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Prosperity is causally prior to taxation, not the other way around. To quote the great Bryan Caplan, "It takes a colossal host to sustain colossal parasitism."

Your argument against minority rule is to invoke... the courts? "Majority rule is great. Except when it does stuff I don't like, in which case I'll lean on minority rule by an infinitesimal number of unaccountable dudes in black robes to override it."

Constitutions are not enough. This isn't an academic question. Throughout the country's history, majorities have consistently trampled the rights of minorities. To me, majority rule looks an awful lot like rampant injustice. Minority rule looks like defense.

You seem to be positing a world where “bad” decisions are somehow kept off the ballot, leaving only a menu of “good” options for the wise majority to enact.

Well, that’s not our world. When a CA gay marriage ban comes up for vote, it’s important to me that the majority not get their way. And unless I’ve seriously misapprehended your politics, I’m not sure why you’re advancing an argument where such a ban is just because “letting the minority prevail” would be worse.

So yeah, it’s a mistake to treat the “what” and the “how” of decision-making separately.

No, not literally a smoking hole (though I believe arson was a problem for a time?) But as close to one as you’re going to get in the USA.

I can’t disagree more with your majoritarian arguments. You (and I) would probably object when, e.g. California voters ban gay marriage. But you cheer when slim majorities attempt to saddle others with heavy economic burdens or interpose themselves in others’ contractual arrangements. I find most democratic decisions illegitimate; how hard is to to just keep your nose out of other people’s business?

The founders were aware of urban/rural tension from the beginning. The system was designed to make it difficult to force obligations on fellow citizens. That means majorities are being thwarted in their efforts, and that’s a good thing.

> doesn’t suggest any useful policy

All good points. Some blue cities do very well and some do very poorly. I have to conclude that the problems are mostly exogenous to policy.

> being “blue” leads to failure

To be clear, I was never suggesting that progressive policies lead inexorably to decline—the most successful parts of the county are blue.

> a pretty strong argument could be made

I’m more skeptical here. The policies you cite are neither necessary nor sufficient for vitality. Most pointedly, progressive values were nonexistent for most of America’s history, and yet it did quite well economically.

> literal “smoking hole in the ground” worse

But my whole point is that it was a smoking hole in the ground! I started this whole thread by responding to a claim about the inevitability of red states going “third world.” To my eye, such a thing has never happened to rural areas, but has happened to urban areas (I might add, with some frequency). Be it density or whatever—there’s something that needs to be explained.

> rural few dictate to the urban many

Agreed. I think it would be equally bad for the urban many to dictate to the rural few. Federal level policy is inappropriate for most things

It's easy to change my mind on this: just provide me a decision rule that'll put rural decay data points on the "failure" side of the classification boundary while leaving urban decay on the other.

I earlier acknowledged the difficulty of coming up with a reasonable definition of "failed." I will say that I don't think it's enough to be simply below-average in literacy or above-average in crime or whatever; you really want a multivariate outlier in the space of social pathologies. I suspect that most ways of operationalizing "failure" will capture primarily urban decay, like the examples I brought up.

Does rural West Virginia rise to that level? Having been there myself, I don't think so, though I could be convinced otherwise. Can you point to large-ish rural areas that match the dysfunction of, say, south-side Chicago? Preferably along with some (crude) quantitative comparisons. I'm genuinely curious here; not trying to pick on progressive policies.

I'm not inclined to think that slow demographic decline constitutes failure. Even if you disagree with that, my preferred definition has the additional "law and order" requirement, and I've never seen a rural example of a "Bronx is burning"-type event.

Not sure why you were downvoted. This is the best answer I've ever received to my question.

I put the word in quotes to indicate the tendentiousness of any potential definition. I personally don't think of any part of America as having "failed," but if you force me to pick, I'd choose any area that suffered from breakdown in law and order and severe de-population. NYC in the late 70s and Detroit's long-running (but hopefully interrupted?) decline especially come to mind. A number of other urban centers could potentially fit too.

These have been the rules for nearly 250 years. Why are you only up in arms about it now?

Curiously enough, the only parts of the country that have ever approached anything resembling "failure" are (heavily progressive) urban areas like NYC and Detroit.

Can you point to the law McConnell violated in doing this? And if not, in what sense is the current court illegitimate? Finally, how does this in any way address my question about the president "seizing" power?

Can you explain how the current president "seized" power? Was there some extra-legal mechanism at work that I'm not aware of?

