I have no political identity. I can mingle with communists and libertarians and MAGA conservatives as if I were their friends. It’s not neutral politics but deliberate realism grounded in how civilizations stay alive or grow.
As a note, this document is ever changing. My politics and baseline ideologies will barely change, but I may edit this document to continually clarify my position. For domestic politics and specific policy debates, look towards other blog posts or short thought posts.
Human Nature
One might suggest it’s libertarian pragmatism which guards individual liberties and uses evidence-based outcomes to drive decision-making. I think that is pragmatic politics, but it isn’t grounded on making a prospering society of high wages.
My politics is about advancing a society — growing its economics, its scientific advancements, and its technological breakthroughs. Libertarian pragmatism is about letting individuals do what they want whereas my politics is about creating incentives for nation-state residents to help the society solve problems through business or science and grow. A libertarian would believe in market-based economics to let things happen, but, if you’re rooted in trying to progress all problems into being solved, some solutions require government backing to accelerate solving problems.
You might think this is similar to China. In Breakneck by Dan Wang, he describes America’s need to add engineers to Congress. He compares the politically similar cultures of the US and China where policies are made to incentive people to solve problems typically through business but also through scientific funding. The dysfunction that Dan describes in Congress is that it’s run by lawyers who don’t understand how things work and instead use legalese to argue individual liberties rather than ground truth economic policies. He says that China’s lack of lawyers means over-engineering the human level of society like the One Child Policy and having a lack of protections for indvidual liberties to drive society. In other words, the difference between China and America are the appraoches to driving a prospering society: America’s belief is that through chaos and the natural order of business, a talented base of citizens driven to be rewarded through solving problems can grow society. China’s belief is that a controlled environment is the only way to make a prospering society; that’s the point of Maoism and its continuing belief to this day; today, China still believes in control, but they have also realized that the chaos and mere size of its educated population can solve problems that the government can’t recognize through private markets. It’s a realization that bottom line humans solve problems and make small businesses out of them like a small market stand out on a highway.
My belief is this blend of America and China: that government must continually accelerate the growth and prosperity of its nation as much as it’s capable of without denying individual liberties and improving everyone’s living conditions. China does the acceleration of growth well; however, China’s social contract with its people is hardened through brute militaristic oppression.
My politics and even business theses are revolve around human nature. People generally want what others have. People demand more. Should socialists countries ban toys because they provide no value? What toys do people want? A private market solves both questions: yes, kids want toys, and different people want different toys. People also want better living conditions; even for the smallest problems like having to take the trash out is a problem that people want solved through expensive means like underground tunnels. Yet people want it; many socialists may think people are willing to settle on the conditions of modern, good conditions of western society so long as everyone ascribes to socialism, yet that’s not how people think. People want more and better. And that’s a good thing; the continual progression of business and science allows for the betterment of society in many ways that no one could’ve dreamt of. It is through random discovery and individual chaos and freedom to do things they want that provide value to oneself and to others does society advance, and central planning and holding down people to do things that only a few bureaucratic members of government deems necessary is limiting on humanity.
Staying Relevant through International Competition
You might think if you’re a small nation then you cannot become a superpower. And that’s true. But it doesn’t mean you can’t help your nation grow or stay relevant. Staying relevant is the baseline because everyone must prosper. A dying nation is the worst, and many countries that adopted socialist social policies are like this. At first, with very progressive social policies, countries in Western Europe and South America did well due to their wealth. But to maintain relevance, you still must grow. The problem with these countries today is that they stopped growing but kept their expensive social policies. Today, all these countries suffer from a populace that doesn’t want to grow. Eventually, their populations, especially in democratic governments, will struggle due to a staganant culture that values comfort. Argentina is facing this today with a populace that doesn’t want to work and got spoiled by corrupt officials. People must be incentivized to help grow a nation.
Why do these countries stop growing? Because of international trade, you have to compete internationally; countries have varying talent bases that export products of different value based on the wages of that country> For a developed nation, that means exporting high value products. To afford the best products like medicine, a country’s talent pool must make competitive wages to be able to afford it. If the local population’s businesses can’t compete in business internationally, then the populace’s ability to do many functions start dying.
