My Kids Tried Communism

 My kids tried communism, multiple times, and it has failed every single time.  I have two sons who love playing Minecraft.  We play together on servers I host.  Every few months we end up starting a new server from scratch, so we can start over with a new version of Minecraft or some new set of mods we want to try.  This is a lot of fun for all of us, but, my boys always decide they want to build a house together and live together, sharing all of their resources and such.

Now, this isn't that different from how I have played with my older friends in the past.  We generally have separate houses, and we each own our own stuff, but we share as well.  If someone needs something and someone else has extra, the person with extra will share.  We often build and maintain a central warehouse of extra stuff we don't need that anyone can come and take from if they need it.

As similar as these two economic systems appear, they are actually wildly different.  In the first case, sharing is compulsory.  If one of my sons decides he needs a bunch of skeleton bones to make bone meal to fertilize the crops, he can go and take them without even asking.  Because ownership is shared, he owns them as much as anyone else, so he can go and take as desired, for whatever use he feels is necessary.  If my other son decides he wants to use them for something else, he can do it without asking as well.  Two days ago, this exact scenario led to a heated argument.  The bones in question were collected by one of my sons and used by the other.  The one who collected them went to use them and discovered they were all gone.  He believed that as the collector he had some kind of special right to use them before anyone else.  My other son was playing by the rules they had agreed upon, where everything was shared ownership, and right to use was based on immediate need.  In the second case, sharing was 100% voluntary.  Whoever worked to obtain the materials didn't just have first dibs but had sole ownership.  We chose to share our excess as we desired.  And we didn't always share all of our excess.  Diamonds are rare and precious in Minecraft, so if someone asked if anyone had spare diamonds they could have, odds are the request would not yield any willing to give diamonds, even if some of us did have more than our immediate needs called for.  If you want diamonds, you can go mining for them yourself.  I worked hard for mine!  Alternatively, I might be willing to sell you some of my diamonds, in trade for something of similar value.  On the other hand, if someone wanted to cobblestone to build a house, a tower, a castle, or whatever with, pretty much everyone would be willing to share, because cobblestone is not rare and is trivial to obtain more of as needed.  We were also generally quite willing to give food, as it is not super rare and not hard to get.  In fact, I would often go to great pains to build a machine to produce unlimited food on nearly every server we played on, and then I would allow anyone to take as much of the food it produced as they wanted, because food is a pretty important resource in the game.

Another way of putting it is that the system my sons keep trying to use is communism, while my friends and I use a system of capitalism, but we also share, because in capitalism, reputation matters, and in capitalism sharing is a good way of earning a good reputation.

The outcomes of these two systems, even in Minecraft, is quite different.  The capitalist system my friends and I use is conducive civilized, friendly gameplay, where we all build wealth together.  Yes, there are some people who are poor.  They build low quality houses, spend a lot of time exploring, and spend very little time mining and accumulating wealth.  Some of us are very wealthy, with massive herds of all manner of livestock, multiple houses, towers, castles, and even cities full of villagers with valuable trades.  We build automated machines for producing certain valuable resources in massive quantities.  We spend a lot of time mining, accumulating massive amounts of valuable resources.  We put a great deal of effort into obtaining the best gear possible.  We decorate our properties in gold, lapis lazuli, and beautiful marble and quartz.  Some of us have different kinds of wealth than the others.  Some amount of trading happens.  We are generous with common resources that we have plenty of, but we are tighter with rarer resources that require a lot of time and effort to obtain.  We even go our of our way to either mark our property or claim property far enough away from others that disputes won't arise.  This system keeps everyone friends.  It avoids petty arguments.  We don't steal from each other, because we are all civilized human beings, so there are no arguments about property rights at all.  If the wealthy won't share with the poor, the poor either do without or work harder to get what they want.  The poor don't whine and wail that the rich are taking advantage of them or exploiting them, even when the poor have to trade with the rich to get what they want.  In Minecraft, it's easy to understand the work that goes into generating and accumulating wealth, so civilized humans playing the game understand that they have no call to blame the wealthy for their own poverty.  Sadly, in real life capitalism is poorly understood.  Many people believe that CEOs get paid a lot of money for very little work, when that is not true at all.  Many see wealthy business owners as leeches exploiting the poor, when the reality is that creating and maintaining a successful business is an incredible amount of work.  The "exploited poor" could be wealthy, if they worked as hard as the owners and CEOs.  Many people choose employment over ownership specifically because they understand how much work ownership is and aren't willing to do it.  This is not to suggest that exploitation doesn't exist within Western capitalism, but the truth is that it is extremely rare.  I've done the math, and I've found that the average American could easily make a living making and selling artisan soap, with a startup cost of less than $100 (even after "Bidenomics" rampant inflation).  It's a trivial skill to learn.  All you need to do it is a large pot, some cheap chemicals and other ingredients, and something to mold the bars in.  The time required is low enough that a stay-at-home mom could do it at the same time as caring for 2 children (maybe more).  But, running the business is a lot of work.  You'll probably need to setup a website, unless you can find enough local stores willing to resell your product.  You'll have to take care of orders in a timely manner.  You'll have to keep up with demand even if you don't feel like working today.  When you are running your own small business, you can't just call in sick and let someone else cover your shift.  You are accountable, if you make a mistake.  Most people don't want that level of responsibility, even if it means they can work from home and make more money for less hours.  Even if you can make a living working only 30 hours a week, running a business is much more stressful.  You might hear that some CEO makes $400k a year, and that might sound unfair.  The problem is, if that CEO wasn't getting paid that much, it wouldn't be worth the stress of the job, and without a CEO the business would collapse and all of the "poor exploited" workers would lose their jobs.  Some of those workers might think they could do the job, but odds are the business would still collapse when any one of them in charge.  In Minecraft though, there are no employers.  You kind of have to run your own business.  I suppose on a server with a huge number of people, there might be a few willing to run businesses, and that would create the opportunity for others to be employees instead of owners, but few Minecraft servers have that many people, and if they did, running business would be just as stressful as it is in real life.  The key though, is that capitalism creates a space and atmosphere for civility.

Communism, on the other hand, creates conflict.  When property is shared between multiple people, that creates circumstances perfect for breeding conflict.  This is true of more than just communism to.  Business partnerships are significantly more likely to fail than sole proprietorships.  Part of the reason corporations are governed by a board of directors rather than collectively run by the shareholders directly is exactly because of the potential for conflict in systems of shared property.  In Minecraft, on a small scale, this is extremely obvious the first time people start arguing about who gets to use what.  My sons have tried communism this way tens if not hundreds of times now.  It always ends the same way.  They get in a fight over something one of them used that the other was planning to use, and then they stop doing the shared ownership of everything they have, until eventually they are using the same system of capitalism my friends and I use.  Now days, they no longer start by sharing a house, because they know how that is going to go.  They still start with shared resources though.  And here's where things get really interesting.  It's always the same one who suggests the shared ownership.  In my experience, communism is almost always the idea of people who aren't very wealthy and want more without having to work for it.  Even Karl Marx, the one who wrote the Communist Manifesto, giving communism a formal definition, meets this definition.  He came from a wealthy background, but he wasn't wealthy himself.  He even spent a lot of his life in poverty.  He was well known to be a lazy drinker.  On several occasions he wrote articles on communism and related subjects in exchange for alcohol.  He came from a family that was originally wealthy enough to not need to work for a living, and he spent his entire life trying to avoid working for a living.  Of course he wished for a communist system, where all of the wealth of society was shared with him, so he could live a lavish lifestyle while still avoiding work!  Similarly, look at which Americans promote communism the loudest.  It has always been college students who would rather protest than do their coursework or get jobs after graduation.  Now and then someone who isn't lazy will get suckered into promoting the movement, but the vast majority of those who promote communism are looking for a handout, not a morally superior economic system.  I can even see this in my sons.  The one who suggests this system is always the one who wants something someone else has and would gain access to it through the institution of a communist system.  Now, it might be tempting to believe that in practice the conflict potential can be eliminated through government.  This is false though.  Government itself is a system of shared ownership, and it is plagued with conflict.  Government within communist systems can give the illusion of reduced conflict, but this is actually false.  Government can mitigate some conflict by forcing people to accept a particular decision, rather than letting people argue and fight over it.  More importantly though, conflict is constant within government.  Every large scale communist government has been plagued by these new problems.  When you give an individual or group greater power within a communist economic system, conflicts are always resolved in favor of the individual or group with greater power.  In Russia, members of the ruling Soviet Party had exclusive access to special stores where they could get stuff that was not available to the general population.  The Soviet rulers had the authority to take whatever they wanted, rather than abiding by the communist rules of shared ownership.  We see the same exact kind of system in North Korea right now.  Those who are part of the wealthy ruling group literally have stores only they are allowed to go to, while the general population lives in poverty.  Communist China gives members of the ruling party more resources and greater access to resources than everyone else.  Communist Cuba does this too.  It is literally impossible to have a communist system of government where the government doesn't give itself special privileges with regards to resource access.  The whole point of communism is that the resources are shared among everyone, but in practice it is impossible for this to actually work.  If there is no government, this facilitates mass contention that would lead to civil war if attempted on a large scale.  If there is a government, the resources are no longer shared among everyone, because the government will always claim sole ownership of a portion of the resources and special privileges over the rest.  The only way a communist system ever could work is through divine intervention, forcing people to remain civilized without a government that takes more than its share.

