I hate this framing because the “freedom” vs “order” tradeoff is not real. Russia has a higher homicide rate than the US. life there is shorter and more violent. if you’re choosing between freedom and order autocracy will get you neither https://t.co/qeSCHsI0cW
— Seva (@SevaUT) February 20, 2024
“I hate this framing because the “freedom” vs “order” tradeoff is not real. Russia has a higher homicide rate than the US. life there is shorter and more violent. if you’re choosing between freedom and order autocracy will get you neither”
Seva Gunitsky is referring to Jon Stewart telling Tucker Carlson that the reason why the US ‘can’t have clean functioning subways or cheap grocery prices like they do in Moscow is “the literal price of freedom”‘.
I am sure Jon Stewart would decline with horror an offer to work as one of Putin’s worldwide army of propagandists. But Putin does not need to make the offer when Stewart and many others are spreading his message for free.
Many working people who currently have no choice but to endure the aggressive begging, foul smells, and frequent violence in the subway systems in New York and other U.S. cities run by progressive Democrats would count freedom (a political abstraction that they are constantly being told is an outdated white patriarchal construct) as an acceptable price to exchange for getting to go to work in something more like the gleaming Moscow Metro.
Sure, they would eventually realise that they made a poor bargain. A Professor Gunitsky says, the cleanliness and order of the Moscow subway is like one room of a generally filthy house that is obsessively kept clean in order to impress visitors.
This behaviour is a common pattern among autocracies across the world, but it was Russian history that gave us the most famous example, that of the “Potemkin Village”:
In politics and economics, a Potemkin village (Russian: потёмкинские деревни, romanized: potyómkinskiye derévni) is a construction (literal or figurative) whose purpose is to provide an external façade to a situation, to make people believe that the situation is better than it is. The term comes from stories of a fake portable village built by field marshal Grigory Potemkin, former lover of Empress Catherine II, solely to impress the Empress during her journey to Crimea in 1787. Modern historians agree that accounts of this portable village are exaggerated. The original story was that Potemkin erected phony portable settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress the Russian Empress and foreign guests. The structures would be disassembled after she passed, and re-assembled farther along her route to be seen again.
Russia has always had huge problems with alcoholism. Back in 1960, having visited the Soviet Union, Robert Heinlein observed that “Drunks, passed out in public places, are more truly symbolic of the USSR than is the Hammer & Sickle.” Russia also has suffered a sharp rise in the number of drug overdose deaths in recent years. Turning to homelessness in general, a survey conducted in November 2023 found that one in five Russians had experience of homelessness and one in ten respondents said they had slept rough – no joke in Russia’s climate. To some extent the USSR “solved” homelessness by making it a crime. Putin is going back to the the pattern of his youth in his treatment of the less drug-addled of the homeless, only instead of sending them to a prison camp he sends them to fight in Ukraine. For those of the homeless who are physically incapable of fighting, there is always the time-honoured solution of clearing away their frozen corpses in the morning.
Putting them in the army is certainly a popular policy, and letting them die is probably quite popular too. Mussolini’s infamous claim to have made the trains run on time was mostly false, but all the people scornfully repeating it in the 2020s forget why Mussolini made the claim in the first place. It made him popular. People want their trains to run on time. People want them to be free of urine-soaked hobos and mad people.
Fortunately there is no necessary tradeoff between freedom and safe, efficient public transport, which need not necessarily mean state-run transport. Japan has both. Many European countries have both. Many American cities have both. New York itself once had both. To get that situation back, all New York has to do is stop facilitating vagrancy. This would help everyone. It would the ordinary working people who have no choice but to use the subway. It would help whichever faction of the Democratic Party broke with current orthodoxy first. It would help the vagrants themselves. The current reluctance to enforce rules against begging or sleeping in subway carriages seems compassionate on the surface. But if the experience of American cities like New York and San Francisco in recent years has taught us anything, it is that making it easier to be a vagrant increases the numbers of vagrants. Once someone falls into that pattern of life, they very rarely ever pull themselves up from it. And the lives of vagrants are usually nasty, brutish and short.
