When we want to change the world we’re usually reacting to a problem. Even positive visions usually come out of negatives. We want liberty because we have tyranny. We want health because we have sickness. We want prosperity because we have poverty. We want equality because some people have way more than they need and others less than need.
When we solve a problem it’s generally mediated by a principle. Very often the principle is just the problem stated slightly differently.
Problem: Some people have more than they need, others have less than they need.
Principle: Make sure no one has more than they need while anybody has less than they need.
A principle tells you, generally speaking, what you should be doing about a problem. It doesn’t tell you how to do it.
So, for the example above, post-war Welfare states generally came upon the solution:
Solution: Tax the rich heavily and put the poor on Welfare, controlled by social workers and other bureaucrats because poor people can’t be trusted to use money wisely.
If you think poor people aren’t stupid, then you have another solution, basic income + progressive taxation.
Restate the problem slightly by removing having too much as a problem, and the principles and solutions change:
Problem: some people don’t have enough.
Principle: Make it so that everyone has enough, or more than enough.
Solution: Just give everyone who has less than enough money, enough money. (Basic Income.)
Solution: If we make the rich even richer, enough will wind up flowing down to take care of everyone else. (Trickle Down Economics.)
Solution: The rich should give away most of their money over time, on good works or to organizations which do good works. (Charity.)
The difference between welfare and a basic income is instructive: one trusts those without enough money to spend it themselves, the other doesn’t. It’s mediated thru a view of why people are in poverty. Welfarism assumes poor people are somehow defective, basic income assumes they’re fine, they just don’t have enough money.
The first solution assumes having too much is bad, the second solutions all assume that some people having too much isn’t wrong, it’s that others don’t have enough
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Let’s look at another Triune, closely related, which focuses on being rich or powerful as the problem.
Problem: rich and powerful people use their power and wealth to take control of society and direct the benefits to themselves, hurting everyone else.
Principle: Keep the rich poor and the powerful weak.
There are a lot of different solutions to this and solutions are often in used together. Those that work usually only work for a while.
Solution: If they have enough money to influence politics or society, take it from them. (Specific policies like progressive taxation, estate taxes, wealth taxes, and so on.)
Solution: Don’t let the rich spend their money on politics. (Public finance laws, donation limits and so on. Doesn’t work all that well, but does have some effect.)
Solution: Don’t let the rich have private specialists in violence.
Solution: Don’t let rich people happen at all. (Proposals for maximum income and maximum wealth taxes.)
But wealth isn’t the only type of power, so something also needs to be done about people who control rich or powerful organizations. If I only have 3x as much money as median, but control a large bank, that’s all bullshit. I’m rich, I just have some limits on how I can spend that money. And this is where you come up with things like anti-trust law, limits on how large any organization can be, limits on corporate political spending, separation of church and state and so on.
Let’s move to another problem, primarily from the 18th and 19th century.
Problem: industrialization requires large numbers of people willing to work in factories but most people don’t want or need to work in factories because they can support themselves thru agriculture on common lands and factory jobs involve much more work in horrible conditions.
Principle: Large numbers of people must not be able to support themselves without working in factories.
Solution: Take away their commons rights so they must take any other job.
Note that other principles and solutions could have been tried. Perhaps:
Principle: Make factory work more desirable than agricultural commons work.
Solution: concentrate on safety and wages and don’t have 6 1/2 twelve hour shifts a week.
Pay them better and treat them better, in other words. The argument against is that it wouldn’t have been profitable, but profit is a function of political and social choices.
In fact, in post WWII America, that solution was tried, and it worked. China had to deal with this problem, and used both principles and solutions in concert.
Problems suggest principles, and principles suggest solutions, but there relationship isn’t 1:1, it’s mediated thru ideology, which is to say how the decision makers think the world is and should be.
I’m going to write a series of articles on the principles which would create a good society: the Fundamental series.
But it needs to be understood that every principle is based on a perceived problem or vision. Every principle is based on a set of assumptions about the world, an ideology, and that solutions are extensions of principles.
You don’t discard problems unless you don’t think they’re problems.
You don’t discard principles unless you disagree with their underlying ideology.
You blow thru solutions until you find some that work, and work without creating problems you can’t mitigate.
When FDR was in charge he knew what he wanted to do, but if a solution didn’t work, he’d throw it out and try something else. He wasn’t wedded to specific solutions.
