organization’s main activity is to try influencing the state and it is only taken seriously because it’s backed by a state, it’s part of the state. What would happen to Soros Foundation in China if the US government withdrew its protection?

                  If you ignore that soft power is only effective when backed up with the cold steel of the Anglo empires, you tend to get the nonsensical leftist complaints that coca-cola or soap dramas are ruining the world or something, which is why I think the public-private distinction is still important.

                • pdimov says:

                  “What would happen to Soros Foundation in China if the US government withdrew its protection?”

                  The government of China will kick its ass, which is not very libertarian.

                  Similarly in Russia. When the state doesn’t fight leftism, Soros is free to do his thing.

                  The central question here and in the university subthread is, is the state always and everywhere the source of all leftism, or is this just a property of leftist states?

                  People who take the first position necessarily arrive at the conclusion that the state must be depowered and presto, no more leftism.

                  People who take the second position view leftism as entropy, something that always happens unless there is a force resisting it. A rightist state is one candidate. Hypothetical market forces that supposedly prevent, say, the university drifting left is another. Do they exist?

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  Nothing non libertarian about kicking the ass of an organization that’s part of a foreign state trying to impose more leftism on you. Libertarianism is not pacifism, self-defense is allowed.

                  I just do not see leftism influencing society at all when they are not in charge. Public education seems to be the key vector for leftism to spread, if you look at places like the Old South or the Ming dynasty where public education was minimal or non-existent they were not moving leftward. Obviously a rightist state can fight leftism, I don’t question that, but rightist states tend to have problems of their own and are pretty vulnerable to being captured by leftists like Franco’s Spain because they have a ton of bureaucrats who are natural leftists, which is not the case for a laissez faire society.

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  Also, if you look at how Soros operates, he operates through influencing the target country’s state institutions and spreading feminism, “anti-racism”, etc through the education system. If private education existed and Soros had to spread his ideas through hiring people to hand out pamphlets on the streets, doubt many girls would be getting his message.

                • pdimov says:

                  “I just do not see leftism influencing society at all when they are not in charge.”

                  Sure, but is that because leftism is harmless or because the people who _are_ in charge do not allow it to spread, using their evil powers of coercion?

                • pdimov says:

                  “Also, if you look at how Soros operates…”

                  I know, he doesn’t have the decency to serve as a perfect example for my claim. He does coopt the state for his purposes instead of doing everything himself.

                  He does so however not because he can’t do everything himself, but because he prefers to use the host state budget instead of his own money. Pretty ingenious. *distant helicopter sound*

                • pdimov says:

                  “Public education seems to be the key vector for leftism to spread, if you look at places like the Old South or the Ming dynasty where public education was minimal or non-existent they were not moving leftward.”

                  This is an interesting point, but today we have mass media, so I suspect that just eliminating public education will not be enough.

                • jim says:

                  Mass media is quasi state. For example the official white house press work from government offices, receive government office services.

                  Theoretically they are employed by private businesses, but in their day to day life, look and act like government employees de-facto.

                  Obviously the government is not going to allow a free press, just as it’s obviously not going to separate church and state, and if you have high and noble principles declaring separation of Church and State, and freedom of the press, what happens is informal state power, a striking discrepancy between official reality and actual reality.

                • jim says:

                  By definition, in a libertarian society you will have separation of church and state, and separation of Mass Media and state. Good luck with that.

                  Obviously church, state, and media all want to get in bed together, hard to stop them.

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  Old South did not persecute leftists. Can you find an instance of leftism spreading in a country with no state education system, no democracy and freedom of speech? I’ve been to rural China and I’m pretty sure these people would not think feminism is a good idea even if you give them another 2000 years without the state dragging them into school for 8 years and periodically persecuting the old clan structure.

                  Mass media are leftist because non leftist media tend to have no contacts in government and a mysterious tendency to violate their broadcasting licenses, which will not be the case in a libertarian society.

                • pdimov says:

                  Arab states banned satellite receivers. Mass media can obviously be a transmission vector for leftism, so we’re back to the question of whether a free and independent media in a libertarian state will be leftist or not.

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  The transmission of leftism to Arab states is clearly through public education and not the mass media, see Jim’s posts about how 55% of Saudi Arabian university students are females. Arab states do a lot of things, doesn’t mean any of them are justified.

