{"id":32332,"date":"2018-03-14T12:00:40","date_gmt":"2018-03-14T17:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32332"},"modified":"2018-03-14T12:01:13","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T17:01:13","slug":"you-hate-the-state-but-do-you-hate-politics-how-self-deception-and-coalitions-affect-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32332","title":{"rendered":"You Hate the State, But Do You Hate Politics? How Self Deception and Coalitions Affect Society"},"content":{"rendered":"

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You Hate the State, But Do You Hate Politics? How Self Deception and Coalitions Affect Society<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Our ancestors <\/span>weren\u2019t nice people<\/span>. They kept slaves, <\/span>looked forward to wars and sent people to concentration camps. <\/span>It is <\/span>easy to dismiss them as moral retards<\/span>, but that would be setting the bar way too low. Slavery is bad, war is violence, and sending people to concentration camps isn\u2019<\/span>t very nice. B<\/span>lacks, Jews<\/span>, and foreigners are not <\/span>ambiguous classes of people, and violence is unambiguously wrong.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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It <\/span>takes<\/span> no particular sophistication to see how cruel our ancestors were. But <\/span>it takes<\/span><\/span>remarkable<\/span> insight to see such cruelty hidden in plain sight today. <\/span><\/p>\n

Libertarians are fairly good at seeing cruelty others miss. We see taxation as theft, war as murder and citizenship as slavery. <\/span>We<\/span> aren\u2019t na\u00efve enough to think everything will be fine if we have a good president at the helm.<\/span><\/p>\n

But <\/span>we <\/span>make a huge, comparable mistake. <\/span>We assume<\/span> <\/span>the market is a great restraining force against fraud and deception<\/span>. <\/span>Now it is true that certain forms of deception are checked by the market. But this is not true of many <\/span>other <\/span>forms of deception. <\/span>There is <\/span>a real<\/span> sense in which the<\/span> market values the ability to deceive<\/span>.<\/span> Libertarians are blind to this, at their own peril.<\/span><\/p>\n

Politics in Business<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I dropped out of college and started working, <\/span>I couldn\u2019t help seeing<\/span> that <\/span>d<\/span>eception is the norm, even in private organizations. <\/span>There <\/span>was<\/span> so much that <\/span>could have been<\/span>done <\/span>so much better, but <\/span>wa<\/span>sn\u2019t <\/span>being done because of political reasons. <\/span>In my experience, organizations reward prudent predation.<\/span> <\/span>What <\/span>is going on<\/span>?<\/span><\/p>\n

Economist Robin Hanson answers such puzzles more satisfactorily<\/span> than anybody else<\/span>.<\/span><\/span>In <\/span>any large organization<\/span>, there are coalitions which compete for limited resources. <\/span>Coalition pol<\/span>itics<\/span> is vicious, and<\/span> <\/span>a major reason why firms are inefficient<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You Hate the State, But Do You Hate Politics? How Self Deception and Coalitions Affect Society Our ancestors weren\u2019t nice people. They kept slaves, looked forward to wars and sent people to concentration camps. It is easy to dismiss them as moral retards, but that would be setting the bar way too low. Slavery is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[19279,637,8249,19278,1309,15276],"class_list":["post-32332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-coalitions","tag-politics","tag-self-deception","tag-shane-athiparambath","tag-state","tag-the-daily-bell"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32332"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32333,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32332\/revisions\/32333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}