Some people will argue that none of these are "real" communism, but the truth is, two kids sharing resources, without any sort of government or higher authority to siphon resources and distribute them preferentially to government officials is about as pure as communism could ever get, and even it doesn't work.  Maybe it would work with adults.  Plenty of married couples share resources like this with little or no conflict over resource allocation.  The truth though, is that even this is closer to capitalism.  As a married person myself, I can tell you that it is not like communism.  I do have property that I own.  My wife has property she owns.  We share ownership of our home and vehicles.  We share ownership of income and money savings.  That shared ownership, however, still isn't like communist shared ownership.  For big expenses, allocation of space, and vehicle scheduling, we discuss and negotiate.  It's not "take what you need", and it's not "whoever needs it first gets it".  For small necessary expenses we don't always need to discuss, but when funds are low or the expense is significant, discussion is critical in maintaining civility and avoiding conflict.  Under this system, distribution of resources is not equal.  The resource pool is not a free-for-all or a communal pot.  It is literally owned by both of us, and this means that every single element is half owned by each of us.  If I want to spend a dollar or even a penny, my wife is necessarily part of that, because she owns half of it.  And I don't mean she owns 50¢ of each dollar and I own 50¢ of it.  I mean, she half owns the whole dollar and I half own the whole dollar.  There is no division so small that we don't both own half.  In communism, it's all about equal distribution.  In marriage it is not.  It's more about need and negotiation.  My wife sews and I do software development and mechanical engineering.  So she gets sewing machines when she needs and we can afford, and I get computers, laser cutters, and desktop mills as we can afford and I need.  We don't keep track of cost, because it's a lot less important than meeting our needs and maintaining a civilized relationship.  We are going to be getting a bonus soon.  I'm not going to be buying anything big out of it, but my wife will likely be getting a new sewing machine to replace an old one that's worn out and damaged.  That's definitely not communism.  It's much closer to the kind of capitalist cooperation my friends and I engage in when playing Minecraft together, where resources are individually owned, necessities are shared based on need, and other resources are sometimes freely given and other times negotiated over.  This kind of relationship can look like communism from the outside, but the truth is, it isn't, and even if it was, it's not very scalable.  What works for two people who have formally covenanted to live and work together, acting as single entity, won't necessarily work for a country of 330 million people, who mostly don't know each other and many of whom are not trustworthy enough to have a national credit debit giving them unfettered access to all of the country's wealth.

The truth is, if none of this is "real" communism, then it proves beyond a doubt that real communism is completely impossible.  That said, according to Marx's definition of Communism, which is the official definition, what the USSR did and what Cuba, China, North Korea, and Cuba are all doing is "real" communism, probably even more so than the massively overregulated capitalism of the U.S. is "real" capitalism.  (Note that regulation is inherently socialist, so a economy that is free market by default but where nearly everything is touched by massive amounts of government regulation is probably more honestly called a socialist economy than a capitalist one.  As such, any failure of the U.S. economy right now is actually more evidence that socialism doesn't work, not evidence that capitalism doesn't work.  The decline of our economy actually followed the rise of our socialist regulatory system.  The less capitalist our economy has become, the worse it has functioned.)  Anyhow, communism doesn't work, not even in Minecraft with only two people.

Response to "The Conservative Argument for a Liberal Arts Education"

This is a response to the YouTube short "The Conservative Argument for a Liberal Arts Education".  YouTube sometimes issues mysterious "returned error" messages when attempting to post comments, without any explanation of clarification.  I generally assume that my comment must be too long for YouTube, so I'm going to post it here instead and drop a link in the video comments for anyone who might actually care.

The problem is that most colleges offering “liberal arts” degrees are actually teaching liberal politics rather than liberal arts. Classes that claim to be teaching critical thinking only pass students who come to the same conclusions as the teacher and fail students who don’t. That’s not critical thinking, it’s just teaching students not to question things and to follow “authority” figures like sheep, by punishing them if they don't come to the same conclusions.

If U.S. universities’ liberal arts programs actually taught liberal arts, yeah, it would be well worth pursuing. But they don’t, so it isn’t.

If you want to learn real liberal arts, maybe start with the Federalist Papers. Read some Jane Austin. Read the Bible. Those are impressively good sources for starting out. Look up books that the Founders read, and read those. There are lots of gems in there, and you can learn why they designed the U.S. government the way they did. In college, I was looking for sources in a comparison I was writing of slavery in different cultures, and I came across a book in the university library from the early 1800s on how to best care for plantation slaves. Know what I learned? Most slave owners weren’t abusive tyrants. Most slaves didn’t hate being slaves. And slave owners generally understood that if you want productivity, you must ensure your slaves are well fed, get sufficient rest and free time, and are generally happy! Now I’m not trying to suggest this justifies slavery, but reading about history is a great way to actually understand it! I grew up thinking every slave owner beat their slaves regularly and murdered slaves for fun, and that all slaves were miserable being slaves and wanted their freedom. It turns out that’s just not true. Slavery is certainly tragic and exploitative. It should be avoided at most costs. But as bad as it was, many slaves voluntarily continued working for their masters after the Civil War, often for the same compensation they had as slaves (sufficient room and board to live comfortably and be healthy). And did you know that during times of war, when plantation slave owners had to ration their food, they rationed their own food aggressively, so that the slaves could continue to eat their normal diet or as close as possible to it? The slaves were the workers. They couldn’t afford to underfeed the slaves, otherwise they wouldn’t have energy to work. So instead they rationed their own food and that of their family, so the slaves could continue to get all of the necessary nutrition.

The best way to get a strong liberal arts education is to real a whole lot! Consuming a wide variety of media also helps, in moderation. I grew up watching Cheers and Star Trek, because that’s what my dad liked watching when I was young. In my teens, my parents started picking up boxed DVD sets of older TV shows, so I’ve watched a fair amount of The Andy Griffith Show, Hogan’s Heroes, I Dream of Genie, and a while slew of shows ranging from the '50s through the 1970s. We also sometimes watched stuff currently airing, so I’ve watched some Hercules, some more recent Star Trek, and other shows through the '90s. I moved out in the early 2000s, and I watch very little TV myself, but I watch the occasional movie, and I consume a moderate amount of YouTube and have since the late 2000s, so I never lagged too far behind. I also watched bunch of the original Dr. Who and bits and pieces of other older TV shows on my own in the 2010s (as well as some of the current Dr. Who series).

What this means is that unlike the typical Millennial (or any other generation), I have exposure to a massive timespan of American culture. I have studied the U.S. Constitution, in its original context. I’ve studied U.S. culture within difference parts of the 1800s (with significant overlap), in terms of politics, in terms of household cultures, and in terms of industrial, farm, and different work cultures.

On top of that, I’ve also studied Japanese culture, from the mid-1800s to now, and certain eras of the past. I’ve studied the Japanese Constitution and compared it with the U.S. Constitution (if you’ve never done that, you should; do while keeping in mind that the people who wrote it were American diplomats (not legal scholars), who consulted with the Japanese peasantry to determine what the majority of Japanese people wanted, rather than merely what the ruling class wanted; you may notice some very interesting differences between the Japanese Constitution and the U.S. one that only people with experience with the application of the U.S. Constitution would ever think of).

Very little of this is taught in any U.S. university, in liberal arts or anywhere else. The only element of this I learned anything on in college was the portion around the founding of the U.S., which I had already studied, aced all of the tests on, but did learn a bit more on. And I wouldn’t have had any classes on this in any other college in the world. I attended a religious college for a faith that holds freedom of religion and liberty in general to be extremely sacred. No other university cares enough about religious freedom and liberty to even consider it.

