The Utopian World Liberals Want So Much Isn’t Possible
Elon Musk’s rosiest scenario with Artificial General Intelligence is, ironically, pretty much the socialist dream world.
It’s that AGI and robots become so advanced that they essentially create unlimited prosperity. There would be no need to work; robots could build anything you want, and everything would become so abundant that it would practically be free.
Is that possible? Absolutely. Is it the most likely scenario? Probably not. It seems much more likely that AI will wipe us out, enslave us, or serve us so well that we essentially die alone, without breeding, in happy little virtual worlds we’ve created for ourselves.
However, barring that, or dying and going to heaven, there’s no utopia to be found in the world we live in for two reasons that can be explained with these profoundly intelligent quotes:
Put in a simpler way, there are not enough resources to go around, and human beings are not wise, honest, and competent enough to micromanage how they should be “fairly” distributed.
Conservatives understand these concepts very easily, but liberals? Not so much.
For example, Peter Daou is a liberal campaign apparatchik who worked for a number of candidates, including Hillary Clinton in 2008. Way back in the day, the two of us worked on some project together (it has been so long I don’t even remember what it was), and he was polite and friendly, so we got along. I note that, because I just want to make sure everyone understands that I have no beef with Peter Daou personally. However, I find this post of his to be very typical of liberal thinking:
As a practical matter, this doesn’t mean anything. It’s just like saying, “Everybody should be happy, wealthy, and live forever!” Okay, but they aren’t and they won’t. Now what?
The “now what” with liberals always turns out to be confiscatory tax rates to pay for increasing the power and size of the federal government, but they never seem to learn anything from the fact that this way of solving a problem fails over and over again.
Let’s cover a couple of prominent ones just to show you what I mean:
So, in just one state, the result of their spending !!!24 billion dollars!!! on homelessness was that the problem got considerably worse. Meanwhile, the guy who is responsible for that utter debacle, Gavin Newsom, is considered a leading candidate for the presidency on the Democratic side in 2028. Does it sound like they learned anything from this disaster? No, of course not.
Here’s another one that gives you a great example of how futile this way of looking at the world always turns out to be, with the stats compiled from the end of Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” in 1968, to the present:
Spending is roughly 5 times higher overall and 3 times higher per person, but the poverty rate has barely moved in more than half a century.
How can this be?
It’s because people respond to incentives just the way you see in this cartoon:
Everyone’s natural inclination is to do as little as possible to get by and to only push themselves when they get rewarded for it.
In other words, when you punish makers, they stop making. When you reward takers, they start taking as much as they can get away with, and more people join them. Meanwhile, the government is stupid, slow, inefficient, and doesn’t do anything well. The only thing our government even appears to be competent at is the military, and that’s just because we’re mostly competing against other governments and have a huge resource advantage.
It’s also worth noting that there are a lot of lazy, immoral, and just generally worthless human beings. You give them a job, they’ll get fired. You catch them breaking the law and give them a break, next week they’ll be breaking the same law again. You can give them a place to stay with the most minimal requirements imaginable, and they’ll still screw up so much they’ll be back on the street. How much do you want to take from people who earn, create jobs, and pay taxes to give to people like this?
Granted, there certainly are working poor and good people trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but you don’t fix their problems by giving them things; you make their lives better by creating an environment that allows them to create a better life for themselves. You keep the economy strong so they can get jobs, keep their neighborhood safe from criminals, keep inflation minimal, and keep their taxes low. Then, you let people take care of their own lives.
The problem liberals always seem to have with doing this is that if you go this direction, Crack Whore Christina, Chronically Homeless Harry, Felony Phil, and Lazy Lana struggle badly. But guess what? Even if you pour resources into them, all these same people still struggle because the problem isn’t that they aren’t getting enough charity; the problem is them. They’re failing in life because they make bad decisions, and they deserve to fail.
Is that every single person, all the time? No, there is such a thing as bad luck and temporary reversals of fortune, but the truth is, most people end up in life exactly where someone who made their choices would be most likely to end up.
Getting beyond this, how do you decide how to fix things? Ultimately, the liberal solution to that problem always turns out to be, “We take over the government, and we force everyone else to do what we want, whether it works or not.” In other words, the liberal “cure” that’s supposed to create a utopia is worse than the disease.
