Fake Nous

America’s health care system is obviously f—‘ed up. Even politicians recognize it. Almost everyone I hear talking about health care (a) knows that our system is terrible, and (b) has some radical proposal that would make things much worse and would ignore all the main problems. I’m getting kind of tired of this situation, and I’m worried that when I get old and need more health care, I will have to leave the country in order to avoid being bankrupted. Of course, no one with power will listen to me, and the problem will probably continue worsening for decades, especially if politicians pass more “reforms”. But I’m going to say what I think anyway.

1. The Problem

What’s wrong with American health care? Is it

1. Its quality
2. Its quantity
3. Its cost
4. Its distribution?

There are some quality issues (like people dying from medical errors), but overall America has high quality health care. The main problem is obviously (3). Costs are absurdly high, which in turn prevents many people from getting health care, so that affects (2) and (4) as well. Anecdotally, you can literally buy some drugs from Canada for less than a tenth the price you would pay in the U.S. If you take your cat to the vet, the cat can get health care for a fraction of the price you would pay for similar care for yourself. So we know that health care does not inherently have to cost this much. Now some statistics:

We spend over a sixth of the entire GDP on health care (18%), over $10,000 per person per year, much more than other developed nations. Costs have been skyrocketing for the past few decades, as shown in these graphs:

If this goes on, we’re all going to go bankrupt from medical costs.

We’re outspending the rest of the world, including other developed nations, but we’re not getting better health outcomes than other developed nations. This is a graph of deaths amenable to prevention by health care, per 100,000 population, in several developed countries:

Notice how the U.S. is doing worst (the red bars).

(Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_the_United_States, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262881094)

Let’s keep this in mind. The main problem isn’t that we don’t have enough insurance, or that the costs are being borne by the wrong people, or any dumb thing like that. The main problem is the total costs are too high. If we can address that, all other problems are going to get easier. If we don’t address that, then nothing else can really be fixed. No matter how you shuffle around the costs or modify the method of paying, it really cannot produce a satisfactory outcome if you don’t do something to drastically reduce the total.

2. Why Is Health Care So Damned Expensive?

There are many factors. Here are a few big ones.

a. Insurance.

Note: the problem here is not that the greedy insurance companies are making excessive profits. Profit margins in health insurance are not out of line with profit margins for companies in the U.S. economy generally. Rather, the problem is:

1. Any time you add a middle man, you’re increasing costs. The middlemen have to be paid. If we all bought food using “food insurance”, then food costs would probably double.
2. Insurance companies want to make sure that they don’t overpay or pay for unnecessary procedures. So they require paperwork to be filled out to convince them of this. There then have to be experts on all the complicated rules about what the insurance company pays for, how much, etc. This greatly increases costs.
3. Because a third party is paying, patients ignore the prices. Because patients ignore the prices, providers jack up the prices. Since it’s being paid by a big, faceless corporation, no one feels bad about this.

This is part of why veterinary care is much cheaper than human care. It’s also why elective procedures (e.g., cosmetic surgery) are cheaper than “necessary” procedures — because insurance won’t pay for the former.

b. Shadow Prices.

If you go to a doctor or hospital, they never tell you the price of anything before you take it. You just have to take the medical care, whatever it is, and then wait to get a bill in the mail. For this reason, there is no question of going to a lower-cost provider, even if you wanted to.

c. Supply Restrictions.

Basic economics: the Law of Supply and Demand: for a given level of demand, if you restrict the supply of a good, the price goes up. Also, if you add very costly hurdles that suppliers have to jump over, you increase the prices.

In this case, to be allowed to practice medicine in the U.S., you have to:

1. Get an undergraduate degree (~4 years),
2. Go to medical school (~4 years),
3. Do an internship (1 year, possibly included in the following requirement), and
4. Do a medical residency (~3-7 years).

All of this is extremely costly in both time and money. Therefore, prices of medical care have to go up, a lot, in order to make it worthwhile for people to enter the field. Health care providers have to be compensated for the enormous up-front costs, else there wouldn’t be any providers.

There also is a limited number of residencies available in various specialties, making it impossible to increase the supply of providers to meet demand. Residency Review Committees, staffed by doctors in a given specialty, have control over how many residencies are offered, and they use this power to restrict the supply and raise prices. (Source: Sean Nicholson, https://www.nber.org/papers/w9649.pdf.)

d. Because We Care.

Why is it so easy to get health care for your cat, and why can he get excellent care for a fraction of what it would cost to care for you? Because he’s just a cat.

Because he’s “just a cat”, people don’t freak out as much about giving him care. They don’t do as many unnecessary tests and procedures. If something goes wrong, you probably won’t sue the vet. If you do sue, you probably won’t be awarded millions of dollars. Therefore, the vet doesn’t have to practice defensive medicine, and doesn’t have to buy malpractice insurance. And because he’s just a cat, there is less regulation governing his care.

When your cat is terminally ill and in pain, the vet will offer euthanasia. When the same situation befalls you, in most states, your doctor will not be permitted to offer the same mercy. This may result in spending much more money on care in the last few months or weeks of life.

3. Bad Ideas that Ignore or Worsen the Problem

Here are some examples of the incredibly bad ideas people come up with to “reform” the system. I think these are products of ideology rather than serious reflection or even awareness of the basic problem:

a. Make everyone buy health insurance. (per Obamacare)

This ignores the main problem. The main problem was never a shortage of insurance policies. The main problem is the total cost. Buying insurance spreads the costs over the insurance pool, which of course might be worth doing, but it does nothing to reduce the total, which is the main thing we need.

In fact, insurance is one of the main reasons why health care costs are so high in the first place, so we should expect this idea to increase the total cost of health care. And indeed, health care costs have continued, utterly unsurprisingly, to rise since the ACA (Obamacare) was adopted (https://ldi.upenn.edu/brief/effects-aca-health-care-cost-containment).

