(Part 3) Top products from r/NeutralPolitics

> As someone who is economically illiterate, I'd like to know if there is any value whatsoever to what I typically hear for the conservative talking points for helping the economy (aka de-regulation, lower barriers to entry, cut taxes, etc)

Yes. Absolutely, there are. Markets are widely agreed upon to be the most efficient way to allocate most products in a world of unlimited desires and very limited resources. The first chapter of any economics textbook will outline these benefits excellently.

But there are limits to what you can do with these tools since, despite what many people would tell you, it's actually quite difficult to lay the groundwork for a properly functioning market. Listen to the differences in the rhetoric used by mainstream Republicans like Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney and more libertarian-oriented politicians like Rand Paul and Gary Johnson. The former often talks about how praiseworthy American business is and the latter often talks about markets, that might seem like a fine distinction but it matters a lot.

Let me use an extended example to illustrate.

There are certain assumptions that economics relies upon: rational buyers and sellers looking to maximize their utility, with ordered preferences and an understanding of their limitations and needs, both sides have access to the information necessary to make an informed decision, the goods being sold must be rival and excludable.

Most importantly for this example, there must be competing buyers and competing sellers using price to signal their desire for a good or service.

Now, let's take a public utility like electricity. Where I live I only have one option for electricity, a company called AEP. I only have three market option I can exercise: to buy electricity from them, move at tremendous cost to myself or choose to go without electricity, also at tremendous cost to myself. Moving or not getting electricity hurts me a lot more than my lost revenue hurts AEP so they have way more market power than I do in the transaction and since they are my only option, they can set the price at whatever they want.

Now, the only way for me to have true options would be multiple companies building multiple electrical grids and my choosing which one I want to run to my house. Then there would be competition and by and by the competitors would drive the price down on each other. However, while that might be great for me, building an electric grid is very, very expensive. Electric companies build these grids initially at an enormous loss and they wouldn't take that risk if they don't have a reasonable expectation of recouping their investment.

So, let's say company A decides to build an electric grid in my city but any other company could use the grid once it was built and compete for my business. Well, that's no good because company A would be at a huge disadvantage since company B and C aren't in the hole for having built the infrastructure in the first place. Companies B and C could charge way less than company A. So, no company has any incentive to be the first mover - everyone waits for everyone else to build the grid first and, thus, no grid ever gets built.

Thus, you need the government to step in and say, "company A, if you build the electrical grid, you will have a monopoly on this area for X period of time, to guarantee you make your initial investment back." But, since company A is now a monopoly and can charge whatever they want, the government also steps in and regulates the amount charged.

The most efficient outcome is achieved only with government intervention in this case, and cases like this are not at all uncommon.

Now, since there's no real "market" for providing me electricity, I think most economists would agree it's a suitable place for government intervention. However, pro-business politicians will often push to have previously public enterprises (like my electricity) privatized in order to increase "efficiency." However, what they're really doing is providing a monopoly to a company who doesn't even need to make the initial infrastructure investment (since it's already built) and get huge profits simply for lying in the cut and providing no real value-added to their customers. A private company needs to turn a profit, the government doesn't. So, for public utilities you actually often end up paying less when it's run by government or at least through a public corporation than when the same is run by a private firm. Thus, pushing for a business to run such an enterprise isn't embracing the benefits of the market, it's corporate welfare.

Republicans often look to private contracts and business as inherently better and more efficient, almost as an article of faith. But very often, the most efficient outcome requires substantial government intervention. I would say that after 35 years of a broad program to deregulate business, cut taxes and devolve federal authority we have reached a saturation point of the benefits that can be derived that way.

For a full list of pros and cons, I would recommend "Marijuana Legalization, What Everyone Needs to Know" (https://www.amazon.com/Marijuana-Legalization-Everyone-Needs-Know%C2%AE/dp/0190262400). It's written by the three leading experts on marijuana and neutrally covers almost every issue pertaining to legalization. The one problem with it is it's overly directed toward a lay-audience and as such doesn't directly cite sources (there's a list of "further readings" at the end which amounts to their reference section).

An important, but so far unaddressed, issue of legalizing marijuana is what system should be used to legalize it? All the propositions on the ballot this year call for a full commercial market, like alcohol. But, there are a large number of options in between fully legalizing something for free production and for-profit sale and criminalizing its possession. For example, Washington DC only allows cannabis to be freely given. How you legalize cannabis is going to have a much bigger effect on the pros/cons than whether your legalize cannabis. For full options, see http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR864.html (specifically, page 106 for the "Eight Regulatory Decisions for Legal Marijuana")

In Economics "investing" is investing in capital such as factories, equipment, or training. -- Basically, "new production".