I wrote a post on a related subject last year, “Ideology and insanity on the New York Subway.” It was about the Jordan Neely case. In the comments to that post, commenter “llamas” said this:
It’s quite fascinating, when reading the in-depth coverage of this case, just how many resources and services this man received over the past few years. There were agencies, and task forces, and teams, and committees, until Hell wouldn’t have it. Each and every one of them knew full-well that he was a dangerous schizophrenic and drug abuser with a long history of violence and other criminal behaviour. The caring and compassion must have run to thousands of pages and thousands of person-hours of effort, no doubt all compelled by the most earnest and fiery imperative to Do Good. And none of it made the slightest difference – he was a dangerous schizophrenic when all this ‘help’ started, and he was every bit as much a dangerous schizophrenic on the day he died.
Order is quite common in free interactions. Pretty much all business are structured in an ordered way. Generally people want their houses to be ordered. The order obtained with freedom, emergent from voluntary interactions among individuals is almost always superior to centrally determined order. For one, because people generally know what is best for them more than a central planner. The only real problem is when “best for me” imposes significant costs to others – e.g. theft, murder, pollution, etc. These are not particularly relevant to subways however.
The funny thing is that the subway example is not at all an example of freedom. The New York subway system was taken over by the government from private entities – people do not freely invest in building or maintaining it. There is no competition or voluntary association here.
But suppose that in a free society it turned out that we didn’t have beautiful subways or some other thing. That would still be acceptable, because we would know that the resources required to make subways beautiful were being used more efficiently, for things that people valued more. Maybe that is the “price of freedom” that Jon Stewart means (though I doubt it). If so, it is not a cost at all.
I don’t think that New York’s subway system is just the price of voting for Democrats. If Republicans controlled the government, it probably would not be that much better. But the real problem is that the government is involved at all, and has no incentive to change. The Moscow subway system is nice as a matter of chance. The central planners happened to prefer a pretty subway, so they built one. I would point out that this likely required very inefficient use of labor and resources. Trading freedom away would not give certainty that one’s desired plans would be implemented, it would just subject them to the arbitrary whims of those in government.
Excellent post, by the way. The idea that freedom comes at the expense of order is classic zero-sum thinking. I wonder if Stewart has ever bothered to pick up a book by a Toqueville, Hayek, etc. There’s also a failure to understand how “order” – or the values and habits that sustain it – can be internalised in a high-trust society. Think of Japan as a present-day example, or for that matter, Singapore.
it probably doesn’t hurt that the police in Moscow will deliver an asskicking just as soon as look at you and Russian jails are not equipped with turnstiles and they have a system in place to take the mentally ill off of the streets and put them in asylums.
Exactly – Jon Stewart is utterly wrong, freedom is NOT the freedom to plunder others. Jon Stewart was always a socialist, even when he was at High School, it always astonished me that some conservatives could not see this in his work. For example, his objection to the show “Cross Fire” was not, as they supposed, an objection to heated argument – the objection of Mr Stwart really was that a conservative was allowed equal access, his idea of “freedom” was always that only Progressive opinions should be treated with respect – with “reactionary” opinions to be treated with ridicule and contempt.
To be fair to Tucker Carlson, when he was recently interviewed by Glenn Beck he said that he did NOT want a Putin style regime in the United States – he just wanted a United States as it had been till 1993, a place where the government (Federal, State and local), the FBI and so on, was basically on the side of honest citizens – where it was not their enemy, as it is now.
My answer to Tucker Carlson would be – fair enough but MAKE-THAT-CLEAR in your own work, it should not need Glenn Beck (or anyone else) to drag the information out of you.
To give a couple of, non Federal, examples of what Mr Carlson is talking about – the Attorney Generals of Minnesota and New York are both politically motivated criminals, they should be in prison – not in a position to attack other people.