There’s Trump, FDR, and lincoln who took the American style of liberal democracy very far. I think there’s a time and a place for authoritarianism. Generically, one could say “in times of chaos, you need order”. I think that’s a specific example mostly about needing to set direction during dire times when everything is on fire and you need to put 99% of everyone’s focus on a small niche focus that’ll greatly improve everyone’s condition before letting go and letting people flourish individually.
This doesn’t mean I’m for libertarian/conservative ideology that we should be some unregulated private market only hellscape. Prosperity and utilitarian thinking has to be guided, and private markets does not always enable your country to continue growing. A fully optimized solution is required.
The only reason countries need to continuously grow is because of global competition. No, your country does not have everything. Even if you had all the resources in the world, people demand certain things and a lot of the time that is experienced talent and hardened industries that have been at least steady for decades due to a mixture of private incentivization structures but also policies that helped drive those new incentives. This is why China has a dominance on rare earth metals; South Korea and Brazil’s dominance in plastic surgery; the US’s dominance in software.
Though I would dive into reasoning for my economics, I fear the article would be sidetracked. The baseline thinking for the necessity of incentivizing growth of real wages due to global competition is that, in order to afford the best products globally, both for consumers (e.g. buying electronics) and for businesses (e.g. buying machines or enterprise software), real wages must keep pace.
Trivial Costs for Citizens: Domestic Politics
Though I do take issue with social problems, it’s not my main focus. Morals and ethics are left up to a society to dictate. Though I do take issues with many domestic issues such as social media and religion affecting democratic thinking, they are merely hindrances in the ultimate goal.
Thomas Jefferson unrealistically proposed to rewrite the Constitution every 20 years. Luckily, the U.S. rarely amends the Constitution; not only have politics been polarizing since the founding of the nation, but Constitutional amendments remain a high barrier for change where it disarms militant thinking in to protect liberal democratic processes. However, the thinking is correct.
Today, costs for necessities have skyrocketed. Though real wages have grown steadily, the costs of scarce resources in addition to instability have squeezed citizens around the world. Housing is one of those fundamental issues; due to material costs, zoning, policies, and the fundamental scarce nature of land in valuable locations, housing has been a core topic of concern. However, plenty of inelastic services have seen increasing costs such as nurses and teachers. Each individual worker can only sustain a certain number of customers. This fundamental issue of rising inelastic services with human capacity, relatively slower real wage growth, and relatively slower productivity growth is known as Baumol’s cost disease.
This disease could be remedied through replacement of those inelastic services with non-humans. We’ve already exited this disease for many services such as farming where we use machines to rapidly increase output instead of a linear proportion of humans added to a process would increase a constant addition of output. However, for the services that still require humans, they happen to be services that we as a society find as a necessity such as healthcare and education.
Though there is no remedy for healthcare workers and teachers being replaced by humanoids — which likely won’t happen in the next two decades — it is necessary to figure out how to reduce the costs of other services and cost necessities. Typically, it means reform.
The problem with reform is that there are many historical reasons for certain policies. My politics is about seeing what is necessary with a baseline thesis and value for citizens and creating long-term solutions: if housing is necessary and the elements in the housing must be there such as air conditioning and heating, then how do we bring down the cost without sacrificing the condition of the product or service? Striking out archaic policies and creating incentive policies, in the case of housing, is one idea. I’m not entirely in favor or lowering the living conditions of people if they aren’t necessary to begin with.
Seesawing
Today, Argentina and Europe struggle with their democratic bases culture: they work less, their real wages have grown slower, yet their costs continue outpacing their inelastic services. The balance is to reset the government revenue spent on welfare programs and summarily reduce spending on subsidizing services that citizens find as necessary.
I’m not bashing welfare spending; in fact, I support it heavily within the realms of the government’s ability to purchase those services. In the aforementioned countries, their inability to continue growing their tax base while spending heavier year over year on welfare means these countries will bankrupt themselves, which is exactly what happened in Argentina. Debt should be used for growth, like in business, but these countries, including the U.S., are using debt to spend on inelastic services that don’t aid in growing people’s wages for spending on those inelastic services. The question boils down to who pays? The government can’t pay forever if the tax base is shrinking.