Now days, what is called “liberal arts” isn’t actually liberal arts. The only real option today is to take the effort to learn it on your own. It is well worth doing though. You will gain a much broader view of life and a better understanding of where we came from and how we got to where we are (politically, technologically, and such).

Technically, I’m considered an elder Millennial. (Elder, because I’m at the very beginning.) In reality, due in part to my upbringing and in part to my choice to educate myself very broadly, I don’t really fit into any particular generation. I’ve learned from generations spanning from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin all the way up to the generations on popular media today. I’ve even learned from more ancient generations than that, through scripture, like the Bible, and published books by authors including Jane Austin, Edmund Spenser, and many others.

While I’m a Millennial by birth date, I am timeless by culture. This is largely by choice. I’m aware of Millennial culture. I could embrace it and be “Millennial”. But why? I can see so far back into the past that I’m fully aware of how absurd Millennial culture is. Even Gen X, Boomer, and Silent generation cultures are absurd compared to the sum culture of all humanity through the ages. Gen Z and “gen alpha” are no different either. Every generation seems to want to separate itself from previous and future generations (except in isolated tribes with no technology and small populations, that are so close to abject poverty that they have to be more concerned with survival than petty garbage like that). The result is always the same: A constant mix of cultural progress and cultural backsliding. Do you really think that the hippie free love movement was some huge new cultural invention? It’s not. The Romans did it, and when their leadership bought into it, they became so distracted by it that they let the empire decay into irrelevance. Before the Romans, there were civilizations that worshipped Isis/Ishtar (and other names), a fertility goddess, whose temples were basically centers of “free love”. It didn’t end up working out for them either, and when those civilizations collapsed, they were replaced with superior cultures that were more “prudish” and that survived much longer. Homosexuality is no new thing. Plenty of ancient cultures allowed or even embraced it. But those cultures consistently went extinct in favor of, again, more “prudish” cultures. Cultural evolution is at least as real as biological evolution. History shows us that destructive cultural mutations show up frequently, and the good ones stick around while the bad ones decline and disappear. All of these new trends of modern “morality” have all happened countless times in the past, and the reason our culture didn’t already have them is that past cultures that included them died out every time. The moral trends that always survived through cultural collapse or evolution are things like marriage, the sanctity of sex, the importance of family (not necessarily the “nuclear” family, but blood relation, and at least two generations living and working together), belief in a faith that emphasizes personal responsibility, a good work ethic (not necessarily the “Protestant” work ethic, but ideas like valuing quality and honesty in your work), binary gender roles, individual charity, and basically all of the values taught by Christ, whether those cultures were actually aware of Christ or not. Those are the cultures that survived. The ones that didn’t are the ones that embraced many of the things modern Western generations starting from the 1920s have embraced. If the supposedly hardcore feminist Amazons are so great, where are they now? Where is their culture? Heavily feminist cultures have existed in the past, but they’ve been rare and have almost never lasted more than one or two generations. They went extinct, because they weren’t fit in a battle of cultural survival of the fittest. (Some of those fertility cults where temples were basically free whore houses leaned that direction. Where are they now?)

And no, there is no, “But they just didn’t do it right.” All the ways that are necessary to rule these terrible ideas out have been tried! If a cultural idea is only valid if it is done just right, it’s not fit enough to survive. It’s too fragile. Communism is a great example. It’s destructive and oppressive, and it always tends toward collapse. “Oh, but no one has tried real Communism.” First, yeah they have. Read Marx and compare. All of these different “types” of Communism were done according to his definition (and Marx is the definer of Communism). They all failed. Second, a system that only works if it is perfectly balanced and doesn’t work otherwise, can never work, because there’s no such think as perfect balance. A system can only work if it works at least proportionally to how close to "pure_ it is. Capitalism and democratic government both work proportionally. More capitalism works better, but it still provides proportional benefits if you only do a little bit of it. Look at China. They’ve allowed a moderate amount of capitalism in certain contexts because it doesn’t need to be done “right” to work! A little capitalism works a little bit. But a lot of communism doesn’t work at all! A little communism doesn’t work either. Why would anyone think that “pure” communism would work, when there’s no amount of communism less than that that works? That’s absurd. Even if pure communism did work, there’s no way to keep it pure once we’ve gotten it pure, so it’s only a matter time, probably only a few minutes, before it’s rolling back down the hill. A perfect system that isn’t stable enough to last is a terrible system! It doesn’t matter if no one has done it right, because even if we could do it right and managed to get there, it wouldn’t be long before we are back to mass murder and extreme oppression.

This is the kind of stuff we can learn from studying liberal arts far beyond the scope of anything you could learn in college. I don’t think most liberal arts even belongs in college, because they can’t teach enough to be a significant benefit. If instead though, we taught personal responsibility, basic civics, and strongly encouraged people to study and read to improve themselves throughout their lives, maybe Americans would eventually have a good enough real liberal arts education that this stupid “generational” bull crap would end, and everyone could get along and “common sense” might actually be common.

The U.S. Bail Scam

Over the last decade, there has been a lot of controversy surrounding the practice of allowing those accused of crimes to be "bailed out" of jail while awaiting trial, by posting a money bond.  There is good reason for the controversy.  The system is predatory.  Judges almost always set the bail far higher than the accused can afford.  Even with bail bondsmen "helping out", the cost is prohibitive.  And it does not matter whether the accused is guilty or not.  Merely being accused of a crime suddenly puts the cost of freedom at a premium that is barely affordable in the moment and sometimes life destroying in the long term.  Unfortunately, the odds of winning a criminal case from behind bars are extremely low.  Finding and hiring a decent attorney from jail is nigh on impossible.  Some jails maintain phone lists for local lawyers, but local lawyers almost always have a very strong conflict of interest, with strong motivations to maintain good relationships with local judges and prosecutors, even at the expense of their own clients.  Jails almost never provide phone lists for lawyers outside of the local area.  If you are lucky enough to have someone outside who is willing to help, they might be able to find a suitable lawyer, but with very limited access to the candidates, the accused is very unlikely to find the best lawyer for their specific circumstances.  The result is that those who cannot afford to pay bail typically end up with public defenders, who are overworked, underpaid, and have an even stronger incentive to sacrifice clients assigned to them to the "justice" system to maintain professional relationships.

Few people today truly understand how the bail system was originally designed to work.  As originally intended, it is actually quite elegant.  The system was created because it was understood that incarcerating people accused of crimes but not convicted is unjust.  They are, after all, innocent until proven guilty, are they not?  And keeping an innocent person in jail is obviously a miscarriage of justice.  Unfortunately, there is a risk that if they did actually commit the crime, they will attempt to flee law enforcement.  Bail bonds were an elegant if imperfect solution to this problem.  During the arraignment of a person accused of a crime, the judge is supposed to determine how much money the accused can afford to give up in exchange for freedom, then balance that with the risk of flight to determine and assign a fair bail bond amount.  The accused could then pay that amount into a bond, a temporary holding of the money by law enforcement, that would be fully refunded once flight risk was gone (typically once the case was over).  There are two critical things here.  The first is affordability and the second is refundability.  The idea of bail bonds is that the jurisdiction is holding some money of the accused as collateral, with the goal of minimizing flight risk.  As long as the accused shows up to court as ordered, the bail bond is refunded once the case is over.  And this is true whether the case ends in acquittal or conviction.  Bail is not supposed to be a punishment, a fine, or a fee.  It is only supposed to be collateral, and unless the flight risk is so high that the judge does not believe that affordable bail would be sufficient motivation to prevent flight, it is supposed to be within the capacity of the accused to pay.  If the judge does feel that it is impossible for the accused to pay an amount of bail sufficient to prevent flight, it is the responsibility of the judge to deny bail.  There is some flexibility in this though, to allow friends or family members to pay bail in exchange for taking upon themselves the responsibility for ensuring the accused does not flee.

Unfortunately, due to a combination of laziness of law enforcement, profit motive, and general lack of morals and accountability of our legal system, this system has been hijacked for profit.  Bail bond companies have popped up to "help" those accused of crimes who cannot afford to pay the assigned bond amount.  The very fact that those accused of crimes routinely could not afford their assigned bonds is the first miscarriage of justice in the system.  Why judges did this is unclear, though back when this system was first put in place, corrupt judges were common.  Bribery and other illegal and unethical influences were normal.  Not to suggest that the majority of judges were corrupt, but if you read journals and non-fiction accounts of people's lives from 100 years ago and further back (especially in the U.S. in the 1800s), a great many of them that include anything regarding law enforcement and trials include accounts of at least one corrupt judge.  And cash bail is much older than this, with hundreds of years of history in Europe, where corruption was often just how the judicial system and law enforcement worked, and the majority of judges probably were corrupt.

