Current Events > NYT opinion piece: Tax bill shows GOP's contempt for democracy

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/opinion/tax-bill-gop-democracy.html

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Looking ahead to a potentially paralyzing presidential scandal, midterm blood bath or both, congressional Republicans are in a mad dash to emancipate us from the welfare state. As they see it, the redistributive upshot of democracy is responsible for the big-government mess theyre trying to bail us out of, so theyre not about to be tender with the niceties of democratic deliberation and regular parliamentary order.

The idea that there is an inherent conflict between democracy and the integrity of property rights is as old as democracy itself. Because the poor vastly outnumber the propertied rich so the argument goes if allowed to vote, the poor might gang up at the ballot box to wipe out the wealthy.

In the 20th century, and in particular after World War II, with voting rights and Soviet Communism on the march, the risk that wealthy democracies might redistribute their way to serfdom had never seemed more real. Radical libertarian thinkers like Rand and Murray Rothbard (who would be a muse to both Charles Koch and Ron Paul) responded with a theory of absolute property rights that morally criminalized taxation and narrowed the scope of legitimate government action and democratic discretion nearly to nothing. What is the State anyway but organized banditry? Rothbard asked. What is taxation but theft on a gigantic, unchecked scale?

Mainstream conservatives, like William F. Buckley, banished radical libertarians to the fringes of the conservative movement to mingle with the other unclubbables. Still, the so-called fusionist synthesis of libertarianism and moral traditionalism became the ideological core of modern conservatism. For hawkish Cold Warriors, libertarianisms glorification of capitalism and vilification of redistribution was useful for immunizing American political culture against viral socialism. Moral traditionalists, struggling to hold ground against rising mass movements for racial and gender equality, found much to like in libertarianisms principled skepticism of democracy. If you analyze it, Ronald Reagan said, I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.

The hostility to redistributive democracy at the ideological center of the American right has made standard policies of successful modern welfare states, happily embraced by Europes conservative parties, seem beyond the moral pale for many Republicans. The outsize stakes seem to justify dubious tactics bunking down with racists, aggressive gerrymandering, inventing paper-thin pretexts for voting rules that disproportionately hurt Democrats to prevent majorities from voting themselves a bigger slice of the pie.

But the idea that there is an inherent tension between democracy and the integrity of property rights is wildly misguided. The liberal-democratic state is a relatively recent historical innovation, and our best accounts of the transition from autocracy to democracy points to the role of democratic political inclusion in protecting property rights.

As Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and James Robinson of Harvard show in Why Nations Fail, ruling elites in pre-democratic states arranged political and economic institutions to extract labor and property from the lower orders. That is to say, the system was set up to make it easy for elites to seize what ought to have been other peoples stuff.

In Inequality and Democratization, the political scientists Ben W. Ansell and David J. Samuels show that this demand for political inclusion generally isnt driven by a desire to use the existing institutions to plunder the elites. Its driven by a desire to keep the elites from continuing to plunder them.

Far from endangering property rights by facilitating redistribution, inclusive democratic institutions limit the organized banditry of the elite-dominated state by bringing everyone inside the charmed circle of legally enforced rights.

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tl;dr:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfXdaE7ph_I
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Reminds me of a post that @Darkman124 made the other day
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That's a near record breaking number of words created without a single identifiable logical point being made.
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So how long exactly has the NY Times been trash?
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Coffeebeanz posted...

That's a near record breaking number of words created without a single identifiable logical point being made.

there are entire "news" websites that make fewer identifiable logical points
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It's like someone engaged in stream of consciousness writing while watching Schindler's List while taking PCP.
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Coffeebeanz posted...

That's a near record breaking number of words created without a single identifiable logical point being made.

I had to cut out some when pasting; the argument is probably clearer in full.
My attempt at tl;dr: the GOP's hasty, secretive process on the tax bill is a manifestation of the anti-democratic attitudes that come with these sorts of policy goals. But, the author argues, the view that democracy and property rights for the rich are oppositional forces is incorrect.
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hey I know that writer he is a libertarian
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Godnorgosh posted...

Antifar posted...

As Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and James Robinson of Harvard show in Why Nations Fail, ruling elites in pre-democratic states arranged political and economic institutions to extract labor and property from the lower orders. That is to say, the system was set up to make it easy for elites to seize what ought to have been other peoples stuff.

Key paragraph, right here.

It is, because it betrays a fundamental lack of awareness by the author and his sources

Countries overwhelmingly fail because the state is given to much power, not private businesses. Why has Venezuela collapsed despite having as abundant natural resources as Norway after only ~10 years of socialism while the economy and standard of living in Singapore,a small city-state, has skyrocketed under their extremely free-market system?
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Mal_Fet posted...

