So at the very least, wealth taxes ought be smaller than inflation.

Not a huge problem, just continue to add leisure [unemployment years, years of higher ed, retirement years]

Royalism is lazy by comparsion. If you have it, or if you’ve had it. We never did.

However my restoration is childs play compared to a King or Strongman over America. This just King would have to rule over a cemetary.

The vulnerabilties of the American State exist, as do it’s many strengths. Even now our Constitution still gifts us with powerful liberties, and democracy remains a potent symbol [although that’s weakening as the people realize they’re being ignored].
But every government system has weaknesses . Certainly a monarchy, or a [either impossible without slaughter of tens of millions] Dictator.

We’re already pretty self-policing ruthlessly vigilant if we’re pointed at something.

Leaders should point the guardians of the state; organs, Tribunes, citizens* at the threats to freedom and the Republic. Which they already are .

Currently we’re pointed at the wrong threats. Namely Americans The problem for the Progs is no one believes it anymore. And that the citizens/majority have become aware it’s pointed AT THEM. This realization is recent, but quite real. It’s consequences are only beginning to play out.

There’s ample precedent. It’s normal when there’s an internal change of government for the victor to assume the old departments. Of which there will no matter what be less. In terms of budgets we’ll all get Libertarian government, it’s the only one we’ll be able to afford.

It’s also normal in American History for the people to assume a religious zeal against their foes. In this case traitors who would enslave or ethnically cleanse them, have bankrupted us, and are…incompetent, cowardly, and weak. As Moldbug said if this were the bad ass New Deal government he’d be silent.

The New Deal is dying anyway. It would be if none of us ever lived.

Reaction knows this, for of course in America Reaction is now a small but highly intelligent faction of the Court Party that perceives correctly a mortal threat to the Court – and wishes for this just King to preserve their own stations .

[*Citizens – a restricted franchise of power. The vote is restricted.]

At any rate – it’s highly useful for neoreactionaries to distinguish between the two phenomena. The number one ‘counterargument’ I hear to left-singularity hypothesis ‘things are going down the toilet in a hurry’ is ‘well, look at all this technological progress! We must be doing something right. Not only ‘right’, in fact, but ‘better’, because we’ve got better technology than they had bad then. In fact, if I had to choose between time periods, I’d stick with the present and our internet and medicine and plumbing, etc.”

And there’s no doubt that, for example, contemporary England has a much more advanced technological level than the Victorians. I think it’s completely accurate and useful to say ‘technological level s one thing, and social-cultural-politics is another, almost orthogonal thing.’ After all – it’s possible to just dump a certain advanced level of technology on a backward culture that couldn’t have created it on its own, but can at least maintain parts of it. North Korea, I was told by a Russian who’d had the ‘privilege’ of traveling there, is an example.

As far as a reconciliation between the two mostly-distinct phenomena goes, I think it’s becoming a kind of NR conventional wisdom that technological progress over the last 125 years has repeatedly ‘bailed out’ (if not completely ‘enabled’) what would have been the calamitous economic and social consequences of various utopian / ideological movements. Sailer’s said something like this, and so has Scott Alexander in his crude summary of the Reaction.

We would have gone bankrupt under Socialism, ah, but some inventor’s come up a with a new technology, which keeps the party going. We would have utterly lost the open exchange of ideas through our various mediums that requires hard-copy publication in the new censorious age, but then there’s the internet to bail us out. Can we disaggregate Sexual Liberation from advances in easy, cheap birth control? Check out, “A Great Leap Forward” for a good example. Did WWII get us out of the Great Depression? Well, partially. But there’s also the fact that the practical difference (in economically effective terms), in only 15 years, between the 1946 level of technology and that of 1931 has almost no parallel in History.

As always, the question is ‘what if there’s no more bail-outs?’ I think we’re running out of techno-bail-outs.

Indeed, the cleverer New Class cultural-revolution proponents tipped their hats to the old cultural order and its norms and mores as having ‘once been necessary, given our backward state of development then, but now, with all this, we can move on to new things.”

Are they wrong? Yes, but not for everybody. Ross Douthat and Charles Murray and David Brooks have all made the point that the Bobo elites have managed to find their “New Equilibrium”, while the masses continue to drift into ethical chaos and loss of ‘heuristic conditioning’ without the anchor of a socially-supported single moral-cultural vision.

TFP-improvement-efficiency (‘TFPIE’?) is like a tug boat tied to a cultural Titanic going the wrong way. Perhaps always wanting to go the wrong way, and only checked by an uncompromising reality, the strictures of which are negated by our mastery over Nature.

In the early Victorian Age, I imagine both ships going strongly in the same direction with complementarity. As the technological ship gains strength, the other one weakly reverses course. These days, it’s going backwards with all engines on full, slowed only by the techno-tug which gets weaker and weaker. Eventually the rope breaks, the techno-tug plodding along slowly, nearly stationary, and the Titanic, well …

Royalism is mere laziness in comparison.

