In practice Socialist nations just substitute inequality based upon income and wealth for inequality of rank within the party. Party leaders in Socialist or Communist nations always have very cushy lifestyles compared to the masses.
The difference is that they did nothing to create that wealth. They only expropriated it from others. Which in the long run undermines the standard of living of the masses.
There is no magic metric for judging the relative merits of different national economies, or for judging the degree to which qualitatively different mixes of privileges, immunities, and coerced wealth transfers makes one national economy more "socialist" than another. Indeed, empirical metrics are entirely inappropriate for formulating economic theories, since the mental states that are relevant to economics can't be directly observed or compared to a measurement standard by others, nor subjected to the kinds of experimental controls that are needed for rigorous logical inductions.
The correct method for an economist is to start with the self-evident truth that humans are purposeful actors, and deduce from that universally-valid causal theories that can then be applied to qualitative explanations of particular historical situations (i.e. abductive reasoning). An important aspect of abductive reasoning is that when evaluating different possible causes for a given outcome, the stronger explanation will be the one that involves the causal factor that also best explains other observed outcomes, and that best explains changes in the outcome of interest over time.
This approach greatly complicates comparisons between national economies. Rather than focusing on whether one economy is more "socialist" than another in some aggregate sense, an economic historian must examine specific privileges, immunities, and coercive transfers occurring in each country and the constellation of effects each of them is associated with.
In comparing America and Sweden, I would say that both countries are engaged in capital consumption and thus gradually deindustrializing and eroding the well-being of their working classes, but the Swedish policy of high progressive taxation and the American policy of printing fiat dollars to finance enormous government deficits and periodically bail out Wall Street and other privileged private entities have dramatically different impacts on their respective elites. Different forms of coercion can and do push inequality metrics in different directions.
Ordinary Swedes might enjoy their path to gradually increasing economic dysfunction more than ordinary Americans do, but one must make a leap from comparative economic history to ethics to claim that future poverty is a good thing if it promotes greater equality now. Pol Pot's regime, with its radical deindustrialization/deurbanization of Cambodia and profligate use of the killing fields to keep dissenters in line, was a flop in terms of producing useful goods, but it was enormously successful in terms of making sure that goods were equally distributed. If "coercive redistribution" to achieve equality is the goal, then the Khmer Rouge regime and not Sweden is the relevant example to ponder.
Once it is conceded that some inequality can be justified by the pursuit of other values and that even most socialists don't want to live under a Pol Pot-type regime, then they have to go back to the drawing board to come up with some other specious justification for usurping the moral and intellectual autonomy of others.
The core value of the "capitalism" they oppose is not the enrichment of a few wealthy capitalists, but rather a system of justice where each individual has exclusive control over the use and disposition of oneself and one's peacefully-acquired property; with private ownership being the essential institution that safeguards individual autonomy. Private ownership of the means of production doesn't mean that a capitalist owns one's workers or customers, nor does it prevent other people from exercising their liberty to become capitalists themselves and compete in the same line of production. Since coordination and exchange can only arise from voluntary cooperation in a system based on peacefully-acquired private ownership, a capitalist can only become rich by serving the interests of others, and doing so well enough that one isn't driven out of business by one's competitors.
If a few people grow richer by unjust means of privileges, immunities, or coerced transfers of wealth, that isn't the fault of the institution of private ownership; placing the blame on capitalists and "capitalism" for the unjust accumulation of wealth is misdirected. It is the market-rigging privileges, etc. that need to be abolished.
I tend to think your overall sense that something is wrong here is correct but I think there is a better to express than wrangling over definitions. Say instead:
Sure, other things being equal more egalitarian distributions are better. However, the question of pragmatic relevance here isn't whether god should wave a magic wand and make a one time redistribution but whether countries tend to do better when they adopt certain kinds of policies. Indeed, if you aren't sure about particular policies isn't it a mistake to encourage people to generally be more inclined to adopt such policies?
"that any taxation is a violation of rights and thus should not happen?"
This is where being a Georgist Single Land Taxer comes in handy. I can claim that any tax on production is a violation of rights, and thus the tax on the value of undeveloped land is deontologically acceptable.
But how do you gather revenue in a Georgist way that doesn't either violate your principle or cause some really problematic distortions to the economy?
If you use the actual current land value you've violated your principle because if I develop some useful service on plot A that will increase the value, and hence my tax, on plot B next door.
OTOH suppose you tax all land equally (or at least on the value someone would have assigned ab initio). Now you have a problem, if you want to generate non-trivial revenue you've probably made it unprofitable to raise cattle or farm. Either you end up leaving land fallow or the government ends up retaining almost all ownership and just renting it out which seems even worse.
I think the discussion of the Fraser Institute metrics, as well as government spending as a fraction of GDP, is a key aspect of this debate. These statistics are as you point out used selectively by both sides to bolster their position. But I would further argue that they are highly questionable and not a good bedrock for a position here. For example, I graphed government spending/GDP according to the IMF against the Fraser regulation score. These are the two pieces of evidence Sehon offers in his response piece. It turns out that they are weakly correlated (R squared = 0.29), but in the OPPOSITE direction that Sehon argues, i.e. higher spending is correlated with less regulation. If you restrict the analysis to "the West" (I used Europe without Russia and Turkey and with US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), the correlation is actually zero. Even if you just look at Western Europe, US, and Canada, it's pretty weak (about 0.15), although now in the opposite direction. The regluation index is strongly correlated with their overall economic freedom index, so the results are more or less the same with that one as with the regulation index.
I think this is yet another reason that analysis at the level of nations is not the best way to understand policy issues. GDP is unreliable, and I'm sure the Freedom and Regulation indices are full of researcher degrees of freedom that reduce reliability. I think it's much better to think about issues individually as Bryan wants to: does immigration restriction help, or not? Zoning? Etc. Comparing a massive menu of policies, history, culture, demographics, and natural resources to another one just seems futile by comparison.
Two thoughts regarding your many excellent points above:
1. I'm sure it must be frustrating to you that you have to make arguments you've made countless times to eager but unread socialist college freshmen to, instead, highly educated and intelligent fellow PhDs. Your points, though quite well put, are nothing many of us, non-academics, haven't heard many, many times before. Why are these people so unstudied and incurious? Thoughts? It reminds me of your point in your book on education, that people forget what they learn in a course soon after the final exam. I wonder, if you asked Sehon to repeat your critique of his position in, say, 6 months, how well he'd do.
2. Your point about justice in initial acquisition is not only well put, but, given what's happening in the Middle East right now, quite timely. In case some of your readers had the same thought, I'll mention Stephen Halbrook's seminal article in Journal of Libertarian Studies Vol 5, #4, "The Alienation of a Homeland: How Palestine Became Israel*" It's available free online.
Socialism requires a high level of social trust, which, at the very least, makes it un-scalable. The quote from the Danish prime minister says it all - “The welfare society is fundamentally a community, which is based on a mutual trust that we all contribute,” Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said in March at a summit of the country’s municipalities. “All that is being seriously challenged by parallel societies.” The PM made this statement in defense of the draconian measures the government is taking to preserve Danish ideals. i.e. tearing down their low income immigrant housing! https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/world/europe/denmark-housing.html#:~:text=The%20government%20says%20the%20plan,the%20country's%20generous%20welfare%20system.
"Socialism" in the authoritarian leninist/maoist sense mainly only came to be under unique circumstances or war and/or civil war in backward countries a long time ago.
Nobody in Sweden wants to introduce a Leninist state, and they indeed guard their democratic privileges. When Sweden felt certain "socialist" reforms weren't working they didn't starve the peasantry and purge dissidents, the legislature passed reforms based on the will of the people to move in a different direction.
It seems really pointless to go on the on about the Soviet Union when that isn't what most people calling themselves "socialists" or admiring the Nordic model want.
"universal redistribution, education subsidies"
Most people that like the Nordic model seem to want more of that stuff. Maybe they disagree on some details. The three big things I hear about are universal healthcare, free daycare/generous maternity leave, and probably cheap university.
It's hard to defend the US health system as superior because it isn't.
I can't quite parse the way the Swedish child support system works and I favor cash over subsidized daycare, but the bottom line raising kids costs money whether you do it yourself or farm it out. I don't think it's the end of the world for the childless to have to subsidize the raising of the next generation they aren't producing themselves.
The American system of wildly expensive college funded by government backed undischargable debt doesn't seem particularly superior to Sweden either.
So I don't know. The areas people gripe about appear to be one where Sweden does at least as well if not better then the American status quo.
If someone called for a VAT to fund a bigger child tax credit would you call him a commie pinko?
Most of the people who complain about “wildly expensive college funded by government backed undischargable debt” are unwilling to do the obvious simple thing to fix it. Stop federal student loan guarantees.
I think it's always useful to bring up the collectivist tragedies of the 20th century because nearly every one of them was perpetrated by elites trying to manifest what they'd read in Marx and various other socialists' work. Perhaps the balance that the Nordic countries is currently striking is not bad, though they do not exist in a vacuum and so benefit from some of the excesses of our system, but that can easily lead people to think that a similar approach applied to the rest of the economy would be advisable. With the help of a convincing enough sophist, the dysfunction you breed can be turned into passion for more extreme adherence to the ideology causing your woes. These historical examples show us what that could look like and so are hardly every pointless.
About the US healthcare and higher education systems, I would agree with you that they're inferior. But that's because our system is more crony capitalist/corporatist than it is laissez faire, and those are some of the sectors which are the most striking examples. If you're not aware of the level of government meddling in those sectors of the economy, I can point you to a few resources, but most libertarians don't deny the massive drawbacks of the current system; we just have different explanations of how it got this way and hence different proscriptions for how to undo this mess.
"Libertarian" solutions in healthcare tend to amount to some DC think tanks and lobbying groups take some government program and making it super complicated and full of loopholes to make some private actors rich at public expense while talking about how it increases "choice" or "privatization."
Medicare Part C didn't drive down the cost of healthcare.
Medicare Part D not negotiating prices led to a ridiculous system of Pharmacy DIR and manufacturer rebates.
Adding a bunch of useless metal levels to the ACA didn't do anything to create a real "marketplace".
I have to evaluate the libertarian impact on healthcare as it is, not what it would want to be in some alternate world. In the world we have increased "privatization" and complication of government benefits tends to lead to worse outcomes, and that is the impact libertarians tend to have on the margin in most recent health legislation.
Whenever you see "choice" read "risk pool loophole swamp". We would be better off with a simpler and more universal structure that insurers and providers could spreadsheet game less, even if it meant less "consumer choice".
Except what you describe can't be considered remotely libertarian as it's the exact type of things that we have been decrying for years as examples of government waste and inefficiency. A libertarian solution would be to phase out entitlement programs and pay back citizens what they'd paid into the system so that they can pursue their preferred alternative on the open market without the distortions introduced by having those programs there in the first place. Antony Davies and James Harrigan have been blowing the whistle on the looming economic issues we'll face if we don't do something about our unfunded obligations (e.g., medicare and social security), and by do something, they usually mean phase out or at least reduce benefits. Honestly, I'm kinda flabbergasted that you're associating those policies with libertarians since usually libertarians end up getting lambasted as wanting people to die because we oppose the whole mess and would rather do away with it.
Also I just want to clarify that I'm not trying to measure whether a policy is libertarian based on whether it was successful or not. I'm measuring based on the actual implementation of the "solution" and whether that reduces the involvement of the state in affairs or not, not on a more corporatist/neoliberal standard of "protecting" the free market or "increasing" competition. Whether a course of action is libertarian or not can really just be boiled down to whether it's reducing NAP violations (or fraud). Whether it's the right course of action can be argued about, but we have a very simple standard for whether something can be considered libertarian or not. Regardless what your views are on zoning laws/urban planning, public education, monetary policy, etc., I can say they're all non-libertarian with high confidence.
You seem to be confusing supply and demand with that argument. The point in Bryan's case is that there is an over abundance of bad professors to take his spot, so even if he was merely zero value his replacement would be worse, and the demand would be constant. In the case of meat eating environmentalists decreasing their demand for meat would decrease supply.
No, I don't think he has said that. I don't think the view that a system of tenured professors and public unversities is bad implies that everything resulting from that system is also bad.
For example, we're all against the federal government having Senators throw darts at a board to decide the size of the federal budget, but if this random process happens to result in my favored size of the federal budget, I don't think I'm obligated to advocate for the voiding of the result because the process was unfair.
I would guess that Bryan thinks that tenure results in unproductive tenured faculty and an unproductive rent-seeking competition among prospective faculty (clearly both true). But I think he believes that SOME tenured faculty happen to be productive, himself included.
"I would guess that Bryan thinks that tenure results in unproductive tenured faculty and an unproductive rent-seeking competition among prospective faculty (clearly both true). But I think he believes that SOME tenured faculty happen to be productive, himself included."
How nice. "I happen to think that tenure and education are both scams but there are exceptions for tenured professors, which I conveniently happen to be one."
This is obviously not convincing imo. Imagine a billionaire leftie saying "billionaires should donate 90% of their wealth but there are well-defined exceptions, which I happen to be one..."
Besides all that he has written about education (lack of transfer learning, useless credentialing etc.) would also apply to his classes. So it's not clear to me why he is an exception.
Also, he admits that his thoughts on tenure conflict with his holding such a job. He just doesn't think he's a hypocrite becasue he's not being hyperbolic when he decries tenure. Again very convenient.
<<Some will call me a hypocrite for taking part in this system, but that’s part and parcel of being a whistleblower. If I wasn’t a tenured professor, who would take my critique seriously?>>
My response: You have blown the whistle. Now, GTFO.
"The oppression of taxpayers and the deception of donors need to end. If the result is that I lose my dream job for life, so be it."
My response: GTFO now, so that taxpayers are oppressed a little less.
Isn't this roughly the equivalent of telling people who complain about e.g. systemic oppression to simply end themselves, because by continuing to live they are being hypocritical? Or is it closer to telling police officers who blow whistles about police corruption that they should quit themselves because police are corrupt?
It seems like you are arguing that anyone who is in a field with many bad actors that take advantage of people must leave the field because it is impossible for any actor in the field to be good. That seems like a self fulfilling prophecy, or at least a way to ensure there are never whistle blowers.
In practice Socialist nations just substitute inequality based upon income and wealth for inequality of rank within the party. Party leaders in Socialist or Communist nations always have very cushy lifestyles compared to the masses.
The difference is that they did nothing to create that wealth. They only expropriated it from others. Which in the long run undermines the standard of living of the masses.
There is no magic metric for judging the relative merits of different national economies, or for judging the degree to which qualitatively different mixes of privileges, immunities, and coerced wealth transfers makes one national economy more "socialist" than another. Indeed, empirical metrics are entirely inappropriate for formulating economic theories, since the mental states that are relevant to economics can't be directly observed or compared to a measurement standard by others, nor subjected to the kinds of experimental controls that are needed for rigorous logical inductions.
The correct method for an economist is to start with the self-evident truth that humans are purposeful actors, and deduce from that universally-valid causal theories that can then be applied to qualitative explanations of particular historical situations (i.e. abductive reasoning). An important aspect of abductive reasoning is that when evaluating different possible causes for a given outcome, the stronger explanation will be the one that involves the causal factor that also best explains other observed outcomes, and that best explains changes in the outcome of interest over time.
This approach greatly complicates comparisons between national economies. Rather than focusing on whether one economy is more "socialist" than another in some aggregate sense, an economic historian must examine specific privileges, immunities, and coercive transfers occurring in each country and the constellation of effects each of them is associated with.
In comparing America and Sweden, I would say that both countries are engaged in capital consumption and thus gradually deindustrializing and eroding the well-being of their working classes, but the Swedish policy of high progressive taxation and the American policy of printing fiat dollars to finance enormous government deficits and periodically bail out Wall Street and other privileged private entities have dramatically different impacts on their respective elites. Different forms of coercion can and do push inequality metrics in different directions.
Ordinary Swedes might enjoy their path to gradually increasing economic dysfunction more than ordinary Americans do, but one must make a leap from comparative economic history to ethics to claim that future poverty is a good thing if it promotes greater equality now. Pol Pot's regime, with its radical deindustrialization/deurbanization of Cambodia and profligate use of the killing fields to keep dissenters in line, was a flop in terms of producing useful goods, but it was enormously successful in terms of making sure that goods were equally distributed. If "coercive redistribution" to achieve equality is the goal, then the Khmer Rouge regime and not Sweden is the relevant example to ponder.
Once it is conceded that some inequality can be justified by the pursuit of other values and that even most socialists don't want to live under a Pol Pot-type regime, then they have to go back to the drawing board to come up with some other specious justification for usurping the moral and intellectual autonomy of others.
The core value of the "capitalism" they oppose is not the enrichment of a few wealthy capitalists, but rather a system of justice where each individual has exclusive control over the use and disposition of oneself and one's peacefully-acquired property; with private ownership being the essential institution that safeguards individual autonomy. Private ownership of the means of production doesn't mean that a capitalist owns one's workers or customers, nor does it prevent other people from exercising their liberty to become capitalists themselves and compete in the same line of production. Since coordination and exchange can only arise from voluntary cooperation in a system based on peacefully-acquired private ownership, a capitalist can only become rich by serving the interests of others, and doing so well enough that one isn't driven out of business by one's competitors.
If a few people grow richer by unjust means of privileges, immunities, or coerced transfers of wealth, that isn't the fault of the institution of private ownership; placing the blame on capitalists and "capitalism" for the unjust accumulation of wealth is misdirected. It is the market-rigging privileges, etc. that need to be abolished.
I tend to think your overall sense that something is wrong here is correct but I think there is a better to express than wrangling over definitions. Say instead:
Sure, other things being equal more egalitarian distributions are better. However, the question of pragmatic relevance here isn't whether god should wave a magic wand and make a one time redistribution but whether countries tend to do better when they adopt certain kinds of policies. Indeed, if you aren't sure about particular policies isn't it a mistake to encourage people to generally be more inclined to adopt such policies?
"that any taxation is a violation of rights and thus should not happen?"
This is where being a Georgist Single Land Taxer comes in handy. I can claim that any tax on production is a violation of rights, and thus the tax on the value of undeveloped land is deontologically acceptable.
But how do you gather revenue in a Georgist way that doesn't either violate your principle or cause some really problematic distortions to the economy?
If you use the actual current land value you've violated your principle because if I develop some useful service on plot A that will increase the value, and hence my tax, on plot B next door.
OTOH suppose you tax all land equally (or at least on the value someone would have assigned ab initio). Now you have a problem, if you want to generate non-trivial revenue you've probably made it unprofitable to raise cattle or farm. Either you end up leaving land fallow or the government ends up retaining almost all ownership and just renting it out which seems even worse.
Your rebuttal is well said.
I think the discussion of the Fraser Institute metrics, as well as government spending as a fraction of GDP, is a key aspect of this debate. These statistics are as you point out used selectively by both sides to bolster their position. But I would further argue that they are highly questionable and not a good bedrock for a position here. For example, I graphed government spending/GDP according to the IMF against the Fraser regulation score. These are the two pieces of evidence Sehon offers in his response piece. It turns out that they are weakly correlated (R squared = 0.29), but in the OPPOSITE direction that Sehon argues, i.e. higher spending is correlated with less regulation. If you restrict the analysis to "the West" (I used Europe without Russia and Turkey and with US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), the correlation is actually zero. Even if you just look at Western Europe, US, and Canada, it's pretty weak (about 0.15), although now in the opposite direction. The regluation index is strongly correlated with their overall economic freedom index, so the results are more or less the same with that one as with the regulation index.
I think this is yet another reason that analysis at the level of nations is not the best way to understand policy issues. GDP is unreliable, and I'm sure the Freedom and Regulation indices are full of researcher degrees of freedom that reduce reliability. I think it's much better to think about issues individually as Bryan wants to: does immigration restriction help, or not? Zoning? Etc. Comparing a massive menu of policies, history, culture, demographics, and natural resources to another one just seems futile by comparison.
Two thoughts regarding your many excellent points above:
1. I'm sure it must be frustrating to you that you have to make arguments you've made countless times to eager but unread socialist college freshmen to, instead, highly educated and intelligent fellow PhDs. Your points, though quite well put, are nothing many of us, non-academics, haven't heard many, many times before. Why are these people so unstudied and incurious? Thoughts? It reminds me of your point in your book on education, that people forget what they learn in a course soon after the final exam. I wonder, if you asked Sehon to repeat your critique of his position in, say, 6 months, how well he'd do.
2. Your point about justice in initial acquisition is not only well put, but, given what's happening in the Middle East right now, quite timely. In case some of your readers had the same thought, I'll mention Stephen Halbrook's seminal article in Journal of Libertarian Studies Vol 5, #4, "The Alienation of a Homeland: How Palestine Became Israel*" It's available free online.
Thanks for the recommendation, I'm gonna check it out!
Socialism requires a high level of social trust, which, at the very least, makes it un-scalable. The quote from the Danish prime minister says it all - “The welfare society is fundamentally a community, which is based on a mutual trust that we all contribute,” Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said in March at a summit of the country’s municipalities. “All that is being seriously challenged by parallel societies.” The PM made this statement in defense of the draconian measures the government is taking to preserve Danish ideals. i.e. tearing down their low income immigrant housing! https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/world/europe/denmark-housing.html#:~:text=The%20government%20says%20the%20plan,the%20country's%20generous%20welfare%20system.
Why do people think Sweden has lower GDP/capita then the USA?
1) They spend 50% of GDP instead of 44% on government?
2) Their Heritage economic freedom score is 10% higher then the USA?
3) History, Geography, Resources, etc?
4) Socialist Healthcare?
5) They kept schools open and didn't mask.
6) Not enough middle eastern refugees, diversity is our strength.
1/9 of Sweden’s population is middle eastern refugees. Far too many of those are military service aged men. It’s a recipe for trouble.
"Socialism" in the authoritarian leninist/maoist sense mainly only came to be under unique circumstances or war and/or civil war in backward countries a long time ago.
Nobody in Sweden wants to introduce a Leninist state, and they indeed guard their democratic privileges. When Sweden felt certain "socialist" reforms weren't working they didn't starve the peasantry and purge dissidents, the legislature passed reforms based on the will of the people to move in a different direction.
It seems really pointless to go on the on about the Soviet Union when that isn't what most people calling themselves "socialists" or admiring the Nordic model want.
"universal redistribution, education subsidies"
Most people that like the Nordic model seem to want more of that stuff. Maybe they disagree on some details. The three big things I hear about are universal healthcare, free daycare/generous maternity leave, and probably cheap university.
It's hard to defend the US health system as superior because it isn't.
I can't quite parse the way the Swedish child support system works and I favor cash over subsidized daycare, but the bottom line raising kids costs money whether you do it yourself or farm it out. I don't think it's the end of the world for the childless to have to subsidize the raising of the next generation they aren't producing themselves.
The American system of wildly expensive college funded by government backed undischargable debt doesn't seem particularly superior to Sweden either.
So I don't know. The areas people gripe about appear to be one where Sweden does at least as well if not better then the American status quo.
If someone called for a VAT to fund a bigger child tax credit would you call him a commie pinko?
Most of the people who complain about “wildly expensive college funded by government backed undischargable debt” are unwilling to do the obvious simple thing to fix it. Stop federal student loan guarantees.
I think it's always useful to bring up the collectivist tragedies of the 20th century because nearly every one of them was perpetrated by elites trying to manifest what they'd read in Marx and various other socialists' work. Perhaps the balance that the Nordic countries is currently striking is not bad, though they do not exist in a vacuum and so benefit from some of the excesses of our system, but that can easily lead people to think that a similar approach applied to the rest of the economy would be advisable. With the help of a convincing enough sophist, the dysfunction you breed can be turned into passion for more extreme adherence to the ideology causing your woes. These historical examples show us what that could look like and so are hardly every pointless.
About the US healthcare and higher education systems, I would agree with you that they're inferior. But that's because our system is more crony capitalist/corporatist than it is laissez faire, and those are some of the sectors which are the most striking examples. If you're not aware of the level of government meddling in those sectors of the economy, I can point you to a few resources, but most libertarians don't deny the massive drawbacks of the current system; we just have different explanations of how it got this way and hence different proscriptions for how to undo this mess.
"Libertarian" solutions in healthcare tend to amount to some DC think tanks and lobbying groups take some government program and making it super complicated and full of loopholes to make some private actors rich at public expense while talking about how it increases "choice" or "privatization."
Medicare Part C didn't drive down the cost of healthcare.
Medicare Part D not negotiating prices led to a ridiculous system of Pharmacy DIR and manufacturer rebates.
Adding a bunch of useless metal levels to the ACA didn't do anything to create a real "marketplace".
I have to evaluate the libertarian impact on healthcare as it is, not what it would want to be in some alternate world. In the world we have increased "privatization" and complication of government benefits tends to lead to worse outcomes, and that is the impact libertarians tend to have on the margin in most recent health legislation.
Whenever you see "choice" read "risk pool loophole swamp". We would be better off with a simpler and more universal structure that insurers and providers could spreadsheet game less, even if it meant less "consumer choice".
Except what you describe can't be considered remotely libertarian as it's the exact type of things that we have been decrying for years as examples of government waste and inefficiency. A libertarian solution would be to phase out entitlement programs and pay back citizens what they'd paid into the system so that they can pursue their preferred alternative on the open market without the distortions introduced by having those programs there in the first place. Antony Davies and James Harrigan have been blowing the whistle on the looming economic issues we'll face if we don't do something about our unfunded obligations (e.g., medicare and social security), and by do something, they usually mean phase out or at least reduce benefits. Honestly, I'm kinda flabbergasted that you're associating those policies with libertarians since usually libertarians end up getting lambasted as wanting people to die because we oppose the whole mess and would rather do away with it.
Also I just want to clarify that I'm not trying to measure whether a policy is libertarian based on whether it was successful or not. I'm measuring based on the actual implementation of the "solution" and whether that reduces the involvement of the state in affairs or not, not on a more corporatist/neoliberal standard of "protecting" the free market or "increasing" competition. Whether a course of action is libertarian or not can really just be boiled down to whether it's reducing NAP violations (or fraud). Whether it's the right course of action can be argued about, but we have a very simple standard for whether something can be considered libertarian or not. Regardless what your views are on zoning laws/urban planning, public education, monetary policy, etc., I can say they're all non-libertarian with high confidence.
"If someone called for a VAT?"
You can stop right there, the rest of the question doesn't matter. And the answer is YES.
Bryan, this is all good and well but you are a hypocrite for holding a tenured position and you should just resign from your academic position.
I believe he's discussed this before. If he resigned, he'd just be replaced by someone else and has no reason to think that would be a better outcome.
Well many Bryan accuses of hypocrisy could mount the same defense. For example, "if I don't eat this meat as an environmentalist, someone else will."
You seem to be confusing supply and demand with that argument. The point in Bryan's case is that there is an over abundance of bad professors to take his spot, so even if he was merely zero value his replacement would be worse, and the demand would be constant. In the case of meat eating environmentalists decreasing their demand for meat would decrease supply.
Again, according to Bryan, all professors are bad professors.
No, I don't think he has said that. I don't think the view that a system of tenured professors and public unversities is bad implies that everything resulting from that system is also bad.
For example, we're all against the federal government having Senators throw darts at a board to decide the size of the federal budget, but if this random process happens to result in my favored size of the federal budget, I don't think I'm obligated to advocate for the voiding of the result because the process was unfair.
I would guess that Bryan thinks that tenure results in unproductive tenured faculty and an unproductive rent-seeking competition among prospective faculty (clearly both true). But I think he believes that SOME tenured faculty happen to be productive, himself included.
"I would guess that Bryan thinks that tenure results in unproductive tenured faculty and an unproductive rent-seeking competition among prospective faculty (clearly both true). But I think he believes that SOME tenured faculty happen to be productive, himself included."
How nice. "I happen to think that tenure and education are both scams but there are exceptions for tenured professors, which I conveniently happen to be one."
This is obviously not convincing imo. Imagine a billionaire leftie saying "billionaires should donate 90% of their wealth but there are well-defined exceptions, which I happen to be one..."
Besides all that he has written about education (lack of transfer learning, useless credentialing etc.) would also apply to his classes. So it's not clear to me why he is an exception.
Also, he admits that his thoughts on tenure conflict with his holding such a job. He just doesn't think he's a hypocrite becasue he's not being hyperbolic when he decries tenure. Again very convenient.
See here:
https://betonit.substack.com/p/tenure-is-a-total-scam
<<Some will call me a hypocrite for taking part in this system, but that’s part and parcel of being a whistleblower. If I wasn’t a tenured professor, who would take my critique seriously?>>
My response: You have blown the whistle. Now, GTFO.
"The oppression of taxpayers and the deception of donors need to end. If the result is that I lose my dream job for life, so be it."
My response: GTFO now, so that taxpayers are oppressed a little less.
Yes, I think this is true.
Isn't this roughly the equivalent of telling people who complain about e.g. systemic oppression to simply end themselves, because by continuing to live they are being hypocritical? Or is it closer to telling police officers who blow whistles about police corruption that they should quit themselves because police are corrupt?
It seems like you are arguing that anyone who is in a field with many bad actors that take advantage of people must leave the field because it is impossible for any actor in the field to be good. That seems like a self fulfilling prophecy, or at least a way to ensure there are never whistle blowers.
"Or is it closer to telling police officers who blow whistles about police corruption that they should quit themselves because police are corrupt? "
No. Because in theory it is possible to be a moral cop.
But according to Bryan, no one can have a tenured position at a US institution with public funding because tenure and education are both scams.
You may wish to re-read his arguments, as you definitely have a mistaken understanding of them.