It is, because it betrays a fundamental lack of awareness by the author and his sources

Countries overwhelmingly fail because the state is given to much power, not private businesses. Why has Venezuela collapsed despite having as abundant natural resources as Norway after only ~10 years of socialism while the economy and standard of living in Singapore,a small city-state, has skyrocketed under their extremely free-market system?

literally in the preceding paragraph

But the idea that there is an inherent tension between democracy and the integrity of property rights is wildly misguided. The liberal-democratic state is a relatively recent historical innovation, and our best accounts of the transition from autocracy to democracy points to the role of democratic political inclusion in protecting property rights.
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Balrog0 posted...

Mal_Fet posted...

It is, because it betrays a fundamental lack of awareness by the author and his sources

Countries overwhelmingly fail because the state is given to much power, not private businesses. Why has Venezuela collapsed despite having as abundant natural resources as Norway after only ~10 years of socialism while the economy and standard of living in Singapore,a small city-state, has skyrocketed under their extremely free-market system?

literally in the preceding paragraph

But the idea that there is an inherent tension between democracy and the integrity of property rights is wildly misguided. The liberal-democratic state is a relatively recent historical innovation, and our best accounts of the transition from autocracy to democracy points to the role of democratic political inclusion in protecting property rights.

Not seeing how that changes the context of what I'm responding to nor how that shows democracy is somehow under attack when taxes are lowered.
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Did a bot write that piece? There is no coherent argument made whatsoever.
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Lol opinion pieces
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Opinion pieces only matter when I agree with them

The Admiral posted...

Did a bot write that piece?

A libertarian did, so close enough
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treewojima posted...

Opinion pieces only matter when I agree with them

There has to be a point to agree with first
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Antifar posted...

The Admiral posted...

Did a bot write that piece?

A libertarian did, so close enough

Well he isn't a libertarian if he doesn't want lower taxes so there's that.

RoseIsHorriblle posted...

Antifar posted...

The Admiral posted...

Did a bot write that piece?

A libertarian did, so close enough

Well he isn't a libertarian if he doesn't want lower taxes so there's that.

He's literally the vice president of this place
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niskanen_Center
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Unlike the author, I do think democracy is at odds with most property rights. Large corporate and extremely weathly people's property rights might as well make them mini-governments within a government.
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Perhaps the final two paragraphs, omitted from the OP for space, are clearer about his message:

Democracy is fundamentally about protecting the middle and lower classes from redistribution by establishing the equality of basic rights that makes it possible for everyone to be a capitalist. Democracy doesnt strangle the golden goose of free enterprise through redistributive taxation; it fattens the goose by releasing the talent, ingenuity and effort of otherwise abused and exploited people.

At a time when Americas faith in democracy is flagging, the Republicans elected to treat the United States Senate, and the citizens it represents, with all the respect college guys accord public restrooms. Its easier to reverse a bad piece of legislation than the bad reputation of our representative institutions, which is why the way the tax bill was passed is probably worse than whats in it. Ultimately, its the integrity of democratic institutions and the rule of law that gives ordinary people the power to protect themselves against elite exploitation. But the Republican majority is bulldozing through basic democratic norms as though freedom has everything to do with the tax code and democracy just gets in the way.

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Musourenka posted...

Unlike the author, I do think democracy is at odds with most property rights. Large corporate and extremely weathly people's property rights might as well make them mini-governments within a government.

I would tend to agree with that.
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Mal_Fet posted...

Not seeing how that changes the context of what I'm responding to

he is arguing against venezualan style socialism, too, he is just saying a real democratic process is the antidote to fascism and socialism

Mal_Fet posted...

nor how that shows democracy is somehow under attack when taxes are lowered.

his opening salvo is literally that the process by which it passed is what he's talking about more than the actual content of the bill -- and he's saying that the lower taxes aren't the part people are upset about

rly?

In a nutshell, if you think taxation is theft and redistribution is dealing in stolen property, it's a urgent moral imperative to do whatever it takes to go as far as you can in the direction of the restoration of justice. And if you think democracy by its nature enables redistributive exploitation, you're not likely to see the value in public deliberation and normal legislative procedure. But this is a huge mistake. People don't just magically get property rights because a theory says that we have them. Historically, elites in control of the state use their power to redistribute upwards to themselves, and they're the only ones who enjoy property rights protections with teeth. Democratization is the process by which disenfranchised and exploited groups of people get their rights respected and protected, which is necessary to prevent elites from stealing *their* stuff. Inclusive democracy is a protective institution that guarantees the legal reality and value of our rights against elite extraction. And because widely distributed rights unleash productivity, inclusive democracy makes us rich. It's just ass-backwards to see democracy as an extractive institution that enables the exploitation of the few by the many, and to think that freedom has more to do with tax rates and government spending than functional liberal-democratic institutions. And that's why the integrity and public reputation of our democracy is worth more than any given fiscal policy bill, and why the careless, hostile way GOP pushed through the tax bill ought to worry you, even if you like what's in it.
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