9 thoughts on “Quote of the Day”

  1. Generally everyone is valuable because…

    1) Natural rights and the divine. That you accept that we are God’s creatures, imbued with the divine spark and therefore with natural rights.

    2) The utilitarian. It’s possible that you might be useful some day and we just don’t know. That weird kid that everyone bullied in high school might one day be the 22-year old genius who helps unravel the mysteries of USAID

    or

    3) Mutually Assured Destruction. I consider you valuable so that you will consider me valuable so that we don’t knife each other in our sleep.

    If the first two are necessary myths to allow a high-trust society to flourish, then the third is the bedrock of a low-trust, state of nature (see Hobbes). The problem occurs that if some group, perhaps full of divine or ideological inspiration decides that they 1) have all the answers already and they don’t need you and 2) they think they can get away with it in regard to MAD

    The 20th Century was full of people/movements like that, people who had all thought out. You see glimpses of it beneath the surface in the 21st Century

  3. Well said, Mike. I only wish I could add a string of the Calvin and Hobbes comics appearing in my fakebook feed the last few months. They brilliantly illustrate your 3 points. (Watterson had the genius to make $ on those points!)

  4. I know Lincoln’s b-day was yesterday but what Lincoln wrote here as an argument to a slaveowner also applies, and far eloquently, to my depiction of MAD in #3 above using a basic principle of Natural Law.

    “You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then: the lighter having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.You do not mean color exactly?—You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.”

    Hadley Arkes takes this a step further as an argument against abortion:

    ” The question may be raised, in the style of Lincoln, in this way: Why is the offspring of Homo sapiens in the womb anything less than a human being? It doesn’t speak? Neither do deaf mutes. It has yet no arms or legs? Well, other people lose arms or legs without losing their standing as human beings to receive the protections of the law. There is nothing one could cite to disqualify the child in the womb as a human being that would not apply to many people walking around, well outside the womb. Nowhere in this chain of reasoning is there an appeal to faith or revelation. In other words, one doesn’t have to be Catholic to understand this argument—and that has been precisely the teaching of the Church, that this is not a matter of “faith” and “belief,” but a matter to be weighed with the evidence from embryology and the principled reasoning of the Natural Law.”

    This basic framework is what led Christopher Hitchens, a noted atheist, to opposed abortion from conception.

    Having read Richard Fernandez through the years, I get the sense he would lean in on the basic principle of #1. The problem with basing the worth of an individual on a potential contribution in terms of advancement of the whole is that 1) most advancement is done on innovation of which most is based on finding the small nugget of success after repeated failure – the 10% rule applies and 2) it ultimately reduces the worth of a potential to a cost-benefit analysis

    The Nazis (I know here we go with Godwin’s Law but…) provided an updated version of the infants on the Spartan hillside argument, that those which are specific burdens on the population at large need to be eliminated. However unlike an ancient civilization where the survival of the whole living on a subsistence level, may be imperiled by a “useless eater” Nazi Germany was sufficiently wealthy to allow such people to live.

    Rather for them it was a matter of choice. In either case, the chance of any future contribution becomes matter of accounting and actuarial tables, After all the odds of say a Harvard graduate contributing is higher than someone who dropped out of HS at 16… or more to the point of the Nazis, an IQ of 150 more than one of 80

    The basis of this mentality exists today in our society today. We see it int he medical field. Ezekiel Emmanuel *Rahm’s brother) wondered about the cost/benefit analysis of providing continued medical care/societal support for those older than 75. he was in favor, even for himself, of encouraging those to stop clinging to life for its own sake. Think of the debate 2009-2010 debate regarding Obamacare and rationing.

    At the core of the argument, not truly refuted, was that in any healthcare insurance system, it different from homeowner or car insurance. In health insurance, as I age I tend to draw more from the system than I put in as I age and past a certain age quite dramatically where a given person’s lifetime draw on health benefits is concentrated int he last few years of life.

    To put it crudely, the natural equilibrium of a business model is the P&L statement and there are only 2 ways to balance one out – raise revenue or cut costs. We see this in private insurance markets and the desire to cut costs by denying care, but it also works in the public sphere through rationing.

    The difference between national health care and private insurance is that in the latter, there is a chance of recourse whether market forces or through government regulation. In a world of only national health care, there is no escape valve. As the population ages, health care costs go up, and pressure is put on budgets it is only natural that to make the numbers balance that attention will be drawn to the high expense of the elderly… and from there a weighing of the net contribution of those over 75.

    In a sense we are there regarding net contributions. The entire argument of Trump and MAGA and against globalization is that the laptop class in reality thinks it doesn’t need the non-college graduate anymore. Steel workers? Farmers? Blue-collar? That can be outsourced to other countries in a globalized environment.

    In fact the whole argument regarding globalization was that the advanced economies would move up the economic value chain into a white collar economy and have the nasty hands-on, polluting stuff overseas. The catch to that argument was that there would be need a way to move the population as a whole up the skills chain through training and education.

