Category: Political Science
The ‘Ordinary Men’ of the Nazi Party
We digitize and analyze the near-universe of National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) membership records and link them to population and industrial censuses. Four findings emerge. First, as the party expanded, its membership came to resemble the broader population more closely in occupational, demographic, and religious terms. Second, SS members’ characteristics remained different: younger, more educated, and more fanatical, as measured by the display of Nazi insignia in membership portraits. Third, within communities, coworkers, and families, early membership generated hysteresis, with subsequent entrants drawn from the same groups. Finally, local increases in party membership are associated with subsequent deportations of Germany’s Jews.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
How Reform Happens
What determines whether and how regulations are reformed? We use a newly constructed data set of 3,590 successful and failed regulatory reforms in 189 countries, between 2005 and 2022, to address this question. We document that regulations have become more business friendly in some regulatory domains but not others. We also show that regulations are more business friendly in richer than in poorer countries, and that holding initial regulatory levels constant, richer countries also reform more. We present a model in which the successful passage of reforms is shaped by the number of veto points in the approval process, the social returns to reform, and the cost of compensating losers from reform, and then test it using our new data set. We find that richer countries have both higher reform attempt and success rates, but less impact of individual reforms on regulation than poorer countries. These findings are consistent with the model if richer countries are better at reform, perhaps because they can compensate losers more efficiently. Across the world, reform attempt rates are strongly correlated with reform success rates but not with reform impact levels. Within countries, a higher share of technological reform attempts is successful, compared to administrative or legal reforms, consistent with the importance of veto points.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
I appear on the Coleman Hughes podcast
Republican Congressional deference to Trump is in fact democratic
That does not mean it is good! From Jeffrey M. Stonecash:
Congress is portrayed as compliant with President Donald J. Trump’s agenda because he is intimidating its members. This neglects an alternative explanation that focuses on the increased congruence of presidential and congressional electoral bases. Trump is the beneficiary of a geographical realignment that took decades and has created a high degree of overlap of the two bases. This analysis tracks that process from 1952 to 2024. It has produced a situation in which policy concerns overlap and encourage congressional compliance.
Social Security Should Be a Forced Savings Program Not a Welfare Program
There is a growing movement to eliminate the wage cap on Social Security taxes while capping benefits. The argument, often from the center-right, is that Social Security is insolvent and that “tough” choices are needed to save it. But this moves the system in exactly the wrong direction.
One of the better features of Social Security is that it has never been purely redistributive. It has also functioned, in part, as a forced-savings program. The Social Security Administration itself emphasizes that benefits depend on earnings history: earn more, retire with more. Why do some people receive large Social Security checks? Because they paid a lot more into the system.
Eliminating the wage cap while capping benefits weakens, and in the limit destroys, that connection. It turns Social Security away from forced saving and toward retirement welfare financed by a broader tax on earnings. That is a bad idea.
The problem is not just that this creates another welfare program. It also worsens marginal incentives. A tax that buys you a claim on future benefits is not the same as a pure tax. Suppose 10 percent of your salary goes into a 401(k). That reduces current consumption, but it is not simply money lost to the state. You receive an asset in return. It is closer to a purchase than to a tax–a reason to work more not a reason to work less.
Social Security is not a personal retirement account, but it does contain that logic. There is a connection between taxes paid and benefits received. To the extent that workers understand that connection, the payroll tax is less distortionary than an ordinary tax of the same size. Part of what workers pay is offset by the expectation of future benefits.
Gut that connection, however, and the tax becomes more distortionary even if total taxes paid and total benefits received stay the same. The averages can remain unchanged while the marginal incentives deteriorate. Once additional taxes no longer generate additional benefits, the system looks much more like a straight tax on work.
A much better reform would move in the opposite direction: strengthen the link between contributions and benefits. Make Social Security more like what many people already think it is—an individual account that accumulates benefits over time. The stronger that link, the lower the effective tax wedge.
This would also improve the politics of the system. A welfare program invites zero-sum conflict: my benefit comes at your expense. A claim-based system is less divisive. It ties benefits more clearly to contributions and makes rising prosperity good for everyone. In that kind of system, we can all become richer—including low-wage immigrants—without treating retirement policy as a fight over who gets to pick whose pocket.
