Supporting Kamala over Trump

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Which candidate is better?

There have been a battery of posts about this question since the first shot was fired by Hanania in favor of Trump. Several responses were given: Jeff Maurer, Jeff Giesea, and Bentham’s Bulldog, all in favor of Kamala. I am on team Kamala, but I’m the closest to the center on this issue - They are firmly pro-Kamala and while I am directionally on that side, I am much less enthusiastic about the choice. I find this conversation refreshing as people usually do not try to provide a detailed answer to this question, because they treat the answer as trivially obvious even though an honest answer would have to cover everything from history, the constitution and the stated policies of the candidates, and even the results of prediction markets and game-theoretic reasoning. I’m glad each of these writers took on that challenge to provide a much needed detour from the crude level of discourse you usually see around these questions.

On the Trump question, the undecided voter can take these 4 posts above as a jumping off point to get a lay of the land and the points in favor and against. I’ll start by sketching out the main arguments used by our Belligerents, before adding my own.

The orange man on trial.

Hanania’s argument is roughly as follows:

• Conservatives are flawed in many respects, but the Republican party stands for Capitalism, which is important to remember given that the strength of the economy is the best way to improve people’s lives.

• Typically, this is not what the conservative party is. In different times and places, the conservative party is usually not the pro-Capitalism party, but in the United States that happens to be the case.

• Cultural rights are less valuable than economic rights. This is because with money you can flee to a more free area or otherwise bypass lots of harmful cultural policy. Economic security underlines cultural freedom.

• Is the Democratic party actually anti-market? Prediction markets are one example, with Democrats being opposed and Republicans in favor. Even in non-culturally charged low-salience issues, the parties regress to some mean where the Democratic party is against markets and the Republican party is in favor.

• Republicans are much worse on immigration, but voting for a candidate is actually just voting for a coalition, and a vote for Trump is a vote for the pro-market coalition. In general, Republicans are better than Democrats.

Bentham responds:

• He agrees with the broad thrust of article, but has three main points that change his vote to Kamala.

• The first is competence. Kamala is much more competent than Trump, and when it comes to running the White House competency is a vital asset. She is not only more intelligent and harder working but is more likely to hire on competency as opposed to loyalty the way Trump would.

• This means that on at least some X-risk scenarios Kamala is more likely to navigate those issues better. Covid is a good example of this.

• Lastly, Trump is worse on factory farming. For Bentham this alone is disqualifying.

Jeff Giesea’s points:

• Giesea was a lifelong Republican, until Jan 6. That event completely changed his view of Trump and as such his support for the candidate.

• Trump has poor character and as such has transformed the Republican party into a grift. On the other hand, Kamala’s campaign has been so well ran that it speaks to her competency as a potential president. He views Jan 6th as a red line, that no matter what economic points you want to give to Trump you just can’t vote for him.

• Giesea still disagrees with Kamala on economics, but views giving Trump the nuclear launch codes as foolish.

Jeff Maurer’s points:

• He starts by stating that he will talk only about economics for the sake of the response being directly to Richard’s argument, but that Trump is still a threat to democracy and that matters.

• Maurer says that the price gouging stuff is dumb, but plenty of left-leaning pundits have attacked Kamala over it, showing that the left has an autoimmune response to this sort of thing. Also, Kamala’s positions on these things are more about getting votes than being representative of deeper feelings about capitalism. “The first thing is that left-leaning economists have queued up to call the policy stupid — Jason Furman, Catherine Rampell, Noah Smith, Josh Barro, and the Washington Post editorial board — to give an incomplete list — have publicly said “shit sucks””

• In any case, markets are better when they are regulated and anti-trust is widely used.

• Trump is advocating for a large tariff hike, which is also anti-capitalist. He’s also anti-immigration. For what it’s worth, Harris is more of a YIMBY than Trump.

• Broadly, Maurer agrees that the basic framing of the parties is this: the parties are controlled by kooks, the question is which kooks are more in control? There is a degree of symmetry to the parties in this regard, with the Warrenites being massively influential in the Democratic party, and a large assortment of grifters and opportunists for the Republicans.

• Maurer uses the federal reserve and debt ceiling fights as informative to this question.

I. Response to Maurer

For the three responses, I would rank them in order of which one is best as: Giesea - Bentham - Maurer.

