Political philosophy is all bullshit
Everything is just a veneer for people's selfish special interests.
Here's a story. In the 16th century, King Henry VIII of England wanted to divorce his wife and marry somebody new. The problem was, the Catholic Church wouldn’t let him.
What did Henry do? He converted to Protestantism. All of a sudden, he didn’t have to listen to that pesky Pope anymore. Then he divorced his wife and married somebody new.
Here's another story. In 1956, India banned polygamy, with an exception for Muslims. Guess what happened? Successful Hindu men with multiple wives started converting to Islam in droves.
Here's another story. Talleyrand started his life as a bishop in the Catholic Church, but then during the French revolution, worked to seize control of the church’s land for the nation. Eventually he became Napoleon’s right hand man, fighting for the revolution’s anti-monarchy ideals. After Napoleon was defeated and the monarchy was restored in France, Talleyrand worked for the restored monarchy.
What is the underlying theme of these 3 stories?
People believe in the political and religious beliefs that are most convenient for them to believe.
People don't base their decisions around their moral principles — they base their moral principles around what's best for them.
In other words, if a Marxist wins the lottery, he'll stop being a Marxist.
There are a few exceptions to this rule — maybe one out of 100 people has genuine moral principles and is willing to make personal sacrifices based on those principles. But generally speaking, people sell out their principles whenever they get a chance.
Why? Because having moral principles is a rational thing. But people don't think rationally — they think emotionally and then rationalize whatever decisions they make.
99% of political philosophy is just that rationalization. It's a way of justifying to other people why the thing that's best for you is actually what's best for society as a whole.
That goes for both sides. Some people will read this article and be like “Yeah! Those goddamn Republicans are all just greedy bastards!” or “Yeah! Those goddamn liberals are all hypocrites”. To truly understand this principle, you need to admit that it's baked into human nature, and your side is guilty of it, too.
You can view pretty much any political debate through this lens. Let’s take a look at a few of them:
Government Subsidies
In my favorite novel Catch-22, there’s a character called Major Major Major Major. The book goes on a multi-page digression about Major Major Major Major’s father, a farmer who lived off of money the government paid him to not grow alfalfa on his land.
Major Major Major Major's father would buy more land, not grow anything on that land, and get a subsidy from the government — which he would use to buy more land.
Major Major Major Major's father was also staunchly against welfare. According to the book, he “thought that welfare to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism”.
This is basically how everybody feels about welfare. Most people who are anti-welfare stop being anti-welfare once the government writes them a check.
Staunchly anti-welfare Republicans can accept a $300 bribe from George W. Bush after Bush got elected president, or a $1200 “stimulus check” from Donald Trump during election season.
Similarly, when business is booming, big banks ask regulators to leave them alone. Then when business goes bust, big banks get down on their knees and beg those very same regulators to give them a bailout.
Milton Friedman once noted that the most unpopular welfare programs are those that benefit the poor. This, he says, is because the poor have the least amount of political power of all classes: middle-class people have the numbers to vote for politicians, and rich people have the money to buy politicians, but poor people have no way to get their guys into office.
That's why people talk about cutting food stamps, but nobody can seriously talk about cutting social security or oil subsidies without destroying their political career.
Helping The Poor
In Berkeley, California, about a block from the house where I grew up, there’s a giant ass parking lot.
There should not be a giant ass parking lot in the middle of Berkeley. That giant ass parking lot takes up about 20 million dollars worth of highly valuable land. Even worse, that land is right next to public transit: anybody who lived there could get to downtown San Francisco in about 20 minutes.
The right thing to do is turn that giant ass parking lot into a giant ass apartment building. Especially considering that housing prices in Berkeley are insanely high and nobody has anywhere to live. If you built a 20-story apartment building on that space, you could house hundreds of people in a prime location.
Berkeley residents are staunchly against building an apartment building in that parking lot. If you ask my mother about that parking lot, she will rail against building apartments there. “Think of the shadow it will cast!” she says.
To me it seems silly to worry about a shadow being cast on your house for 1 hour every day so much that you refuse to build housing for hundreds of people. There's a major housing crisis going on in California, and the solution is to just build more housing. But California cannot build more housing because the same liberals who pretend to care about stuff like helping the poor and lowering the cost of living cave in whenever it creates a minor inconvenience for them.
Liberals mostly support policies to "help people in need" out of a desire to appear morally virtuous, not out of principle. They don't actually give a shit about poor people. And so when you put real money on the table, they stop bluffing and show their true colors.
When they do support policies to "help the poor", they generally support policies that appear to help poor people, but actually help themselves.
