There is not much difference between your view and that of the credibility theorists. They are saying: “The policy is unpopular (obvious, since it is not, and is not close to being, in place); and even if you could temporarily institute it—sneaking it past the voters—before long its inherent unpopularity would rise to the fore, and it would be reversed.”
Bryan is wrong, because a law that he says would be unpopular WAS popular enough to be put in place, but was struck down by judges who don't care about popularity:
Try again my friend. The SCOTUS is highly conservative and regressive, always has been. They have never once been on the wrong side of now, just history.
Find me a single case where the SCOTUS was overruled in the immediacy on a matter of mass public import AND where all the justices as a result were impeached and replaced. The number one thing driving the SCOTUS has always been public legitimacy and that means never making genuinely unpopular decisions. In cases where that is called for, they simply refuse to hear the case, sometimes for decades, until there is enough public support to rule the way they want to rule.
There is no universe where the SCOTUS tomorrow rules 'no law' means 'no law', 'shall not' means 'shall not', 'speedy trial' means 'speedy trial', or that any of the amendment mean exactly what the say. Trump could run a third term and as long as Congress and the people were behind him, that SCOTUS wouldn't get involved.
And this isn't hypothetical, seen SCOTUS cases where for example the court flat out said West Virginia didn't legally become a state nor was the CSA succession illegal and yet still ruled for the USG because of mootness, "political question", or made up stuff like 'inability to remedy damages".
You're ignoring that politicians and bureaucrats do not want to solve the problems that created and maintain their jobs. That's the last thing they want. The first thing they want is to wring every possible drop of blood out of every little problem, to get more votes, bigger budgets, more subordinates, and the opportunity to issue more regulations to prove they are working on the problem.
The gullible public assumes that means working to solve the problem. Everyone with any common sense knows it means they are working to exacerbate the problem.
Actually, yes, exactly. You can refine the incentive structure all you want in little details, but the core incentives for bureaucrats remain the same.
If bureaucrats are solely motivated to expand bureaucracy then how could America go to moon, execute Manhattan project, amass a continental-sized territory?
How could China and France build thousands of miles of high-speed trains and America could not?
Look at NASA after Mercury-Gemini-Apollo. The Space Shuttle was a miserable design-by-committee that cost more than the expendables it replaced, killed more astronauts than M-G-A, and its only justification was to build the space station, which was so useless than NASA’s official plan for some time was that when the space station was built, they would de-orbit it to save the expense of maintaining it.
You know nothing of high-speed rail or America if you think high-speed rail makes any sense for more than a couple of hundred miles. Take California’s boondoggle, for instance: As described to the voters, it was impossible. If it had ever functioned as described, it would have taken twice as long as airplanes and had less flexibility.
Europe’s high speed rail is so popular and efficient that governments have outlawed competing airline flights which are cheaper, faster, and more flexible. Europe’s high speed trains are like Concorde, the supersonic airliner: they require subsidies to keep ticket prices low enough to attract customers, and they are still too expensive to survive on their own.
China’s high speed rail was built to political demands, not customer demands, and many were abandoned after building because they had no passengers.
Every single one of your examples is a great example of bureaucracies keeping themselves in business and wasting taxes and resources while inhibiting progress.
NASA even before Space Shuttle did achieve extraordinary things. Even now, it does great things--only the manned flights are problem. In fact manned flights are mostly pointless.
Bureaucracies have done great things. Wars were won by them. Only now, is air travel cheaper than rail. But for 100 years, rail travel was good and cheap.
Hitler achieved extraordinary and great things, as did Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro …
Do you know why air travel is cheap? Because President Carter deregulated the airlines. He got rid of a bureaucracy. Same for rail and road freight — great now because Carte got rid of the bureaucracies which hobbled them.
Do you know why space travel is now cheaper than when it was controlled by NASA? Because Elon Musk was allowed by the politicians to finally have a go at it. Look at NASA’s Space Launch System — old-fashioned recycled Space Shuttle technology, still completely expendable, cost $4 billion per launch. The best bureaucracy money can buy. Elon Musk cut back the bureaucracy to accomplish far more than the old bureaucracy which is still being pushed.
Are you such an affirmed statist that you never wonder how much better any project would be without the bureaucracies?
Bureaucracies never accomplish anything. They turn mole hills into mountains.
California passed prop 187 by 59% in 1994 to prevent illegal immigrants from getting welfare benefits. It was reversed by liberal judges within days.
Republicans lost the next election in CA by 20 points and CA has been a one party socialist shithole ever since. Note that Romney won 53% of California whites by list anyway because the immigrants voted for more welfare.