But how do bail bond companies actually cause problems?  Today, every judge knows that there is a bail bond company waiting to "help" every person who is offered bail.  Actual ratios vary with company and region, but bail bond companies often charge between 10% and 20% of the bond amount.  So when a judge is setting bail, the judge will take into account the fact that the accused can get out of jail for only 10% or 20% of the amount that bail is set to.  If the judge determines that the accused can reasonably afford $500 bail, and the flight risk is not high enough to justify setting it higher, then the judge will set bail for $5,000.  If bail was set to $500, then the accused could get out for $50 to $100.  And because the bail bond company does not refund the bond once the case is completed, there is no motivation for the accused not to flee.  And in fact, this is true regardless of what bail is set to.  Instead, the bail bond company is liable for the bond amount.

This is how bail bond companies work: The client pays the bail bond company some percent of the bail amount set by the judge, typically in the range of 10% to 20%.  High risk clients might be required to pay more.  The bail bond company keeps this money regardless of the outcome.  This is their fee.  Then the bail bond company puts up the full bail amount, giving it to the police or whoever handles that for the specific jurisdiction.  That money goes into a bail bond, which is refunded when the case is over.  So now the bail bond company stands to lose the $5,000 or whatever bail was set to.  They have the incentive to make sure the accused shows up to court and does not flee.  If the accused takes off, the bail bond company loses that $5,000.  The $500 paid by the client is something like a one-time loan interest payment, similar to how payday loans work (including being similarly predatory).  Bail bond companies often get special treatment, and many jurisdictions use bail bond money as reward for capture if that money is seized due to the accused fleeing or not showing up to court.  Law enforcement will often give bail bond companies some time to capture the accused before claiming ownership of the bond.  And when law enforcement does start tracking down the accused, if the bail bond company can capture them first, the bond money will be returned to them.  For law enforcement and the governments they serve, this is a great deal, because they do not have to spend money doing their job.  Instead, bail bond companies will do the job of law enforcement (and are sometimes even legally deputized, though without wages or other compensation), and those accused of crimes pay for their labor (again, whether they are guilty or not, and whether they jump bail or not).

(Note that most bail bond company contracts do include liability for the client if they violate the terms of bail.  If the client jumps bail, they (or whoever signed the bond agreement with the company, if wasn't the accused) are contractually obligated to pay back the bail bond company for the full amount of the bond.  Often this does not matter, because just getting arrested and put in jail frequently leads to job loss, loss of property, and large legal fees, rendering the client incapable of repaying the money, and if they did actually commit the crime and are convicted, they could end up incarcerated for years on top of that and unable to get a decent job after that.  There's not much motive to repay bail bond companies in these cases, and those irresponsible enough to violate the terms of bond are also likely not responsible enough to ever repay the debt.  In short, this is not a strong motive to adhere to the terms of bail.)

This is all a scam.  For law enforcement and their associated governments, this saves money at the expense of those accused of crimes.  Bail bond companies obviously benefit from this, often getting paid hundreds or thousands of dollars for what amount to short term, low risk loans, with worse interest per unit time than loan sharks (again, in the realm of payday loans).  Additionally, bail bond companies literally have a captive market.  If you are accused of a crime, and you don't get bailed out, odds are very high that you will be convicted even if you are innocent.  Finding a decent lawyer is almost impossible from jail.  So you have to choose between being punished for a crime you may not have committed or just submitting to getting scammed.  And even if you did commit the crime, if you cannot get a good lawyer, odds are you will suffer an unjustly severe punishment for your crime.  For the judicial system, there is less benefit, but it does generally guarantee that there will always be someone who has both the resources and motivation to capture those who violate the terms of their bail, even when law enforcement is massively underfunded or just plain lazy.  Ultimately, those who pay for this are those accused of committing crimes.  They do not have to actually commit the crimes they are accused of to be forced into this scam, and even if they did commit the crime, they still have to submit to the scam to get a fair trial and avoid cruel and unusual levels of punishment.

This does not necessarily mean that getting rid of bail entirely is the right thing to do though.  The core justification for bail still stands: If we believe in and adhere to the principle that those accused of crimes should be treated as innocent until they are proven guilty, we cannot keep people in jail until they are acquitted.  That's more unjust than scamming them for their freedom.  The original intent of the cash bail system was and still is wise and good.  The problem is allowing a middle man to scam those accused of crimes and then adapting the judicial system to facilitate this scam instead of just shutting down the scam.  The solution is to abolish bail bond companies entirely.  Do not allow 3rd parties to post bail.  Perhaps make exceptions for family members and close friends, but to avoid abuse, require the judge to reevaluate bail based on who is paying it, and require evidence that the accused cannot afford to post bail directly.  If a person can afford to pay bail themselves, the judge should deny any petition to allow anyone else to post bail.  If the accused cannot afford to pay their own bail, then a friend or family member should be allowed to petition the judge to pay bail themselves.  The judge must then determine if that person can be trusted to ensure that the accused does not flee and does show up to court as ordered and if so, then the judge will determine what amount is both affordable and will be sufficient motivation for the person paying bail to keep their agreement.  Perhaps even require them to swear under oath that they can and will ensure that the terms of bail are strictly adhered to.

Is this a perfect system?  No.  Will it sometimes be abused?  Sure.  Does that mean we should not do it?  Well, why do we not just punish everyone accused of a crime without even having a trial, when we know that some people who are actually guilty will end up being acquitted?  If we put punishment and safety ahead of justice, we will end up punishing a great many innocent people.  Our current bail system does that, and that is a bad thing, but abolishing bail and keeping people accused of crimes in jail while awaiting trial does it even worse.  A justice system that routinely punishes the innocent encourages crime, because avoiding crime has no benefit when you will be punished whether you are guilty or not.  The idea that we should treat people as innocent until proven guilty is an admission that it is better to sometimes let guilty people go free than it is to ever let an innocent person be punished.  Our current bail system does punish innocent people, and abolishing bail entirely punishes them even worse.  This is very bad thing, and we can and should be doing much better.  So while a bail system without the bail bond company middleman might indeed sometimes allow the guilty to escape, it is better than punishing the innocent.

In addition, we do not just have to lie down and accept the abuse that is bound to happen sometimes.  We can make it a crime to lie about financial resources during bail hearings.  We can punish those who post bail on behalf of others in bad faith.  We can deny bail for anyone who has ever violated the terms of their bail, and we can summarily reject 3rd party bail petitions for anyone who has ever posted bail for someone else and then allowed the terms of bail to be violated.  We can ensure that there are strong motives against abuse, without violating anyone's rights and without harming the innocent or otherwise treating them unjustly.  And we can even retain many of the benefits of the current system, by allowing bounty hunters to earn bail bond money where bail was violated by capturing the accused and returning them jail.  Yes, sometimes abuse will still happen.  Right now though, abuse is just how the system works.  Replacing the massive scale institutionalized abuse with a system where abuse will occasionally happen is a massive net gain.  There is no perfect system, but we can do far better than we are now.  We should be protecting the innocent much better than we currently are, and even the guilty deserve better treatment than we currently provide.

Autism and ADHD are Super Powers

I wrote most of this out as a YouTube comment, but it's so long YouTube won't take it.  Here's the video I'm responding to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sw87u86i2E&t=3174s

I was diagnosed with ADHD quite young.  I'm not exactly sure when, but somewhere between 3 and 5 years old.  The doctor recommended medication.  My parents considered this very seriously, and they ultimately decided against it.  My ADHD made school quite difficult for me.  Up through 6th grade, I struggled.  I had a hard time paying attention.  I did do very well in some subjects, but I couldn't concentrate on others at all, and I got in trouble a lot for being restless.  In 6th grade the problems became to big to ignore.  I was in the Talented and Gifted program, thriving in it, but I was also failing 6th grade.  I'm sure my parents got some pressure to medicate me again at this point, but if so they never mentioned it.  Instead, they decided to homeschool me.  My mom bought a ~3 inch thick workbook that was supposed to cover all of 6th grade, and she assigned me 10 pages a day, which she calculated would get me done by the end of the school year (which we were halfway through, so it was basically a double course load).  Not only did pull it off, most days my school work was done by noon.  (Most people don't realize that ADHD doesn't just mean you are very easily distracted.  Most people with ADHD can also hyperfocus given the right motivation.  I've always really enjoyed learning.  The problem with public school is that it was way too slow for me, so I would get bored.  Giving me a double workload and letting me work at my own pace produced an environment perfect for triggering me to hyperfocus.)