(Note: I know there is more to the ACA than the individual mandate.)

b. Have the government subsidize health care.

On an individual level, this might seem like a solution: if you are facing high health care costs, your problem is solved by having the government pay for (part of) your health care. But this can’t be the solution for society if society as a whole is facing excessive health care costs. This just redistributes the cost; it doesn’t reduce the cost borne by society overall.

In fact, basic economics tells us that if a product is subsidized, then (a) more people will try to buy it, and (b) the prices will rise. So this idea increases total costs.

If the supply is fixed (per section 2c above), the result will be that suppliers raise their prices so that the same number of people receive the good as before. We just spend more money for the same amount of the good.

c. Have the government pay for all health care. (“Single payer”)

Another proposal to shuffle around who pays the cost or how it is paid. In fairness, there is an economic theory whereby a single payer can reduce prices. It’s just the reverse of a monopoly: if you have a monopoly (single seller), you can raise the prices above what would be the competitive market level. If you have a monopsony (single buyer), you can lower the prices below the competitive market level. Both, by the way, result in a lower total quantity of the good being consumed, and lower economic efficiency (monopoly benefits the seller but harms the buyers by more; monopsony benefits the buyer but harms the sellers by more).

However, this theoretical possibility does not mean that things would in fact work out that way, in the United States as it actually is, with the federal government as the single payer. The U.S. government, as it happens, is extremely subject to influence from rent-seeking special interest groups, and is not extremely good at reducing costs or balancing its budget. Another factor is that, when the government is paying for something, many Americans have a tendency to spend as much as they can. Thus, the following are all possible results of a single-payer American system:

1. Prices might be reduced, maybe by a lot, due to the state’s bargaining power.
2. The number of health care providers might decrease because of (1). (When prices go down, fewer people want to enter the industry.) There would then be less health care available.
3. There may be more rent-seeking lobbying from the medical industry, with unpredictable results. This could increase health care costs, as providers use political influence to get the government to cover things that private insurers would not have covered, or even to get the government to pay above market rates for procedures.
4. Health care providers might start to recommend more, and more expensive forms of, medical care, and patients might agree, since the government is paying.
5. The federal debt would of course explode, even more than it already has. Because there’s no way we’re going to raise taxes by trillions of dollars per year to pay for it.

. . .

Before proposing a reform, we should think about this: what is going wrong in the health care industry, as compared with normal industries?

In most industries, prices decrease relative to wages over time. Subjectively and anecdotally speaking, the products of most industries seem really affordable yet high-quality. (E.g., for $350, you can buy a machine that can literally perform a billion calculations a second, can store millions of pages of information, connects you effortlessly to a world-wide network so you can share your fake-nous thoughts, and other amazing things.) What is different in the health care industry, compared to the industries that are going well?

I’ve answered that in section 2. The answer is not “the industries where things are going well are run by the government” or “they have a single payer for all of their products” or “everyone has insurance”.

Notice how all of the reforms discussed in this section completely ignore all the points I raised about health care costs in section 2. It’s as if those were completely unknown or incomprehensible points. But they’re not; they’re totally obvious with a basic understanding of economics and basic facts about the American health care system.

4. Non-Stupid Ideas that at Least Acknowledge the Problem

What would a minimally smart person say who was trying to think about the problem, rather than trying to score points with know-nothing ideologues? You can doubtless find more developed and better answers than this, but the following is a start:

(a)

We should eliminate shadow prices. My proposed law: For any medical care accepted by a patient, the price of that care must be made available in advance, or else the patient is not legally obligated to pay. In the case of emergency care, for which there may not be time to discuss pricing information when the particular patient shows up, the information should still be published in a publicly available location.

(A legal rationale: you can’t claim that someone has implicitly agreed to pay some price, if there was no way for them to know what the price was. If patients have not agreed to pay the price, then they should not have to pay it.)

(b)

There should be less reliance on insurance. Insurance should only pay for large, unanticipated expenses, not routine medical care.

Also, insurance should be purchased by the individual, not the individual’s employer. (Take the money that employers are already spending on health insurance: they can just give that money to the employees, then employees can buy insurance themselves.) Then insurance plans could be expected to become better tailored to individuals’ desires. You also wouldn’t lose your insurance if you changed jobs.

(I don’t know exactly how these outcomes would be brought about.)

(c)

Remove the goddamned rent-seeking supply restrictions.

Supply restrictions, unfortunately, are among the most popular anti-libertarian laws. People love being fleeced by industries. Whenever you propose relaxing restrictions on the supply of some good, consumers immediately and indignantly start to repeat the rationalizations originally invented by the industry to serve the industry’s financial interests.

FYI, putting huge hurdles in the way of people providing a good does not generally result in higher quality. Many economic studies have been done of licensing requirements. To quote one review of the evidence, “most research does not find that licensing improves quality or public health and safety.” That’s not some libertarian propaganda piece; that’s a quotation from an Obama administration report on professional licensing laws (https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/licensing_report_final_nonembargo.pdf). Everyone who looks at it agrees, however, that these sorts of barriers definitely do increase prices.

The industries where things are going well — products are affordable, well-adapted to consumer needs, and there is frequent innovation — are not industries with large barriers to entry. They’re the opposite, areas where new entry is easy and frequent. And they do not have terrible quality. If anything, quality tends to be higher in the industries with lower barriers, because they are more competitive. Competition drives up quality. (The tech industry has little regulation and low barriers to entry; that’s why it has frequent innovation, high quality, and decreasing prices.)

(d)

We should reduce legal liability in medicine. Doctors should not fear multi-million-dollar lawsuits for honest mistakes.

. . .

None of suggestions (a)-(c) are even on the public radar screen. No political leader comes close to entertaining any of them. I assume the reason is either (1) that our leaders want prices to keep going up, because they’re in the pocket of the industry, or (2) that no leader (and hardly any citizens either) has given serious, informed, and non-ideological thought to the American health care problem — nor bothered to consult anyone who has.