As for the Federal authorities (the FBI, IRS and-so-on) they are far left instruments of persecution – if a rock from outer space destroyed Washington D.C. honest citizens would feel a weight of fear left from them (knowing that ruthless enemies, who wish to destoy them and their families, were now dead) – and it SHOULD NOT BE THAT WAY.
Honest people should not live in fear of their government – not in Russia and not America either.
At this point some American States, such as New York and California, are beyond saving – honest people should leave them, even though that may mean giving up homes and farms their families have had for generations.
As for the Federal Administrative State (including the tax authorities and other supposedly neutral agencies) it is utterly corrupted – and dominated by a vicious ideology
A new President and a new Congress will have to repeal the Civil Service Acts and dismiss these people – on mass.
It has also been pointed out that grocery prices in Russia are not cheap in relation to total expenditure, Russians spend more of their income on food than Americans.
https://ourworldindata.org/engels-law-food-spending
Tucker’s fascination with coin operated grocery carts left me thinking he was actually making a parody documentary.
We have coin operated carts at Aldi’s. You put in a quarter, get the cart, and get the quarter back when you return the cart. They’ve been doing that for ages. It’s not new.
“The current reluctance to enforce rules against begging or sleeping in subway carriages seems compassionate on the surface….’The caring and compassion must have run to thousands of pages and thousands of person-hours of effort…'”
Cf. In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas, Dalrymple (“You can’t throw out one prejudice without accepting another in its place, and part of wisdom is to exercise discrimination in the cultivation of your prejudices.”)
For example, valuing a prejudice toward compassion (whether well- or ill-defined) at some point requires a devaluing or elimination of a prejudice toward personal responsibility or prudent management of limited resources or other common sense approaches to governance and enforcement of socio-cultural norms.
At the same time, government-funded programs in the name of compassion have more to do with cultivating dependency within the polis than caring about individuals or elevating their quality of life.
Leftist autocrats and bureaucrats care not a whit for people. They focus on “data-driven, evidence-based policies and programs” as applied to “sub-populations,” etc. (I believe there’s a famous quote about that.)
I remember the coin-operated carts i used in the late 80s, in Alberta.
Why 1993, if i may ask?
It is true that i did not pay much attention to the US in that decade: Europe seemed more interesting at the time.
Still, the US would have seemed interesting if 1993 really was a turning point!
I tend to think that 1981 (Reagan taking over) was more of a turning point.
Coin-operated carts? Late 1970s, Albert Heijn, the Netherlands. Who’s got an earlier sighting?
I saw that snippet also, from Carlson’s report, and it struck me as peculiarly tone-deaf – as though noone associated with the production, from Carlson on down, is aware that this is common grocery-store technology around the world. Speaks to serious elitism, like George Bush had never seen a supermarket barcode scanner in action. I’m not saying that everyone should be intimately familiar with every detail of grocery-store technology, mrrelt that you’d think that between all the producers and writers and editors, at least one woukd be familiar enough to say ‘yeah, boss, not a good look.’
llater,
llamas
The real reason that the left’s ideas always end in chaos and dissolution stems from their essential mindset that there should be no rules and no accountability. They’re essentially eternal children, who do not want responsibility or consequence. This is why they excuse all manner of crimes and sloth, enabling the drug-addicted to kill themselves, and to allow criminals free rein: They’re on their side because that’s who they are, too.
Here’s a truism: Civilization and culture reside in one place, and one place only, that being the hearts and minds of the individual. You’ve an essentially uncivilized population? You’re going to have an uncivilized society. Inevitable, and as sure as the sun rising in the East, tomorrow.
Where civilization begins is toddlerhood. Depending on how much your essential nature resides in your biology, it may even begin when the egg and sperm that made you encountered each other… If you’re the sort of person who steals, who lies, who exploits others? That doesn’t come out of the void; it was inculcated, excused, and allowed to flourish by those around you. Hell, it may have been bred into you before birth. No idea; I can’t prove heritable behavioral traits, but I can damn sure observe what seem to be those.