Addendum: James Buchanan first made these points here. John Cochrane gets the economics right, of course.
My excellent Conversation with Paul Gillingham
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler calls Paul Gillingham’s new book, Mexico: A 500-Year History, the single best introduction to the country’s past—and one of the best nonfiction books of 2026. Paul brings both an outsider’s eye and ground-level knowledge to Mexican history, having grown up in Cork — a place he’d argue gave him an instinctive feel for fierce local autonomy and land hunger —earning his doctorate on the Mexican Revolution under Alan Knight at Oxford, and doing his fieldwork in the pueblos of Guerrero.
He and Tyler range across five centuries of Mexican history, from why Mexico held together after independence when every other post-colonial superstate collapsed, to why Yucatán is now one of the safest places on earth, what two leaders from Oaxaca tell us about Mexican politics, how Mexico avoided the military coups that plagued the rest of Latin America, what Cárdenas’s land reform actually achieved versus what it promised, whether the ejido system held Mexico back, why Mexico worried too much about land and not enough about human capital, how Mexico’s fertility rate fell below America’s, why Guerrero has been violent for two centuries, why the new judicial reforms are a disaster, where to find the best food in Mexico and Manhattan, what a cache of illicit Mexican silver sitting on a ship in the English Channel has to do with his next book, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Now, after independence in 1821, why did not the rest of Mexico fragment the way Central America did a few years later, where it splits off from the Mexican empire? What determines the line? What sticks together with Mexico, and what does not?
GILLINGHAM: That’s a very good question because it’s one of the things that really makes Mexico stand out in that period, those histories, is that after independence, the rest of the Americas, you get a series of super-states. You get Gran Colombia, which is most of the Andes, and going across what’s now Venezuela. You get the United Provinces of the Rio Plate. These are huge, very difficult to conceive of super-states, and they fail within a decade. Elsewhere, you look at other post-colonial states, thinking particularly of India, within a couple of years, you’re fragmented and failed. Mexico doesn’t. Mexico actually stands up with the exceptions you put of Central America, which is formally part of it, in fact, but leaves within short order.
It’s one of these questions of what Álvaro Enrigue calls the miracle that Mexico exists. To explain it is a paradox. To make a try at it, I think that there is a common theme in Mexican history, which runs across most of those five centuries, which is a remarkable degree of hands-off government. It’s imposed. Mexico has a lot of mountains. It’s very difficult to rule from any central pole. Savvy governments, or governments with no choice, which are quite often the same thing, are very hands-off. Federalism is built into Mexico’s soul. I think that’s one of the reasons, from early on, Mexico actually out-punches the rest of the Americas in terms of sticking together as a territorial unit.
COWEN: As you know, in the early 19th century, there are rebellions in Yucatán, the Caste Wars, but Yucatán does not split off from Mexico. What keeps that together?
GILLINGHAM: Yucatán has always felt itself to be a different country, effectively, and that runs through to the present. You can see the cultural reasons, obviously, and the Maya and the other great, sophisticated urban culture of the 16th century and before. It makes sense that they should feel themselves very different from the rest of what becomes Mexico. In fact, it comes through in small but revealing ways. Back in the 20th century, people find themselves being asked whether they want a Yucatán beer or a foreign beer, and a foreign beer being anything in Mexico outside Yucatán.
Why doesn’t Yucatán leave? I think that it came extremely close. In fact, there’s a moment in the 1840s when Mexico and Texas form an alliance, and Texas is chartering warships out to Yucatán to try and prevent any naval incursions. Why on earth does Yucatán stay? I think it’s because of the absence of an alternative capital, because Yucatán is profoundly racially divided. It’s one of the few places in Mexico where you could say that really is a fairly stark racial divide. You have a plantocracy, in some ways, like the US South before the Civil War.
You’ve got a relatively small white plantocracy centered in Mérida. They have no interest whatsoever in leading an independent struggle. While the Maya achieve an underestimated level of sophistication as a state, it’s still not at the point where you would get, for more than a couple of years, a really joined-up independence movement spanning all races, all areas, and the entire peninsula.
Recommended, interesting and substantive throughout. In the United States at least, Mexico remains a greatly underdiscussed nation.