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edited to be more accurate:

From Principles of Macroeconomics by Robert Frank & Ben Bernanke.

>Investment is spending by firms on final goods and services, primarily capital goods. Investment is divided into three subcategories:

>* Business fixed investment is the purchase by firms of new capital goods such as machinery, factories, and office buildings. (Remember that for the purposes of calculating GDP, long-lived capital goods are treated as final goods rather than as intermediate goods.) Firms buy capital goods to increase their capacity to produce.

• Residential investment is construction of new homes and apartment buildings. Recall that homes and apartment buildings, sometimes called residential capital, are also capital goods. For GDP accounting purposes, residential investment is treated as an investment by the business sector, which then sells the homes to households.
  
• Inventory investment is the addition of unsold goods to company inventories. In other words, the goods that a firm produces but doesn't sell during the current period are treated, for accounting purposes, as if the firm had bought those goods from itself. (This convention guarantees that production equals expenditure.) Inventory investment can be positive or negative, depending on whether the value of inventories rises or falls over the course of the year.
  
  ---
  
  > People often refer to purchases of financial assets, such as stocks or bonds, as "investment." That use of the term is different for the definition we give here. A person who buys a share of a company's stock acquires partial ownership of the existing physical and financial assets controlled by the company. A stock purchase does not usually correspond to the creation of new physical capital, however, and so is not investment in the sense we are using the term.

Yes, similar efforts have been made elsewhere to recreate the results of gauntreaux, many have had results like this, due to many factors. One of which you mentioned, white flight, which turned once prosperous areas like Newark and Camden into dangerous ghettoes. In some cases, they didn't vet candidates well enough, some people didn't move far away at all, or moved to predominantly non-white areas where the same problems exist. Like I said in my post, it's really complicated and I don't think even recreating gauntreaux in complete identical fashion would yield the same results.

It makes me think of a book which was fantastic, American Nations which is a history of the unique cultures that populated the US and how vastly different we really are from one another, so for example in the northeast, education and using the government as a hand of good action may work great for gauntreaux, but somewhere in the Deep South where education isn't as stressed and the government has been more been seen a force of intrusion and distrust, well it may not work as easily. Thomas Sowell is a conservative author who actually wrote about black culture essentially being redneck culture (themes the same as American nations only that author is much more liberal) I think these conversations need to be had if you want to talk about finding any kind of effective solutions.

https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029
The Sowell book is called black rednecks white liberals, I got it at home but I haven't been able to get to it yet.

Populism is a reaction to corruption. I think everyone can agree we have a lot of that right now. There is bad populism and there is good populism. Trump is a good example of a bad/fake populist: a corrupt liar. The solution is a good populist. Think someone like FDR.

The book "The Populist Moment" is a great book on the history of the populism movement in American and the fifty year struggle to build it.

In no specific order: The Dictator's Handbook: presents a realist perspective on international and intra-national politics, specifically it presents a real-world analysis of politics through the lens of Selectorate Theory.

Something from Chomsky, I'd say Manufacturing Consent or Understanding Power or both. Chomsky has written about 40 books so it's impossible to keep up with him and you may end up disagreeing on substantial points, but I think he's probably the most important to read because he situates his political analysis outside the invisible constraints of American political culture, and American political culture tends to be naive about the goals and methods of government and other institutions.

Watch this CGP Grey video and consider how it applies to political parties, political discourse, and political activism. Afterwards you should either read the meme wikipedia page or Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene.

Looking back I notice all my recommendations circle around studying politics itself as a phenomena, I don't know if that's what you meant but you might enjoy it. If you're more wondering which political stances you should take, decide that by which policies have empirical evidence of working and base your decisions on how robust you think the evidence is.

For more on this topic, I highly recommend P. W. Singer's "Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century." It's a bit dated since the technology has come so far since 2009, but he does a good job of weighing the pros and cons of lethal technologies like robots and drones.

Two of his main points:

1. Shouldn't we do everything we possibly can to protect the good guys?
   
   
2. Is it too easy to go to war now that we don't have to risk human lives?
   
   I think the use of drones to defeat domestic bad guys still satisfies the first question, but I'm not sure how it relates to the second question, especially since we have a reason to use non-lethal force in domestic situations. I think it's a very valid discussion.

> Some drugs cost huge amounts because of R&D.