Anyhow, I'm middle aged now.  I still have the symptoms of ADHD.  But now it's different.  I consider ADHD a super power.  I'm not a victim, because I've learned to use the benefits and largely avoid the negatives of having ADHD.  I got through college, both a Bachelor's degree and I just graduated with a Master's last month, with a consistent GPA well over 3.8.  I even regularly went far beyond the requirements on many assignments.  College lets me learn at the pace I want to.  I don't have a teacher discouraging me when I get ahead of the other students, out of fear that I'll be disruptive (which I certainly would have been and sometimes was in public school).  College professors (at least, the ones I had) love students who are excited about learning.  I was always the student that would take up the professor's sometimes flippant challenges, offering significant grade boosts for doing things that should be very difficult or impossible for inexperienced students (though I never needed the grade boosts...).  Even better, I came into college with almost 20 years of experience in my major, so I had to go well beyond the assignments, because I knew if I didn't, I would get bored, then get distracted, and then start failing my classes.  So I would intentionally do my assignments in unorthodox ways that would allow me to learn something new, while still technically satisfying the requirements.  I sometimes would ask professors for permission to do assignments differently, satisfying more difficult requirements instead of the normal ones.  If a professor made a flippant remark like, "If anyone manages to include [this expert level element that you won't learn about for three more semesters] in their project, I'll give them an automatic A in the entire course", I was the one who would do it.  I even had a physics professor who had a grading policy of giving the course grade of either the composite score or the grade for the final, whichever was higher.  So every time I got a graded test back, I would rigorously study everything I missed on the test.  That professor used to tell his students that no one had ever gotten a better grade on the final.  When my brother took his course after I finished it, he told me the professor now tells his students only one has ever done it.  My composite grade was a B.  A scored better than 100% on the final.  (I did miss one question, but I made it up with a much more difficult bonus question that was worth more than the one I missed.)  I worked hard for that, but I did it because I knew I had to hyperfocus to get a good grade at all.

Another really valuable power that comes from ADHD is being very observant.  I notice the tiniest things.  Most people with ADHD do this, but then they are immediately distracted by them.  If you can learn to refocus immediately though, after very quickly assessing whatever it is you've noticed and making sure it doesn't need immediate attention, this goes from liability to super power.  And with practice, it becomes automatic.  My brain will notice everything.  It will quickly analyze each thing it notices, and if it is more important than what I'm currently doing, it will "notify" me instead of returning my focus to my current task.  Otherwise, it will store it away for later.  This is extremely valuable in many situations.  In the simplest case, it just means that I can remember things that happened around me when I wasn't paying any attention at all, often days or weeks later.  The ADHD made my brain consider it important enough to maintain a memory of far longer than most people would.  More deeply though, it means that I can remember what people said around me when I wasn't paying attention, for example, in a class, when I'm getting distracted by something else.  It means that I can often  search for a lost object entirely in my own head and find it, even if it wasn't important enough to consciously notice at the time that I saw it.  (Like, something that belongs to someone else, that I may never have even seen before and didn't seem out of play or otherwise unique or interesting when I saw it.)  Fully leveraging this may require some memory training as well.  When I was young, my mom did a lot of memory training with me, which probably helped to amplify this super power by increasing retention time significantly.  But this is exactly the kind of thing that educators could do (and that doctors could recommend) to develop and leverage the powers of ADHD.

I'm so happy that my parents didn't listen to the doctors.  I know others who grew up with ADHD, drugged, and they still struggle with it.  They still have a very hard time focusing on things.  Because I wasn't drugged, I was forced to deal with it and to learn to control it, and that's why ADHD has become a super power for me.  I can deliberately hyperfocus when I want to now, and that allows me to be 10 to 100 times more productive than most people working in my field.  Allowing myself to be distracted when I don't need to focus also provides me with great value, both in terms of mental health, and in terms of learning.  I can spend my free time learning large amounts about a massive range of different subjects on YouTube, Wikipedia, and all sorts of other places on the internet.  As a result I have a solid education in hundreds of different subjects.  Because my parents didn't take away my ability to be distracted by every little thing, I can be interested in practically everything, and because I can hyperfocus on demand, I can go from being interested in something to learning a huge amount about that thing very quickly.  And that means I know a huge amount about a huge amount of things.  Every person I talk with who has some project, I can offer some insight or help on their project.  If you have some hobby or interest, I can probably hold a coherent conversation about that hobby or interest.  For any given person, odds are I have some interest in common with them.  And that's extremely powerful and valuable!

ADHD is a super power.  You aren't a victim because you have ADHD.  Like any fictional super power though, if you don't learn to control it, it will do more harm than good.  Some people with ADHD do need drugs.  My daughter has a friend whose ADHD is so severe that he literally can't function without drugs.  He's so incredibly excitable that he'll end up running around screaming at the slightest stimulus.  (And even on drugs, his ADHD is similar to what mine was before I learned to control it.)  But most people with ADHD are at least as function as I was in elementary school.  Instead of fearing ADHD and drugging kids who have it, we should be teaching them to control it, because we need more people who have and can control this super power!

It may also be worth noting that I have Asperger's (I've decided I'm not going to buy into the "spectrum" lingo/classification).  I'm not diagnosed (most qualified people won't diagnose the same person with both ADHD and anything related to autism, due to significant overlap), but I've gotten unofficial two professional opinions.  One was from a close family friend who spent a lot of time around me.  (She specialized in child psychology and provided in-home therapy and psych evaluations for children.)  She didn't tell me she thought I had an autism disorder, but after I was an adult and had moved away, she told my mom, and when I told my mom I suspected, my mom told me that this friend had said the same thing.  Then, around 5 years ago, I was in a situation where someone wanted an official autism diagnosis.  It is generally extremely expensive for an adult to get an autism assessment from someone qualified to give a diagnosis, and the entity that wanted the assessment wasn't willing to pay for it, so they settled for a regular psychiatric evaluation with a "is consistent with" or "isn't consistent with" diagnosis, and the psychiatrist who evaluated me basically "diagnosed" me as "consistent with" having very high functioning autism.  Again though, while this does come with some social issues, autism, when high functioning, also comes with significant benefits.  The combination of ADHD and autism might have made it easier for me to control the powers ADHD gives me.  But on top of this, the autism also helps me by making me care less about what other people think and more about objective reality, logic, and such.  I work in a technical field, where this is incredibly valuable.  Additionally, I have some friends who also have Asperger's or more severe autism, and we can have very frank and blunt conversations, and none of us are offended.  This allows for very concise and terse discussion, wasting nothing on pleasantries, hedging, or beating around the bush.  It's so efficient and results in discussions and debates that progress very rapidly, producing value at a very rapid rate.  I've learned to be decent at conversation with normal people (though I still tend to talk too much and sometimes ramble), but when I don't have to, the exchange of information and development of ideas is so much faster.  Autism, when reasonably functional and controlled, is also a super power!

So here we are, trying treat ADHD and autism, when we should be trying to develop them in those who have them, and help them learn to control them for their benefit.  I don't identify as ADHD or autistic.  That seems stupid to me.  In fact, I generally don't strongly identify with any personal trait I have that I came with naturally.  I am a human male, but these aren't major parts of my identity, because I didn't decide to be these things.  The things that make me unique and interested, in my opinion, aren't the things I came with.  They aren't the things that are beyond my control.  Having pride in attributes I can't control is stupid, because I didn't do them.  I'm very intelligent, but that doesn't give me any special kind of worthiness or superiority.  What I choose to do with what I have been given is what actually defines me.  I'm an engineer/maker, because I chose to learn the required knowledge and skills and then to use them.  I'm an artist, because I chose to learn and practice various arts.  I'm a scientist, because I chose to seek out and learn science and experiment with it.  I'm not as "smart" as I am because I have a high IQ but because I use what I have learn about everything I possibly can and practice those things that I have the resources to be able to practice.  This might sound a bit big headed, but I don't actually feel superior to anyone else who uses what they've been given to improve themselves to a similar degree.  How many athletes are there who may not have a high IQ, a very good memory, and the benefits of ADHD and Asperger's, but who instead have very high quality muscles, tendons, and bones, who have put as much effort as I've put into my super powers into their own special super powers?  And further, I recognize that even people who have no obvious specialty might have invisible super powers.  I've often wondered if there might be a kind of savant (in the actual psychiatric sense of the word) whose specialization is social skills.  We define savantism as a trade between social skills and some specialization, but what if it isn't?  What if it is just a trade between all other skills and that one specialization, and social skills just happen to be the most noticeable one, because they are so important in our culture?  If that's the case, then there could be actual social savants, who are beyond genius level at social interaction but lacking in everything else, and we might just see them as lazy slackers because very good social skills are just written off as "charisma" while bad social skills are treated as a huge problem.