In order to drag a bunch of human dead weight over the finish line, we’re going to oppress everyone else, tax the money they earned at confiscatory rates, and make them do what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren want, whether they like it or not. It's, “We’re going to screw over 80% of the population to make life easy for the 20% of the population that didn’t want to put in the same level of effort as everyone else.” Even if it worked, which it doesn’t, what’s compassionate about this? What’s noble about this?
As a practical matter in liberal cities, this means taxing the hell out of the most productive people, adding unsustainable levels of debt, letting criminals run wild, and handing out mediocre goodies to poor people that they resent and everyone else is unimpressed by. Would you think you were in a utopia if you lived on welfare in NYC or San Francisco? No way!
Ultimately, the government is not going to create a utopia. In fact, most productive people would be better off if the government never even knew we existed. The best thing the government can do to make life good for the American people is to do the basics well (police, roads, safety regs, etc.) and otherwise, get the hell out of everyone’s way.
It it wasn't for f*cking China and f*cking Apple corporation and a few other greedy American corporations trained China to take over most industry and manufacturing, we would have absolute historical and current proof that the collectivist models that American liberals crave is a road is a shit model that will only lead to more collective misery.
Democratic capitalism, until it is corrupted to be more authoritarian corporatism like it is today - and we saw its ugly seven serpent head during the global pandemic - is by far the best design in terms of matching human nature. The core of human egoism... our craving of individual achievement and reward as our top psychological need of self actualization. Only the free playing field of merit competition supporting the creative destruction construct of the capitalist model do enough people have enough opportunity and income mobility to keep them satisfied at different socioeconomic levels. The guy with less will be less resentful because he knows that with hard work, some risk taking and a bit of luck... he too can rise to the upper classes. He might decide he does not want to do that... but the fact that the path is not blocked is all he needs to be satisfied with a lower socioeconomic class life.
But massive Wall Street-drive corporate consolidation and the move for big government to collude with these big corporations in more consolidation, regulations, taxes, fees, certifications, restrictions, etc... has eliminated much of competition and pitted the playing field. There is not enough economic opportunity and income mobility for the bottom 80%. The top 10% has managed to horde and lock the income and wealth-making machine. So the guy with less is now resentful because his path is blocked.
Our government failed to protect the very things about our democratic capitalist system the greatest on God's green earth. Even today, the Trump Administration is wringing their hands over corporate merger and buy-outs that we should absolutely deny.
So the resentful guy looks at China and says "hey, communism works well!". And liberals exploit the ignorance to lie that there is a collectivist utopian model that can work, because, hey, look at China with all their gleaming cities and bullet trains!
But China is only China today because they looted everything that the American democratic capitalist system first developed. China sucked the lifeblood from the American system that previously gave the lower class guy comfort that he path was not blocked. Our politicians and government not only allowed it to happen, but encouraged it. Wall Street has done very well. The lower 80% of Americans have falling further and further behind.
And now those falling behind are trashing capitalism as the cause... ignorantly missing the point that is the corruption of capitalism that is the cause. It is the already existing drift of the system to be a Chinese corporatist model that has led to such lopsided rewards for only the upper class. And the dopes that now think Chinese style governance is their savior really ignore the fact that most of the Chinese people still live way below the socioeconomic circumstances as the people of Mississippi... the American state with the lowest family income and wealth.
What the US needs is a bill to enhance antitrust actions against large corporations where there are few of them that dominate more than 50% of a given market. We also need new legislation that restricts Wall Street ownership concentration in corporations and markets when firms own shares of each other. Together Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street might own 30% of many major corporations, but they also each own a large number of shares of each other. That cross-ownership makes them a single entity that should never own 30% of a corporation, and should be restricted to a lower percentage. Also, Wall Street firms should be restricted from having directors on the boards of these corporations. The same should be for public pension funds and foreign sovereign funds. Wall Street is for equity funding, not control. Pension funds are for investing in member pensions, not control.
If we look at the number of small business starts that hire (not the government lie that small business starts have increased, because the bulk of that increase is SOHO operations or people having to join the gig economy), it crashed beginning with Obama and never recovered. THAT is the measure we need to focus on. Breaking up big corporations. Preventing more corporate consolidation. Re-shoring. Basically exploding our small business economy again. THAT will give the guy currently seething about his blocked path and renewed vision that he can rise up with effort.
That is how we save the system from liberal destruction.