As an industry, the pharmaceutical companies spend far more on marketing (24.4%) than R&D (13.4%).

^1 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080105140107.htm
^2 http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050001
^3 http://www.amazon.com/Take-Medicines-Complicity-Business-Endanger/dp/0195176847

I don't necessarily have an answer to your question about alternatives because the whole system is out of control. Profit motive and healthcare make for a pretty dysfunctional marriage, but I don't have a proposal to fix it.

Yes. If one wants to truly understand the origins of the Civil War, you need to have an education in the Constitutional Convention, then a good intermediate education (so before the Compromise of 1850, which accelerated everything).

The best source I ever read to get some long-term context on why the Civil War happened the way it did was What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe- link is to Amazon page, where you can read the first chapter free on the Kindle sidebar.

It opens with the Battle of New Orleans and the Treaty of Ghent in 1814-1815, and continues methodically through until the end of the Mexican-American war in 1848. It also spends entire side-chapters on the religious and social movements that emerged, which helps one understand what abolitionism was, and how it emerged- and became mainstream. Basically you read a good history of the Constitutional era, something like this, then watch the Civil War by Ken Burns.

http://www.pbs.org/civilwar/

Which btw is being broadcast April 3rd-April 7th!

"You see, the thing about the Civil War is..." - every Shelby Foote quote ever

I would highly recommend The Myth of Ownership by Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagle

www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Ownership-Taxes-Justice/dp/0195176561


edit: formatting

That may be true if you are simply looking at a brain, but if you look deeper there are differences. In the end it all comes down to sex-related hormones and their role in development, and differences in personality are related to the resulting brain chemistry whether or not it is enforced by culture or embraced by the individual.
https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Differences-Central-Nervous-System/dp/0128021144/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1540332134&sr=8-5&keywords=sex+differences+in+the+brain

> know a bit about humanity

Have you read Pinker's or Armstrong's latest on human nature? They are both on my list, but so far, I have only read reviews.

https://www.amazon.com/Investments-10th-Zvi-Bodie/dp/0077861671

This is the textbook for the investments class I'm taking. We covered treasuries in weeks 1 and 2, bond pricing and risk in week 3.

There isn't. If you have any doubts, I'd highly recommend the book At Dawn We Slept. It's by far the most detailed history of what led up to the attack on Pearl Harbor that I've ever read.

Just to show that I'm not making up these complaints, here's an excellent review of the disastrous side-effects of the Communications Act of 1934 that gave AT&T a national monopoly on phone service. Also, in Jeff Hecht's book City of Light, he traces the invention of fiberoptics and the frightening zeal of AT&T to suppress the development and deployment of the technology in favor of AT&T patented, vastly inferior microwave waveguides. Billions in taxpayer dollars were spent on waveguide technology, and it was never competitive.

And this is just phone service. Imagine if similar national monopolies barring competition had been struck for water, food, electricity, fuel.

It is your position that roughly one percent of Native American DNA substantiates a claim to be Native American? This is exactly why many Native Americans are upset. They are tired of white people staking a claim on Native American identity based on the most tenuous familial connection.

>I consider that her business.

Many Native Americans disagree. Considering that white people have tried to eradicate their culture, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Dance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_schools)

have stolen their land (https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/01/18/368559990/broken-promises-on-display-at-native-american-treaties-exhibit http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/ntreaty.asp),

and have disrespected and commercialized their culture (https://www.amazon.com/Handmade-American-Catcher-Feathers-20-22inch/dp/B071ZNMFR2 https://www.costumesupercenter.com/categories/historical-native-americans),

I think they are well within their rights to take a position on this.

> e number of troops in Iraq in 2001 was negligible, as this report from the Congressional Research Service shows.

Well, one, that report doesn't show that, it's from 2007 onward. Don't lie about what's in your sources. And two, the troops dealing with saddam weren't based in Iraq, they were based based in saudi arabia, bahrain, turkey etc. Several thousand of the and dozens of aircraft, not counting the carriers. That's two dishonesties.

>Gonna need a source for that, because the earliest mention I could find of Bush having an exit plan was from 2003, which mentioned keeping some troops in until 2006:

then you haven't looked. there are many good books on the subject. Moreover, it's quite obvious from the way that US troops immediately started leaving iraq as soon as the major combat operations were over. the plan was to pull a massive version of what was done in grenada. By the end of 2003, troop levels were down at least a quarter from their invasion peak, and since the british were pulling out even faster, the actual decline in overall strength was at least 1/3.