Anyhow, I think we've barely brushed the surface of what ADHD and autism really are, and massive scale overdiagnosis and overtreatment are just muddying the water, making it more difficult to learn more.  I suspect the best treatment for most people with ADHD and autism would be a special educational strategy that helps them learn to control and focus these superpowers instead of just trying to suppress them.  The X Men narrative is prophetic.  Any abnormality is automatically treated as bad and we try to suppress it, even when we know that there is good in it.  If instead of focusing on the perceived bad and trying to suppress it, we focused on the good and tried to develop it and control it, we could have a world changing number of people with mental super powers on our hands.  I have several children with ADHD and/or Asperger's myself.  (Most actually diagnosed.)  We don't medicate them, because it isn't severe enough to need medication.  I figure society is lucky that my wife and I got these kids with these "disorders" instead of someone else, because I know how to develop them for great good, and I can (and have to some degree) teach my wife how to do this as well.  Unfortunately, there are tens or hundreds of thousands of kids with ADHD and/or autism that are being treated as dangerous mutants whose powers need to be suppressed to protect themselves and others.  We can and should do better, and maybe if we do, having tens or hundreds of thousands of additional people capable of hyperfocusing, broad learning, communicating efficiently without taking offense at every little thing, and generally solving hard problems, the world would become a much better place.

In fact, what if the problem with modern society is that we have suppressed the people who normally keep society from going off the rails by saying "That's an absolutely idiotic idea", with no fear of what people will think of them, every time someone comes up with some new idea of "justice" that is ultimately self destructive and bad for society?  What if autistic people and ADHD people are a necessary check and balance against illogical, destructive groupthink, and our deliberate suppression of their unique capabilities is partially responsible for where our society has gotten itself.

Are Housing Prices Mostly Regulatory Costs?

 I've done research on housing costs, inflation, and regulation many times over the last decade or so.  See my previous article for background information that might be useful in the following.  Recently I claimed that over 70% of material costs for housing are due to building cost, and someone challenged this claim, asking for sources.

Now, I may have gotten ahead of myself, and I need to explain a few things.  First, I don't actually think the costs are directly due to building codes.  Rather, building codes require specific types of materials.  Many other viable options exist that are much cheaper, but building codes generally don't allow them to be used.  These include things like compressed wood products that are stronger, more fire resistant, and often even cheaper than the much more heavily regulated 2x4s, plywood, and drywall that are practically mandatory.  (In fact, compressed wood products are even more fire resistant than most steel studs, which will weaken and even melt with heat that would require many hours to get through compressed wood.)  Why aren't modern homes just built with poured concrete?  Because electrical code has requirements that don't make sense and thus cannot even be followed with poured concrete walls.  There's a reason we don't see extremely cheap 3D printed concrete houses flooding the market.  It's because building codes assume houses must all be build with hollow walls where plumbing and electrical can go, and the requirements making those assumptions cannot be satisfied with any other architecture, even if it is far more fire proof, earthquake resistant, water proof, and generally safer and technically superior in every way than "traditional" construction.

If you need evidence of the above, see this source on legal problems with 3D printed construction.  If you need more, you can also look up legal problems with very low cost tiny homes and with cantilever homes.  Building codes also get in the way of underground construction, which can be much cheaper in some areas than traditional construction (and which can significantly reduce heating and cooling costs).

So, the point here is that building codes restrict what construction materials builders are allowed to use.  This is where regulatory costs of these "legal" construction materials becomes a building code cost.  I don't have the time or energy to find sources on every construction material used in modern home construction, but I can give you one very solid one: Wood.  Here is a 2018 article about the impact of tariffs (a form of regulation) on home construction costs.  It is estimated in the article that this increased home construction costs by an average of $9,000 (and apartment construction by $3,000 per apartment).  That's on the low end of regulatory cost increases, likely running around 0.25% to 0.33%.  And keep in mind that this is just one regulation increasing the price of wood.  EPA regulations on logging and on energy (used for milling and kilning the lumber) likely add significantly more than that.  That article also estimates that regulatory costs make up 32% of multifamily developments (mainly apartment complexes).

I also have some personal knowledge of concrete production processes, and one the steps is heating limestone to high temperatures and maintaining those temperatures for several hours.  This causes the calcium carbonate to release its carbon component in the form of carbon dioxide.  EPA regulation over the last ~10 years or so has hit the concrete industry hard both with regulations increasing energy costs and with CO2 emissions regulations, making concrete foundations (also legally required by most building codes) significantly more expensive.

A more recent article explores how lumber price volatility, caused in part by concerns about regulatory changes and the impact of U.S. Treasury interest regulation, has caused significant increases in home construction costs.  This article estimates that regulations on construction materials increases home construction costs by 14.94%.  I don't have data on what percentage of home construction costs goes to materials, but labor is generally the bulk of the costs, so the regulatory costs included in material costs are almost certainly well over 30% and it's certainly conceivable that they are as high as 70%.  (Also, thus far I've not seen a study that takes all regulatory costs into account, including trickle down costs like transportation, EPA energy regulation costs, and such.  So that 14.94% likely only includes direct regulatory costs at the last step before the materials are bought by the construction company, which is only a small portion of total regulatory costs.)

This paper explores the regulatory costs of construction during development and construction (which doesn't even include the regulatory costs that went into the gathering, fabrication, and transportation of materials), and it estimates a total regulatory cost during those stages of 23.8% for single family homes. 

This article discusses the study and includes some nice breakdowns of data from the paper.  It also includes some additional data about regulatory price increases of lumber (mainly tariffs and market volatility caused by unpredictable economic regulatory changes) and lists a number of other materials impacted.  It also mentions delivery delays caused by pandemic regulations, which also contribute to cost increases significantly.

On top of all of this, I did construction work off and on in my late teens and early 20s, and I learned about additional impacts of regulations that don't typically get counted in estimates.  On one construction site I worked on, a team of plumbers spent their entire work shift sitting around doing nothing, because the electrical union had convinced the state government to add to building code a restriction on who can even touch electrical equipment.  Some electrical equipment, I forget what but something like a breaker box or some such, had been left too close to a sewer line or water line, such that the plumbers couldn't do the work they were supposed to do, and they couldn't legally move it.  The electrical workers weren't scheduled to come in until the next day, but the plumbers couldn't just take the day off, because they had families to feed, so the construction company paid for a day worth of labor from some 3 or 4 plumbers for nothing.  And it actually ended up costing a bit more than that, because the plumbers weren't scheduled for the next day, and they had to get their job done before insulating (what I did) and drywalling could be completed.  Delays caused by regulations don't just cost time, they also cost the wages of people scheduled to work who can't because of the delay, because people still need to make a living, whether everything is ready for them to work or not.

Anyhow, I don't have the time or energy to go step-by-step through the supply line working out the exact percent of the cost that comes from regulations.  I've provided plenty of sources showing that individual steps can end up costing at least 30% each in regulatory costs for the end product of those steps, and there are many more steps than just one for any kind of construction material.  Just 30% per step hits 69% in a mere two steps.  (This is a compounding increase, not an additive one, so the math is 1.30^2, which gives 1.69 or an increase of 69%.)  The truth is, I was really hedging when I said 70%.  It's probably closer to 80% or 90%, and that's just material costs.  When you include labor regulations, direct costs of build codes, licensing, and all of the other stuff, the total cost of a home is probably no less than 60% to 70% regulation, likely at least 80%, and if the math on regulatory compounding in my last article is right, it may be as high as 90% or possibly even higher.

The fact is, a significant majority of the cost of houses today is regulatory costs.  Even before loan costs and bank fees, you are mostly paying for the regulation.  You are paying for contractors to use more expensive, inferior materials.  You are paying for vehicle safety regulations that provide only marginal safety benefits.  You are paying for emissions and energy restrictions intended to solve problems that haven't even been proven to be real problems.  You are paying for plumbers to sit on their butts all day, so that the electricians can feel more secure demanding excessive pay for their labor.  And after all of that, the little bit of money remaining is what is actually paying for your house and the legitimate labor that went into its construction.