As long as this continues to be the case, we’re just going to keep pouring more and more of our economy into this industry, without getting any more benefits in return.

Think of the epistemic environment as an intellectual commons. To get a deeper understanding of the world, it helps to have a wide range of ideas to consider, especially when arguments are given to support them. This helps us justify our beliefs, which tends to be good for everyone.

But some people are motivated to pollute the commons with false beliefs that aim to please an audience or promote a political outcome. Examples include dishonest political advertisements and biased journalism intended to provoke outrage. Each of us internalizes the benefit of adding a bit of epistemic pollution, but all of us share the costs. Journalists and activists know that motivated reasoning pervades politics, and that if they repeat dubious accusations or false beliefs that titillate their audience, the beliefs are more likely to stick, and the articles they write are more likely to be shared. Mike Huemer summarizes some of the reasons for this in a previous post.

Dishonest journalism is nothing new, and to some extent it just reflects what consumers of news want to hear. The benefits of making bombastic claims go to the writer of a story, and to those who get a dopamine hit from consuming it and feeling outraged. But the costs accrue to all of us in the epistemic commons, who find it harder to figure out what to believe.

When our indignation is activated, we feel like our lives gain meaning. Don Quixote is a comical character who symbolizes the rush we get from fighting injustice, whether real or imagined.

The social isolation of large, liberal societies tends to make this worse. Many people find meaning in political movements in the same way true believers find direction from religious institutions. As religious belief wanes in free and prosperous societies, religious wars give way to political battles. Journalists and academics assume the position of a secular clergy who take it upon themselves to burn the heretics who challenge sacred dogmas. Those of us who attempt to bend or break the Overton Window of acceptable belief are crucified by the Cathedral. Our ideas are attacked as wicked rather than engaged with. Journalists cash in on indignant mobs. They also create them.

There are many ways of writing click bait journalism, and many sources of “evidence” to appeal to. Some organizations specialize in producing biased data that journalists can go to when they want to assassinate a political opponent. For example, some journalists use the SPLC’s “hate map” to discredit political opponents who they don’t know how to argue against. Everyone who’s studied the issue knows the SPLC is a rapacious and morally bankrupt organization that manipulates data to generate outrage and increase their donations.

The thing is, it works. The SPLC smears people like former Muslims Aayan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz as “Islamophobic” for criticizing female genital mutilation, and for exalting the virtues of Western societies.

There are many other examples online. A website called RationalWiki is an especially egregious offender, and it is – predictably enough – promoted by Google’s search algorithm. It provides an outlet for zealots to create hit pieces against people and publishers whose ideas they disagree with. Because it mimics the template of Wikipedia, which is considered somewhat credible by casual readers, journalists and activists sometimes use it as a source.

Click-bait journalism benefits those who create and consume it. But in the long run it harms all of us. When we’re confronted with hit pieces aimed at indulging our desire to be outraged, readers should refuse to click and targets should refuse to apologize. The only way to clean up the intellectual commons is to shame the mobs and protect their targets.

Today (Oct. 19, 2019), I’m participating in the Open Borders Conference at the New School in New York — https://freemigrationproject.org. In keeping with that, here is a post about why illegal immigration is cool. There’s no reason to respect immigration laws.

1. Ethical Questions About Illegal Migration

• Many people — at least politicians during campaigns — appear to express some indignation and condemnation at people who have “violated our laws!!” by immigrating illegally. Are such attitudes appropriate?
• Sometimes it is suggested that these illegal migrants should be punished for their presumed misdeed. Would that be just?
• If you have the chance to migrate and thereby improve your overall welfare, but doing so would be illegal, do you have a reason to refrain out of respect for the laws of your desired destination country?

I suggest that the answer to all of these is “no”. Potential illegal migrants have no moral reason to respect immigration laws.

2. Things I Am Not Assuming

I am skeptical about political authority. I think that no state is legitimate, no one has political obligations, and no one has political authority. That stance would make it easy to answer the above questions. Since there is no obligation to obey the law in general (merely because it’s the law), there is also no obligation to obey immigration laws.

Unfortunately, not everyone has read my book on The Problem of Political Authority. Worse, even some who have read it don’t agree with it. So let’s suppose we bracket that. I mention the issue of authority only to make clear that I am not assuming any controversial stance on that.

I also am not assuming anything controversial about the justification of immigration laws.

In other words, my claim is that even if the state has authority, and even if the immigration laws are entirely justified, there is still no moral reason at all for potential immigrants to respect the immigration laws.

How can that be? Briefly, (1) even if the state has authority, that authority only extends to its own citizens; and (2) even if there are good reasons for the state to adopt immigration restrictions, those reasons are not reasons that the migrants themselves have. (You might have a reason to try to prevent me from doing something, even while I have no reason not to do it.)

3. Accounts of Authority

Basically, all extant accounts of authority imply that the state’s authority would not extend to potential illegal immigrants. I don’t agree with any of these theories, but let’s pretend that we think one of them is correct.

a. The Social Contract Theory

On this account, the state’s authority derives from a contract with its citizens. We have to obey the government’s laws, because we somehow (“implicitly”?) agreed to do so, in exchange for the state’s protection.

On that view, this authority would not extend to would-be immigrants. People living in other countries are not parties to this state’s social contract, even if the social contract exists. So they would not be obligated to obey this state’s laws.

You might think: “Okay, they’re not now obligated by our laws. But once they migrate into ‘the government’s territory’, or perhaps when they start benefiting from some government services, they will become so obligated (even if they are not citizens). At that point, they will acquire an obligation to deport themselves, in order to stop violating the law.”

Here is the problem. A contract involves some sort of exchange of value. When you sign a rental agreement, you agree to exchange some amount of money for a space to live in. When you sign an employment contract, you agree to exchange labor for money.