                  I think the Old South and England prior to the establishment of public education (1870s and after) are a better proxy for what media is like when the government is libertarian. Both of these places were not experiencing constant leftward movement. They had mass newspapers too so its not like they didn’t have a transmission mechanism. If Facebook spreads degeneracy so would newspapers.

                • pdimov says:

                  TV/cinema is most harmful because moving pictures go through a different pathway in the brain, it trusts images more than words. (((Some people))) know this very well.

                  At this point, I don’t have an opinion one way or the other. The data is insufficient. Maybe you’re right and in a country free of coercion media and universities will not spread leftism. And maybe not.

                  I look, for instance, at John Warnock, cofounder of Adobe, sinking millions into Salon dot com every year to keep it from folding, and see no explanation for his behavior that involves government coercion.

                • jim says:

                  I was at Adobe, briefly, it was massively in violation of affirmative action laws every which way. You can only get away with that by government favor. If you are not a good lefty, heart and soul, they enforce the laws. If you are a good lefty, heart and soul, they do not enforce the law, but rely on your (entirely genuine) good intentions.

                • Oliver Cromwell says:

                  Rich people fund leftism because they want to get invited to high status parties, but those parties are only high status because they are government-aligned. Same is true for media: journalists adopt leftism because it grants admission to a high status social circle. Journalists rae generally low-agency people anyway so they don’t find it very painful to adopt whatever dogma.

                • pdimov says:

                  “55% of Saudi Arabian university students are females…”

                  Here in my country under communism 50% of university students were female – only 50 because the evil state has imposed quotas, would’ve been 55-65 otherwise. But universities didn’t spread leftism – this being an odd expression to use in this case, but still, they did not, for instance, teach that women are oppressed. Try that, and the Party would come down on you as a ton of bricks. Women aren’t oppressed under communism, they’re equal, and that’s exactly what feminism wants, comrade, right?

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  Pdimov, do you really think that if there was no AA and private education females would make up more than 50% of all university students enrolled considering their lower IQ (both average and standard deviation) and creativity? My hypothesis is that if you have an education system where 50%+ of courses consist of memorizing bullshit, which is true for all modern public education systems, it automatically is a form of AA for females because they are way better at memorizing bullshit.

                  I suspect the cap on female university admissions counteracted biases elsewhere in the system, although I would be very interested if you could link me to something showing this. I can’t speak for Eastern European communism since in our last debate I found out that their effect on fertility was not exactly what I thought, but definitely East Asian communism was quite feminist, at least relative to Ming dynasty Confucianism. North Korea today has below replacement fertility and China’s fertility collapse began before one child policy.

                • pdimov says:

                  “Pdimov, do you really think that if there was no AA and private education females would make up more than 50% of all university students enrolled considering their lower IQ (both average and standard deviation) and creativity?”

                  This depends on a lot of factors, but mainly on whether the university admits based on high school grades or based on entrance tests. Grades favor females because males care less about their grades. Females do better in a credential-based system because they care about credentials, males better in a result-based system because they care about results.

                  In the IQ-heaviest disciplines, with entrance tests, it’s always brutal, 10:1 male:female or so.

                  My point however was that the male:female ratio of the university students is not a predictor of leftism.

                • jim says:

                  It is a manifestation of leftism. Girls get better grades because grades are arbitrary and subjective. They are simply given better grades by politically motivated female teachers. If graded blind, girls do not do better than boys.

                • pdimov says:

                  “My point however was that the male:female ratio of the university students is not a predictor of leftism.”

                  Saying this about communism is again a bit awkward… I meant that a high female to male ratio of university students is not necessarily an indication of that university spreading leftism in the sense of moving society to the left.

                • pdimov says:

                  “They are simply given better grades by politically motivated female teachers.”

                  Don’t have to be politically motivated. Girls obey female teachers, boys don’t. So female teachers don’t like boys and give them worse grades.

                • jim says:

                  True. Boys give teachers, especially female teachers, a lot more trouble. So they are apt to grade them down for disobedience. They are not supposed to, but they will.

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  Female teachers are already leftist abomination. Without AA I doubt any woman would be permitted to teach a male, they cannot teach to save their lives.

                • pdimov says:

                  You know what a female mathematician and a Guinea pig have in common?

                  The Guinea pig is neither a pig nor from Guinea.

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  lmao

                • peppermint says:

                  The fact that pictures hit harder than 5000 word essays is the key to the success of the meme war, and the response of Left intellectuals is is whine about how essays are more true or whatever.