How Regulatory Costs Can Compound to Suffocate an Economy

 Around a decade ago, I wrote a college English paper on the topic of inflation.  I went into my research with the assumption that inflation is primarily caused by greedy businesses raising prices faster than wages, and at the time I though my research supported this assumption.  I was wrong, but I did not realize this until several years later, when I was discussing my research with a friend over email, and he asked me some questions I had not considered.  When I did the math, it proved my original assumption wrong.

For the paper, I looked at inflation over the 50 year period from 1960 to 2010.  Now I don't recall all of the exact details, and I don't have the time or energy to search my archives for the original paper, but a few figures were hard to forget.  Average inflation from 1960 to 2010 was 659%.  That means that prices increased by 6.59 times over those 50 years.  Housing prices increased by somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000% (a little more, I think), and car prices increased by somewhere in the neighborhood of 800% to 900%.  That's 10 times and 8-9 times.

I did some math on these figures, and they seemed to match up with some claims by others that greed driven inflation caused prices to increase, and businesses just deliberately lagged on wages, so that they would come out ahead.  I don't recall the exact value, but wages during that time period increased by significantly less.  A smoking gun?  I thought so.  Now, I did find some evidence that some of the inflation was caused by government regulation, so in the paper I accused businesses of taking advantage of regulation to justify bigger price increases than the actual cost of the regulation.  Again, the numbers seemed to support my claims.  I'm pretty sure I got an A on the paper.  It was a little controversial, but the professor graded based on my English writing skills and not the subject matter or opinions.

As mentioned above, several years later I was discussing this with a friend over email.  He wondered exactly how much role the government regulation played.  We both agreed that government regulation couldn't have contributed much, probably not more than a few percent.  At the same time, he wanted to know why houses and cars had inflation so much more than the average, and the obvious answer was regulatory costs.  During that time period, building codes grew quite substantially, and regulations around selling and buying homes grew a lot as well.  Similarly, this was the time period where all of the safety and emissions regulations for cars were put in place.  But could regulation alone really explain such a huge difference?

So I did the math.  Say regulatory costs increase prices for something by an average of 2% per year.  Over the course of 50 years, that's a 269% cost increase for producing that thing!  2% doesn't seem like much, but when you compound it over time, it adds up fast.  Of course, we don't have new building codes or car manufacturing regulations coming out every year, so this surely can't explain all of the difference.  This is true, but the 2% is an average.  Emissions requirements for new vehicles increased prices by far more than a measly 2%.  Each new safety regulation added significantly more than 2% to the price of new cars.  Periodic large regulatory cost increases can increase prices at least as fast as constant small ones.  A 15% increase each decade adds up to a 201% increase over 50 years.  When you intersperse that with multiple 2% to 5% increases every 3 to 5 years, that can easily add up to enough to explain the difference, and building codes are even worse, because they typically have a bigger impact.

Ok, so regulation can explain the difference between average inflation and the much higher inflation for houses and cars.  Those are only two products though.  Surely it doesn't play a big role in average inflation?  Unfortunately, this is also wrong.  It's easy to miss the impact of multi-stage supply lines, which are hit by regulatory costs at every stage.

Consider this: A car dealership gets hit with a new regulation requiring them to record some additional data about each sale or repair.  That data takes extra time to collect and extra space (physical or digital) to store.  Maybe that increases operating costs by a couple of percent per transaction.  So they must pass that cost onto customers (businesses can't take loses, therefore it is necessary that every cost be passed on to customers or be recovered by paying less for labor).  But also the manufacturer gets hit with a new safety regulation that costs an additional 2% (pretty low end for safety regulations).  That cost gets passed to the dealership, which passes it to the customer.  So now we've got a 4.04% total increase.  (Cost increases like this tend to compound, rather than adding.)  But wait, the steel mill supplying the manufacturer also gets a 2% increase, because of some additional regulation, and so that regulatory cost "trickles down" to the customer, compounding for a total of 6.12% inflation.  The steel mill isn't where the raw material originates though.  They are getting scrap steel from garbage dumps, recycling collectors, and scrap yards, who also got hit by a 2% regulatory cost increase requiring them to pay more for their electricity to meet new EPA requirements, and if they are smelting raw ore, the mining companies were probably impacted by the same regulation.  Now we are up to 8.24%.  There can also be cycles in here that cause additional compounding steps, for example, the mining company, the scrap companies, and the steel mills are also all using steel products, so their cost of operation increases a bit more than the 2%, any time they have to repair or replace steel equipment.

Now, this is a contrived example.  Odds of all of these getting hit all in the same year are pretty low.  At the same time, 2% is a really low estimate for cost of new regulations for any of these.  Not only would most of these regulations increase prices by more like 5% to 15%, government regulations rarely affect only one element of a business's operations.  One safety regulation might only cost 5%, but the bill with that regulation is going to have another two or three, each also adding 5% or more, because "Well, now that we are thinking about auto manufacturing, we might as well look at everything about it."  Additionally though, some regulations affect all industries.  For example, any new vehicle regulation is going to impact over-land shipping costs, and practically everything depends on transportation infrastructure in the developed world.  Fuel regulations also impact transportation costs heavily.  And there are tons of cycles in here as well.  If gas prices go up by 10%, prices for everything at the supermarket are going to increase by at least 5% to cover that, and now I'm paying more, so I have to ask for a raise to cover the increase in cost-of-living, and that will eventually trickle back to the supermarket prices adding an additional fraction of a percent to prices.  Anything that impacts electricity prices (basically and EPA regulation) will raise costs for every company that uses electricity, and businesses can't take losses, so that means prices increases across the board.

Between 1960 and 2010, we had a lot of significant increases in regulatory costs in industries that impact all other industries.  Gasoline and diesel fuel were significantly more heavily regulated.  Vehicle manufacturing was more heavily regulated.  Electrical power generation was more heavily regulated.  Even communications (from post office to every kind of electronic communication) saw heavy regulatory increases.  And housing costs do broadly affect the economy, so the very heavy regulatory increases in housing costs did contribute significantly to all of the other inflation.

When you put this all together, most industries saw significant cost increases due to regulation between 1960 and 2010, every single year, even when the new regulations didn't target them specifically.  The average annual regulatory cost increase to produce average inflation of 659% over 50 years is a mere 3.84%.  (You can calculate this including the compounding effect with 1.0384^50.  The 1.0384 is equal to 100% (the original cost) plus 3.84% (the average increase), and the 50 is the number of years.)

The truth is, it's actually surprising that average inflation was so low, despite the constant barrage of regulatory cost increases.  It's not just easily believable that most of the inflation was directly caused by regulatory cost increases, it's actually feasible that almost all of it was caused by rampantly growing regulation.  (Only "almost" because increasing government debt also causes inflation very directly.  That's a topic for another article though.)  And cars and houses increased in price faster because they were more frequent direct targets of the additional regulation.

Sadly, it really is that simple.  I was wrong.  Inflation wasn't and isn't driven by greedy businesses.  It's mainly driven by constantly growing government regulation, slowly suffocating the economy.

New Age Slavery

The Democrats are determined to revive slavery.  This shouldn't be a big surprise.  After all, the party was created with the express intent to protect the institution of slavery, and ever since the Republican Party successfully abolished slavery, the Democratic Party has been subtly trying to bring back various parts of it.

So what's this all about?  How is the Democratic Party trying to bring back slavery?  I must be some crazy conspiracy theorist right?  Actually no.  There's no conspiracy.  This is just how the Democratic Party operates and how it was designed to operate.  Fundamentally, the Democratic Party is about trying to create an economy where poor people are required to work for the lowest survivable compensation, for the benefit of the wealthy elite.  First, see slavery.  It wasn't actually successful in this.  Modern Democrats like to claim that slavery significantly benefited free Americans (whom they assume were 100% white, as if black people were incapable of surviving without being slaves in the early U.S.), but the truth is, states that allowed slavery never did as well economically as the northern free states, and they consistently did worse by a large margin.  Slavery was a scourge that caused economic harm, not an exploitation that created some kind of utopian society for the free people or even the elites.  (The reason the South lost the war was that they didn't have a strong enough economy to provide the resources to win it.  Their economy was weak because slavery can't produce strong economies.)  Anyone who preaches that one particular class or race in the U.S. has some special privilege granted to them by the benefits of slavery is painting slavery as far more good and desirable than it actually is.  Are Democrats painting slavery in a good light intentionally?  Probably not, but intentional or otherwise, they are making it look better than it ever actually was.  Strong economies are produced by maximizing participation and keeping regulation light, and slavery inherently limits participation, so slavery powered economies will never beat lightly regulated capitalist economies.  (Some people believe slavery was part of capitalism.  This is false.  Capitalism is all about protection of private ownership, and the most fundamental part of this is ownership of self.  Slavery was an artifact of the colonialist economic system that has no place in a capitalism economy.)