In general, it cannot be a condition on a contract that one party give up the very good that they are entering into the contract to receive. For instance, in a rental agreement, there couldn’t be a clause that says the tenant can’t use the apartment in any way. In an employment contract, the employee could not be required to never cash his paychecks.

Now, the central point of the social contract is for individuals to secure the benefits of peaceful cooperation in a given society. That is what the individual is supposed to be entering into the contract for. Therefore, the individual cannot be required, under that contract, to renounce living in that very society. So there could not be a social-contract-based obligation to deport oneself.

b. Fair Play

The Fair Play account says that, when there is a cooperative scheme that produces benefits for all (including you), you generally ought to do your fair share in supporting it; you should not free ride on the efforts of others. Thus, you should obey the law, because general obedience to the law in society is required for there to be peaceful and orderly social cooperation. If you decide to break the law while others are obeying it, then you’re seeking to free ride on the sacrifices of others.

But it is a condition on having a fairness-based obligation that one actually receive a fair share of the benefits of the cooperative scheme in question. If the scheme produces benefits for others but excludes you, then you are not obligated to support it (at least, not by fairness considerations).

Thus, there is a similar constraint here as in the case of the social contract: it cannot be part of doing your “fair share” in supporting a cooperative scheme that you exclude yourself from the benefits of that very cooperative scheme.

Example: say you’re on a lifeboat with several other people. The boat is taking on water and needs to be bailed. You should do your fair share by bailing out the boat. On the other hand, if someone suggests that you should do your fair share by jumping overboard to lighten the load on the boat, that’s ridiculous. You don’t have to do that.

In the case of our alleged political obligations, fair play might require one to obey almost all other laws. But it could not require one to obey a law whereby one would be entirely excluded from the society, for then one would receive none of the benefits of the social cooperation that one was contributing to. Hence, fair play cannot support an obligation to obey immigration restrictions.

c. Democracy

Some say that the state’s authority is based on the will of the majority. Provided that the state is democratic, it has been authorized by the people to make the laws that it makes. For some reason, we have to obey the will of the people, so we have to obey those laws.

This theory obviously implies that non-democratic governments lack authority. Slightly less obviously, I think it also implies that those who are excluded by the state from the democratic process are also outside the state’s authority. Defenses of democracy tend to emphasize the good of equality, which democracy is said to realize (see Christiano), or the good of well-conducted public deliberation (see Habermas, Cohen).

But the immigration laws are made without any participation from the main group that is affected by those laws — the potential immigrants. They are given no vote, and no say in the making of those laws. So even if you think the democratic process confers authority on its outcomes in general, the potential immigrants in particular have no moral reason to respect these laws.

d. Freedom of Association

People in general have a right to freedom of association, which includes a right not to associate with others whom we do not wish to associate with. Perhaps this can be used to explain why the state has the right to make immigration restrictions — perhaps this is an exercise of a right to freedom of (non-)association on the part of the nation’s existing citizens.

Two problems: first, the right to avoid unwanted associations generally applies to substantial relationships, not extremely vague and tenuous “associations”. For instance, if I don’t like you, I can refuse to have you as an employee, friend, or spouse. I cannot, however, refuse to allow you to live in the same neighborhood as me — that is much too weak of an “association” for me to claim rights over. I have a right against your moving into my house, but not against your moving into my neighborhood.

Second, the right to freedom of association includes a right to veto one’s own associations with others, but does not include a right to veto other people’s associations. E.g., if I don’t like you, I can, again, refuse to hire, befriend, or marry you. But I cannot demand that third parties not hire, befriend, or marry you.

Now, immigration restrictions, to be justified by freedom of association, would require rights over extremely tenuous, vague associations — such as a right not to merely be in the same vast geographical region as a certain other person — or rights over other people’s associations — such as a right to demand that employers who want to hire a person not hire that person simply because you yourself don’t want them to.

In my view, individuals have a right not to associate with immigrants or would-be immigrants, if they so choose. That is, one could refuse to hire, befriend, marry, etc., an immigrant. But one cannot justly demand that an immigrant not live anywhere in the same country as oneself (on someone else’s property), nor can one justly demand that someone else not hire an immigrant (using their own money).

4. Reasons for Restriction

a. Jobs

Why should the state restrict migration? Some say that the state should do this in order to protect employment opportunities for low-skill native workers.

This might count as a reason for the state to restrict, provided that the state is justifiably partial toward low-skill native workers. But notice that this reason would not apply to the immigrants themselves — the immigrants themselves have no reason to be partial to native workers. The immigrants rationally prefer themselves to be hired, just as native workers prefer themselves to be hired. If it’s not wrong for a native worker to take a job that an immigrant could hold, then it’s not wrong for an immigrant worker to take a job that a native could hold.

So, even if this is a good reason for the state to restrict, it isn’t a good reason not to illegally migrate.

b. Fiscal Burdens

Some say that immigration imposes fiscal burdens on the government because immigrants consume social services and pay lower-than-average taxes (due to being poor).

This might be a reason for the state to restrict, again assuming the state is justifiably partial to native citizens. But again, there is no reason for the immigrants themselves to be partial to native citizens. If it’s permissible for native citizens to consume social services and impose fiscal burdens on the state, then this should also be permissible for immigrants.

Now, some would say that it is impermissible to take handouts from the government. In that case, both natives and immigrants should refrain from doing it. But they still don’t have to completely exile themselves from the society.

c. Political Change

Some say that we should restrict migration to prevent immigrants from changing the political culture of our society, e.g., by voting for authoritarian policies and leaders.

Again, assume that this is a good reason for the state to restrict. It still wouldn’t be a good reason for the immigrants themselves not to illegally migrate. Of course, the immigrants, like all of us, should support freedom and not authoritarianism. If you have been voting for authoritarian candidates, what you should do is either start voting for good candidates or stop voting.