                  The government supports CNN et al in many ways, which must be suppressed. It’s not fair that every time they have a halfway decent meme everyone in the world has seen it within the week.

                  At the same time we need to make sure that memes remain legal, because memes are inherently right-wing.

                  There is literally no reason for the legacy news institutions to be so big, any more than for the legacy educational institutions. Their continued existence and size which implies the future of their employees depends on their role in pushing leftism. They need to be disrupted by innovation, particularly in pricing structure.

                  (1) Can you imagine if songs could only be played by radio stations that were licensed? That would kill all right-wing radio stations as most songs are owned by Jews. TV needs the same mandatory licensing.
                  (2) Why is cable+Internet cheaper in many places than just Internet? This is obviously monopoly abuse and something the Administration can get a lot of good will from tackling.
                  (3) Bundling of cable channels is the reason so many people pay for CNN and MSNBC. That can also be eliminated with antitrust law and make consumers happier.
                  (4) The problem with porn is that it’s an industry with stars. Enforcing the law against porn having copyright protection would destroy the industry, thereby exposing the money losing and hard to find actresses for category of race cuckold porn as purely politically motivated.

                • peppermint says:

                  Ps. Fastest way to cut off Nazi recruitment in high school is to shame 13 year old boys for trying to look at boobies, fastest way to suppress masculinity is to shame them harder for BDSM stuff, fastest way to suppress women’s interest in Nazis is to tell them Nazis only want missionary position. Anglin is really out on a limb.

                  Everyone used to know what Fifty Shades brings up, women want a 28 year old who hasn’t been really involved in the sexual marketplace because he’s been winning against other men as evidenced by his bank account but he’s inexplicably infatuated and sexual demanding. Women are more than willing to put up with less as long as he’s four years older, sexual demanding, and confidently claims he plans to win against other men in some way.

                  Porn as a public health crisis is the result of women telling each other it’s okay and men prevented from marrying at the proper age, both by leftism.

                  The solution isn’t to get rid of pictures of sex. That will cause people to read the forgery of otto frank and schindler’s list and other propaganda and claim they’re doing it as historical research. The solution is to restore the visceral disgust reaction towards seeing Aryan women engaging in beastiality in a way that could cause them to give birth to abominations, and disgusting sex acts like buttsex and pissing, and slut shaming of thots who do porn. Naturally, that’s racist and sexist and heteronormative, which is why the fems came around on the issue of porn in the first place

                  Pps. Thank the nigger who came up with the word thot.

  17. Rasputin says:

    If education was cocaine, it would be 98% brick dust.

  18. Jehu says:

    Lasic is the only medical area I can think of that doesn’t suffer cost disease. That’s probably because it isn’t covered by health insurance in general. People pay cash money for it and competition is based on cost and quality of results. Seriously considering it for myself honestly.

    • Cavalier says:

      Don’t.

      See under “laser eye surgery”: http://endmyopia.org/faqs

      Also, a video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=M-5pATbLQcg

      I personally vouch for this guy. I had a -2.00 dioptre prescription a year ago (-2.00 dioptres is clear vision to about armslength) and with the knowledge gained from that website, my vision is now “better than 20/20”, as declared about a month ago by one optometrist and one ophthalmologist, as well as the DMV when I had the eyesight restriction removed from my license.

  19. Channelized U-Turn says:

    Socialism – government money funded from afar – works great for roads. Worked in Rome. Worked in the Third Reich. Worked in America. The Via Appia. The Autobahn. The Los Angeles freeway system.

    Problem is bureaucracy, red tape, diversity.

    —End any education requirement for engineering licensure. We have tests, they’re hard, most don’t pass. Used to be you qualified with experience, a year of school only knocked off a year of experience. Now the school is mandatory. With mandatory school, no Isambard Kingdom Brunel (denied entry to the Ecole Polytechnique). No Brunel, no Victorian railway network.

    —End any requirement for licensure for private projects. You do not need a license to site a house. Large private owners (or their financiers) will require some sort of certification; having competition for the government cert ensures the government cert stays reasonable.

    —End all prevailing wage requirements and low bid contracting requirements, allow agencies to pick contractors based on past performance. Ending the adversarial relationship between consultants and contractors cuts engineering plan size by 2/3rds, cuts production time by 2/3rds.