It is a fundamental mistake to think of “civilization” as residing in the externalities of a society. It does not; no institution can enforce civilized behavior; you either have it, or you don’t. Set a dozen boys on a desert island, see what happens: If it’s what happened with those Samoan youths, that’s the result of civilized people recreating civilization from within themselves. If it’s the “Lord of the Flies” scenario, well… Guess what? Whoever does that can safely be written off as “uncivilized”.
That’s the difference, I fear, between the left and the right. The leftish are usually immature children, living in a fantasy dreamworld of mutual love and affection that they imagine everyone has for each other. The right mostly lives in reality, where we know that you can’t take civilization for granted, and that it must be implanted anew with each generation. You must also ruthlessly cull the demonstrably uncivilized, when encountered, making sure that their genes and mentalities do not propagate. It’s an unfortunate thing, but there you are: Civilization is a choice, not something we achieve by way of natural inclination as a species.
… the left’s … essential mindset that there should be no rules and no accountability. They’re essentially eternal children …
That may be the mindset of the typical lefty in the street. However, the leaders (actual thought leaders, not necessarily the ones with positions of nominal power) appear to know perfectly well that (in the absence of the automatic incentives of the market) it takes massive and detailed regulation to create a functional society. They nevertheless choose to push these ideas, and sometimes – what a surprise – end up rich and powerful; see for example the BLM leadership.
I think you can drop the “nevertheless” from your sentence. It’s a feature, not a bug. It’s grift, all the way down. And, sadly, it’s the same way on both sides. We on the right have as many good, based leaders as do those on the left.
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bobby b said:
In my opinion, the “Left-Right Dichotomy” of today is more a con game run on the body politic by the oligarchy we’ve allowed to grow up and infest our institutions. They’re the same people, doing the same things, just making different promises and saying different things. The only real difference is that the so-called “Right” is moving things a bit more slowly towards statism and control. Which you could easily interpret as being a response to the public outrage at the excesses of the outwardly Left; they’re just dialing things down a tad, and letting the people think that “something is being done”, while continuing the slow, steady erosion of rights.
Honestly can’t think of too many on the so-called “Right” that I could honestly support. I don’t trust any of them.
What the whole thing is, I am afraid, is representation of the fact that none of this crap really works. We’re doing it wrong; the fact that we have all this power invested in “government” is the real problem; that power acts as an attractant, a bait, a lure for the exact wrong sort of people to put in charge. Of anything.
The best way to deal with the abuses of power? Take that power away, take it back. The regulatory state is the bureaucratic equivalent of one of those deals where they gradually get the wild animals used to an enclosure with bait, and then make the entry smaller and smaller until it’s down to a single gate that they can close and trap the herd within. Too many things have been put in place by bureaucrats which should rightly have been only done by democratic means, debated in legislature and agreed to with the consensus of the people. The fact that this has been allowed to happen? Thanks mostly to the malfeasance of the people we put in charge, all of whom sought office. And, much as I hate to say it, one of the key markers to use when assessing a candidate for political office is “Do they want the job…?”, and if the answer is yes, that candidate is almost certainly unfit for office.
Of course, the fact that Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein kept getting sent back to Congress by their voters is a marker saying that maybe even representational government ain’t all that good an idea, when the voters don’t pay attention to what their representatives are doing.
And, of course, the reason so many of these “wrong people to put in charge” gravitate towards government? The power, the money, the acclaim. Take those away, make it just another dirty job, and you’ll get better people.