Many native-born voters support authoritarian values. No one thinks that they’re obligated to exile themselves. Similarly, there’s no reason why immigrants who support authoritarian values would be obligated to exclude themselves from the society. In both cases, they should change their values to support freedom; or, failing that, not participate in the political process.

Of course, illegal immigrants can’t vote anyway, so they don’t have to worry about directly supporting bad policies. Perhaps they should also be careful not to speak in favor of bad policies either.

Conclusion

Conclusion: even if the state has good reasons to restrict immigration and even if the state has authority (both of which points I doubt), there would still be no moral reason for the migrants themselves not to migrate illegally.

I discussed this all at greater length in my chapter contributed to this book: www.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Movement-Geographies-Transformation/dp/0820354260/

The Puzzle of 2016

I try not to spend too much time talking about contemporary political figures, as they’ll go by the wayside soon enough. But the phenomenon of Trump and his 2016 victory is particularly interesting, for understanding America, and politics, and democracy. Many seasoned political experts were caught by surprise and puzzled. Many explanations have been offered (including some by me). I regret to say that I’m going to add to that pile now.

First, I think we should remind ourselves that the election was close, who won was partly a matter of chance, and therefore whatever conclusion you draw about “what this tells us about the American voter” should be one that you would draw regardless of who actually claimed the victory. If the weather had been different on election day, the outcome might have been different. But we’d still have the same basic question. Trump turned out to be far more popular and far more politically viable than almost any expert anticipated.

Maybe the biggest thing the case demonstrates is the chasm between the attitudes of the elites of our society and the attitudes of the masses.

Semantic note: “Elite” has an unusual sort of meaning. On the one hand, “elite” in many contexts means “extra good”. On the other hand, “elitist” is a term of censure in American politics. Anyway, I use it purely descriptively, not evaluatively. The “elites” are just the class of people who have unusually high influence, social status, and/or resources in society — for better or worse. The “masses” are everyone else.

Elites expected Trump to fail, and many continue to expect that, in part because most elites themselves found the idea of supporting Trump unimaginable. But a large portion of the masses turned out to have no trouble supporting him wholeheartedly. The elites (myself included) then started, as elites are wont to do, to develop theories about why this was so.

Most of these theories are at least somewhat intellectual explanations, that is, they cite aspects of the content of Trump’s message, or other ideas and values that (half of*) the masses allegedly believe in, that would tend to support voting for Trump. For example, perhaps the masses are largely racist, and they embraced a racist message that they heard in Trump’s speeches. Or perhaps they are merely nationalist. Or they believe that most Washington insiders are corrupt, and thus they preferred an extremely unconventional candidate. Or they have simply taken a very strong turn against left-wing political beliefs.

*Hereafter, I omit the qualifier “about half of”.

It’s Not About Belief

I don’t deny that these sorts of things have some influence, of course. But I think we elites vastly overemphasize them, when we try to understand voting patterns. We do this because we confuse the masses with ourselves.

I started to think this during the campaign, when I saw Republican voters preferring Trump over 15 other candidates. The Republican party was supposedly the conservative party, but … a person who was motivated by conservative beliefs obviously had many better choices. (And indeed, the people who were really serious about conservative beliefs were outraged by Trumpism. E.g., George Will abandoning the Republican party after a lifetime as a member.)

Furthermore, I heard that Trump’s support was strongest among evangelical Christians. This is striking because Trump is extremely far from being a good Christian. Indeed, if you believe in Christian virtues, it would be hard to find a less suitable exemplar than Trump.

No doubt it is still possible to come up with intellectual (belief-based) explanations for Trumpism. Maybe the putative evangelical Christian conservatives believe so strongly in the need to stop Mexican immigrants that this just overrides all other considerations. But we never thought this was the case before Trump came along, and it’s kind of a weird belief system for someone who professes Christianity to have.

So what is it?

Leadership Types

I think a large portion of voters vote, not based on political ideology, but based on perceived leadership personality. They have a general, implicit sense of what “a leader” is like, and they pick the candidate who strikes them as most leader-like.

Now, why would people do that? Don’t they know that ideology is more important?

Well, in fact it might be rational to disregard ideology. Most people have minimal knowledge about policy issues, and they know this fact about themselves. They have no intention of learning enough political information to evaluate competing policy proposals and overall ideological stances, either, since doing so is extremely time-consuming, possibly also very boring, and they know their vote almost certainly won’t make a difference anyway. So they may not have enough political beliefs to base a vote on (nor should they). (Pollsters sometimes drag “opinions” out of them, but these opinions are not held very seriously.) So they might as well just vote for whomever they feel like.

There are, of course, different sorts of leaders. Some are not natural leaders but just do the job because circumstances thrust it upon them (like most academic department chairs). Some leaders are consensus builders who try to lead by smoothing over differences and making everyone feel respected. Others lead by manipulating things behind the scenes. Others lead by flattery (most politicians). And still others lead by brute force.

The last is the “strongman” type. This type has an aggressive, extremely confident, fearless disposition. The strongman does not try to build consensus, but to crush opponents and force everyone to submit to his will.

Now, I’m not saying that everyone wants a strongman. But a large portion of people perceive that as the most genuine type of leader. Enough people, perhaps, to let a strongman figure triumph in an election, almost regardless of other considerations, provided that there is no challenger who has anywhere close to as much of the strongman personality traits.

Love for the Strongman

Why would anyone choose a strongman over more benevolent types of leaders? Isn’t that just obviously against one’s own interests?

Conjecture: it’s an evolutionary adaptation. Throughout our evolutionary past, going back to even before there were humans, our ancestors always lived with social hierarchies. Every society has them. Some people/primates control the resources and wield power over others.

The dominant primates, the ones who wield the most power, have generally been strongman type personalities, for obvious reasons. The dominant primate is the one who physically defeats others in combat. This requires an aggressive, low-empathy, highly confident personality, in addition to physical size and strength. Millions of years of evolution have thus conditioned us to think that this is what a leader is.