    —End 100% of MBE/DBE requirements, “women in STEM” outreach initiatives, everything. Government employees working in design squads in state highway departments in the 1950s and 60s put out better and more innovative designs than layers of private-sector workers in the 2010s, because 1960s design squads were entirely white men while 2010s consultants are saddled with women and Indians who freak if you don’t do it by the book.

    • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

      Your suggestions basically amount to a massive deregulation of construction, not really proving government roads are good. You are not being reactionary enough. In early America private sector had a major role in road construction, see TurnPike.
      Government-built roads in the 1950s were probably a lot more efficient than now, but still way less efficiently than what an unregulated private company would have done. I doubt Third Reich’s road-building program had a positive return since they were moving towards bankruptcy before the outbreak of the war.

      • Cavalier says:

        Everyone who mattered knew in the 1930s that there would be war within the decade. National Socialism and everything related to National Socialism and everything the National Socialists did in the run-up from 1933 to 1939/1941 should be viewed as war preparations, including and especially the Autobahn.

    • jim says:

      The Third Reich failed, as so many socialist regimes failed, through inability to feed people.

      Genghis Khan operated a very low tax regime, except when he took everything and set anything remaining on fire, and the King of Dubai operates a very low tax regime. Presumably they do so because they believed it is the revenue maximizing strategy in the long run, believe that the long run Laffer curve maximum is at the low tax end. In view of results, looks likely.

      Capitalism simply works economically. Its weakness is inability to defend itself. Obviously you have to reward your friends and make your enemies suffer, which requires some deviation from free markets and capitalism, and some loss of efficiency, but the lesson of Genghis Khan and Dubai is that the deviation should not be too large. should be moderately small.

      If, like Genghis Khan, you need to feed and arm large armies and send them long distances, you need low, not high, taxes.

      And the lesson of the Roman Empire in the West is that if you derive your legitimacy from a mob of parasites on welfare, you are hosed.

      • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

        Jim, Genghis Khan did not operate a low tax system, at least when compared to the Song. The official history of Mongol empire is filled with stories of how taxation was way higher due to Islamic tax farmers. Mongols also severely fucked up the economy with stuff like paper money hyperinflation, nationalizations and guild regulations, there’s a reason why Chinese economy stagnated after the Song dynasty with exception of late Ming period.

        • jim says:

          In their decline, the Mongols overtaxed and issued too much paper money. Higher taxes, less ability to support armies in the field. But I am pretty sure that Genghis Khan did not overtax.

          At all times, the Silk Road was one of his major military objectives. He aimed to put it under a unified low tariff regime. You need funds for armies, and the Silk Road was where the money was.

          Before Genghis Khan, there were multiple tariff collections along the Silk Road, so each tariff collector had an incentive to put tariffs too high, because if he did not, someone else would. By bringing the Silk Road under a single command, Genghis Khan could grab all the revenue derived from the Silk Road, and would be free to set tariffs at the Laffer Maximum. And the rate at which he set tariffs on the Silk Road was quite low.

        • jim says:

          I think you are thinking of Kublai Khan.

          He made two unsuccessful attacks on Japan, and then to pay for these defeats, raised taxes and printed too much paper money, and the Mongol Empire in China was never solvent or safe or militarily strong again after he raised taxes.

          One defeat, you can recover. Two defeats you can recover, if the enemy is not going to come after you. Raising taxes, could not recover.

          • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

            The way Genghis organized the territories in North China was pretty much similar to how the Spartans treated the helots, he took the Chinese population and basically assigned them to pre-fixed occupations where they would provide free labour services to support the Mongol nobles and army. Under a system like this the tax rate may have been below modern or even Song levels (although Chinese historians would think otherwise) but the level of state intervention was high since it was pretty much a system of war communism, especially when you consider the constant conscription to support Mongol campaigns.

            When Kublai conquered southern China he didn’t impose this system on the south (but then as you pointed out he fucked up in other ways), but since north China was conquered during Genghis’s time they were permanently fucked. That’s why the Song-era coal and other industries were pretty much destroyed, everything that was not essential to the Mongol war machine was deprived of resources and those that were were pretty much nationalized.

      • Channelized U-Turn says:

        Dubai has low tax, low social services, huge infrastructure. Sheikh Zayed Road, no tolls, 16+ lanes with a monorail next to it, which puts it to the “left” of most GOP.

