(Part 2) Best products from r/NeutralPolitics

> You can't say Trump doing it is okay because Bush did.

Don't put words in mouth that aren't there: it isn't good for an elected official to have conflicts of interest. I think both candidates in 2016 offered differing conflicts of interest, but that's a different story.

> I think maybe a better question is when did this sort of behavior become acceptable?

Glenn Greenwald argues in his book "With Liberty and Justice for Some" that American Democracy and government fundamentally changed when Richard Nixon was pardoned. I think that's part of the answer - since that event we've really viewed the elected officials as a ruling class; thus exempt from moral and ethical conditions we apply to ourselves.

But there's also an ideological root to all the acceptance of this; core to the belief of Ayn Rand and some libertarians is that business leaders should make the best public leaders. So, if you've been successful in private business you ought to have influence in public policy as well.

With the rise of H.W. Bush (Sr.) as Vice President of Ronald Reagan, this ideology had become fully embraced by the Republicans. H.W. Bush was known as an oil tycoon, and it was expected that he could level out the oil prices through his inside knowledge.

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But then we also need to backup and realize that this isn't a problem exclusive to the White House; the "revolving door" of public appointments and private business has been documented for about 100 years. This isn't a new thing, and in some ways it makes sense to have people familiar with the industry making decisions about an industry. That's a whole other topic though. Anyways, we shouldn't pretend that Trump is an unprecedented nefarious evil about to doom America because he has some business interests. The reality is that a fuckton of politicians at all levels have business interests - many would argue that's not a bad thing.

The business cycle is all spending not just government. And the Austrian theory goes is that an excess of credit, by setting the inflation rate too low, is what causes the business cycle. But the Chicago school (freshwater) take on it is interesting as well.

>I wish we had more honesty like yours from the Krugman types in the world.

Krugman is more free market than he gets credit for.

I think there is a somewhat false dichotomy presented with the modern view of Keynes/Hayek and I think most people don't really understand either person; amusingly Keynes was also very much pro eugenics as some of the social left was at the time.

There is a good book called Keynes Hayek you might check out it you have time.
>Instead most people say "SEE CAPITALISM FAILED!"

Most people have a very limited idea of what capitalism is, they don't understand the difference between an economic theory and a social one. I have some friends in a very left state who were decrying capitalism in favor of the social policies of Sweden. I pointed out that Sweden was in fact capitalist and got the typical open-but-closed minded response of 'shut up!'.

Epstein's views on this matter, and most matters, are ludicrously out of the mainstream.

Richard Epstein is a libertarians libertarian, whose ideas were once regarded as so far right-wing fringe that the far-right-wing Justice Clarence Thomas repudiated them in his Senate confirmation hearings. It took Thomas' immediate embrace of that formerly fringe ideology upon confirmation to slowly bring some of those ideas into the mainstream.

Epstein seldom seems to find any law he favors, tending to prefer freedom over any restriction, with the notable exception of the Supreme Court ruling that freed gay people from restriction on marrying, and who supports preemptive warfare. Epstein believes that if people are to be taxed they need to receive benefit in proportion to the amount that they are taxed. Epstein does not believe people have the right to health care, nor to fire stations, nor to schools.

Epstein does not like law to affect people's decisions much, and to the extent law governs the President's actions, it would be highly noteworthy only if Epstein were to regard anything as being actually impeachable. Epstein is of the Judicial branch, and Congress is of the Legislative branch: Congress makes that law that Epstein regards so poorly. Never look to Epstein with any expectation of his approval for the actions of Congress.

> Public housing just isn't very big in the US

I have to disagree with the characterization here. I'm not sure we can just look at a number in a vacuum and say that the policy impact is small based on our intuition.

In 1979, there were 1,204,718 public housing units against a population of about 77,330,000 households in the U.S. That's 1 public housing unit per 64 families in the United States, and one per every 28 families that rent. By 1993, that number had dropped to 1 unit per 69 families and today that number is a little less than 1 for every 95, 1 for every 43 families that rent. That's a 31% decrease in the number of available public housing units on a per capita basis in about two generations. That's a pretty drastic cutback.

At the same time, the number of total private housing units being created was, with some ups and downs surprisingly flat from the late 50s through the mid 2000s, despite the fact that the number of households in the market more than doubled over that same period. And over the last 12 years, housing production has been way below previous benchmarks.

It seems to me a substantial reduction in public housing aimed at the most vulnerable households combined with a roughly flat (I would argue falling) production of new private units would have a pretty substantial bottom-up impact on the housing market.

>Restrictive zoning has banned us from building the sort of places we used to build.