What should I ask Katja Hoyer?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is Wikipedia:
Hoyer was born in Wilhelm-Pieck-Stadt Guben, Bezirk Cottbus, German Democratic Republic (GDR), where her mother was a teacher and her father an officer of the National People’s Army. She received a Master’s degree from the University of Jena and moved to the United Kingdom in about 2010.
Hoyer is a visiting research fellow at King’s College London and has published two books about the history of Germany. She is also a journalist for The Spectator, The Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, UnHerd, and Die Welt.
Her first book, Blood and Iron, about the German Empire from 1871 to 1918, was well reviewed, even though some reviewers suggested that she had played down the negative aspects of the period and of Otto von Bismarck‘s legacy. Her second book, Beyond the Wall, about the history of the GDR from 1949 to 1990, was well reviewed in the United Kingdom, but less well received in Germany.
She also has a new, forthcoming book on the history of the city of Weimar, namely Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe. So what should I ask her?
My excellent Conversation with Harvey Mansfield
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Harvey discuss how Machiavelli’s concept of fact was brand new, why his longest chapter is a how-to guide for conspiracy, whether America’s 20th-century wars refute the conspiratorial worldview, Trump as a Shakespearean vulgarian who is in some ways more democratic than the rest of us, why Bronze Age Pervert should not be taken as a model for Straussianism, the time he tried to introduce Nietzsche to Quine, why Rawls needed more Locke, what it was like to hear Churchill speak at Margate in 1953, whether great books are still being written, how his students have and haven’t changed over 61 years of teaching, the eclipse rather than decline of manliness, and what Aristotle got right about old age and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: From a Straussian perspective, where’s the role for the skills of a good analytic philosopher? How does that fit into Straussianism? I’ve never quite understood that. They seem to be very separate approaches, at least sociologically.
MANSFIELD: Analytic philosophers look for arguments and isolate them. Strauss looks for arguments and puts them in the context of a dialogue or the implicit dialogue. Instead of counting up one, two, three, four meanings of a word, as analytic philosophers do, he says, why is this argument appropriate for this audience and in this text? Why is it put where it was and not earlier or later?
Strauss treats an argument as if it were in a play, which has a plot and a background and a context, whereas analytic philosophy tries to withdraw the argument from where it was in Plato to see what would we think of it today and what other arguments can be said against it without really wanting to choose which is the truth.
COWEN: Are they complements or substitutes, the analytic approach and the Straussian approach?
MANSFIELD: I wouldn’t say complements, no. Strauss’s approach is to look at the context of an argument rather than to take it out of its context. To take it out of its context means to deprive it of the story that it represents. Analytic philosophy takes arguments out of their context and arranges them in an array. It then tries to compare those abstracted arguments.
Strauss doesn’t try to abstract, but he looks to the context. The context is always something doubtful. Every Platonic dialogue leaves something out. The Republic, for example, doesn’t tell you about what people love instead of how people defend things. Since that’s the case, every argument in such a dialogue is intentionally a bad argument. It’s meant for a particular person, and it’s set to him.
The analytic philosopher doesn’t understand that arguments, especially in a Platonic dialogue, can deliberately be inferior. It easily or too easily refutes the argument which you are supposed to take out of a Platonic dialogue and understand for yourself. Socrates always speaks down to people. He is better than his interlocutors. What you, as an observer or reader, are supposed to do is to take the argument that’s going down, that’s intended for somebody who doesn’t understand very well, and raise it to the level of the argument that Socrates would want to accept.
So to the extent that all great books have the character of this downward shift, all great books have the character of speaking down to someone and presenting truth in an inferior but still attractive way. The reader has to take that shift in view and raise it to the level that the author had. What I’m describing is irony. What distinguishes analytic philosophy from Strauss is the lack of irony in analytic philosophy. Philosophy must always take account of nonphilosophy or budding philosophers and not simply speak straight out and give a flat statement of what you think is true.
To go back to Rawls, Rawls based his philosophy on what he called public reason, which meant that the reason that convinces Rawls is no different from the reason that he gives out to the public. Whereas Strauss said reason is never public or universal in this way because it has to take account of the character of the audience, which is usually less reasonable than the author.