Clearly, this ‘model’ gets you to your conclusion here very persuasively, but it opens a genuinely immense Pandora’s box on the way. “Yes there is that nightmare, but don’t get too lost in it, because there’s also this (quite different) nightmare …” (I need to find a way to interrogate you systematically about it, before pursuing a response.)

A mathematically necessary implication of this is that it takes an increasingly large of amount of resources and investment to produce a diminishing quantity of additional productivity or utility-improving innovation. I’ve researched this question as a hobby for about five years now (I own theendofideas.com, a private wiki), and I’ve seen little to sway me from this hypothesis.

The financial consequence of this should be 1. A capital glut and extremely low interest rates almost anywhere in the world and almost regardless of local fiscal and monetary policies, 2. High scarce-asset inflation (i.e. urban land to median wage ratios) combined with low retail inflation, and 3. Corporations, even high-tech ones, amassing large cash reserves (mostly for the option-value of potential buyouts) and without expanding R&D or other investments.

A bit more speculative is that you should gradually see various forms of ‘consumer surplus enjoyment of social capital’ become ‘captured’ financially as rents in various ways without much actual improvement in utility or welfare. So, you’d expect that in the life of your median-wage earner, all of a sudden, he’s paying a fortune for higher education (but not getting any smarter or more marginally productive than what is do to natural ability, but he still has to get that ‘official credential’), health care (but not getting measurably healthier), and houses in urban proximity with safe neighborhoods and good public schools (which used to be plentiful and affordable by single-income blue-collar workers, and now suck up all the wages of two professional-class earners). You can imagine what a mess these trends make of the already perilous attempts to measure thinks like GDP.

The fact that we observe all these should give any techno-futurist-optimist pause.

One more thing about the Laffer Curve and growth rates (vs growth levels). There’s no reason to believe that human beings are strictly logarithmic in their marginal utilities (sense perception is another matter) – and so trying to posit relationships between growth rates and tax rates is problematic.

Consider two countries, we’ll call them ‘America’ and ‘China’, over two years, 2012 and 2013, where income tax rates are identical all around.

In 2012, an American produced 40,000 hot dogs, whereas a Chinaman produced 4,000.
in 2013, an American produced 40,800 hot dogs, whereas a Chinaman produced 4,400

The American growth rate was only 2%. The Chinese growth rate was 10%. Yet the American got ‘more richer’ than the Chinaman, and the gap actually increased instead of narrowed. And, arguably, getting that last 800 hot dogs of additional productivity out of an American worker already producing 40,000 hotdog per year was a lot more difficult and innovation-requiring than the ‘copy and catch-up’ growth seen in China.

What’s important to focus on is the partial derivative of total factor productivity (measuring labor in hours, not wages) with respect to innovation-resource-investment. I’d argue that it’s best to focus on the TFP’s for the outputs which constitute the bulk of economic activity (and it helps if it’s a globally traded, easily transportable commodity). I’d argue further that the data indicates that these derivatives have been falling for a while and continue to do so. The obvious example is petroleum, and the one obvious exception has been information technology. But IT still doesn’t take up a large portion of the economy, and because of its scalability, doesn’t actually employ very many people, especially in the West.

Anyway, the bottom line is that if I’m right about the situation we’re in – in which innovation is insensitive to liekly policy – then either a static or crudely ‘present-value’ calculated Laffer analysis should be sufficient.

Yes the franchise should be restricted to the responsible and informed.

However again in the case of the United States we have not had democracy since the New Deal. We have elections whose influence is slight at best.

And these aren’t the best of times, so democracy’s influence since 2008 is ZERO.

Krugman is deranged. He sees it ending and wants to bring down the Temple.

Reaction in the United States is in many ways a faction of the Court Party that realizes the Party is ending. They desire a King to save the Court Party.

There are problems with a King in America. Reaction seeks to restore tradition, in America there has never been a King closer than 3000 miles. I am speaking of America 1600 to present. When was the last time a warrant was served in America “In the name of the King?” with the exception of the American revolution and the buildup? How often do you think it was the Kings writ even in the 18th century?

Reaction and restoration in America would be restoring Constitutional Government, I refer to the document of 1789. The people would also demand some restoration of their usurped rights. **The People are not only armed but in an internal Arms Race**

We look at managerial liberalism which is the New Deal and see it’s a disaster for 40 years and conflate it with “democracy” because idiots vote.

The New Deal is no more democracy [that’s the “Deal”] than the EU.

Democracy in America existed 1830-1933. The Democracy in America didn’t destroy the Constitutional Republic, it complimented and strengthened it.

Also most reactionaries draw back at the thought of violent revolution, preferring order. If you think a Restoration would be violent, try putting a King by any name in charge. You’d have to raze and slaughter most of the country.

You cannot believe in History and Tradition and ignore Atavism.

Atavism is my politics in one word.

In America Reaction is a small but highly intelligent faction of the Court Party that wishes a King to restore the Court to sanity. I suggest the best and least sanguinary course is to call the Constitution King and restore it.

Interestingly, you can apply the same logic to seigniorage: inflation is a distortionary tax, so it has a Laffer curve and a maximising level. Therefore, in theory, we can compute the optimal level of inflation along with a broader set of tax policy instruments.