But, again, why would you actually choose such a leader, if you have a choice? Well, faction-forming has also probably been with our ancestors going back hundreds of thousands or millions of years. You choose a faction in order to get ahead. And when you do so, you want to choose the winning faction. It’s no good allying yourself with a would-be leader who is going to be defeated. If you’re not yourself going to be the leader, you have to ally yourself with the primate who is going to come out on top, in order to succeed in the society ruled by that leader.

So when we see a contest for a leadership role, something deep inside our brain whispers to us,

“Ally yourself with the strongman.”

“Choose the one who is most likely to kill the others.”

That thing isn’t the only force deciding our votes, thankfully. To some extent, we also consciously reason about who is likely to actually produce benefits for us and our society. But that little voice inside will sometimes get its way — especially when there is one candidate who is far and away the most aggressive.

Of course, few if any voters explicitly, consciously say to themselves, “I think I’ll vote for the strongman.” The little voice doesn’t literally speak to us. What it does is give us a general emotional attitude. When a candidate starts displaying strongman personality traits, we find ourselves feeling positively disposed toward him, we know not why.

But we quickly start to confabulate — that is, we start finding reasons to feel favorable towards that person. We look at aspects of the person’s message, or other information we have about him, for reasons why we might like him. There is always something we can come up with. When a pollster interviews us, we will say some of these reasons that we came up with. We won’t say, “It’s because he feels to me like the primate most likely to physically destroy the others,” even if that’s the truth.

The Irony of Democracy

This is the loophole — or rather, one of the loopholes — that enables democracy to be exploited with terrible results. In theory, democracy may trample on the rights of the minority, but at least it ought to ensure that leaders are chosen who do a non-terrible job of serving the interests of at least a majority of the people.

In theory. But only if you forget some unfortunate aspects of human psychology and model humans as well-informed, instrumentally rational choosers.

The problem is that we have inborn preferences, including especially the preference for strongman leaders, which are not only uncorrelated with the objective quality of leaders, but are actually strongly anti-correlated with leadership quality. We have a preference for the type of personalities that, when given power, are most likely to use it to exploit and harm others — people who are aggressive, over-confident, and low in empathy. Indeed, such people are the most likely to undermine democracy.

These sorts of instinct-based preferences, I would conjecture, are more pronounced among the masses, as compared to the elites of our society. For this reason, it is the preferences of the masses that are the greatest threat to the masses. The elites are needed to protect the masses from themselves. If the masses get exactly what they want in the short term, they will gladly surrender their liberty, surrender democracy, and submit themselves and their descendants to a tyrant. (For more, see this book, from which the title of this section is taken: The Irony of Democracy.)

Some impeachment-related questions:

1. What’s going to happen with the current impeachment efforts?
2. What about so-and-so’s crimes??
3. In general, what should Presidents be impeached for?
4. What should be the standard of proof?
5. What have we learned from this?

1. What’s Next?

The House

I expect that the House will pass some articles of impeachment against President Trump, for using the powers of his office to try to get Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden, perhaps for obstructing justice on behalf of Paul Manafort, perhaps for an attempted coverup, and perhaps other things.

After everything that the Democrats have said, they can hardly back down now. I don’t see any possibility that Trump didn’t really do the main thing he’s accused of. He can’t very well claim that the telephone transcript that he himself released is wrong. I don’t know how many Republicans will vote yes on the impeachment articles, but I expect all or nearly all Democrats will do so, and that’s enough to pass the House.

The Senate

After the House impeachment vote, a 2/3 majority in the Senate is needed to remove Trump from office. People are saying that the Senate Republicans will never vote to convict. I think there’s a good chance they will. Some observations:

• Nixon resigned because he knew he was going to lose the vote in the Senate, even though it was controlled by Republicans and he was a Republican. He was going to lose because they had him on tape talking about bribing the Watergate burglars, etc. The evidence against Trump seems similar, and the thing he’s accused of also seems similar to Nixon’s misdeeds, with the added issue of involving foreign powers. Another parallel: during Watergate, people were saying the same kinds of things they are saying now — that this was a politically-motivated smear campaign by the Democrats, etc. Some Nixon-supporters continued to think that until the end.
• Republican politicians have gone along with Trump so far, which means they haven’t yet reached their limit. Presumably, there is some limit to what Trumpian behavior they will defend. Now, I’m not saying the Ukraine business is morally worse than anything else Trump has done. But it is more likely to constitute a breaking point for Republican support. This is partly because it’s an offense against non-partisan values, not an offense against a value especially associated with liberals; there is maybe a stronger case that it’s illegal than any other thing (that we can prove) Trump has done in office; it’s a simple case; and the evidence is clear-cut and undeniable. (Nixon had the advantage of being smarter and knowing what he had to conceal; Trump proudly handed over the key piece of evidence because he really has no idea how his behavior is wrong, and he’s out of touch with the values of the elites of this society.)
• Republican leaders never liked Trump. He faced an unprecedented level of opposition from people in his own party in 2016 (there was nothing like that for Nixon). Most of them know that he’s bad for the party, bad for the country, and generally a bad person. Most have been pretending to be with Trump, only because they’re afraid of his base. No one in the government feels any loyalty to him. Senators are part of the Elite class of society, and Trump is out of step with the Elites; he is a candidate of the masses. Even though he’s a New York billionaire, his temperament and ways of thinking are plebeian.
• Public opinion is likely to grow against Trump, as the public catches up with the story, and the Administration continues to prove unable to defend the President. If and when a clear majority of Americans turn against Trump, his apparent support among Republican leaders will vanish in a puff of smoke.

Who’s Going to Jail?

