Nice post but perhaps a bit US-centric: "Most polities are split into two big hostile tribes." That's significantly less true in Sweden. There's the difference between two-party and proportional systems. There's also the difference that the US is much less a folk—from history, from hugeness, from language. Demonization of 'the other side' is not as stark in Sweden, partly because there is less cogency to the notion of two opposing sides and partly because there is less demonization.
This is true. The nastiness of the present US polarization seems to have something to do with the evaporation of any basis for national unity aside from economies of scale (whose benefits accrue mostly to the top). I had long been thinking that the fading sense of American unity was mostly a result of the decline in religious belief and the increase in racial diversity, but I enjoyed this essay in which Darel Paul argues it's the loss of confidence in empire -- damaged after Vietnam, damaged further after Iraq and Afghanistan:
I think a better way to understand the US polarization and lack of coherency is to think of the United States itself as an empire, one straining under overly centralized rule. Comparing the US to countries with a small fraction of the population or land area is always going to lead to bad conclusions.
I think there's some truth to what you're saying, and I'm certainly a fan of decentralizing the monster that our administrative state has become. But my biggest problem with your argument is that it doesn't seem to account for what has changed more recently. The US population has increased continuously since its founding. The rate of increase has actually slowed more recently. Meanwhile, centralization in the US administrative apparatus has also been on a generally upward trend, though most of this happened in a few specific shocks, none of them very recent.
But despite all this, disunity and polarization have not increased continuously and have in fact clearly accelerated in the past 10-15 years.
I think your model could be reworked to say that more sprawling states tend to be more vulnerable to disunity-promoting shocks, particularly when they insist on holding rigidly to a centralized administration. This is probably true, but it doesn't answer the question of what the actual shock of the 21st century has been.
For significant part of 2000s, all major parties in the Swedish "multiparty system" were voluntary in either the Left or Right block. The block that got most seats (majority) in parliament after elections would form the government. Inside each block, the relative power of parties within had some significance, but it was effectively two-party system.
Until recently, when Sverigedemokraterna become a thing: both blocks refused to work with them ("SD" and "not-SD" became the most important blocks), which after the most recent elections caused problems as SD had so many seats that neither "official" block had a majority in parliament. Now the latest polls I saw suggest that SD is going to be have more seats than the largest traditional Right party, Moderaterna in the next elections.
I can't speak with any authority on Sweden, but I do think there's some truth to the idea that having two parties contributes to polarization. If the US adopted proportional representation and the Republicans and Democrats were each split up, then even if the coalitions remained basically intact for decades yet (which they probably would), I do think people on the street would think somewhat differently about both their political opponents and their own parties. People tend to assume their opponents are a monolith, and simply organizing into multiple parties gives the lie to this assumption. Also, a two-party system actually makes coalitions more monolithic, because a lot of voters end up adopting positions just because it's what their favored political party supports.
"Or give up on trans rights in exchange for $50B of federal school funding."
This deal helps one member of the Dem coalition but hurts another. Before even discussing it with the other party, they would need to agree internally. The trans people are getting nothing in return for this deal.
You aren't just negotiating with the other party, you are negotiating within your party.
"Similarly, imagine Republicans offering to support higher immigration as long as immigrants were excluded from the welfare state."
Yeah, this has worked so well in the past huh.
"Or promising to abandon school choice if public K-12 establishes a 40% Republican teacher quota."
A 40% Republican teacher quota sounds like a wildly unworkable and idiotic idea. So you would be giving up a real solution for something that might even make things worse.
"But it utterly fails to explain why China would refuse to name a price and cross its fingers in the hope that Taiwan will play the fool."
If China accepts that deal they have forfeited their claim. It destroys their credibility including with their own people. If they try to enforce that claim in the future it will be seen as illegitimate.
China already has a bunch of foreign exchange it doesn't know what to do with. Will more foreign exchange allow the CCP to declare that China has surpassed the West.
"Why did you refuse to compromise on the death penalty to get your way on abortion? "
Abortion a the death penalty aren't about "life". The death penalty is a proxy for how seriously we take crime and abortion is a proxy for whether you believe in traditional sexual and familial values (chastity, fertility, marriage). That's why few on the pro-life side care about IVF, because people doing IVF are trying to start families which is what the debate is really about, not fetuses.
There is a lack of imagination here. What principals were Manchin and Sinema pushing when then they signed the latest bill? Sure looked like horse trading to me.