There are non-negotiable means, mostly along the lines of “don’t torture or rape”, but mostly the question is “are you actually solving the problem and doing so while respecting the principle?”
This three part design is the first fundamental.
Harris was asked what she would have done differently from Biden, and she answered:
What strikes me is our loss of leadership competency, from the extremely competent people who managed us through the depression and through WWII to the clowns of today.
I’ve been involved in Youtube exchanges where some idiot creates a video claiming how we “saved” the USSR in WWII via Lend-Lease. First, that is that factually untrue. The USSR saved itself; Lend-Lease was such a trickle in 1941-1942 that it had essentially NO effect on the Battle of Moscow in December 1941, and very little impact on the Battle of Stalingrad in the fall-winter of 1942. Stalingrad at the very least marks the point where “the USSR will survive and not lose” so Lend-Lease didn’t “save” the USSR. Lend-Lease did help the USSR, but the bulk of it (60 %) came in the last 10 months of WWII well after the USSR had turned the tide and driving back the Wehrmacht out of the USSR. The most important part of Lend-Lease help wasn’t the weapons we sent, nor the locomotives, nor the steel, nor the petrol, nor even the trucks (the most common ‘fact’ brought up). It was the food we sent–in 1942 42 % of the USSR’s arable land was occupied, and the USSR instituted a rationing program where soldiers, workers in essential industries, and children got first priority on food. If you weren’t one of those, you didn’t get much, and hunger contributed mightily to the USSR’s civilian death rate in the war. The FDR administration promised the USSR 10 % of US food production to help, but could only manage to deliver 3 %.
But my point in mentioning Lend-Lease is that such Youtubes miss the main reason why we did what we did in aiding the USSR. It wasn’t some act of friendship or mercy, we weren’t just ‘being nice’; we did it OUT OF ENLIGHTENED SELF-INTEREST. George Marshall and the US military leadership were not sure we could win WWII without Soviet help; at the very least if the USSR went down to defeat and Hitler obtained access to the USSR’s resources it would prolong both the length and sacrifice of the US and UK. The military problem the US faced was war both in Europe and the Pacific, with far-flung bases and long supply lines that “ate” up manpower and required a powerful Navy and Air arm to protect. We thus couldn’t raise an army of hundreds of divisions and supply it overseas, to do the work that the Soviets were providing the West by grinding up the Wehrmacht. Keeping the Soviets in the war was quite vital; ergo Lend-Lease.
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In short, Marshall and his ilk had a clear and correct notion of what the US could do, and what it couldn’t do. The manpower restrictions on ground forces meant “no land war in Asia” which meant we wouldn’t field armies in China. Instead, we focused on a ground force manpower-minimizing “island hopping” strategy where we only took relatively few key islands and just left Japanese ground forces in elsewhere stranded and cut-off from supply. The bulk of the ground forces we did raise were going be used to defeat Hitler, whom Marshall correctly identified as the biggest threat to the US, given Germany’s technological skills and industrial base.
This kind of calculation is what we’ve lost. In WWII, we knew we were powerful, in some ways relative to the world more powerful then than now, but we knew we couldn’t do everything and that we shouldn’t even try. But after WWII, inside the US spread the notion (largely spread by conservatives and the anti-communists) that we had really ‘done it all’ and won the war without much of anyone’s help. Why did we cave to Stalin at Yalta? Why didn’t we let Patton drive the Soviets out of Eastern Europe? We had the bomb after all! (cue in Henry Stimson rhetorically patting his coat pocket). WE WERE OMNIPOTENT!
The first generation who acted on this belief, a belief definitely not shared by those who planned and executed WWII, was the “Greatest Generation” who had fought it as common soldiers when they assumed leadership—JFK through Reagan/Bush I. It led to Vietnam and to interventions everywhere, because we could and should impose our will upon the world. It was exacerbated when (as you say) financial means of scoring economies replaced measures of actual industrial capacity and output, from Clinton to today. What gets me is that the US’s leadership is more arrogant and more convinced of its supremacy despite the fact by all objective measures, whatever power the US actually has is far less relative to the rest of the world than the US during WWII during Marshall’s and FDR’s time. Yet Marshall and FDR knew we weren’t omnipotent and couldn’t ‘do it all’. And I fear nothing less than a massive comeuppance will change their attitudes.