        Turnpikes were a bit player in US expansion compared to Erie and C&O canals (public sector), Penna RR (public sector), UP/WP RR (public subsidy via enormous land grants), and 1926/56 highway acts.

        A nation requires a coherent polity, otherwise it is an empire. A coherent polity requires social intercourse, which means either compact borders (Netherlands) or expansive borders with good transport (pre-1965 US). The Chinese understand this, so as Han are settled in Tibet, Tibet also gets a 100mph railway link.

        Genghis Khan was good at conquering, bad at administering. Hence the entire empire schisms after 1294. If Genghis Khan had built roads, perhaps modern-day Persians would look more like Mongols and less like Greeks.

        • jim says:

          Dubai has low tax, low social services, huge infrastructure. Sheikh Zayed Road, no tolls, 16+ lanes with a monorail next to it, which puts it to the “left” of most GOP.

          Dubai infrastructure is user pays and built to make a tidy profit. The Sheik Zayed road does have tolls. Rather high tolls. Also the monorail fees are fierce.

          If you want nice infrastructure, that is how you do it. User pays, built for profit by tight fisted businessmen who keep a sharp eye on the bottom line.

          • Channelized U-Turn says:

            RE: Dubai tolls, I stand corrected.

            However, fascinated by this tendency to point to public sector tolls (e.g. Dubai RTA) as an argument for private roads. No, public-sector toll agencies are an argument for public-sector toll agencies.

            Routing is important. Private sector will build a highway to Dulles, won’t build a highway to West Virginia. Individual networks don’t work. Tried that, c. 1910. Nice brick road dumps you into ruts on the other side of the state line.

            Ultimately you need one guy who decides where the lines on the map go. Call him Emperor, General, or Chair of the Special Committee on Route Numbering. It matters not.

            • jim says:

              Ultimately you need one guy who decides where the lines on the map go. Call him Emperor, General, or Chair of the Special Committee on Route Numbering. It matters not.

              Yes, the emperor needs to have charge of interstate highways. But if he does not want to lose control to a rapidly multiplying horde of bureaucrats too numerous for him to keep track of or discipline, he had better delegate the Texas state highways to the Duke of Texas. And similarly for the Duke of Texas until we get the road that services the local mall built largely by shopping mall management.

              And if the emperor does not want to find himself captive to a permanent caste of road management bureaucrats, he had better arrange for those interstate highways to be built by profit oriented businessmen who can be trusted to keep a sharp eye on the bottom line.

              • Channelized U-Turn says:

                And the Govern-, er, Duke of Texas will want to appoint a Chief Engineer to oversee the Department of Tr-, er, Road Builders’ Guild. Who will set standards for the contra-, er, businessmen.

                We have arrived at the exact same org chart, minus the bloat, and with better titles.

                So: Fire all of the HR ladies, let the engineers know they won’t be dismissed for heresy, deregulate as mentioned above, and let Faustian Man build what he endured 8-10 years of training to build.

              • But who sees to it that the Duke of Texas and the Duke of New Mexico cooperate and coordinate on the interstate highway across their borders using a universal standard? If that is regulated from the central authority, then you still by necessity have some bureaucracy involved from the top, right?

                One of the problems that plagued separate private railway, light rail, and subway lines early on was that they used all sorts of different conventions that were difficult to reconcile.
                Different track gauges in different jurisdictions was a logistical nightmare for the Austro-Hungarian empire in WW1, for example.

                By their very interconnectedness, transportation systems tend towards monopolies. So even if strictly private businesses were used to build and maintain the road system, you’d have to be vigilant against ending with a single huge contractor that grows into Road Wal-Mart through strategic assets and economy of scale.
                Even preventing road wal-mart, perhaps you end up with a road industrial complex, an ecosystem of contractor specialists.

                Contractors may be private entities yet not really in practice. Like government workers, they tend to lose any sense of urgency or the bottom line once they know the payola is coming from their only customers, the ruling system, no matter what. They become agencies in all but name.

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  Private monopoly is still way better than the government. Compare Hong Kong subway to New York subway. Literally no contest.

                  I doubt transportation tends towards monopolization. Majority of US infrastructure in 1800s that matters were railroads, which were privately owned, and that industry was highly competitive until it started getting regulated. Private sector also owned a substantial number of turnpikes so it’s pretty clear that a private road network would work. If you think a state-owned road on which bureaucrats decide the toll would work why not a privately owned one where the toll is decided by the market?