I also want to point out that I agree with this sentiment broadly, but the two theories are not mutually exclusive. As a tremendous number of Americans have a tremendous amount of wealth tied up in their homes, they have an extremely strong political incentive to fight anything and everything in their community which would have an unpredictable impact on their housing values, including new dense construction.

Isn't there something to the idea that systematically commodifying housing and then reducing the supply of social housing causing prices to increase overall would have a double-barrelled impact on newly formed households across the income spectrum? These new planning restrictions didn't just come out of nowhere - there was a political constituency that wanted them.

> This creates a lot of stability for families, larger communities, governments, and so forth. It allows for growth/improvement, but forces it to move gradually so there's isn't an unexpected implosion.

This is a really important point and one that's very well made. A well-understood part of the lifecycle of any person (and entire generations) is a natural and human desire to overturn previously held traditions. However, overturning traditions in service of genuine progress and overturning them simply for the nihilistic glee of it isn't as easy to parse in practice as one might hope. While "tradition" isn't a particularly good justification for continuing with the status quo, it's not an automatic argument the other way, either. Often times, institutions calcify and traditions form because there is a very real utility to them.

Maintaining the status quo can be suffocating but progress can be very destructive and in the meantime, a lot of real people have their lives destroyed underfoot of that same progress and never get to enjoy the fruits of the supposedly greater world that was created from the ashes. As Keynes said: "In the long run, we're all dead."

Thanks! (he said hoping that you weren't being sarcastic)

Yeah if you're interested in critical responses to the legal formalist model (which is the model that says that law should be this rationally consistent system of principles that can be merely applied by judges--pretty much the basic thing you learn in civics class) I can suggest reading Sociological Jurisprudence and the Legal Realist critiques as a starting point because they are pretty well known (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Roscoe Pound for the former, Karl Llewellyn and Jerome Frank for the latter).

Then maybe you want to look at some of the Critical Legal Studies movement, which basically says that the law is a social tool used to systematically disadvantage certain groups in society--women, people of color, homosexuals, etc--while maintaining the illusion of moral superiority by hiding behind the idea that "the law" is this perfect, reasonable system divorced from political and social concerns. Though while I see their arguments' value I find CLS either incredibly dull and repetitive or upsettingly polemic and inflammatory.

I find the most compelling work to be the relatively new field of Judicial Politics though, since it kind of brings social science tools (like behavioral models) to bear on the judiciary. The seminal model here is definitely Segel and Spaeth although there has been some movement since then obviously. Basically this says that judges decide how to vote based on their policy preferences, just like Congressman decide how to vote based on their policy preferences, and then just come up with a legal reason (not necessarily consciously so, but you can tell a lot more about how a Supreme Court Justice will behave in the future by looking at their policy preferences than by looking at their legal opinions). Not that there aren't plenty of problems in this field (like I said, the Formalist Model was so dominant for so long that people really haven't been studying the judiciary in a social scientific way for very long) but I think that everyone who is at all interested in either Law or Public Policy needs to read at least some of their work.

Sorry for the massive reading list, but I figured you rarely get the opportunity to actually change someone's mind on the internet!

I think the list amassing here is going about things the wrong way. I(a not so humble econ major myself) would argue that if you want to start at the beginning you should pick a book on the history of economic thought.

The best ones for your level of understanding would be Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers(and his Teachings from the Worldly Philosophy). Unfortunately Heilbroner was very much a socialist, and though it does not come through so much in his analysis of the various economists it is fairly obvious if you look at which economists that make his cut and which don't.

But lucky for you(not your free time) Mark Skousen(a raging libertarian not satisfied with Heilbroner's text) has done a reasonable job covering the history of economic thought. If it weren't for his overbearing attitude I would say that his is the superior text.

So ~750 pages worth of material will catch you up to the latter part of the last century(great). Unfortunately(theres a lot of that in economics) if you want to keep up with what is going on now you are going to need to invest a great deal more time.

All of this is only if you want to get all the historical context(which is great). But you should take it all in with the knowledge that in mainstream modern economic thought knowing the works of Adam Smith and Malthus is almost entirely unnecessary and most economists will get their PhD's with only a perfunctory class on history of thought. This is because the pre-WW2 stuff is seen very similarly to the idea of the Luminiferous aether(interesting, but not required). The basis for which is the idea that it has all been picked over so many times that anything of worth has been carried over and all else is chaff.

My suggestion(if you want to learn undergraduate economics) is to pick up a micro economics textbook, because micro-economics is generally uncontested(and those bits that are are uninteresting to the beginning student).