And yes he does tell us what Straussianism means and how to learn to be a Straussian. From his discussion you will see rather obviously that I am not one. Overall, I found this dialogue to be the most useful source I have found for figuring out how Straussianism fits into other things, such as analytics philosophy, historical reading of texts, and empirical social science.
Perhaps the exchange is a little slow to start, but otherwise fascinating throughout. I am also happy to recommend Harvey’s recent book The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy.
The AI arms race
That is the topic of my latest column for The Free Press, here is the closing tag:
The biggest risk is not from the AI companies, but rather that the government with the most powerful AI systems becomes the bad guy itself. The U.S., on the world stage, is not always a force for good, and we might become worse to the extent we can act without constraint. The Vietnam War is perhaps the least politically controversial way of demonstrating that point.
So today we need an odd and complex mix of not entirely consistent ideologies for the current arms race to go well. How about some tech accelerationism mixed with capitalism, and then a prudent technocratic approach to military procurement, to make sure those advances serve national security ends? On the precautionary side, we need a dash of the 1960s and ’70s New Left and libertarian anti-war ideologies, skeptical of Uncle Sam himself. We do not want to become the bad guys.
Do you think we can pull that off? The new American challenge is underway.
Worth a ponder.
Understanding Demonic Policies
Matt Yglesias has a good post on the UK’s Triple Lock, which requires that UK pensions rise in line with whichever is highest: wages, inflation, or 2.5 percent. Luis Garicano calls this “the single stupidest policy in the entire Western world” — and I’d be inclined to agree, if only the competition weren’t so fierce.
The triple lock guarantees that pensioner incomes grow at the expense of everything else, and the mechanism bites hardest when the economy is weakest. During the 2009 financial crisis wages fell and inflation declined, for example, yet pensioner incomes rose by 2.5 percent! (Technically this was under a double-lock period; the triple lock came slightly later — as if the lesson from the crisis was that the guarantee hadn’t been generous enough.)
Now, as Yglesias notes, if voters were actually happy with pensioner income growing at the expense of worker income, that would be one thing. But no one seems happy with the result. The same pattern is clear in the United States:
As I wrote in January, there is a pattern in American politics where per capita benefits for elderly people have gotten consistently more generous in the 21st century even as the ratio of retired people to working-age people has risen.
This keeps happening because it’s evidently what the voters want. Making public policy more generous to senior citizens enjoys both broad support among the mass public and it’s something that elites in the two parties find acceptable even if neither side is particularly enthusiastic about it. But what makes it a dark pattern in my view is that voters seem incredibly grumpy about the results.
Nobody’s saying things have been going great in America over the past quarter century.
Instead, the right is obsessed with the idea that mysterious forces of fraud have run off with all the money, while the left has convinced itself that billionaires aren’t paying any taxes.
But it’s not some huge secret why it seems like the government keeps spending and spending without us getting any amazing new public services — it’s transfers to the elderly.
The contradictions of “Elderism” are an example of rational irrationality. Individual voters bears essentially no cost for holding inconsistent political beliefs — wanting generous pensions and robust public services and low taxes is essentially free, since no single vote determines the outcome. The irrationality is individually rational and collectively ruinous. Voters are not necessarily confused about what they want; they simply face no price for wanting incompatible things. Arrow’s impossibility theorem adds another layer: even if each voter held perfectly coherent preferences, there is no reliable procedure for aggregating them into a coherent social choice. The grumpiness Yglesias documents may not reflect hypocrisy so much as the incoherence of demanding that collective choice makes sense — collective choice cannot be rationalized by coherent preferences and thus it’s perfectly possible that democracy can simultaneously “choose” generous pensions and “demand” better services for workers, with no mechanism to register the contradiction until the bill arrives.
Who is a victim?
Moral disagreement across politics revolves around the key question, “Who is a victim?” Twelve studies explain moral conflict with assumptions of vulnerability (AoVs): liberals and conservatives disagree about who is especially vulnerable to victimization, harm, and mistreatment. AoVs predict moral judgments, implicit attitudes, and charitable behavior—and explain the link between ideology and moral judgment (usually better than moral foundations). Four clusters of targets—the Environment, the Othered, the Powerful, and the Divine—explain many political debates, from immigration and policing to religion and racism. In general, liberals see vulnerability as group-based, dividing the moral world into groups of vulnerable victims and invulnerable oppressors. Conservatives downplay group-based differences, seeing vulnerability as more individual and evenly distributed. AoVs can be experimentally manipulated and causally impact moral evaluations. These results support a universal harm-based moral mind (Theory of Dyadic Morality): moral disagreement reflects different understandings of harm, not different foundations.