                • pdimov says:

                  “Private monopoly is still way better than the government.”

                  Only because the government today sucks.

                  There is no inherent reason for two equally competent CEOs, one in charge of the private monopoly, another in charge of the government, to produce different results.

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  When did government not suck? Theoretically a government agency whose only goal was profit maximization, did not get subsidies from other agencies and could not do stuff like mandate people to purchase their product has the potential to be as efficient as a private monopoly, but these conditions rarely apply. Even non-demotist governments seem to be way below private efficiency, the Bourbons end up outsourcing their tax collection to private investors.

                  The only counter-example I know is Singaporean SOEs but I think the reason they seem very efficient relative to private firms is only because the rest of the world is so badly governed. Also, Singaporean SOEs have to compete with a ton of foreign firms due to the small size of the country, so they don’t really have a monopoly on anything.

                • Cavalier says:

                  Walmart is an amazingly well-run company. If our roads’ biggest problem is that they’re owned by Road Walmart, Inc., we’ve lots of other things to worry about.

                • pdimov says:

                  “Even non-demotist governments seem to be way below private efficiency, the Bourbons end up outsourcing their tax collection to private investors.”

                  There is no difference between the government CEO outsourcing to private actors and a private monopoly CEO outsourcing to private actors. The distinction is wholly artificial.

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  “The distinction is wholly artificial.”

                  No private company would outsource its core function and taxation is arguably that of a government’s.

                  Regardless, if you read Carlyle (reactionary) and Spencer (libertarian) about the 1800s, both of them agreed that private enterprise was far superior to state officials despite living in Victorian England, one of the most efficient states that ever existed. Spencer has a whole chapter which talked about the failure of Victorian municipal SOEs. If Victorian England could not make SOEs work well, doubt any government can.

                • pdimov says:

                  I agree that day to day operation is not something the government does very well, although large private monopolies aren’t that much better.

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  Agreed, but private monopoly is largely a myth except for when they have a government grant of monopoly like the Hong Kong subway. Most “natural” monopolies ended up that way due to progressive regulations. Before the progressive era, electric utilities, cable cars, telephones, etc were highly competitive. Even when there was one firm they kept prices low due to threat of competitive entry.

                  https://mises.org/library/myth-natural-monopoly

                • pdimov says:

                  The subway is one obvious example of a natural monopoly – building a competitive subway doesn’t make much sense.

                  It’s still subject to competition from alternative means of transportation, of course.

                • Reactionary Oriental Libertarian says:

                  If subject to other forms of transportation competing with it it’s not really a monopoly. Maybe there can’t be more than one subway per city (although private industries can coordinate to form a network, see credit cards) but there certainly can be lots of private bus and taxi services.

                • pdimov says:

                  Virtually all monopolies are subject to competition from alternatives, substitutes and at the end, the option to forego the use of product or service.

                  Besides, you yourself gave the HK subway as an example of a government-granted monopoly.

                • peppermint says:

                  The purpose of the military industrial complex was to protect strategic industry from government diversity regulation applied to the government. Space industry was trying to do the same thing later, with red team citing costs and regulatory changes (wink wink) from new presidents and blue team saying there’s no reason the government can’t do it while the government was proving incapable.

                  In my city the subway lines frequented by mud “people” are dirty and smelly while buses are shared so they’re all dirty and smelly and all of the subway and bus lines are covered with pictures of a White woman in handcuffs saying people who punch bus drivers will be prosecuted or faces of White men saying don’t grope other passengers.

                  While all the subway lines except for the one that goes to city hall are equally broken down, the commuter rail service was sold to some third party so commuter rail tickets won’t be taken to subsidize the other lines. The commuter rail trains run on time.

                  Tl;dr niggers and jews = bad news

            • “Private sector will build a highway to Dulles, won’t build a highway to West Virginia. ”

              Having comparable quality roads, electrical grid, phone service, postal service in even rural areas is “wasteful” in the sense of profit motive alone.

              That’s why you need a state that has a central concern in extending its reach to every corner of the empire.
              It may not turn a profit but by example, it establishes the legitimacy of the ruling order over all its subjects.

              • Stephen W says:

                People in inaccessible places should receive no utilities but also no rates or land taxes allowing self sufficient types to live there.

