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Based Camp: Our Political Philosophy
This is a poor translation of the podcast:
Hello, Malcolm. Hello, Simone is wonderful to be here again with you today. I'm very excited. What do we talk about? We are gonna talk today about our political philosophy and political philosophy in general, you actually changed the way that I look at politics and that I look at the value of running for elected office.
And I think a lot of our views on. Government, economy, culture have really shifted over the past few years, so this should be fun to chat about, check in on this. Absolutely. Yeah. So I think we're gonna divide this into sort of three parts. First we're gonna discuss sort of our economics, because I think a lot of people, they see politics as existing on this spectrum of like, Economic conservatism to economic liberalism and then social conservatism to social liberalism or, or progressivism.
Because you know, liberal, you can mean classically liberal, which is basically conservative, doesn't matter. Point being, that's the way that people largely divide this stuff. However, I think that it is wrong to think of things on these spectrums, and if you look at where we land politically, it's nowhere on this spectrum for either.
Our economic or social beliefs. And then there's other beliefs like where we think about international engagement and stuff like that. So first, let's dive into our economics, because I realize we've been doing a lot of videos on things like communism and libertarianism, and it could give people a misunderstanding.
Of what we really believe optimal economic policy looks like. So first I'd say sort of our larger political spectrum. 📍 📍 We call Bull Moose Republicanism which means that we, we take a lot of inspiration from the conservatism of Teddy Roosevelt and, and what that meant. And economically, what that means is very unlike libertarians.
But also very similar to Libertarian philosophy in some way, which is to say we do think that government is intrinsically and always becomes evil, largely regardless of what the intentions are as a heavy governing body because it leads to inefficiency, which leads to enormous evil. An example is something like the,
great leap forward in China, right? 📍 Which during a period of five years, by, some measurements, led to more death just due to inefficiency than the entire period of slavery in the United States, which I, I do as more like intentional evil. And this is by some statistics, not by all something of you used like the most extreme data, but that you could get anywhere close to that just with inefficiency is.
Shocking to me. So I think that we can just say inefficiency and then people can be like, oh, you must not really hate it. No, no, no. Like inefficiency is, is dramatically evil. It's a cancer. And you talk about that in the Pragmatist Guide to Governance. You talk about this bureaucratic inefficiency as literally being a kin.
In fact, it it kind of, it is an almost literally analogous to cancer in organizations. Yeah. In that you get governing institutions and if every year you create 10 new governing institutions, Like say you're a city government or something like that. If just one of those institutions doesn't shut down when it's supposed to, you know, like a cell that doesn't stop doing what it's doing when it's supposed to and think, oh, my job is just to self-replicate.
My job is just to acquire more resources. It will do that. And normally a governance structure will be good at getting rid of that. You know, we have things that kill the cancer in our bodies, but sometimes it'll hide and it'll convince the governing structure. It's actually useful. It's actually important.
But here is where we're really different from Libertarians. So while we see large government as intrinsically evil, we also see this is where we take a lot of inspiration. For Teddy Roosevelt, trust busting is very important which is all la
Published on 2 years, 7 months ago