Rudy Giuliani, Bill Barr, and other Trump lieutenants involved with the Ukraine affair are the ones who should be most worried. In the Watergate scandal, Nixon ultimately escaped all criminal liability, because Ford pardoned him. Several other people, however, went to jail for conspiring with Nixon. (Ford didn’t care about those people; he was just concerned about his poor, maligned friend Richard, who surely had already suffered enough.)

It’s likely that Trump will similarly get off, but his lieutenants who foolishly carried out his bidding will go down for his crimes.

Biden

The big winner in this story is Elizabeth Warren. Biden is finished for 2020.

Trump’s accusation is that Joe Biden (successfully) pushed to get a prosecutor fired who was investigating the company that had hired Hunter Biden — and that Joe did this solely to protect Hunter’s income. Now, we can’t know for sure what was in Joe Biden’s mind, but his opposition to that prosecutor was not an idiosyncratic position. That prosecutor was widely viewed as corrupt, and his firing was welcomed in the EU (https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/eu-hails-sacking-of-ukraine-s-prosecutor-viktor-shokin-1.2591190).

But voters are not going to go do a bunch of background research to verify that. This is one of the reasons why one shouldn’t set up conflicts of interest for oneself — because if you subsequently claim that there was no improper influence, people are not going to believe you.

What is definitely true is that Hunter Biden took this job at a Ukrainian company with a reputation for corruption, getting paid $50k a month, while his father Joe was responsible for heading up U.S.-Ukrainian relations. No one disputes that. If you think that’s a coincidence, and the company hired Hunter because Hunter Biden just happened to be the best man for the job, I have a few bridges to sell you. Obviously, they were hoping to buy influence with the U.S. government. Whether they got what they paid for or not, it’s an obvious conflict of interest for the Bidens, and possibly illegal. Some people seem to have trouble comprehending the idea that both Trump and Biden could have done something wrong. (“But they’re from opposite political parties! How can you accuse both of them? Whose side are you on?!?”)

It’s too bad that the Bidens did this, because otherwise, Joe Biden would have been the strongest opponent to Trump in 2020 (assuming Trump will be running). But it is just for Biden’s prospects to be shot down by this conflict of interests. Maybe this will teach future politicians not to do something so dumb and unethical. For more on this sort of widespread, unethical practice, see: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/hunter-bidens-legal-socially-acceptable-corruption/598804/.

The Election

Before this scandal broke, Trump was in good shape. It probably would have been a tight race, but he had a good chance of winning re-election. The economy is in excellent condition, and the obvious reasons why you would naturally think Trump couldn’t be elected (e.g., his large defects of character) were already true in 2016, when he was actually elected.

Now, however, I would be very surprised if he was the President in 2021. Granted, Trump’s hard-core base will never give up on him. If there was a videotape of him eating a human baby, with a signed confession by Trump himself talking about how delicious baby flesh was, they still wouldn’t turn against him. Trump could just tweet that the baby was a deep-state, Democratic operative who deserved to be eaten.

But presumably, there are some marginal voters — people who just slightly favored Trump over Clinton in 2016. If just a few percent of voters switch sides, that’s enough to ensure a Democratic victory. (Assuming similar numbers don’t switch sides the other direction, for some other reason.) It’s hard to imagine that not happening. So I don’t see how Trump can win.

That is, of course, assuming that Trump will even be running in 2020. He may be removed from office, or resign, or be replaced as the nominee by the Republican party. The Republicans’ best chance is probably to nominate someone else. (Perhaps Nikki Haley: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/10/19/nikki-haley-2020-republican-party-221667.)

But I think the Republicans are going to lose. If the President is removed from office for corruption, it’ll be pretty hard to convince voters to pick someone else from the same party to succeed him. If the President survives, he’ll still probably lose the election because of the corruption.

2. What About So-and-So?

Americans today are unbelievably tribal and dogmatic. So the first reaction when someone from “your side” is accused of some wrongdoing is not to consider whether the accusation is true. The first reaction is to dogmatically insist that your guy is completely innocent.

If that’s not possible — because the evidence is indisputable and the action is indefensible — then the second thing that comes to mind is to ignore the accusation and just immediately start attacking the other side. Say that the accuser is a bad person or has committed various crimes. Or start talking about some completely unrelated case in which someone from “the other side” allegedly did something wrong. Or just go into standard, generic attacks on the other side.

This may seem lame (to people who are paying attention), but it’s the best play that dogmatic partisans have when they know their guy is in the wrong. If they’re lucky, they’ll derail the conversation — people will get caught up talking about their “what about x” and “what about y” ploys, and simply forget about the original accusation.

For example:

• “The whistleblower is politically biased/a traitor/a Democratic operative/an operative of a deep state conspiracy.”
• “The Democrats are trying to advance socialism/take away your guns/open the borders.”
• “What about Hunter Biden?”
• “What about Hilary Clinton’s emails?”
• “What about Bill Clinton’s perjury?”
• “What about FDR’s court packing plan?”

(Okay, I added the last one.)

Now, you might well think some or all of the above are legitimate concerns. Furthermore, they might well be unjustly neglected. Therefore, you might wonder, what’s wrong with bringing them up?

The problem in this case is that

1. We actually need to know whether the original accusation is true.
   • If the President in office right now is corrupt, is undermining our system, is undermining U.S. foreign policy, etc., we kind of need to know that, and we need to do something about it sooner rather than later.
2. The above ploys do not help us answer that.
   • Starting a debate about socialism doesn’t help us find out whether Trump is guilty of misconduct, partly because, obviously, that debate will never finish, so it’s just a permanent distraction.
   • Talking about the Clintons doesn’t help us, because even if Bill Clinton deserved to be removed from office, or Hilary deserved to be jailed, that doesn’t in any way support Trump’s position.
   • Etc.

It can’t seriously be said that discussing the attacks on the whistleblower, or Hilary or Bill Clinton, or even Hunter Biden, should take precedence over addressing whether the current head of the most powerful organization in the world needs to be removed from office. So it is difficult to regard the above ploys as good-faith discussion. They are, rather, efforts to obscure and distract.