In general, I think you just haven't thought through how unworkable these proposals are.
I think the closest thing to truth here is the following two principals:
1) Foreign policy is a bunch of random posturing nonsense most of the time
2) There is a strong status quo bias that is hard to overcome
I came here to say this: parties are coalitions of interest groups, and convincing one to make substantial sacrifices for another is basically unheard of. Even if "the democrats" overall benefit, a deal has to make everyone at the table non-furious. So horse-trading mostly happens within topics (where a topic is defined by the interest groups that exist): any given educational bill will involve deals about education that make it tolerable to people involved. Sometimes a given group isn't on the table instead of at it, in which case they can be sacrificed by one side or another, but that's unusual.
There's a famous quote which I can't find and will now mangle. In most parliamentary countries, people have interests and form parties to advance those interests. In the US, people form parties and then figure out what interests to support.
Mike Munger likes to say the answer to all economic questions is "transaction costs". I like to say the answer to all US political questions is "plurality voting". Given our winner-take-all plurality voting systems, we're more or less guaranteed to form two durable parties which are amalgams of many loosely-aligned interest groups.
Eh. People wouldn't horse-trade publicly, and they can't negotiate away any sacred cows. But quiet deals among politicians, where they support each other's non-sacred-cow legislation is the norm.
Interesting point on trading territory. My impression from reading about European history since the Roman era is most wars were about acquiring resources and that was mostly so those in power had more wealth to play with (either by taxing it or taking personal ownership of stuff you conquered). Middle ages wars all seemed to start because King X wanted territory Y and ended when they traded provinces to end the conflict. For now.
World War II was the last major conflict I can think of which was all about annexing territory. In the years since, we seem to have almost completely given up that behavior (Ukraine is shocking because land grabs are so out of the norm any more). I think your implicit observation that this is because of democracy may be right. It's much easier for an autocrat to give up land. It's much harder for a Parliament to do so even when it makes complete sense.
It's weird. On the one hand, we decry many borders because they were just set by a bunch of white guys in a smoky room drawing lines on a map. And yet, we seem to have terrible difficulty recognizing those cigar-chomping white guys did a bad job and the borders really ought to move. There seem to be any number of long simmering disputed borders which, from an outsiders perspective, seem trivially easy to fix, and yet the people involved don't.
A big part of why it's difficult for democracies to abandon land is that usually the land in question is inhabited by people attached to the country and that the rest of the population thinks of as its countrymen. The Kuril Islands are, for the record, inhabited by Russians who want to be a part of Russia. Protecting their countrymen is viewed as a large part of governments' raison d'etre, and selling them out for a cash prize is viewed as a betrayal of that purpose.
Democracies after WW2 have generally been fine with giving up land they view as not a core part of the country, inhabited by people who don't want to belong to that country -- we call this "decolonization".
Israel gave up the Sinai for peace with Egypt, despite some Israeli settlers living there. This was difficult to do, intensely unpopular in some parts of society, and it required both a real fear of continued Egyptian aggression and a superpower brokering and guaranteeing the agreement to ensure there would be no further aggression. Of course, that sort of guarantee isn't really possible when we're talking about a deal between major powers like Russia and Japan, as opposed to minor nations like Egypt and Israel. And Japan holds no credible threat of violence against Russia.
I think one important aspect that is missing fro this article is the idea of conflicting commitment strategies.
David Friedman has an example of a neighbor who throws his trash into your backyard every day and offers to stop in exchange for a trifling sum. Even if you find his offer credible (and your cheapest option), you will not accept it. Which is why your neighbor won't try this in the first place.
Border disputes are a clear case of such commitment strategies conflicting with each other. If Japan pays Russia for land it already claims, what stops other nations from claiming Japanese islands and getting free money?
I believe deep ideological issues are similar to this. The Democrats don't want to pay the Republicans to step back from an unreasonable position, and vice versa.
I'm amazed at the even far more mundane areas for compromise that are ignored. Drop the min wage in exchange for an EITC expansion? Permanently limit cap gains taxes in exchange for no cap on payroll taxes?
Many government employees believe that earning profits is immoral. Instead, they believe that the government should allocate scarce resources even though that encourages stalemates. For example, from the Wall Street Journal today discussing Colorado River water.
In a letter Monday to federal regulators, John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, accused other users of coming up with unreasonable proposals—including for “drought profiteering.” In an interview, he singled out farming districts in Arizona and California that have offered to use less water on their crops in return for cash payments.
