[postpawl]

“poorer Americans have been subjected to over regulation, an increased state and police scrutiny, under the theory that individual liberty is collectively corrosive.”

That seems like the thesis of the blog post.

I don’t think “over regulation” or lack of individual liberty are the main problem. We’ve been socializing the bad and privatizing the good for a long time now, and now none of our remaining institutions are trustworthy anymore. Regulations are one of the only tools we have to hold corporations accountable, and we’re not using them for that because capitalism doesn’t incentivize accountability.

[nathanaldensr]

The phrase "regulation" implies that the regulators--the State--are ethical actors. They aren't. How many more examples of that do we need to see before people believe it?

The dichotomy of "regulation" vs. "lack of regulation" is a false one. Neither work because too many humans are fundamentally unethical and non-trustworthy, leading to inevitable low-trust societies such as the one the West is experiencing right now.

We need to reject globalism in favor of localism. Local government is fundamentally more accountable to their constituencies if for no other reason than the physical proximity. I can always leave my house, walk or drive a few miles, and protest at city hall.

[woodruffw]

> The phrase "regulation" implies that the regulators--the State--are ethical actors.

Why would it imply this? Regulation is a political object, not a moral one. Regulation can be good or bad (as evaluated by a moral system, dealer's choice) without collapsing in on itself.

Political systems thrive for reasons that are mostly orthogonal to their moral nature, chief among them being whether their individual institutions survive administrations and the people within them. Trust is a function of the perseverance of those institutions when they are also perceived as good; it has nothing to do with globalism or localism.

[pfraze]

My theory is that America needs to reverse some amount of globalization as its influence wanes. We’ll lose some of the cost benefits - it’s very cheap to source labor from third world countries - but we’ll gain from local production, perhaps meaning costs go up but wealth circulates more readily. Whether that’s a very inspiring idea, I can’t say.

But I’m unconvinced local politics are any better than national politics. We don’t seem to have any trouble traveling to Washington to protest.

[andreskytt]

This is much more complex and much less related to globalism than to us monetary policy. Using the dollar as a global fiat is certainly beneficial but it also means others are very interested in selling things to US to get dollars and buying from US means some dollars get out of the immediate circulation. Which is better, who knows, but it’s a specific policy decision by US and _not_ the concept of globalization, that has the consequences described.

[andreskytt]

Please, do not generalize. Life in Finland is much different from life in Italy and in Milwaukee. Low-trust societies are not inevitable in the West and there are clear examples. There is a marked difference between “glibalism is wrong” and “we overdid this capitalism thing (again) in our country”