Frankly, the sad fact is that humans just don’t do organization very well, at all. We should really stop trying, and end the construction of these vast edifices of power, which always turns out to be abusive of the very people they’re supposed to benefit. I mean, really, now: Do you think that when they’re handing out debit cards with $10,000.00 on them to illegals, that that’s somehow a sign that the system is doing a damn thing to those who it was set up for, the actual native citizens who pay the taxes? Those debit cards represent bribes, and the establishment of a client relationship between the Democratic Party and these newly-imported criminals. And, it’s performed with tax dollars taken at gunpoint from the average American citizen, who is getting precisely what, in return…?
Snorri = Tucker Carlson did not explain, he is not good at explaining (he is too emotional), but I think I can work it out.
1993 is when Mr Clinton became President and started to corrupt such organisations as the FBI – turning them into instruments for the left.
The IRS was used as a weapon by the left by various Administrations, such as the Roosevelt and Kennedy Administrations, before the Clinton Administration – but Tucker (54) is too young to remember that.
As for Marxist Identity Politics and the crushing of all freedom of speech in the universities and so on – that really got totally out of control under the Obama Administration.
2008 also marked the total corruption of the “mainstream media” – they systematically covered up the background of Comrade Barack, presenting him as some sort of mainstream nice-guy who appeared at the 2004 Kerry Convention and had no past before 2004.
Which would have made Mr Obama four years of age in 2008 – and thus not eligible to be President, but “details-details”.
On relatively high tech supermarkets-department stores.
I had my first experience of them on my first visit to Germany – they still have not reached my part of England.
I can quite understand why Tucker was impressed – I was impressed with the store I went to in the Rhineland, everything from wedding dresses to loafs of bread, and with the clever shopping trollies and so on.
In my town in England shopping trollies are stolen and dumped all over the place – perhaps if people had to pay a deposit (as they do in Moscow – or in France and Germany) they would return the trolley.
In America it would be considered “racist” – as everything that makes sense is considered “racist”, “sexist”, “homophobic”, “transphobic”, and-so-on.
Frankfurt School, “Critical Theory”, Marxism (which the modern West is drowning in) is not a new society – it is a weapon to destroy society, and leave nothing but ashes.
Tucker Carlson is correct in saying that if cities do not work a country will not work – and most big American cities clearly no longer work.
An exception that springs to mind is Fort Worth – and, yes, that is Republican governed.
That surprises me. I live in Gloucester, hardly the most salubrious city these days, but that’s not what happens here. Occasionally you see a stolen, dumped shopping trolley but it’s relatively uncommon. There’s one at the moment near me which I have reported to the supermarket for collection, but that’s the first I’ve seen for months and I walk everywhere.
Regarding supermarket technology, are you referring to checkout-free or scan-as-you-shop? Both of these are present in my local supermarkets, the local Lidl has adopted checkout-free (you just bag up the groceries as you shop, and scan your phone as you walk out) while the local Sainsbury’s has scan-as-you-shop. Is Kettering stuck in a time warp?
A choice between freedom and order? Sure, just pick two random words from the dictionary and then arbitrarily declare we have to make a choice between them.
Also, it’s not the ‘literal price’ unless you actually have to pay $ for it. Or if someone says, “I’ll give you freedom if you allow me to mess up your subway.”
Stewart should keep his mouth shut, until he learns how to speak English and think properly.
I never see that is Malmsbury 😀
“Is Kettering stuck in a time warp?” if only it was.
See “Old Kettering and its defenders” by Tony Ireson.
SteveD – Jon Stewart thinks that socialism, whether imposed from above by the government – or from below by “Social Justice” criminal gangs, is “freedom”.
He is indeed a waste of space.
Perry – Malmsbury, nice town.
I wonder if anyone ever pointed out to Thomas Hobbes (a Malmsbury Wiltshire – Wessex man) that under his doctrine of unlimited government, even the freedom of the folk of Malmsbury, recognised in 937 AD, could be withdrawn at any moment on a whim of the state.
I suspect that Mr Hobbes would not have enjoyed being a serf or a slave.
I wandered past where Hobbe’s house was a couple days ago. He was nasty, brutish & short 😀