They are also evidence that Trump-supporters know they have no way of actually defending the President’s behavior.

3. What Is Impeachable?

In my view, we need a lot more impeachment, for a lot more things. Presidents should be impeached for supporting obviously unconstitutional legislation, or taking other obviously unconstitutional actions. (But not for actions that could reasonably be defended as constitutional.) If this ever happened, Presidents might start taking their oaths to uphold the Constitution at least minimally seriously. Of course, this would never happen, since Congress has no regard for the Constitution either.

Presidents should also be impeached for committing major felonies (including doing so through proxies). Bush should have been impeached for authorizing torture, which is prohibited under U.S. law. Then Obama should have been impeached for ordering extrajudicial executions, which is also prohibited under U.S. law (the murder statutes do not contain a clause saying “…unless you’re the President”). If this were actually “a government of laws, not of men,” as the popular saying has it, then both of those men would now be serving life sentences.

Of course, these suggestions would be complete political non-starters in Washington. That just shows that Washington doesn’t believe in the Constitution, doesn’t believe any of its rhetoric about “the rule of law”. They all believe that government officials are above the law.

Some say that there should be a very high bar for impeachment, because removing the President is such a serious step. I heard one political insider saying that it has to be “the last resort”. Perhaps this is because the President is busy doing very important things, and he needs some leeway in order to be able to best serve our interests.

This is the exact opposite of the correct reasoning. Because the President is tasked with very important things, and because the President has so much power, we cannot afford to have someone immoral or incompetent in that office. That is, there must be extra high standards of behavior for the President, not extra high standards for removing the President.

Notice how those two things are basically the opposite of each other: to say that there should be a high bar for removing the President is to say that there should be a low bar for letting the President continue. Which would only make sense if you think the job is unimportant, that the decisions the President makes aren’t difficult or don’t really matter, so that it’s fine to have almost anyone making them.

If you think the job is important and difficult to do right, then we should impose the highest standards for the holders of that office. If we let the President continue virtually no matter what he does, if we almost never remove a President, then we are saying that there are little or no standards for this office — and Presidents will act accordingly.

With that said, I think another type of impeachable offense — whether or not it is illegal — is using the powers of one’s office for political gain. That sort of behavior should be immediately squashed whenever it is revealed. This should be done even if the other impeachable offenses mentioned above are not punished. The reason is that allowing this behavior risks establishing social norms under which this behavior is accepted. That, in turn, moves the country toward the norms of a dictatorship, the norms common in the worst-off countries in the world.

As a libertarian, I have been known to be critical of the U.S. government from time to time. Compared to a fully just society, ours is terrible. Nevertheless, corrupt dictatorship is many times worse. If you don’t recognize that, you’re delusional. Therefore, we should first take care not to let our society degenerate into dictatorship, before worrying about how to move to utopia.

4. The Standard of Proof

For the same reason, there should be a relatively low standard of proof for removing a President from office, perhaps just a preponderance of the evidence. Because, again, the job is too important and difficult to have a person who is probably corrupt in that position.

Why not an even lower standard — say, that of mere reasonable suspicion? Because if the standard were that low, this would encourage too many purely politically-motivated charges, which could generate chaos in the political system.

The framers of the Constitution required a 2/3 majority in the Senate for conviction, probably because they were worried about the power of impeachment being abused for partisan political reasons. Understandably enough (since they had no experience to draw on), they didn’t anticipate that this wasn’t going to be the main problem, and that the problem was instead going to be too much deference to the President. In hindsight, they should have required only a simple majority.

5. What Have We Learned?

Americans are probably going to learn approximately nothing from this episode. But here are some things that observers should learn:

• If your boss tells you to help him with an illegal or unethical scheme, even if your boss is the President, don’t do it. Because if it gets exposed, you’re probably going to go down for it, even if the boss gets away with it.
• In fact, don’t even go to work for an obviously immoral person in the first place.

• The stuff that comes out of a person’s mouth is often an indicator of their actual character. That includes things that they say that you think can’t be taken literally since the face-value meaning is too obviously damning. If someone is saying things that, taken at face value, might seem to indicate approval for extremely immoral or illegal behavior, don’t assume that they are just kidding and therefore it doesn’t mean anything.
  • Example from another area: it should have come as no surprise to anyone that Louis CK turned out to be a perv. He was constantly telling jokes about being a perv.
  • It should have come as no surprise that Trump would abuse his office for personal gain, that he would show no loyalty to anything but himself, etc. He’s been completely up front all along about being an asshole. Most of us just couldn’t believe that that was all to be taken literally and at face value.
    • Ex.: expressing admiration for dictators Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin. We should not assume that that is just a stance taken for diplomatic purposes; we should take seriously the face-value meaning of it: that he really would like to be like those people.
    • Remember the interview in which the reporter says to Trump, “But Vladimir Putin is a killer.” Trump responds: “There are a lot of killers. What, you think our country is so innocent?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8-VB-XkjKQ) The face value meaning of this is that Trump is unconcerned about murder, and he sees no important difference between the U.S. and Russia. (Note: I am not saying this is logically entailed by the statement. I am saying this is the natural implication that a normal person would draw, if the speaker doesn’t say anything to avert it.) Therefore, we should not be surprised if Trump turns out to have approved some murders or sold out to Russia.
    • Bragging that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and not lose any support. The face-value meaning of this: Trump thinks he can get away with anything, because his base will support anything he does. We should not be surprised that he acts accordingly.
  • Of course, people who profess high values often fail to live up to them. But people who profess very low values almost always live up to them.
• If there is an individual who has made a life trying to get ahead by manipulating other people, and now that person is promising to help your group get ahead by manipulating other groups, you should assume that that person is trying to get ahead, right now, by manipulating you.

Don’t overlook the obvious.