For example, healthcare. Healthcare wouldn't benefit the poor that much, because they already have Medicaid. The types of healthcare programs that Democrats talk about would mostly benefit the middle class.
If you ask somebody who's in favor of a national healthcare policy why they're in favor of a national healthcare policy, they might say that everyone has the "right" to healthcare. But if they really feel like everybody deserves healthcare, why should they want to start with themselves?
It's estimated that you can save the life of somebody in Nigeria by spending around $4,113. In the United States, it costs around ten times that amount to extend somebody’s life by just one year. So if the goal is really to provide as many people as possible with healthcare, why not start with the people you can help for the lowest cost?
The reason, of course, is that healthcare advocates don't give a shit about other people's healthcare. They just want somebody else to pay for their healthcare.
Another example of this is the $15/hour minimum wage. If you analyze which antipoverty programs have been most effective in America, you'll find that the program that has helped the poor the most is the Earned Income Tax Credit. So someone who wants to help the poor should support beefing up the Earned Income Tax Credit.
But Bernie Sanders basically never talks about the Earned Income Tax Credit, and instead talks constantly about a $15/hour minimum wage. Many economists believe that raising the minimum wage would be bad for people in poverty, because it would mean fewer jobs available to them. But a $15/hour minimum wage sounds great to young adults, Bernie's main voter base.
When you support something like healthcare or raising the minimum wage, you get two benefits. First, you get to feel like a saint, because you're "helping the poor". Second, you get free stuff from the government, because you're actually helping yourself. What a great deal!
Abortion
Now we're gonna get into some even darker shit. This part is even more speculative than the rest of this article and it's more likely that my theory doesn't hold as well here, but here goes.
When you ask pro-choice women why they're pro-choice, they'll usually say something like "it's my body, so it's my choice".
This argument is bullshit — you never hear women making the same argument for bodily autonomy when it comes to, say, shooting heroin. Pro-choice people have no problem with letting the government legislate your use of all kinds of drugs. "Bodily autonomy" seems to only apply to abortion.
(To be clear, I am personally in favor of safe and legal abortion. But I think it's a complex moral issue where you can make a good faith argument on both sides. I'll respect anybody's opinion, but I won't respect when a woman self-righteously implies that people who are against abortion are trying to take away women's bodily autonomy, not protect what they view to be human children.)
Why are so many women so adamantly pro-choice? To answer this question, let's cut through the argument tropes and think about birth control in purely Darwinian terms.
If you're a female of any species, you want to be choosy about who gets you pregnant, because raising a kid is a lot of work. This is especially true in humans. You can only do it a few times over the course of your life, so you want to make sure you do it properly.
So if you're looking at birth control from a purely Darwinian perspective, you would predict that women would support it most adamantly.
That's more or less what you see in the real world. Women support abortion most fervently, and women are rarely against abortion unless they're very religious.
With men it's more complicated — but generally speaking, men pay less of a cost to be a father than women pay to be a mother, so you would expect men to care a lot less about abortion than women. And generally speaking, they do.
A Brief Conclusion
As soon as money hits the table, people's principles go out the window.
All of us are this guy:
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Hey! Thanks for reading.
My name's Theo and every other week, I publish an article about something that was on my mind the week before. Usually it has something to do with psychology, how society works, or long-term trends in the world around us.
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Idk if I told you about georgism but it’s an ideology which states that land as a favor of production belongs to everyone.
There are three factors of production - land, labor, and capital. Land is anything created by God or nature, capital is anything created by man, and labor is work done to produce a good or service.
A fact about taxes that leftists will seldom admit to is that taxes incur deadweight loss. Sometimes, that’s precisely the point as with a tobacco tax or a carbon tax. But a sales tax increases the price of goods, reducing sales.
Land has a fixed supply. All of the land that exists is all the land that will ever exist. A tax on the value of land would not reduce the amount of land available. Henry George supported the land value tax (LVT) for three reasons:
1. For the aforementioned reasons, LVT would not incur deadweight loss. Back then, the main source of revenue for the federal government was tariffs.
2. LVT would actually have a positive effect on the economy. When people buy land to speculate on its value, that land is being withheld. LVT would prevent land speculation.
3. We own our own labor and what we make from it. Profit derived from land is unearned because the landowner needs to do no work for the land to increase in value. Rather, the landowner needs speculators derives profit from everyone else. As George said, “Everyone works but the dirt lot”.
Tying this into your article, land is being used very inefficiently because landowners benefit from it. In a lot of liberal areas, development is obstructed in the name of environmentalism. A real environmentalist would consider the benefits of population density.