    That part of the deal was not kept and in reality the dominant energy of the Democratic side of the Trump realignment into a class-based system is that they (Democrats) don’t see the value in terms of contributions by a large percentage of the population (Trump supporters) anymore.

    Yes they need people for the service economy but whether its the proverbial MAGA supporter or if they get too uppity a border crosser, it doesn’t matter, In fact the border crosser cost less, are more docile, and you don;’t have to listen to their political views. We are on the slippery slope where from the logic of key parts of the Democratic party is that your stereotypical MAGA voter is getting in the way of a better future and that the downside of keeping them around in the political system is less than the upside. To the laptop elites, the future doesn’t need the MAGA people any more; that chance there is a potential Steve Jobs working out of their garage in Omaha

    To them the key part of their political project is to isolate and usher those useless eaters off the stage. That doesn’t mean genocide, but it does mean that for them Jeffersonian democracy has run its course.

    I would imagine there alot of people right now on the coasts, especially in the Acela corridor, who are thinking just that right now as the Trump tsunami hits and they won’t – if given a chance – make the same mistake again

  5. We see that Canada has already, and very quickly, moved down the useless eaters path. This mirrors the abortion debate that started out being concerned with obviously malformed fetuses but quickly progressed to any fetus that was undesired for any reason. I wonder if it is anything besides the inertia of a much larger country that keeps us from following Canada’s example more quickly than we seem to be.

    Left unexamined by those so sure of the superiority of the white collar class is that so much of that “work” consists of simply taking pieces of paper, or other information, and routing it onto one or another predetermined path rather than anything truly creative. This is the sort of activity that “AI” is going to eliminate first, long before, if ever, it learns how to clear a drain.

  6. In Canada, assisted suicide (MAID) is the third-leading cause of death in 2023 (15,343 – https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1310039401) There are two issues. Both the total number of deaths and the number of Track 2 deaths (where a natural death is not foreseeable) are skyrocketing.

    The argument for the large increase in MAID deaths is that it is simply people who would die anyway in a short time (Track 1), but in the link I provided above there hasn’t been a decline in any category re: cause of death commensurate with the increase in MAID deaths. Curious, no?

    To my earlier point re: Lincoln and race, there is a contemporary equivalent with intelligence. This is the hallmark of the Administrative State – people in the bureaucracy can tell you what to do in a given area because they are experts and therefore know more than you do.

    We saw this with COVID (Science!) and also with K-12 curricula where teachers and administrators resisted parents’ efforts regarding CRT and LGBT curriculum, that they needed to trust the experts. Some of the educrats and medicrats even used the analogy of airline pilots, that disagreeing people were the equivalent of passengers who demanded to fly the plane instead of a trained pilot. Note the issue wasn’t so much expertise in making decisions in general as making decisions that affected peoples’ lives without their consent. The more applicable airline pilot-passenger analogy would be a pilot who decided soon after takeoff that instead of going to Vegas as scheduled (and that the passengers wanted), he instead was taking the plane to a diversity seminar in Duluth because he thought they needed that more

    You hear alot of variations on this theme and it’s probably worth a post in of itself. Anybody remember Cass Sunstein’s book “Nudge” from 15+ years ago? Same theme… except it’s the iron fist in the velvet glove. You are too stupid to make decisions on you own so we’ll help you do it, it’s the abandonment of the rational actor theory in favor of paternalism and aristocracy.

    At its root is the idea just as it’s immoral to hold people responsible for outcomes are powerless to effect, they should not hold power for choices that they cannot make responsibly.

    The Lincoln analogy comes in when I ask proponents of this “intelligence approach” that if the basis for power and authority relies not on consent but instead on “intelligence” what do they do when either 1) they encounter someone more intelligent than they are or 2) those who are more powerful find their choices lacking. They have stripped themselves of legitimacy

    To Richard Fernandez’s point, it’s a cult of “intelligence” where the assumption is not only do I know more than you but I know enough to figure everything out (deduction over innivation)

  7. Fernandez in some ways paraphrases Robert Heinlein:
    “Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

    This is known as “bad luck.”

  8. Bob D….I don’t think Heinlein is quite right on this one. The ‘extremely small minority’ is indeed vital, but so is the much larger minority who make the original innovation work better and find new uses for it…and figure out how to make it better. Newcomen and Watt rightly get credit for the steam engine..sometimes people also mention Boulton, who was Watt’s manufacturing partner…but thousands of individuals over the years have improved the engine with compounding, better valve linkages, etc.

  9. Anyone remember the thought experiment on abortion – which baby should be kept and which could be aborted. It was set up so people would let baby Adolf live, and baby Leonardo die. People are bad enough at hindsight, there is no way for them to predict the future value of one child. Niels Bohr and Yogi Berra quotes inserted here…

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