Permitting opt-outs lacks credibility, not because the people remaining in the system care about the personal fate of opt-outs (e.g. a few might wind up sleeping in the streets without Social Security and Medicare), but rather because their own benefits depend on a continual influx of fresh victims to pay for those benefits. It is the potential success of the vast majority of opt-outs that puts the whole welfare state racket at risk.
I would disagree with the bit about the central banks. Central bankers have no choice but to inflate the money supply and drive up prices (and generate wasteful boom/bust cycles and enable real long-run capital consumption as they do so) in order to prevent sovereign debt crises and banking crises. The independence of central bankers is no safeguard against the financial moral hazards of politicians running up deficits and commerical bankers exploiting their deposit creation privileges; politicians and commerical bankers know that central bankers must ultimately bail them out no matter how fiscally irresponsible they former are. Independence is also no safeguard against the generation of cyclical risks and deterioration of credit quality inherent in fractional reserve bank credit expansions.
If you truly want a credible monetary system, you need a natural commodity with low transaction/storage costs and low volatility of its total stock (i.e. gold) to serve as the monetary base, coupled to 100% reserve requirements for all risk-free money substitutes.
Respectfully disagree: credibility is a real problem in many important cases. Voters are fickle and the entire policy structure of a democracy can change in a matter of months- prior loud pronouncements (even by the same individuals!) notwithstanding. For people who have to make investments with longer time horizons, the risks of these changes far out weight any potential benefits so the investments rationally do not get made.
Take the case Byran knows well of Prospera where Honduran officials gave loud speeches promising to respect the rights of foreign capital. And yet now, one election later, they are doing everything they can to expropriate it all.
In the USA, we do have ways to tie ourselves to the mast- most notably constitutional amendments because they are slow and difficult to enact and change. But maybe they are too slow and so almost never get used for this purpose. So maybe we need more practical solutions....
The history of judges amending the Constitution by reinterpretation does justify thinking the difficulty of Article V is any roadblock. I can't imagine any founding father, not even Hamilton, approving the current understanding of the current Constitution.
So true. Unless we amend the constitution to replace SCOTUS with a LLM. No oral arguments - parties would submit briefs to the system and out would come deterministic decisions. Weights and seed would be public so anyone could confirm decisions independently, and even try experiments like "what-if brief A had made this argument instead?" People would still be unhappy with decisions, but probably not more so than today.
Then we could all argue about how often to update the weights and what should be in the training data and prompts - but at least it would get rid of ex-post decision making.
I have a simpler solution. Give We, the People, the ultimate veto. Allow anyone to pay for a jury of random competent adults to veto any law, regulation, or any other government edict, including executive orders, memos, etc. Put every juror in a room by themselves, with the law, regulation, or edict in question; a notepad; a pen; and a dictionary and appropriate technical dictionary. No legal dictionary. No internet, no eraser, no trash can or shredder.
Tell them to write down their interpretation of the law, regulation, or edict. Or answer a question, such as “Does the IEEPA(?) allow Trump’s tariffs?”.
When all are done, compare the answers. If 10 or 11 agree, their notes define future judicial interpretations — judges cannot make up new interpretations 10 years later. If more than 1 or 2 jurors disagree, the law, regulation, or edict is void. The jurors can also say they think the law, regulation, or edict is bonkers, unwelcome, ugly, or make up any other reason to veto it.
No attorneys to “explain” what it means or answer questions. No appeals — the jury’s veto is final. Jurors cannot revise the law, regulation, or edit, nor can they void only part of it.
It needs work and it will never happen. But I cannot think of any other way to stop government from defining its own limits. There is something truly awful about government judges deciding when other government employees have crossed the line. There has to be some simple immediate way for ordinary people to stop government overreach.
If anyone can convene one of these veto courts, and we assume there is a distribution of beliefs in the population, then I'd expect people would just keep spinning the wheel until they, through random sampling, happen to come up with a jury willing to veto. So, in practice, because of the ratchet effect everything would be vetoed - even things that the vast, vast majority of people are in favor of.
Is that worse than what we have now, where the people get no say and everything depends on 9 unaccountable government employees to rein in the other several million?
My scheme has lots of things to work out, but your example is one of the easiest: don’t allow more than one challenge per year for each law, regulation, or edict. Or don’t allow any single person to challenge more than once a year. Or don’t allow any single person to be a juror more than once a year.
It is always so. It is in the nature of living in a society that few decide for many and larger a society is, smaller is the proportion of deciders. The point is made in Burnham's book The Machiavellians
"The same goes for permanently denying immigrants welfare benefits. If you were serious about this idea, you would loudly proclaim your commitment. [...]You would create an oversight board of Cato Institute alumni, dedicated to the proposition that we should build a wall around the welfare state, not the country."
I'm currently living in the UAE and this is basically what this country does. There's no option for permanent residency and no pathway to the citizenship that grants enormous welfare benefits. All the expats here know that their time here is impermanent; they are here to work and earn, then leave.
This makes me wonder, keeping in mind your objection about western democracies, if an option for western democracies is to cap the immigrant age, e.g. cutoff at 35, in addition to the other restrictions you want to place. Younger immigrants are going to contribute far longer to the economy and be a net economic benefit relative to someone who theoretically could arrive at 50, acquire citizenship just before retirement, and end up receiving benefits totaling far more than their working-age contributions.
Soviets did exactly this experiment in the twenties of last century. Western companies built many factories, which were promptly confiscated, and western specialists who worked there sharing their expertise with local workers were arrested and executed or sent to labor camps.
Bryan Caplan DOES think we should end welfare for immigrants (he thinks we should end it for everybody). He has advocated for a "keyhole solution" to immigration https://openborders.info/keyhole-solutions/ and praised the Gulf States for bringing in lots of non-citizen workers who benefit from higher pay even if they have none of the rights of citizens. None of those Gulf States are democracies, nor do they have liberal judges seeking to help out poor minorities.
The analogy being: You're never going to get open borders. No one wants it.
But you advocate for it a lot. Yet I've never seen you advocate for ending welfare (including free education) for immigrants. You'd probably agree too! (Heck I want to end it for citizens too.)
If you are concerned about increasing human welfare for all those immigrants you should strongly endorse such compromises: No birthright citizenship. No welfare. Those are easy compromises, right?
There is not much difference between your view and that of the credibility theorists. They are saying: “The policy is unpopular (obvious, since it is not, and is not close to being, in place); and even if you could temporarily institute it—sneaking it past the voters—before long its inherent unpopularity would rise to the fore, and it would be reversed.”
Bryan is wrong, because a law that he says would be unpopular WAS popular enough to be put in place, but was struck down by judges who don't care about popularity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_v._Richardson
Try again my friend. The SCOTUS is highly conservative and regressive, always has been. They have never once been on the wrong side of now, just history.
Find me a single case where the SCOTUS was overruled in the immediacy on a matter of mass public import AND where all the justices as a result were impeached and replaced. The number one thing driving the SCOTUS has always been public legitimacy and that means never making genuinely unpopular decisions. In cases where that is called for, they simply refuse to hear the case, sometimes for decades, until there is enough public support to rule the way they want to rule.
There is no universe where the SCOTUS tomorrow rules 'no law' means 'no law', 'shall not' means 'shall not', 'speedy trial' means 'speedy trial', or that any of the amendment mean exactly what the say. Trump could run a third term and as long as Congress and the people were behind him, that SCOTUS wouldn't get involved.
And this isn't hypothetical, seen SCOTUS cases where for example the court flat out said West Virginia didn't legally become a state nor was the CSA succession illegal and yet still ruled for the USG because of mootness, "political question", or made up stuff like 'inability to remedy damages".
You're ignoring that politicians and bureaucrats do not want to solve the problems that created and maintain their jobs. That's the last thing they want. The first thing they want is to wring every possible drop of blood out of every little problem, to get more votes, bigger budgets, more subordinates, and the opportunity to issue more regulations to prove they are working on the problem.
The gullible public assumes that means working to solve the problem. Everyone with any common sense knows it means they are working to exacerbate the problem.
actually, not exactly. See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bureaucracy-isnt-measured-in-bureaucrats for a more accurate description of the incentive structure by someone who deals with the health care system a lot. (it is too complicated to explain in just a couple paragraphs here, sadly)
Actually, yes, exactly. You can refine the incentive structure all you want in little details, but the core incentives for bureaucrats remain the same.
If bureaucrats are solely motivated to expand bureaucracy then how could America go to moon, execute Manhattan project, amass a continental-sized territory?
How could China and France build thousands of miles of high-speed trains and America could not?
Look at NASA after Mercury-Gemini-Apollo. The Space Shuttle was a miserable design-by-committee that cost more than the expendables it replaced, killed more astronauts than M-G-A, and its only justification was to build the space station, which was so useless than NASA’s official plan for some time was that when the space station was built, they would de-orbit it to save the expense of maintaining it.
You know nothing of high-speed rail or America if you think high-speed rail makes any sense for more than a couple of hundred miles. Take California’s boondoggle, for instance: As described to the voters, it was impossible. If it had ever functioned as described, it would have taken twice as long as airplanes and had less flexibility.
Europe’s high speed rail is so popular and efficient that governments have outlawed competing airline flights which are cheaper, faster, and more flexible. Europe’s high speed trains are like Concorde, the supersonic airliner: they require subsidies to keep ticket prices low enough to attract customers, and they are still too expensive to survive on their own.
China’s high speed rail was built to political demands, not customer demands, and many were abandoned after building because they had no passengers.
Every single one of your examples is a great example of bureaucracies keeping themselves in business and wasting taxes and resources while inhibiting progress.
NASA even before Space Shuttle did achieve extraordinary things. Even now, it does great things--only the manned flights are problem. In fact manned flights are mostly pointless.
Bureaucracies have done great things. Wars were won by them. Only now, is air travel cheaper than rail. But for 100 years, rail travel was good and cheap.
Hitler achieved extraordinary and great things, as did Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro …
Do you know why air travel is cheap? Because President Carter deregulated the airlines. He got rid of a bureaucracy. Same for rail and road freight — great now because Carte got rid of the bureaucracies which hobbled them.
Do you know why space travel is now cheaper than when it was controlled by NASA? Because Elon Musk was allowed by the politicians to finally have a go at it. Look at NASA’s Space Launch System — old-fashioned recycled Space Shuttle technology, still completely expendable, cost $4 billion per launch. The best bureaucracy money can buy. Elon Musk cut back the bureaucracy to accomplish far more than the old bureaucracy which is still being pushed.
Are you such an affirmed statist that you never wonder how much better any project would be without the bureaucracies?
Bureaucracies never accomplish anything. They turn mole hills into mountains.
California passed prop 187 by 59% in 1994 to prevent illegal immigrants from getting welfare benefits. It was reversed by liberal judges within days.
Republicans lost the next election in CA by 20 points and CA has been a one party socialist shithole ever since. Note that Romney won 53% of California whites by list anyway because the immigrants voted for more welfare.
Permitting opt-outs lacks credibility, not because the people remaining in the system care about the personal fate of opt-outs (e.g. a few might wind up sleeping in the streets without Social Security and Medicare), but rather because their own benefits depend on a continual influx of fresh victims to pay for those benefits. It is the potential success of the vast majority of opt-outs that puts the whole welfare state racket at risk.
I would disagree with the bit about the central banks. Central bankers have no choice but to inflate the money supply and drive up prices (and generate wasteful boom/bust cycles and enable real long-run capital consumption as they do so) in order to prevent sovereign debt crises and banking crises. The independence of central bankers is no safeguard against the financial moral hazards of politicians running up deficits and commerical bankers exploiting their deposit creation privileges; politicians and commerical bankers know that central bankers must ultimately bail them out no matter how fiscally irresponsible they former are. Independence is also no safeguard against the generation of cyclical risks and deterioration of credit quality inherent in fractional reserve bank credit expansions.
If you truly want a credible monetary system, you need a natural commodity with low transaction/storage costs and low volatility of its total stock (i.e. gold) to serve as the monetary base, coupled to 100% reserve requirements for all risk-free money substitutes.
Respectfully disagree: credibility is a real problem in many important cases. Voters are fickle and the entire policy structure of a democracy can change in a matter of months- prior loud pronouncements (even by the same individuals!) notwithstanding. For people who have to make investments with longer time horizons, the risks of these changes far out weight any potential benefits so the investments rationally do not get made.
Take the case Byran knows well of Prospera where Honduran officials gave loud speeches promising to respect the rights of foreign capital. And yet now, one election later, they are doing everything they can to expropriate it all.
In the USA, we do have ways to tie ourselves to the mast- most notably constitutional amendments because they are slow and difficult to enact and change. But maybe they are too slow and so almost never get used for this purpose. So maybe we need more practical solutions....
https://wp.josh.com/2025/04/27/how-to-tie-ourselves-to-the-mast-the-persistent-charter/
The history of judges amending the Constitution by reinterpretation does justify thinking the difficulty of Article V is any roadblock. I can't imagine any founding father, not even Hamilton, approving the current understanding of the current Constitution.
So true. Unless we amend the constitution to replace SCOTUS with a LLM. No oral arguments - parties would submit briefs to the system and out would come deterministic decisions. Weights and seed would be public so anyone could confirm decisions independently, and even try experiments like "what-if brief A had made this argument instead?" People would still be unhappy with decisions, but probably not more so than today.
Then we could all argue about how often to update the weights and what should be in the training data and prompts - but at least it would get rid of ex-post decision making.
I have a simpler solution. Give We, the People, the ultimate veto. Allow anyone to pay for a jury of random competent adults to veto any law, regulation, or any other government edict, including executive orders, memos, etc. Put every juror in a room by themselves, with the law, regulation, or edict in question; a notepad; a pen; and a dictionary and appropriate technical dictionary. No legal dictionary. No internet, no eraser, no trash can or shredder.
Tell them to write down their interpretation of the law, regulation, or edict. Or answer a question, such as “Does the IEEPA(?) allow Trump’s tariffs?”.
When all are done, compare the answers. If 10 or 11 agree, their notes define future judicial interpretations — judges cannot make up new interpretations 10 years later. If more than 1 or 2 jurors disagree, the law, regulation, or edict is void. The jurors can also say they think the law, regulation, or edict is bonkers, unwelcome, ugly, or make up any other reason to veto it.
No attorneys to “explain” what it means or answer questions. No appeals — the jury’s veto is final. Jurors cannot revise the law, regulation, or edit, nor can they void only part of it.
It needs work and it will never happen. But I cannot think of any other way to stop government from defining its own limits. There is something truly awful about government judges deciding when other government employees have crossed the line. There has to be some simple immediate way for ordinary people to stop government overreach.
If anyone can convene one of these veto courts, and we assume there is a distribution of beliefs in the population, then I'd expect people would just keep spinning the wheel until they, through random sampling, happen to come up with a jury willing to veto. So, in practice, because of the ratchet effect everything would be vetoed - even things that the vast, vast majority of people are in favor of.
Is that worse than what we have now, where the people get no say and everything depends on 9 unaccountable government employees to rein in the other several million?
My scheme has lots of things to work out, but your example is one of the easiest: don’t allow more than one challenge per year for each law, regulation, or edict. Or don’t allow any single person to challenge more than once a year. Or don’t allow any single person to be a juror more than once a year.
It is always so. It is in the nature of living in a society that few decide for many and larger a society is, smaller is the proportion of deciders. The point is made in Burnham's book The Machiavellians
Yes, Bryan is lacking in empiricism here.
My understanding is that politicians have attempted to deny welfare benefits to immigrants, but were overruled by the courts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_v._Richardson
So Bryan is wrong to say that this wouldn't work because it would be rejected by voters rather than judges.
"The same goes for permanently denying immigrants welfare benefits. If you were serious about this idea, you would loudly proclaim your commitment. [...]You would create an oversight board of Cato Institute alumni, dedicated to the proposition that we should build a wall around the welfare state, not the country."
I'm currently living in the UAE and this is basically what this country does. There's no option for permanent residency and no pathway to the citizenship that grants enormous welfare benefits. All the expats here know that their time here is impermanent; they are here to work and earn, then leave.
This makes me wonder, keeping in mind your objection about western democracies, if an option for western democracies is to cap the immigrant age, e.g. cutoff at 35, in addition to the other restrictions you want to place. Younger immigrants are going to contribute far longer to the economy and be a net economic benefit relative to someone who theoretically could arrive at 50, acquire citizenship just before retirement, and end up receiving benefits totaling far more than their working-age contributions.
Soviets did exactly this experiment in the twenties of last century. Western companies built many factories, which were promptly confiscated, and western specialists who worked there sharing their expertise with local workers were arrested and executed or sent to labor camps.
Don’t feed crocodiles.
A very insightful analysis.
But it's interesting that you can see this and I assume therefore I've never seen you repeating
ad nauseam that we should end welfare for immigrants.
Now apply your same logic for open borders?
Bryan Caplan DOES think we should end welfare for immigrants (he thinks we should end it for everybody). He has advocated for a "keyhole solution" to immigration https://openborders.info/keyhole-solutions/ and praised the Gulf States for bringing in lots of non-citizen workers who benefit from higher pay even if they have none of the rights of citizens. None of those Gulf States are democracies, nor do they have liberal judges seeking to help out poor minorities.
The analogy being: You're never going to get open borders. No one wants it.
But you advocate for it a lot. Yet I've never seen you advocate for ending welfare (including free education) for immigrants. You'd probably agree too! (Heck I want to end it for citizens too.)
If you are concerned about increasing human welfare for all those immigrants you should strongly endorse such compromises: No birthright citizenship. No welfare. Those are easy compromises, right?
"and public post videos "
and publicLY post videos
Enh, who needs adverbs anyway? All they do is clarify meaning.
Autocorrect my pedantic friend on the latter snark. That whole assign malice ignorance thing sub 2026 auto correct / word suggestions.