Pleasant-Sounding Beliefs and 2nd-Order Effects

1st-order victims and 2nd-order victims. One kind of freedom can devour another.

This may seem based, but it isn’t:

These are the kind of middle-school-tier political stances that contribute to societal malaise and degradation. This superficially agreeable view is the libertarian equivalent of "I believe in equality and social justice". Gosh that sounds nice, who could disagree with such a statement? Unfortunately, your rainbows-and-puppies SJW policy produces DEI neocommunist outcomes. The political left and right are equally susceptible to this kind of thinking. In fact, democracies encourage it.

Political platforms in democracies tend to be motivated by how they make you feel; because feelings and intentions, not outcomes, inform how well it sells to your base. In a democracy the majority rules, and the majority is, by definition, mostly composed of the lowest-common-denominator (LCD).

When victory is determined by the LCD, the messaging must cater to them. This is where nuance and sophistication goes to die. Complex issues distilled down to three-word chants. It should not be confusing why the best and brightest don't get into politics; it's because the best and brightest are not optimized to sell to the LCD, meaning they're less likely to win elections. The selection effects this produces for candidates and platforms are clear.

To craft policy positions based on outcomes is to commit electoral suicide. Few care about your results, because that would require actual analysis. If the vibes poll well and align with your moral precepts, you’ve got a voter.

From another essay of mine, We’ll Give You Things > We’ll Leave You Alone

“The investor who overtrades eventually realizes it's a fallacy that more activity means more profitability. Take what the market gives you, more is not necessarily more. The zealous bureaucrat or academic never realizes his actions are counterproductive; the feedback mechanism is too long, and failure attribution too vague. If your policy didn't work, it's because you didn't do enough of it. Real *insert my policy* has never been tried.

So now you get more of the bad idea as a solution to the bad idea. However despite it being a technical failure, the idea was actually a strategic success. Your “more is always more” approach to political policy ended up being quite effective at what it was really aiming to accomplish: generating loyalty.”

We'll Give You Things > We'll Leave You Alone

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No Victim, No Crime? What Do You Consider a Victim?

This "no victim, no crime" fantasy is destabilizing and produces numerous 2nd-order victims at the societal level. They’re superficial political stances that can’t see beyond 1st-order effects and create 2nd-order repercussions that everyone pays for. Luxury conditions insulate many from the outcomes of their luxury beliefs. A venture capitalist in Pacific Heights doesn't experience the consequences of virtue-infused drug and homeless policies in the Tenderloin.

Here are some "victimless" crimes:

• Drunk driving

• Drug use

• Insider trading

• Public homelessness

There are no immediate victims from any of these. Here's what happens when you allow them unchecked:

Drunk driving: The penalties are onerous because they act as a society-wide deterrent for actions that obviously lead to higher rates of death and injury. Many a stupid drunk-driving decision has been stopped because people know what awaits them if they get caught. Allowing it would create 2nd-order victims by making the act more prevalent: if you only get in trouble when you hurt someone, and not just for doing it, you’d do it more often and assure yourself you’ll just pay closer while driving. Of course it won't be you who hurts someone driving drunk, it'll be the other guy. You're always super safe…

Hard drug use: Go look at the 'safe injection' sites in SF are creating. The normalized use of hard drugs invariably leads to degraded public spaces, increased property crime, and decay of social cohesion across entire neighborhoods. Everyone who has to be surrounded by the degeneracy that mass drug use causes is a victim. Only completely deluded liberals and libertarians could look the other way at this.

Insider trading: You undermine trust in markets by letting big players access inside information and disproportionately profit off it. This potentially reduces investment (growth) as well as market participation, which decreases liquidity, which impedes price discovery.

The 2nd and 3rd-order effects of this harm economic activity, hurting jobs and a whole host of other positive things nations need to prosper. Markets without integrity become playgrounds for the connected few while the many lose faith in the system altogether. Victims everywhere, just not ones you can easily point to in a headline.

No one is victimized by a homeless guy sleeping on the sidewalk, but what about a homeless encampment along the street near your kids? You get to the latter by allowing the former. We're seeing real time in big cities what this mentality breeds. Property values erode, businesses close, tax revenue diminishes, filth spreads, and entire neighborhoods slowly become uninhabitable for families.

The 2nd-order effects are spikes in crime and declining living standards for everyone that's around it. 2nd-order victims.

The tyranny of "how nice does it sound and how good does it make me feel" political thinking eventually results in societies where no one wants to live.

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1st-Order Freedoms and 2nd-Order Freedoms

Sometimes maximum freedom reduces everyone's freedom. Sometimes restricting freedoms produces more of it. This is the paradox at the heart of functional societies that liberal and libertarian platitudes consistently fail to address.

I met some Singaporeans recently, and it was interesting hearing how they appreciated the militant laws of their country. They understood the tradeoff they were making by losing some 1st-order freedoms, but gaining 2nd-order freedoms in the process. On one axis they had less autonomy, and on another they had far more of it. They can't chew gum, but their children can play in parks at midnight. They can't openly criticize the government, but they don't need to worry about stepping over human waste on their morning commute. All of life’s a tradeoff.

You’re maximally free in an environment that best facilitates your normal mode of being. An exaggerated example: Tom Brady is optimized for a highly restrictive environment. A football game has rigid rules for what you’re allowed to do, and there are swift punishments for violations. In this domain Tom performs at peak capacity. It’s how he prefers to exist. He welcomes this constraining situation, because it's where he's most capable.

This concept is abstractable on a societal level. If you have no desire to operate outside the circle drawn for you, you're maximally free within that circle.

If you're content living inside a circle with unyielding boundaries, you're actually freer than if you lived in a space with no boundaries, because the constraints almost exclusively only limit others' abilities to act upon you.

How comparatively liberated are the people of Singapore who can walk wherever they want at night vs those in LA and NYC who can’t do the same? People in SF have more 1st-order freedoms, but far less 2nd-order ones because of the unstable environment it’s produced. Whereas the Singaporean has less 1st-order freedom, but far more 2nd-order ones.

By only focusing on 1st-order victims, Massie would have you believe all that exists are 1st-order freedoms. This is a naive, politically expedient fiction that ignores how societies function. A nation is an organism, subject to homeostasis, and there are degrees of freedoms where one kind can devour another. The liberty to shoot heroin in public devours the ability of families to use that same public space.

The same people who champion "victimless crimes" policies wouldn't let their children wander freely in the neighborhoods those policies create. "No victim, no crime" decadence promotes pretend freedoms while insidiously sowing the seeds of a society’s decline.

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