After slavery, Democrats pushed for segregation, because racial segregation gave them the power to decide who could work what jobs.  Black people, ex-slaves and their descendants, were restricted from public facing work and separated from everyone else to limit association, leaving them mainly stuck in the domestic service sector, a sector where they had traditionally worked as slaves before abolition.  By the 1960s, even many state level elected Democrats had realized how obviously morally corrupt this was, many segregation states had abolished segregation, and the remainder were rapidly heading in that direction.  The Republican Party (a little late to the party this time) introduced the Civil Rights Act to codify the reforms that were already happening into Federal law.  This was shut down repeatedly by Democrats, until Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon B. Johnson, possibly the most racist President in U.S. history (yes, even counting pro-slavery Democrats before abolition from Andrew Jackson up through James Buchanan), pressured Congressional Democrats to vote in favor of the bill as a tribute to and legacy of Kennedy, posthumously making Kennedy a martyr).  It's popular among Democrats to blame Republicans for all of the work requirements attached to our welfare programs, but those were actually part of the Democratic welfare agenda starting right after the Civil Rights Act was passed.  Without segregation, Democrats needed a new strategy to force poor people to work for as little as possible, and welfare programs with work requirements were the solution.  (Making welfare more like a subsidy for employers than charity for the poor.)  Republicans were easily convinced, because they were skeptical of expensive welfare programs in the first place (and rightfully so, as they were so disastrous that they've been being reformed (often by Democrats) regularly ever since to fix problems and they still are absolutely terrible), and work requirements that limited welfare spending mitigated the cost.  Since then, Democrats have consistently favored welfare with work requirements, and Republicans have largely acquiesced to mitigate waste.  Many Democratic voters have fooled themselves into believing that work requirements are concessions to the Republicans, who wouldn't help pass welfare programs without them, and while it is true that without work requirements fewer Republicans would vote to pass welfare bills, the truth is that this is merely a side effect of Democrats doing exactly what they wanted in the first place.  Since the welfare programs of the 1960s and 1970s, Democrats have had control of both houses of Congress and the White House many times and for quite a large portion of that time, but they've never removed or reduced work requirements, and they've consistently included work requirements in most new welfare legislation.  (The one exception is medical welfare, where qualification requirements are mostly managed at the state level, and most states, including Republican dominated states don't have work requirements.)

So, what now?  It's not so much now as it is something that Democrats have been throwing around for a while.  It's definitely a new strategy for getting cheap work out of people.  Now, some might argue that Democrats can't be trying to pull stuff like this, because they support raising the minimum wage to a living wage.  Even back during slavery, slave owners understood that underfed slaves whose needs weren't met couldn't be as productive.  There are even manuals from that time period, instructing slave owners on how to maximize the productivity of their slaves.  Ideas that slaves were generally underfed, housed in facilities with insufficient protection from the weather, and generally treated poorly are false.  Even plantation slaves were fed quite well, provided with solid quality shelter (often group homes with many families though not always), provided with decent clothing appropriate to their work, and most plantation owners also treated their slaves with respect.  (The stories are true, some were disrespectful, abusive, and even murderous, but these were a small minority.  We hear the reports of the bad far more than the good.)  This is because they were far more productive this way.  After slavery was abolished, the Civil War was won by the North, and the slaves were freed, many continued to work on the plantations of their ex-masters, precisely because they had been treated well.  Not to suggest slavery was ever anything but a horrific moral travesty, but Democrats from the very beginning wanted slaves to have enough to live contently, because content slaves are more productive.  Raising the Federal minimum wage to provide that lifestyle of reasonable contentment is completely in line with the Democratic goal of controlling and extracting maximum labor from the poor!

The new plan of Democrats is the Federal Job Guarantee.  On the surface, this looks like a good idea.  If you want a job, and you can't find one, the Federal government will provide you with one that pays wages equivalent to the cost of supporting a slave (sorry, perhaps you prefer "person"?) sufficiently to maximize productivity.  Now we can reduce unemployment to nothing, right?  That's actually a separate question that I won't get into here (spoiler: the answer is no), as is the question of whether 0% unemployment is even a good thing (spoiler: also no).  Anyhow, providing jobs for everyone that pay a living wage must certainly be a good thing that will eliminate poverty, right?  The goal of eliminating poverty is a good one, but a Federal Job Guarantee is more like voluntary slavery than an effective anti-poverty program.  Now the Federal government has 20 million lackeys, doing its bidding.  If this isn't terrifying, you probably haven't studied world history (or even U.S. history...).  I can raise you one here though, add any sort of welfare with work requirements and now you have involuntary slavery!  On unemployment?  You are legally required to look for a new job and accept any job you are offered, or you can just starve (your unemployment is canceled).  If you don't accept a job you are offered, you don't only lose your current unemployment benefits, in most cases you no longer qualify ever again.  This is true even if you are offered a job you are incapable of doing, due to disability, severe allergies, or other physical limitations.  With a Federal Job Guarantee, this dynamic gets worse.  Now if you lose your $120k job and get on unemployment to cover the gap while you find a new job, you can (and let's be honest, states will adjust their laws to ensure that this is the case) be required to apply for a Federal Job Guarantee position, which pays a minimal living wage.  You will obviously qualify and get a job offer, because it's a job guarantee.  Without the unemployment, you won't be able to pay your bills, and the slave wages of the Federal Job Guarantee won't even begin to make up the difference.  So now you lose your home, your vehicles, and many of your other assets, even if you manage to eventually get a new $120k job.  SNAP (food stamps) has a work requirement as well.  It's not terrible, as it only applies to one person in the household (and everyone else can have benefits even if that one person, typically the oldest adult male, doesn't qualify), but single people will be forced to get a "guarantee" job to qualify, and smaller families (~3 people) often don't get sufficient food stamps even when one adult is working and everyone qualifies.  And of course, there is also EITC.  It's built directly into our tax code.  The only welfare benefits you consistently qualify for if you don't have a job is health care, and even that is hit and miss in some cases.  For example, in some states, college students don't qualify for Medicaid unless they also work 20 hours a week.  You are covered if you are lazy, no good freeloader, but as soon as you start trying to improve your education to qualify for something better, nope, you are getting punished if you aren't splitting your time with a low pay, part-time job, limiting your ability to learn effectively.  And even some states that don't have strict work requirements for SNAP in general do have similar punishments for college students who want SNAP benefits.

The fact is, the Federal Job Guarantee is the worst solution to unemployment ever conceived, aside from actual chattel slavery.  Combined with welfare programs that include work requirements, it gives the government the right to force you to work for them or deny you any welfare benefits, if you can't instantly get some other job, and that's potentially a far worse welfare trap than any we have right now.  Finding a job is a ton of work.  How can you be expected to put in that much work on top of working 40 hours week doing the bidding of the government?  Sure, some people manage to find a new job while working 40 hours a week.  Ever wonder why so many Americans work in jobs they hate instead of finding new jobs?  It's because those people who can manage finding a new job while working are very rare.  In fact, most of them aren't looking and are offered new jobs unsolicited, without ever actually looking and working at the same time.  The Federal Job Guarantee isn't some charitable government program, designed to improve the lives of Americans and provide work for all of the poor.  It's a program designed to restore much of the mechanics of slavery, maximizing the productivity of the poor as efficiently as possible and forcing the poor to become cogs in the American economic machine.  The fact is, this idea that people are merely elements of a giant economic machine that should play their roles with maximum efficiency and minimum complaint died in the 1920s, and should remain dead and buried, but the Democrats insist that this idea should be revived and that they should be put in charge of powerful machine they believe it can create.

The Federal Job Guarantee is fundamentally a pro-slavery program.  The Republican Party abolished slavery over 150 years ago for good reason.  If we allow this program to become law in the U.S., we can expect an economic nose dive, as the whole country returns to the terrible economic state of the 1800s, slavery powered South.  Supposedly the majority of Americans on both sides of the aisle put the economy at the top of their list in terms of political importance the majority of the time, and even during global pandemics economics doesn't go below third place.  If Americans truly care about the U.S. economy, support for the Federal Job Guarantee should be a reason not to vote for a candidate regardless of any other part of that candidate's platform (and regardless of that candidate's race, sex, sexual preferences, or personal beliefs about the candidates sexuality).  The alternative is losing our status as a major economic power in the world and heading rapidly toward a collapsing slave economy, where most poor people work for the government being very productive in things that don't actually benefit anyone.