This is just an example of how I believe in seesawing. There are a ton of Chinese proverbs and poems that speak in antithesis. However, balance doesn’t mean neutrality. I have a baseline for what looks right: lowering costs for citizens, supercharging growth, etc. Seesawing means enacting policies or performing actions in order to get something done correctly, even if it means tipping the scales outside of norms heavily. I believe in times of chaos, the U.S. should be streamlined for efficiency to achieve its goals; the FDR administration during the Great Depression and WWII exemplifies strong leadership, rigid structure, and little deviance from planning. During times of peace, we should allow people to flourish by expanding into territories the government doesn’t really know or care about. The Chinese government, as an authoritarian regime, understands this and hence allows social media. They may censor it, but they understand the value and innate need for humans to connect, feed on instant information delivery, and congregate with a world-wide community. Seesaw politics doesn’t mean the U.S. should become a dictatorship merely for war; there are bounds to the regime’s ideology. In the case of the U.S., there must be bounds to ensure the regime returns to normal. China is the opposite; as an authoritarian regime, they would do splendidly in times of efficiency. In times of peace, they struggled with central planning — like the Soviets, and China realized the value of an independent, unconstrained private market. Today, China is the second-largest capitalist market in the world, not just from manufacturing bug also from their surging housing industry and citizens using the scarce housing as their only means of investment (which is scary since the U.S. at least diversifies investment into the stock market). The CCP enacts guardrails such as censorship to ensure their regime can return to authoritarian control when times of control are needed. The U.S. in turn uses constitutional amendments and democratic processes to ensure times of authoritarian efficiency return to democratic norms.
Down to the minutia of policy, seesawing means enacting policies that are pragmatic without significantly worsening people’s needs and wants in the long run.
Looking Forward
I want to transition into talking about a podcast I’d like to start about modern-day nation building. Looking at history is nice when you need to kickstart a domestic economy, but we are in current times with modern technologies enabling globalism, the end of free market international global trade due to aggressive competition, domestic talent development, and domestic industrial growth. I want to start a podcast exploring the policy ideas of growing governments of different ideologies: the U.S., China, Syria, Nigeria, Singapore, Mauritius, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Vietnam alongside individual large regions such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, ShenZhen (specifically individual provincial or city leaders), Chongqing, NYC. Dying countries and slow-growth countries (e.g. Philippines, Thailand, EU, South Korea, Argentina) aren’t gearered towards growth in their industries and have cultures and barriers that prevent them from growing, usually the root cause being oligopolies, corruption, and debt.
The nature of government is a social contract between the government and its people. No matter the government, the plain definition of one in this contract is to ensure the well-being of its citizens. No matter the country you go to, every regime understands the power of the masses. With enough drive, any regime can collapse. This means every country in the world is looking to create the same policies but tailored to their country. That tailoring is not only strategic due to geography, population size, education, and culture; for example, a concern for Indonesia, manufacturing facilities may not move there due to Muslims praying during crucial production hours that require attention. But also, policies are tailored to how people think. The U.S. is a very young nation, short history, and thus highly dynamic; most nations have ancient histories, drilling the learnings of millenniums of mistakes into the culture. For example, family is extremely strong in Asian countries; there have been tons of infighting within those kingdoms, so the strongest reliance was family in times of anarchy whereas the U.S. made the strongest bond for its citizens solely with the government. In this podcast, I want to explore those mindsets and the policies that governments are enacting to help their citizens’ living conditions and growth.
My politics are utilitarian in nature, ensuring the civil liberties of the individual and the citizen’s general happiness, but setting up policies to ensure the nation grows productively, can compete on the world stage, ensure real wages and the purchasing power of imports grow, improve living conditions, and allow people to do what they want in an act of tolerance. Though I’m a believer in Democracy, in particular America’s governmental structure to ensure civil liberties and the act of tolerance and freedom, I see value in many political ideologies. There are many examples of rich countries that are dying, and it shows how they are in a worse position than poor countries with much less social benefits: poor countries can eventually grow. Many rich countries that are dying have a much harder time making policies to get its country out. My politics is pragmatic with a baseline for individual liberty and risk-taking.