To Maurer’s point about the debt ceiling fights, parties only have so many levers to signal to their voters what their stances are. The Republican party cannot realistically lower the debt, but they still deem it necessary to signal that they care about it by fighting over the debt ceiling periodically. Obviously the debt ceiling simply allows us to pay existing debt and isn’t a tool that can actually lower the debt, but voters are ignorant of that fact - they literally think that Republicans fighting against the debt ceiling is them fighting the debt. It’s not so much that Republicans are uniquely uninformed about how the government works, it’s that very few people - my guess around %95 cannot describe the debt ceiling correctly. You pander to the audience you have, not the audience you wish you had.

Image Prompt: Create an image of a president giving bread and circus to apes

As for the left having an autoimmune response to Harris’ bad ideas, this is not actually a good thing on the meta level. An autoimmune response indicates sickness, and the fact that there is a market for a small number of center-left commentators to push back against her policy positions does not indicate that the Democratic party is healthy. It’s sick in an important way: they’re too statist and not pro-market enough, and there are many influential groups pushing it left.¹ The right doesn’t have this same defense mechanism because market supremacy is something of a conceptual anchor on the right, whereas it’s a lively debate on the left. It’s still good in isolation that the left has this reaction, likely a result of absorbing more intelligent people and experts from the right, a topic I’ll touch on in a bit.

Anyway, most of what the executive does is appoint people and sign executive orders. She’ll sign a high number of anti-market orders and directives. On the executive order point, the case against Kamala is stronger. Maurer is right to bring up the tariff and immigration points, but I do wish someone would try to calculate the actual cost of these things. I’m not absolutely positive it outweighs the damage Kamala would do, and I don’t think most people disagree given that they usually only mention those things once. His point about fed independence is very good - that is a great example of Trump being extremely dumb and anti-expertise. Trump has a habit of regressing to just installing cronies to positions of power.

As far as the points about capitalism in general, the most important economic policy a government can effectively do is redistribution. Both candidates are pro-redistribution and I don’t see Trump really cutting medicare or social security. Maurer’s points about regulations being good are weaker - there are hundreds of thousand of pages in the code of regulations, and the effects it has on the economy cannot be definitively quantified in any objective way. It’s too complex, and there are an infinite number of ways a researcher can slice and dice the data to conjure any number of important correlations between the Federal Code and the Economy. You could try to do cross-country comparisons to avoid this problem, but that introduces about as much complexity to the analysis as it subtracts. As far as science goes it’s unknowable.

To Maurer’s credit, he did say he would only address the economic argument against Trump, which is Kamala’s weakest point as a candidate.

II. Competency is key

Why was Trump unable to successfully steal the election? It basically comes down to what the executive actually does - which is making executive decisions about appointments and orders. Trump’s original sin was playing nice with the Republican party and choosing Mike Pence. As a giveaway to the evangelical wing of the party, Trump chose Pence as his vice presidential running-mate. This was because lip-service will only get you so far; at some point you need to make a real political choice to secure the votes of people who have some reason to be skeptical of you. But he didn’t repeat that decision most of the time, and most of the time he surrounded himself with hacks and Trump loyalists.

It was this critical reason, among others, that caused Trump not to be able to steal the election. Trump surrounds himself with retards and incompetent hacks, mostly because being competent and intelligent correlates with not wanting to do everything the man says. This means that the people closest to him end up being worse in general, because he chooses based on loyalty and fealty to the MAGA cult over competence. The people who came up with the fake electors scheme, the lawyers who tried to argue that there was widespread fraud, and the rioters who showed up on Jan 6th were all really, really dumb. There was almost no shot at any of this working - which is good news for us, but bad news if they actually did get power again and were really running the country.

In all likelihood, a Trump 2 administration will differ in one very important way from Trump 1: he will have realized that people like Pence, these individuals that are lifelong Republicans, are not loyal enough to him. His cabinet will be filled to the brim of the dumbest, lowest IQ people possible, pledging loyalty to Mar-A-Lago above the constitution. Vance is the first step in this direction - and is why a lot of political commentators thought this was a misstep when he could have chosen much more obvious picks. He made that mistake once and has no intention of repeating it.

So why can I agree with Hanania that economics is the most important issue, and that the Republican party has many strong points in that regard, but still support Kamala? It comes down to human capital. It’s true that Kamala has plenty of bad opinions, and it’s also true that Elizabeth Warren and the lizard people have had a worryingly large impact on the party, but the Democratic bench is full to the brim of some very strong players who are good on economics. What you will ultimately get from Kamala is an administration hamstrung from the beginning by a close senate - likely the first administration in a long time that enters the White House without a senate majority. I do not expect this to improve much in the midterms if Kamala wins this year.