Farm officials say they have conserved, too, and called the money-for-water plan necessary to quickly achieve savings and help offset the economic impact.
In Yuma County, Ariz., four irrigation districts have put together a plan to pay farmers $1,500 for each acre foot of water they don’t use over 935,000 acres there over the next four years, said Wade Noble, general counsel for the districts.
The arrangement would represent a roughly one-fifth reduction in the farmers’ water use, which they would attempt to make up by improving crop yields. They could get compensation from $4 billion in drought relief Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) negotiated to include in the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed Tuesday.
One concern about these sorts of bargains is they may incentivize extremism or expressing false preferences. Democrats might advocate for open borders as leverage to get abortion but they might not truly want open borders. Financially rewarding the capture of islands might incentivize military conquest. I don’t know if this would actually happen, but it’s worth noting.
They face a cost for advocating positions if their followers don’t accept them. If they have no support for the position, sacrificing it has no credibility. It is hard to spoof. Even marginal support might not be worth anything - “my constituents all want to burn billionaires at the stake, but I am willing to forego this if you give me Medicare for all.”
That seems like a problem in any negotiation--candidate says he won’t settle for any salary less than X when in fact he’d settle for 0.8x--and yet deals in the private sector happen all the time. The powerful insight here is how impossible bargaining becomes when you’re trying to make trade offs across “moral absolutes” which I think Bryan correctly argues describes how most people think about abortion, capital punishment, school choice, national boundaries, immigration, ...
When dealing in "moral absolutes" (a problematic description...but a digression) then yes, compromise is elusive. Government as it's now constructed deals largely with things like paying social security checks and expanding Medicare which are, indeed, full of compromises (e.g. the retirement age). Building straw-men like Bryan has done here does little to illuminate how we can make government better doing the 99% of things that don't touch on "moral absolutes." By highlighting failures to compromise on these fringe issues, Bryan is only making more people believe that government can never get anything done but, for evidence to the contrary one need only look out beyond your private property boundary which, for most people, connects to other property via a government supplied and maintained network of roads and utilities.
Excellent post, and I think that you’re probably right about the priority being getting emotions high as opposed to getting stuff down.
It’s pretty obvious from the way many issues are framed, even. Take abortion. Framing it as pro-choice vs pro-life is--strictly speaking--inaccurate in itself, as there are very few states on either aisle who completely ban or allow abortion. It really depends on context.
A lot of people just don’t like mentioning this though. It makes the conversation harder to have.
Nevertheless, it’s not fair to blame politicians alone. The reason that this “flare up emotions, avoid action” thing works is because people let it work, too. No keyboard warrior hardcore democrats wants to talk about why choice is fair in abortion but not in vaccines. And no similar Republican wants to talk about how Texas still rules abortion illegal even in cases of rape.
We should look at ourselves, too.
If anyone interested in some nuance, at least on Roe, I’d deeply appreciate your thoughts on the article below. Trying to reach more people with it.
"You could insist that all of these are rotten deals for the other side. If that were the key problem, however, you’d expect the other side to jump at the opportunity."
I JUST don't get it. Teach me how to read (again)!
"You could insist that all of these are rotten deals for the other side. If that were the key problem, however, you’d expect the other side to jump at the opportunity."
I JUST don't get it. Teach me how to read (again)!
In the post from which "politics is cruelty" comes, it is said that cruel is an emotion. It is not. You can be cruel but you can't feel cruel, for one thing. A person being cruel is a person disposed to behave in certain ways, for openers. Anger is an emotion: you can be angry, make someone else angry, feel angry, and so on. If a person does something cruel, they are not feeling cruel or making other people feel cruel. You don't feel cruelty; you are cruel or not, which is a way of talking about what you do and why you do it and how it is to be evaluated. Being cruel, again, is not feeling cruel. It is not even having any specific sensation. It is only a category mistake to think it is.
I would draw a line between this piece and your thought-provoking essay justifying Szasz in light of price theory -- in both essays, you seek to the fit the untidy world of human passions to the Procrustean bed of economics. It is a wonderful shtick.
Nice post but perhaps a bit US-centric: "Most polities are split into two big hostile tribes." That's significantly less true in Sweden. There's the difference between two-party and proportional systems. There's also the difference that the US is much less a folk—from history, from hugeness, from language. Demonization of 'the other side' is not as stark in Sweden, partly because there is less cogency to the notion of two opposing sides and partly because there is less demonization.
Sweden has a homogeneous poulation of 10 milion that's why.
This is true. The nastiness of the present US polarization seems to have something to do with the evaporation of any basis for national unity aside from economies of scale (whose benefits accrue mostly to the top). I had long been thinking that the fading sense of American unity was mostly a result of the decline in religious belief and the increase in racial diversity, but I enjoyed this essay in which Darel Paul argues it's the loss of confidence in empire -- damaged after Vietnam, damaged further after Iraq and Afghanistan:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-republics-glue-loses-its-stickiness/
I think a better way to understand the US polarization and lack of coherency is to think of the United States itself as an empire, one straining under overly centralized rule. Comparing the US to countries with a small fraction of the population or land area is always going to lead to bad conclusions.
I wrote about it more here: https://dochammer.substack.com/p/the-usa-as-an-accidental-empire
I think there's some truth to what you're saying, and I'm certainly a fan of decentralizing the monster that our administrative state has become. But my biggest problem with your argument is that it doesn't seem to account for what has changed more recently. The US population has increased continuously since its founding. The rate of increase has actually slowed more recently. Meanwhile, centralization in the US administrative apparatus has also been on a generally upward trend, though most of this happened in a few specific shocks, none of them very recent.
But despite all this, disunity and polarization have not increased continuously and have in fact clearly accelerated in the past 10-15 years.
I think your model could be reworked to say that more sprawling states tend to be more vulnerable to disunity-promoting shocks, particularly when they insist on holding rigidly to a centralized administration. This is probably true, but it doesn't answer the question of what the actual shock of the 21st century has been.
For significant part of 2000s, all major parties in the Swedish "multiparty system" were voluntary in either the Left or Right block. The block that got most seats (majority) in parliament after elections would form the government. Inside each block, the relative power of parties within had some significance, but it was effectively two-party system.
Until recently, when Sverigedemokraterna become a thing: both blocks refused to work with them ("SD" and "not-SD" became the most important blocks), which after the most recent elections caused problems as SD had so many seats that neither "official" block had a majority in parliament. Now the latest polls I saw suggest that SD is going to be have more seats than the largest traditional Right party, Moderaterna in the next elections.
I can't speak with any authority on Sweden, but I do think there's some truth to the idea that having two parties contributes to polarization. If the US adopted proportional representation and the Republicans and Democrats were each split up, then even if the coalitions remained basically intact for decades yet (which they probably would), I do think people on the street would think somewhat differently about both their political opponents and their own parties. People tend to assume their opponents are a monolith, and simply organizing into multiple parties gives the lie to this assumption. Also, a two-party system actually makes coalitions more monolithic, because a lot of voters end up adopting positions just because it's what their favored political party supports.
"Or give up on trans rights in exchange for $50B of federal school funding."
This deal helps one member of the Dem coalition but hurts another. Before even discussing it with the other party, they would need to agree internally. The trans people are getting nothing in return for this deal.
You aren't just negotiating with the other party, you are negotiating within your party.
"Similarly, imagine Republicans offering to support higher immigration as long as immigrants were excluded from the welfare state."
Yeah, this has worked so well in the past huh.
"Or promising to abandon school choice if public K-12 establishes a 40% Republican teacher quota."
A 40% Republican teacher quota sounds like a wildly unworkable and idiotic idea. So you would be giving up a real solution for something that might even make things worse.
"But it utterly fails to explain why China would refuse to name a price and cross its fingers in the hope that Taiwan will play the fool."
If China accepts that deal they have forfeited their claim. It destroys their credibility including with their own people. If they try to enforce that claim in the future it will be seen as illegitimate.
China already has a bunch of foreign exchange it doesn't know what to do with. Will more foreign exchange allow the CCP to declare that China has surpassed the West.
"Why did you refuse to compromise on the death penalty to get your way on abortion? "
Abortion a the death penalty aren't about "life". The death penalty is a proxy for how seriously we take crime and abortion is a proxy for whether you believe in traditional sexual and familial values (chastity, fertility, marriage). That's why few on the pro-life side care about IVF, because people doing IVF are trying to start families which is what the debate is really about, not fetuses.
There is a lack of imagination here. What principals were Manchin and Sinema pushing when then they signed the latest bill? Sure looked like horse trading to me.
In general, I think you just haven't thought through how unworkable these proposals are.
I think the closest thing to truth here is the following two principals:
1) Foreign policy is a bunch of random posturing nonsense most of the time
2) There is a strong status quo bias that is hard to overcome
I came here to say this: parties are coalitions of interest groups, and convincing one to make substantial sacrifices for another is basically unheard of. Even if "the democrats" overall benefit, a deal has to make everyone at the table non-furious. So horse-trading mostly happens within topics (where a topic is defined by the interest groups that exist): any given educational bill will involve deals about education that make it tolerable to people involved. Sometimes a given group isn't on the table instead of at it, in which case they can be sacrificed by one side or another, but that's unusual.
There's a famous quote which I can't find and will now mangle. In most parliamentary countries, people have interests and form parties to advance those interests. In the US, people form parties and then figure out what interests to support.
Mike Munger likes to say the answer to all economic questions is "transaction costs". I like to say the answer to all US political questions is "plurality voting". Given our winner-take-all plurality voting systems, we're more or less guaranteed to form two durable parties which are amalgams of many loosely-aligned interest groups.
Eh. People wouldn't horse-trade publicly, and they can't negotiate away any sacred cows. But quiet deals among politicians, where they support each other's non-sacred-cow legislation is the norm.
Can't forget this classic comic:
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/05/01
Interesting point on trading territory. My impression from reading about European history since the Roman era is most wars were about acquiring resources and that was mostly so those in power had more wealth to play with (either by taxing it or taking personal ownership of stuff you conquered). Middle ages wars all seemed to start because King X wanted territory Y and ended when they traded provinces to end the conflict. For now.
World War II was the last major conflict I can think of which was all about annexing territory. In the years since, we seem to have almost completely given up that behavior (Ukraine is shocking because land grabs are so out of the norm any more). I think your implicit observation that this is because of democracy may be right. It's much easier for an autocrat to give up land. It's much harder for a Parliament to do so even when it makes complete sense.
It's weird. On the one hand, we decry many borders because they were just set by a bunch of white guys in a smoky room drawing lines on a map. And yet, we seem to have terrible difficulty recognizing those cigar-chomping white guys did a bad job and the borders really ought to move. There seem to be any number of long simmering disputed borders which, from an outsiders perspective, seem trivially easy to fix, and yet the people involved don't.
A big part of why it's difficult for democracies to abandon land is that usually the land in question is inhabited by people attached to the country and that the rest of the population thinks of as its countrymen. The Kuril Islands are, for the record, inhabited by Russians who want to be a part of Russia. Protecting their countrymen is viewed as a large part of governments' raison d'etre, and selling them out for a cash prize is viewed as a betrayal of that purpose.
Democracies after WW2 have generally been fine with giving up land they view as not a core part of the country, inhabited by people who don't want to belong to that country -- we call this "decolonization".
Israel gave up the Sinai for peace with Egypt, despite some Israeli settlers living there. This was difficult to do, intensely unpopular in some parts of society, and it required both a real fear of continued Egyptian aggression and a superpower brokering and guaranteeing the agreement to ensure there would be no further aggression. Of course, that sort of guarantee isn't really possible when we're talking about a deal between major powers like Russia and Japan, as opposed to minor nations like Egypt and Israel. And Japan holds no credible threat of violence against Russia.
I think one important aspect that is missing fro this article is the idea of conflicting commitment strategies.
David Friedman has an example of a neighbor who throws his trash into your backyard every day and offers to stop in exchange for a trifling sum. Even if you find his offer credible (and your cheapest option), you will not accept it. Which is why your neighbor won't try this in the first place.
Border disputes are a clear case of such commitment strategies conflicting with each other. If Japan pays Russia for land it already claims, what stops other nations from claiming Japanese islands and getting free money?
I believe deep ideological issues are similar to this. The Democrats don't want to pay the Republicans to step back from an unreasonable position, and vice versa.
I'm amazed at the even far more mundane areas for compromise that are ignored. Drop the min wage in exchange for an EITC expansion? Permanently limit cap gains taxes in exchange for no cap on payroll taxes?
Many government employees believe that earning profits is immoral. Instead, they believe that the government should allocate scarce resources even though that encourages stalemates. For example, from the Wall Street Journal today discussing Colorado River water.
In a letter Monday to federal regulators, John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, accused other users of coming up with unreasonable proposals—including for “drought profiteering.” In an interview, he singled out farming districts in Arizona and California that have offered to use less water on their crops in return for cash payments.
Farm officials say they have conserved, too, and called the money-for-water plan necessary to quickly achieve savings and help offset the economic impact.
In Yuma County, Ariz., four irrigation districts have put together a plan to pay farmers $1,500 for each acre foot of water they don’t use over 935,000 acres there over the next four years, said Wade Noble, general counsel for the districts.
The arrangement would represent a roughly one-fifth reduction in the farmers’ water use, which they would attempt to make up by improving crop yields. They could get compensation from $4 billion in drought relief Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) negotiated to include in the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed Tuesday.
One concern about these sorts of bargains is they may incentivize extremism or expressing false preferences. Democrats might advocate for open borders as leverage to get abortion but they might not truly want open borders. Financially rewarding the capture of islands might incentivize military conquest. I don’t know if this would actually happen, but it’s worth noting.
They face a cost for advocating positions if their followers don’t accept them. If they have no support for the position, sacrificing it has no credibility. It is hard to spoof. Even marginal support might not be worth anything - “my constituents all want to burn billionaires at the stake, but I am willing to forego this if you give me Medicare for all.”
Good point
That seems like a problem in any negotiation--candidate says he won’t settle for any salary less than X when in fact he’d settle for 0.8x--and yet deals in the private sector happen all the time. The powerful insight here is how impossible bargaining becomes when you’re trying to make trade offs across “moral absolutes” which I think Bryan correctly argues describes how most people think about abortion, capital punishment, school choice, national boundaries, immigration, ...
When dealing in "moral absolutes" (a problematic description...but a digression) then yes, compromise is elusive. Government as it's now constructed deals largely with things like paying social security checks and expanding Medicare which are, indeed, full of compromises (e.g. the retirement age). Building straw-men like Bryan has done here does little to illuminate how we can make government better doing the 99% of things that don't touch on "moral absolutes." By highlighting failures to compromise on these fringe issues, Bryan is only making more people believe that government can never get anything done but, for evidence to the contrary one need only look out beyond your private property boundary which, for most people, connects to other property via a government supplied and maintained network of roads and utilities.
Excellent post, and I think that you’re probably right about the priority being getting emotions high as opposed to getting stuff down.
It’s pretty obvious from the way many issues are framed, even. Take abortion. Framing it as pro-choice vs pro-life is--strictly speaking--inaccurate in itself, as there are very few states on either aisle who completely ban or allow abortion. It really depends on context.
A lot of people just don’t like mentioning this though. It makes the conversation harder to have.
Nevertheless, it’s not fair to blame politicians alone. The reason that this “flare up emotions, avoid action” thing works is because people let it work, too. No keyboard warrior hardcore democrats wants to talk about why choice is fair in abortion but not in vaccines. And no similar Republican wants to talk about how Texas still rules abortion illegal even in cases of rape.
We should look at ourselves, too.
If anyone interested in some nuance, at least on Roe, I’d deeply appreciate your thoughts on the article below. Trying to reach more people with it.
https://nanithemoney.substack.com/p/raise-your-hand-if-youre-neither
"You could insist that all of these are rotten deals for the other side. If that were the key problem, however, you’d expect the other side to jump at the opportunity."
I JUST don't get it. Teach me how to read (again)!
"You could insist that all of these are rotten deals for the other side. If that were the key problem, however, you’d expect the other side to jump at the opportunity."
I JUST don't get it. Teach me how to read (again)!
In the post from which "politics is cruelty" comes, it is said that cruel is an emotion. It is not. You can be cruel but you can't feel cruel, for one thing. A person being cruel is a person disposed to behave in certain ways, for openers. Anger is an emotion: you can be angry, make someone else angry, feel angry, and so on. If a person does something cruel, they are not feeling cruel or making other people feel cruel. You don't feel cruelty; you are cruel or not, which is a way of talking about what you do and why you do it and how it is to be evaluated. Being cruel, again, is not feeling cruel. It is not even having any specific sensation. It is only a category mistake to think it is.
I would draw a line between this piece and your thought-provoking essay justifying Szasz in light of price theory -- in both essays, you seek to the fit the untidy world of human passions to the Procrustean bed of economics. It is a wonderful shtick.
What Robin Hanson said.
Also, there are technologies today enabling people to create new democratic and territorial systems
https://thenetworkstate.com/dashboard