After that pick up a survey of macro text. I used Modern Macroeconomics Which just goes over the various schools in roughly chronological order(classical, neoclassical, keynesian, neokeynesian, austrian, monetarism there might be others but these are the big ones you'll want to know). Unfortunately this book is pretty dense(with plenty of math) and will require a greater time commitment than everything previously mentioned. But, on the plus side, there are wonderful little interviews at the end of each chapter to reward yourself with.

If you get bored during all of this try some of the lighter econ books, my favorites are the Invisible Hook(the economics of pirates-yarr!!) and the Not So Wild Wild West(Hollywood is a piss poor educator don'cha ya know).

I'm reading Reinventing American Healthcare by Ezekiel Emanuel. He's one of the top health policy experts in this country. I'd recommend the book if you're confused about or unsure what the ACA will do. We actually have a pretty good idea how it'll work out. It was the right legislation to be enacted. And it will help in its goals of insuring all Americans, increase access to healthcare, keep healthcare costs down, increase the quality of care, and prevent and promote general wellness.

From an economics perspective:

• Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell
  
• The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek
  
• Wealth of Nations
  
  From a social perspective:
  
  
• The Conscience of a Conservative, Barry Goldwater
  
• On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
  
• The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  
• The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the Individual in Modern Society, Carl Jung
  
  From a moral perspective:
  
  
• Mere Christianity
  
• The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  
  There's many more than just these, and there's a lot of underlying philosophy that modern conservationism is based on. I'd also categorize these books as a basis for "intellectual conservatism" as opposed to say "cultural conservatism". Something to note is that little of the conservative mindset is focused on policy and politics, per se. There is instead a strong emphasis on personal action and collective culture, the value of morals, and a focus on introspection. So while these books will perhaps help you understand a conservative perspective better, they will not likely provide a good basis for engaging in political debate. For that maybe you want a book by Ben Shapiro or something.

You absolutely have a right to hold all these views, but as this is an evidence-based forum, I'd like to respectfully request that you reexamine some of your assumptions here.

> I assume many of them either come from a racial/ethnic background similar to the greatest population of illegals in the US; Mexican nationals, or outright come from mixed status families.

Gallup did a poll last year indicating that 87% of non-Hispanic whites support a pathway to citizenship.

> Literally don't own guns, don't know many immediate friends and families who own guns...

Some of the most liberal and vocal public advocates for gun control — such as Bill Maher, Michael Moore, Joe Biden, and even Gabrielle Giffords — are gun owners. Generally speaking, they support background checks, closing the gun show loophole, bans on large magazines, and other policies along those lines... presumably policies that wouldn't affect their ownership, but that they believe would reduce gun-related violence. The idea that liberals don't own guns or know people who do is simply false.

> Often not financially independent...

Some of the most liberal places in the country, such as San Francisco and New York City, are also the wealthiest. The pejorative term "limousine liberal" is not just apocryphal; it has roots in reality. And the evidence suggests that the wealthy shift to the left is increasing.

In one sense it's a check on the power of the judiciary over imprisonment, inasmuch as the President can curtail verdicts or sentences imposed by judges, but only in the direction of mercy. It's important also to recognize that in the early Republic, private prosecutions were pretty common and so the current executive power over the charging process wouldn't necessarily be there, and in the case of a private prosecution, the only intervention by the executive might be through the pardon power.

Separately, it reflects the history of the American Presidency as reflecting the contemporary powers of the British crown at the time and the power of the pardon was one of total royal prerogative at the time. Since the US constitution arose before the system of responsible government the royal prerogatives truly were vested in the Crown/President, and not exercised by them but on advice of the legislative leaders, as is the current scheme in the UK.

Well said! American business culture is not conducive to the modernization necessary to compete. It’s happened again and again post-WWII where business had the opportunity to capture market share or modernize but for an often transitory upper-management profits>everything. Managers expect to only be around a short while so instead of spending money to be competitive they cut so the earnings report looks good, they get their bonus and get out. Schaeffer talks about this managerial inertia in his book [Understanding Globalization] (https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Globalization-Consequences-Political-Environmental/dp/0742561801). Again and again American business chooses short term profits over long term competitiveness.

Ah, I see your point now. I'll debate your reading of the manifesto simply by asking the following question: Where do the ideals of free and open source software, and free flow of information (which you cite) come from?

Free flow of information comes from "Information wants to be free", a speech by Stewart Brand where he argued that technology could be liberating rather than oppressing -- aka, that software has a civil right component.

Free software / open source software comes from Richard Stallman, who argued that in Free Software Free Society that software would be the defining civil right battleground of our age.

These were the driving ideas being the creation of the Mozilla foundation. These are the ideas behind the word "must" in the manifesto's sentences "The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible", and "Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional".