The problem is always capturing the investments one cares about - for real estate and much of stock trading, there really isn’t much of a connection to productivity to begin with, and a lot of the thinking around capital gains taxes centers capturing some of that appreciation.
I do think there is a real connection between capital gains taxes and reduced investment (heck, we know the Laffer curve was empirically observable - but incredibly rare and nowhere near the general case that it became rhetorically). The UK’s fundamental problem is that it absolutely needs to collect tax on one form of capital appreciation, while encouraging higher levels of other forms of capital. Capital gains tax is a blunt instrument in that regard.
Not really. He’s summed up Libertarians. The fact that many people who subscribe to this idea are absolutely unbearable doesn’t invalidate the idea itself.
There was a time, not so long ago, when the Libertarian Party of the U.S. was not simply a refuge for disgraced members of the GOP. Nowadays, it’s like a minor league affiliate of the GOP; you have sex with a child, we’re going to send you to the Libertarian Party, at least until you learn how to delete your text messages and any other evidence.
Ironically, they were originally a left-wing/anarchist movement. They had a knack of quickly getting killed off by both authoritarian left and right wing governments.
The modern incarnation have almost nothing in common with whatever the term originally meant, apart from selectively claiming to be anti-government.
This goes back to why I started this thread. I find the centring of political discussion around parties and simplistic labels too reductive, and it really doesn’t help foster any consensus at all.
That’s why I asked the question up the thread what “modern conservative” views are like. Because I don’t see any coherent philosophy (not having had time to watch the video provided by @SBYM) at all, just a set of grievances about minorities, tax, and not being able to use their favourite vocabulary about the former. It feels more like an identity rather than political values, and if the next day Trump or Farage were to start espousing liberal values, their cult would move with them.
Of course the cynical would suggest that’s exactly what the billionaires want in order to divide us plebs…
Politically, I would call myself a market conservative. The ‘modern’ does a lot of work there. I walked away from a fairly high level of political activity 20 years ago precisely because far too often I was expected to happily share a ‘big tent’ with social conservatives whose ideas centered around dictating how other people lived, who also expected the state to intervene in the economy to shape it toward how they wished to live. I realized I rarely shared any fundamental views at all with the majority of ‘conservatives’.
Certainly strong elements of that, but also an element of distrust of government attempting to produce change that would come from Burke. I also think classical liberals fall into the trap of the ‘state of nature’ fallacy, reasoning from a hypothetical where there is a magically protected free market and no other institutions, when the reality is that free markets are themselves an institution that require protection in and from a free society.
Yeah it does. Considerations of liberty are relevant to include in every debate/decision about government, but extending that out into a stand-alone philosophy necessitates absurd end points meaning it is only loons, or dishonest people, who only end up there. All the good things about libertarianism can very easily be incorporated into standard liberal or conservative ideology.
Horsehoe theory people, do you think there’s a solid basis to the theory, do you think it’s a function of how the political spectrum isn’t sufficiently well-defined along just one or two dimensions, or do you have other opinions?
I think all of the above and more, some of which I have commented on in one of these threads recently.
People on the ends, especially the left end, view the ideology as a way to express anti establishment ideas far more than they are true believers in the ideology. If the landscape changes in a way that makes attacking the establishment from the right more viable then it’s pretty easy to make the switch. When it comes to people to hate, there is a lot of common ground that can be found between Nazis and communists.
Grift is real. There aren’t THAT many prominent switchers whose platform comes from being part of the establishment. The relevance is that when you are competing in the attention economy of the new media you are very beholden to audience capture and if people see that is where the wind is blowing then they have to start moving there to keep an audience. Interestingly, I have seen a couple of MAGA accounts who started veering “left” the last 6 months in ways that are difficult to reconcile and lack any sort of “ah ha” stated epiphany. The cynical side of me views this as a bet on the anti-trump soon becoming the heterodox “independent thinker” position and so there is a small number of people jockeying to take up that space.
If people are moving right because of audience capture we have to address the demand side of the equation - why is that more viable for people looking for attention. For that I think we have to take seriously the limitations of uniaxial left vs right distinctions. I think a significant part of the shift over the last ten years has been a growing sense that “the left” has an approved set of beliefs. Compliance with them is strictly enforced and allows for only really narrow set of behaviors and ideas. Affiliation with the right has increasingly become a way to reject that. They don’t want to disband the DoE, they just want to be able to say the word retard without being hated on. They dont even want to be able to say the word retard, they just dont want to be not be allowed to. The saying then become part of proving a point that they reject the “left’s” view.