>You're basically saying the war had been won at that point. But that makes no sense: if the war had been won at that point, why should we have stayed?

The same reason we stayed in germany and Japan in 1945 and Korea in 1953. Staying brought several benefits. One, it let us protect the still fragile iraqi military we had built at such great cost from political meddling. malaki started firing generals and replacing them with his cronies literally the day we left. Two, it was a huge deterrent. Attacking american brigade is a much more daunting prospect than iraqi ones. Three, it would have kept senior american policy officials paying more attention to the region. Any of those three, on their own, might have prevented the rise of ISIS. All three put together almost certainly would have.

>You've also implied that had Obama not gone into Syria and Libya, or had done something differently, the Iraq war would have ended peacefully.

It makes no sense to say that any war "ends peacefully". Wars are about one side violently imposing its will on another. The iraq war did end. Obama's actions allowed a second one to start.

>That is speculation that can't be backed up by facts, but I personally doubt it because of Iraq's history.

When the US left, violence in iraq was minimal. it only started up again when a new invading force, one directly empowered by the obama administration, attacked an iraq weakened by that administration and not protected by US troops. these facts are not diputable.

David Kopel, a lawyer, writing for the Washington Post has some of University of Colorado, Boulder's history with concealed carry on campus and here is another from the Austin-American Statesman written right before the University of Texas implemented campus carry

From the second link: "For 136 years, the University of Colorado banned anyone but law enforcement officers from carrying a firearm on campus. That changed in March 2012, when the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that a 2003 law expanding concealed gun carry rights in the state overrode the university’s Board of Regents.

The impassioned debate at the time of that ruling has long since subsided, even at the flagship campus in Boulder, a liberal outpost in the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

“The concealed carry issue is not much on the radar screen these days,” said Bruce Benson, president of the University of Colorado system, which includes the Boulder campus and three others.

There haven’t been any significant incidents at the University of Colorado since the accidental discharge of a handgun three years ago by a staff member who was showing her weapon to colleagues at the university’s Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, 35 miles to the southeast of Boulder. The staff member and a co-worker sustained minor injuries, and the staff member no longer works at the university."

The write up by Kopel includes some statistics:

As the brief explained, Colorado’s law, like the law of almost every other state, provides an objective process for issuing permits to responsible adults. In Colorado, an applicant must be at least 21 years old, pass a fingerprint-based background check, and a safety-training class taught by a nationally-certified instructor. Even if a person meets all these conditions, the statute instructs the Sheriff to deny the application “if the sheriff has a reasonable belief that documented previous behavior by the applicant makes it likely the applicant will present a danger to self or others.”

As a result, in Colorado, as in other states, persons with carry permits, tend to be highly law-abiding. For example, in the five-year period between 2009-13, there were 154,434 concealed handgun carry permits issued in Colorado. During this same period, 1,390 permits were revoked. 931 of these permits were revoked following an arrest. Contrast this with the arrests of over 200,000 Colorado adults in 2013 alone.

The Colorado Sheriffs’ support for defensive arms carrying is confirmed by national data. For example, the U.S. Census Bureau conducts in-person interviews with several thousand persons annually, for the National Crime Victimization Survey. In 1992-2002, over 2,000 of the persons interviewed disclosed they had been raped or sexually assaulted. Of them, only 26 volunteered that they used a weapon to resist. [In none of those 26 cases](In none of those 26 cases) was the rape completed; in none of the cases did the victim suffer additional injury after she deployed her weapon.

Professor Gary Kleck, author of the above study, then conducted a much broader examination of NCVS data. Analyzing a data set of 27,595 attempted violent crimes and 16 types of protective actions, Kleck found that resisting with a gun greatly lowered the risk of the victim being injured, or of the crime being completed.

But in 2013, a bill was introduced to outlaw licensed carry on all campuses. Rape survivor Amanda Collins testified before the Senate State Affairs Committee about how a ban on campus carry had affected her life. As a 21-year-old, Ms Collins had a Nevada defensive handgun license. But the University of Nevada at Reno did not allow licensed firearms on campus. She was raped in the parking garage of the campus police station, which was closed for the night.

The crime took place just a few feet from an emergency call box. “How does rendering me defenseless protect you against a violent crime?” she asked the Colorado Senators. State Senator Evie Hudak told Collins that if Collins had been carrying a gun, statistics showed that the gun would have been taken from her. Actually, statistics show that fewer than one percent of defensive gun use results in the defender’s gun being taken.