      • pdimov says:

        “… the long run Laffer curve maximum is at the low tax end.”

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser's_law

        It depends on the population though. The Laffer maximum is probably not the same in Sweden. And Dubai is perhaps not representative, being a sandbox for foreign capital and labor which can easily flee.

        • jim says:

          In the short term, raising taxes raises money – unless you are Greece, where taxes are already so high that each tax increase leads to massive, major, and immediate declines in revenue. Which somehow does not stop them from raising taxes even further.

          But the logical extreme of this is that if in one year you grabbed absolutely everything, as tends to happen during war time, the next year you would be in trouble. Venezuela going overboard on redistribution is a good example of this. One year the poor were fed, the next year everyone, rich and poor, is starving.

          It is clear that in the US, if you raise taxes in one year, the next year you will get more money. Not so clear you will get more money the year after that. Theoretically in a democracy, we would expect taxes on the bulk of taxpayers to be close to the four year Laffer maximum, the tax rate that maximizes revenues over one election cycle without regard for what will happen in subsequent election cycles, and taxes on unpopular groups to be higher than that, in order to cater to envy and hatred, and in order to make the bulk of taxpayers feel less bad about what they are paying.

          It rather looks like taxes in the US are near the four year Laffer maximum, and that taxes in Greece are far above even the instantaneous Laffer Maximum, and are approaching the first kill, then loot, then burn, maximum.

      • Stephen W says:

        The third reich failed because the combined industrial might of the USSR the USA and the British Empire was all used to destroy them.

        • jim says:

          That really does not explain the food shortages, which continued to 1949, and which ended when they ended the command economy. Similar food shortages were afflicting Britain, the winner.

          The third reich was short of food for the same reason as Venezuela and North Korea are short of food.

          • pdimov says:

            The food shortages were entirely predictable, at least according to Wikipedia. Europe was net-food-negative even in peace time, and the war additionally displaced tens of millions, lowering the output further.

            Germans were mostly spreading the starvation around, as you said earlier.

  20. copypasta says:

    The following segment is duplicated in post apparently in error:

    “If you ask why we are giving more stupid people more useless education even though it costs much more than it used to, then you also have the answer to why it costs more. If you have priests in charge, they will make everyone go to church all the time. Our education system is the state church making everyone go to church and attend religious festivals.”

  21. jay says:

    This is why capitalism along with the sound currency of the Gold standard is the way to go.

    No usury,debt as money or the problems associated with socialism.

  22. Ryan C says:

    >For healthcare to be efficient, you cannot allow people for whom healthcare is free to go in by the same door and face the same triage nurse as people who pay for their healthcare. If you want people to pay for their healthcare, they had better not see a pile of drug addicts looking for free drugs and vagrants looking for free room and board in the queue ahead of them. And you will only get efficient reasonably priced healthcare if people do in fact pay for it themselves.

    it can’t be as simple as that, to quote the movie Gandhi, “General… how does a child shot with a 3-0-3 Enfield ‘apply’ for help?”

  23. viking says:

    youre right healthcare needs complete overhaul. Public separated from private to free private and expose public.public should be spartan to encourage private participation and control cost of free system.abortion should be free, white women have few.
    Yes tech big data etc used to privatize government services so reducing govt irrelevance.
    child care credits that target the richest taxpayers most in a way that encourages white women. No welfare without naming the father and agreeing to tubal ligation will reduce brown babies.

    But frankly I dont think any of this works at this stage the only thing that will save us is a race war where all non whites are driven out and a lot of race traitors killed. Its not fair to the browns but thats not my problem its on the heads of the liberals who created the situation

  24. vxxc2014 says:

    ACA website – “Nothing worked until they brought in an emergency team that just happened to consist entirely of white males and east Asian males.”

    The Asian males looked at the first competent white guy and told him “job needs a white guy” meaning he’s in charge.

    Yes 1st crack at ACA website was Computer Associates/CA and they’ve always been a disaster, rescue team was Accenture [formerly Arthur Anderson].

  25. Alfred says:

    Crimestop making very smart people very stupid is an excellent meme. Likewise for first world poverty.

  26. ladderff says:

    Jim,

    Long-time reader, first time commenter. This is an important and clearly stated post; the second paragraph in particular is pithy and quoteable. I also caught your comments over at that crybaby’s website and found them uplifting. Enjoy your day!

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