Cato Unbound

>Thiel apparently gives talks about the Antichrist

You forgot to mention the part where Thiel tells, in all seriousness, that the Antichrist is on Earth, now, and may literally be Greta Thunberg [1].

And that's one of the reason Greta Thunberg must be opposed.

> He's actually a very thoughtful Christian

That's one way to upsell "deranged".

Thoughtful he is (as many lunatics are).

As far as religious aspects go, him losing faith in democracy after women and "benefits recipients" got the right to vote[2] doesn't sound very Christian-like to my ears.

Neither does his argument to end affirmative action[3], if you read it carefully, but that's a whole another can of worms.

> following the works of Rene Girard.

Ah yes, the fine fellow who (like Thiel) sees religion as a technology to manage humans by designating sacrificial scapegoats, which is the Girard's final solution to all problems.

In Girard's (and Thiel's) view, scapegoating isn't only an emergent outcome, it is necessary to stave off the end of the world.[3]

Thiel's support of Trump and his influence and backing of the Heritage Foundation / Project 2025 is very consistent with this philosophy.

Trump/Project 2025 make scapegoats out of immigrants, DEI, minorities, trans people, women who don't dedicate their lives to being breeding machines, ... - the list goes on.

So, in Thiel, we have:

- a gay man (who destroyed the paper that outed him out of spite) who thinks women are not just ewww, but are the reason…

The framing in the article is ahistorical. The post-WW2 period was a period of exceptionally _low_ inequality. If you look back to just the 1800s there were swings in inequality comparable to the present day. We're now moving back to the historical baseline.

There are some contributing factors to the shift in inequality, a major one being that labor is now oversupplied compared to the post-war period, and the competition is driving wages lower. The U.S. has much higher immigration rates now, which contributes to the oversupply of labor. The late 1800s and early 1900s had similarly high immigration and high inequality. [1]

Whether the historical baseline for inequality is the best amount of inequality is a different question though. It's clear that as redistribution flattens the income curve there is dead-weight loss as highly productive people stop wasting their time doing taxable work. It's also clear that investing in children who would otherwise be malnourished or lack education or healthcare is a net positive for society. It's not clear to me that the current level of inequality is the wrong one - we're admitting a lot of immigrants who are vastly improving their life prospects as a result, the economy is growing, and technology is amazing. Spending more money on health care would have limited benefits [2]. I don't really have a strong opinion on whether inequality should be higher or lower (it's hard to find a good-faith analysis in these terms), but the Time article…

> or the blog post he wrote for Cato in 2009 lamenting that women had obtained the right to vote?

He said no such thing in that article[1]. I have no idea about the rest, or about Thiel in general, but I did read the article. Your statement is as bad and inaccurate as any one-liner soundbite on right wing media.

The section in question (emphasis mine):

As one fast-forwards to 2009, the prospects for a
*libertarian politics* appear grim indeed. Exhibit A
is a financial crisis caused by too much debt and
leverage, facilitated by a government that insured
against all sorts of moral hazards — and we know that
the response to this crisis involves way more debt and
leverage, and way more government. Those who have
argued for free markets have been screaming into a
hurricane. The events of recent months shatter any
remaining hopes of *politically minded* libertarians.
For those of us who are libertarian in 2009, our
education culminates with the knowledge that the
broader education of the body politic has become a
fool’s errand.

Indeed, even more pessimistically, the trend has been
going the wrong way for a long time. To return to
finance, the last economic depression in the United
States that did not result in massive government
intervention was the collapse of 1920–21. It was sharp
but short, and entailed the sort of Schumpeterian
“creative destruction” that could lead to a real boom.
The decade that followed — the…

I definitely don't think the existing governments are fine, there's tons of things that make me rage about the state of things. My point was that if you want to (unpatriotically) give up on your country instead of trying to improve it, and you're rich, and you ignore language and culture (like the seasteading idea does), you have many other countries to pick from.

Now if out of all the other countries in the world you can't find one that's even close to your ideals maybe there is a reason for that, maybe your utopia is not possible. Thiel as a CEO got to tell people what to do, he seems to have this idea that he will setup his government and people will just follow his rules. So I guess he's thinking of being some kind of benevolent dictator. In some other of his social writing* he has said he doesn't believe in democracy anymore. But even in a dictatorship you have to get consent from at least your security.

In his effort to escape politics he doesn't seem to realize that politics is what happens when you get a lot of people together making decisions. What happens when charismatic socialist or conservatives leaders rise up in his country? What happens when special interests start competing with each other?

If he were somehow able to solve the technical, economical, security and legal issues the whole thing would just devolve into the same political mess that every society goes through. How do I know? Because that's what happens everytime a government has been…

Sure. For clarification: by G-space I meant 'how to govern well' or 'how to solve problems about, with, or in governance'.

This is obviously an enormous topic area. It is also a dangerous and highly contentious subject matter filled with many taboos, due to its nature and importance.

That said political scholars, like economists, have come to many consensus realizations. This is kind of amazing since Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are clones from a political science perspective, there exists a great diversity of thought.

This means that there is not as much of a gap between somebody like Francis Fukuyama and Moldbug as is popularly imagined. If you have a sincere interest in outcomes you find unexpected allies.

Here is a good start:

Volume 1: The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama
Volume 2: Political Order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama

Seeing Like a State by James Scott

Exit, Voice and Loyalty by Albert Hirschman

The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer

The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joesph Tainter

The majority of the time these authors are interested in outcomes, not in winning for whatever their home team is.

Outside of academia Silicon Valley itself is having a serious discussion on this topic from our perspective:

Balaji Srinivasan : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A

Peter Thiel : http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3EBfS9IcB4

Patri…

Try the lead essay from Cato Unbound and see what you think. [0] There are a few more good short Shoup pieces linked at the bottom of that page.

I have some personal experience here. I have done training and volunteered as a community organizer and worked with my city council and planning department. I have organized neighborhood groups involved in planning. I have studied urban planning and urban form. Nothing helped me to understand American cities and why they work the way they do more than Dr. Shoup's work in the 1990s that is collected in The High Cost Of Free Parking.

Some of it is gritty and technical econometric research, but a lot of it is creative and insightful. It's not a single narrative, but a fun book to dip into in various places from time to time if you care about how cities work and how urban life can be made better for people.

This short 1997 paper introduced me to Dr. Shoup's work (I read it in 1998) and was like a shining blaze of insight for many readers like me when it first appeared. [1] One key insight is that free parking required by law costs the USA about three times as much as all the money drivers spend on cars and gas plus public subsidies for roads and highways. When you read it, you start to see that parking policy drives urban form much more than zoning or free markets or highway and transit construction or public preferences or anything else at all. A lot of the book is like…