Current senate predictions from election betting odds.

Losing the senate also compromises her pick of Judges who will rule on a variety of important economic issues thanks to Chevron. Her cabinet will be mostly standard Democrats with decent heads on their shoulders, able to exercise rational judgement while carrying out their duties. I have no doubt she will sign a flurry of bad executive orders but the most damaging of those will likely be challenged in court, I bet successfully so. The most insane of her ideas such as price gouging will not be able to pass due to a divided congress, and while I am dismayed that there has to be an autoimmune response to them, the pushback she receives from experts will likely make her back down to a degree because she will defer to experts in a way that Trump would not.

The points about tariffs and immigration are worth bringing up however, mainly because Trump is on the wrong side of both of those issues. While Article I, Section 8 of the constitution does give congress tariff power, congress has largely relinquished this power to the executive with a series of acts over the years, especially during the 60s and 70s.

The Trade Expansion Act of 1962 (Section 232), the Trade Act of 1974 (Section 301), the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), and the Tariff Act of 1930 all contribute to the executive’s tariff authority. Both Trump and Biden invoked the Trade Expansion Act and the Trade Act of 1974 to levy tariffs, and Trump also threatened to use the IEEPA during negotiations with Mexico but didn’t have to because Mexico gave in anyway. There’s nothing really stopping Trump from instituting arbitrarily high tariffs, which will not only damage the United States but also our allies abroad as well.

The same story is true with Immigration. Article I, Section 8 also gives congress immigration power, but they’ve relinquished most of that to the executive too. Importantly the enforcement or lack thereof of much existing immigration policy is left to the executive’s discretion. This is exercised through the DHS, ICE, and USCIS in terms of border security as well as deportations and immigration applications.

Presidents have also used executive orders to control immigration, with two important examples. Using Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, Trump issued travel bans that were initially blocked but later held up in court. Obama issued DACA which acted as de facto immigration policy, granting illegal immigrants who arrived as children deportation protection. Prosecutorial discretion is also an important facet of the executive’s authority as they can simply not charge someone with committing a crime. The president can use the IEEPA, change the refugee admissions cap and can even modify immigration regulations. The only check on this is judicial review, but the court is so heavily lopsided that for all intents and purposes this check is not meaningful.

In short, I do think Kamala is weaker than Trump on economics mainly because she will sign a bunch of executive orders and her appointments won’t be stellar, but because of a series of bills the president just has too much say over the border and tariffs - issues that Trump has been consistently terrible at and vows to be even worse.

Our glorious president-border-king watches over his dominion.

III. Final Thoughts

I think the choice is surprisingly close. The issue boils down to judging Kamala by her words on the campaign trail when she is trying to secure her party’s support - and before she has been tested by general election voters and a divided congress, compared to an idealized view of Trump if he were to focus on being meaningfully pro-market.

From my point of view, the lay of the land is as follows,

Kamala:

• After failing to get any traction during the 2020 primaries and finding herself catapulted into the spotlight, is posturing as hard-left on economics to gain Democratic party support and to distance herself from Trump, given that they both support entitlement spending. This makes her come across as more left-wing than she otherwise would be.

• This is causing her to reflexively spit out Warren talking points, facing backlash seconds later after the Republican party labels those views socialist, and even getting pushback from her own side and experts. She seems to be shying away from speaking about those topics again.

• Because Manchin is retiring and the Montana senate race looks like an R victory, Kamala would be the first president to be elected without a senate majority in quite some time. This dumps water on all of her policy ambition as well as her judicial appointments. There are however 2 things she can still do on her own:

• 1) She can sign executive orders, and she most certainly will sign many, possibly a record breaking amount. It’s left as an exercise to the reader to predict the outcome of this.

• 2) She can appoint people to her cabinet and other agency positions. I expect most of these to be standard Democrats, but most importantly they will probably be smart and qualified. This is not all sunshine and rainbows however, for example: Trump appointed a business-friendly NLRB, and Biden appointed a union-friendly NLRB chair. Although the union membership rate has slowly declined under Biden, so I am yet again puzzled at the lack of effect the government seems to have on this sort of stuff.

• These being her only moves is still contingent on Montana, with Electionbettingodds.com giving Republicans a %65 chance of winning.

Trump:

• Will come into power with the senate and likely the house as well.

• His administration will be something like the first one, but even more Trumpy this time. I predict that if there is another pandemic or serious disaster, the response will be even more confused than the first time given more Trump loyalists in power.

• He will remove Powell and replace him with someone who will raise and lower interest rates at Trump’s behest.

• Trump will pass tax cuts for the rich, ballooning the deficit at the same time his fed chair stooge lowers interest rates, increasing inflation and making the average person poorer. This is because tax policy can be changed with a simple majority and does not abide by normal filibuster procedure.

• He will try to mitigate this with increasingly large tariffs, which will for the most part backfire and make things even more expensive. We likely go into something of a recession during this.

• He will appoint the dumbest, lowest IQ MAGA loyalists to every important position of power, starting with RFK being the head of the CIA. Whether he does it or not doesn’t matter, even considering the possibility of doing so is absurd. This is a glimpse of what’s to come.

• He will also heavily restrict immigration because why not.

Yes, the RFK Jr. whose brain was eaten by worms will be the head of the CIA.

I conclude that Kamala is the right choice for the job. Hanania brings up good points like executive orders and regulations, but I’m sure many of her orders will get challenged, and the code of regulations has increased linearly through Republican and Democratic presidents anyway. What I’m basically saying is that in some important respects the executive has a ton of latitude, but in the big picture it’s hard for the executive to meaningfully implement socialism using executive orders and regulations. Contingent on Montana Harris will be facing an uphill battle to do much. This is basically because she is perceived as very left, which is the system working as intended. She could be more moderate and likely win the presidency and senate, but she’s not so she’s less likely to win either of those things.

Trump on the other hand just so happens to be in the position to do a lot of bad things: he would make poor appointment choices not based on merit but based on MAGA loyalty, he would heavily restrict immigration, he would pass ever larger tariffs and fire Powell, and he would also balloon the deficit with tax cuts, damaging the economy in the process. This is nothing to speak of abortion or other social values that may or may not pass under his administration. This also doesn’t touch on issues with democratic norms or institutions that result from him filling the government with sycophants. You basically have to hope that his appointments er towards being more pro-market in between giving Trump blowjobs and just being plain corporatist - favoring or disfavoring market actors based on fealty to Trump.

I think that if the choices were different, my choice would be different. A more normal Republican would be a very competitive choice against someone like Kamala possibly even nudging me over to their side. But Trump is a genuinely special case and the low IQ appeal that he has bleeds into his decision making and his closest political allies’ leadership. Our institutions will become dumber and less competent as a result, and the xenophobia he and the larger MAGA crew are known for will negatively affect our relationships abroad with tariffs as well as immigration. The competency issue also carries with it a bit of x-risk with them being unable to correctly interpret information in highly charged and unclear circumstances in a way that would not be the case in a Harris administration.

Let me be perfectly clear: I support split ticketing and voting for Harris alongside Republicans down ballot if there are decent non-MAGA choices there, depending on candidate stances and quality. I also think that if Trump loses and MAGA loses mindshare among politicians, then I could see myself endorsing Republicans for the 2026 midterms. This is all highly contingent on my opinions as time goes on and the state of politics of course, but it’s a possibility.

The Democratic party may be sick, but the Republican party is dead. It’s the Mar-a-Lago party now, and it’s just not competent enough to be in charge of the country. For this reason I believe Harris is the better choice.²

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EDIT Oct/25/24; Not once during this essay did I bring up foreign policy, which is a mistake on my part - but if included, the essay may have ballooned in length. Long story short the worrying combination of Trump’s domestic policy combined with his stance on foreign policy has a decent chance of ending very poorly, and does impact an objective assessment of his potential administration very negatively.

1. It seems like every week there is a post from Yglesias is about how crazies are pulling the strings behind the scenes, and of the degraded nature of left-governance and information-making.

2. I did not go into Bentham’s animal cruelty argument for a few reasons. I don’t think it’s persuasive to most people, and the theme of the last several blog posts has to do with economics. I do believe that animal cruelty is extremely important though, and the Republican party is savage on this point to a sickening degree. This basically has to do with the same reason they suck on a bunch of other points as well; they’re just stupid and it bleeds into everything from factory farming to Immigration.

Also, the pressure campaign against Harris is working to some extent, showing a level of deference to experts.