Can you explain in what way this is a "Jim Crow era practice?"

Capitalism only "kills" people in a counterfactual sense. For example, you might posit that, had society gone out of its way to provide medical care to a sick individual, that person still would be alive. But that counterfactual is actually pretty complicated; it requires long chains of causation and dubious moral assumptions.

Communism kills in a very real sense: it literally murders by the million and creates deadly privation where there was previously none.

If we take climate change activists at their word, the answer is a resounding YES. There is a full-blown crisis brewing, one that can only be resolved with massive social changes ("if everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little" [1]). The NYT should be pushing much more draconian measures.

[1] https://www.withouthotair.com/c1/page_3.shtml

Your linked paper does not discuss natural disasters at all. How is this an answer to the parent comment’s concerns?

You're confusing concepts. Regression to the mean doesn't depend on any IID assumption. Conditional expectations are right in the definition! In the bivariate normal case (height, intelligence, etc), it's a necessary consequence of a correlation coefficient < 1.

> It's rational for the company to try to pull them

Aren't there issues with follow-on offerings? By taking the entire IPO pot for itself, the company will probably struggle to find investors if/when it needs to come back to the capital markets--which seems like an eventuality with Lyft.

The only real practitioner in this thread has one of the only downvoted comments. Incredible.

I’m not mad at anyone, you simply haven’t explained anything. You just keep repeating the standard litany of Republican sins.

I never disputed Republicans’ attempt to give themselves an electoral advantage. I just disagree that this is consequential, much less decisive. As you yourself argued elsewhere in the thread, NC Republicans’ chicanery could mean a 2% swing in the House. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you’re telling me that by attributing 100% of R success to trickery, in a state that’s the worst of the worst in this regard and so yields the biggest effect size, you can create a counterfactual where Democrats have 2% more seats in just one half of Congress?

Your smoking gun is a rounding error. So I’m asking again: how do these sorts of numbers lead you to believe what you apparently believe?

Suppose they had in fact won the largest House majority in history. What exactly would it change? How would NN be faring right now? Moral grandstanding aside, I don't see the relevance of any of this.

You're unnecessarily fixated on the 1% threshold I set out earlier. While nothing you said has changed my mind (my estimate is still <1%), I'm not really interested in the exact number. My point is that your concerns are qualitatively irrelevant (practically, not morally). So what if, in the absence of gerrymandering, there would be 100 fewer Republican congressmen? The Senate still isn't passing NN, and Trump is still stacking the judiciary with conservatives.

I'm not here to defend Republicans (I think they're pretty bad) or the practices you described (I also think those are bad). But that doesn't change the fact that gerrymandering and power grabs and Fox News are nearly completely inconsequential in explaining the world in front of us. Quit with the liberal wishcasting. People don't vote Republican because they've been misled by some sinister conspiracy. They just don't want what you're selling.

Dude, you're just hand-waving at this point. Add up all the gerrymandering you want. Maybe it gets you to 2%. Maybe 5%. Heck, let's say it accounts for 100% of Republican House members!

Wave your wand and make it disappear. The House is now... still Democratic. And the Senate is now... oh dang, still Republican! And the Trumpenfuhrer... still there!

Sounds to me like your electoral boogeymen don't have that much explanatory power.

I cannot overstate my doubts enough. Can you point me to evidence (aside from Stacey Abrams' sour grapes) that this swung an election?

I'm really not trying to move the goalposts. It just seems weird to use the House to argue about the incredible effectiveness of the Republican's underhanded tactics--when they don't even control the one body where those tactics should help!

In any event, the House sits beside the Senate and the Executive. As another commenter pointed out, this case at best explains ~2% of the dynamics of one out of three legislative bodies offices. And sure, other states might contribute a bit more. Fine, maybe it clears my 1% threshold; but just barely.

Your article explains the House of Representatives makeup in what the NYT concedes is the single most gerrymandered state in the country. Should we really be generalizing from that?

Regardless. The biggest obstacle to NN is currently the Senate and the Presidency. Two out of your three points are completely irrelevant to those offices. Is it all just Fox News? The Russians?

The House of Representatives is currently in Democratic hands, so the system there would appear to be working as intended.

Meanwhile, the Senate and the Presidency are controlled by Republicans, and gerrymandering is utterly irrelevant to those outcomes.

Do you genuinely believe these things explain >1% of Republican electoral success? If so, can you explain your thinking?