That is from a recent paper by Jake Womick, Emily Kubin, and Kurt Gray. Via the excellent, non-victimized Kevin Lewis.
A New Order of Things
Big infrastructure projects in the developing world for things like water and electricity are under-pressure. Chinese and US funding is down and these projects often fall apart due to corruption and political incentives to build but not maintain. It is possible to break old institutions and establish new ones, but “there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” Connor Tabarrok gives a great example. Ek Son Chan in Cambodia:
In 1993, the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority was a catastrophe. The city was emerging from decades of war and genocide. Only 20 percent of the city had connections at all, and water flowed for just 10 hours a day. 72 percent of the water was non revenue water. It was lost to leaks or stolen through illegal connections.
Into this mess walked Ek Son Chan, a young Cambodian engineer appointed as Director General. Over the next two decades he executed an incredible institutional turnaround.
Chan replaced corrupt managers with qualified engineers. He got rid of unmetered taps. Every single connection received a meter and was billed. The old system of manual billing was replaced with a computerized system, which cut down on low level employees giving out free water and receiving kickbacks. Bill collection rates went from 48 percent to 99.9 percent. These changes were intensely unpopular, and Chan faced fierce resistance from rent seekers, from freeloading customers to his own employees. He established an incentive system based on bonuses among the workers, introduced an internal discipline system with a penalty for violators, and set up a discipline commission for all levels of the organization to deal with corruption
He divided the distribution network into pressure zones with flow monitoring. A 24 hour leak detection team walked the streets at night with listening bars to identify underground leaks.
The institutional change dwarfed the infrastructural change, but was absolutely necessary to make the infrastructure investment worthwhile….
This commitment would not be untested. When Chan tried to enforce bill payment on Cambodia’s elite, and sent his team out to install a water meter on the property of a high ranking general who had been freeloading. The general refused the installation of a meter, so the team attempted to disconnect the water. The general and his bodyguards ran them off the property. When Chan heard of this, he decided not to back down, and mobilized his own team to dig up the pipe and install the meter. Always a leader from the front, Chan jumped in the hole to take a shift at digging. When he looked up, his team had fled, and he was facing down the general himself, pointing a gun at his head. In Cambodia in the 90s, consequences for such a high ranking official were unlikely. CHan didn’t give up. He mobilized the local armed police and returned with 20 men to standoff against the general, disconnected him from service and left him out to dry. Chan said this about the dispute:
”He had no water. My office was on the second floor and the general came in with his ten bodyguards to look for me. I said, “ No. You can come here alone, but with an appointment”. He couldn’t do anything. He had to return. He said, “Okay”! At that time we had a telephone, a very big Motorola. He came in to make an appointment for tomorrow. I said, “ Okay, tomorrow you come alone”. So he comes alone, we talk. “Okay. I’ll reconnect on two conditions. The first condition is that you have to sign a commitment saying that you will respect the Water Supply Authority and second, you need to pay a penalty for your bad behavior and you must allow us to broadcast the situation to the public, or no way, no water in your house”. So he agreed. “
….By 2010, coverage in the city went from 25 percent to over 90 percent with 24 hour service. The utility became financially self sustaining and turned a profit. It was listed on the Cambodia Securities Exchange in 2012. Chan won the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2006.
By separating the utility company from the low-capacity local government, Ek and PPWSA proved that:
- Functional infrastructure relies on institutional quality and mechanism design.
- State capacity need not exist within the state
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On the future of war
Murphy: What do you think we need to do to avoid major conflict over the next 25 years? Or do you think it can be avoided?
Cowen: I just think there’ll be more festering conflicts. Consider the difference between World War One and World War Two. World War two is very decisively settled. That’s quite rare in history. And you had a clear, small number of victors that largely agreed. And US & UK set things up. That didn’t happen after World War One.
Yeah, there was a League of Nations that didn’t work. It collapsed again. Future conflicts will be more like World War One than World War Two. Yeah, there’s too many nuclear weapons out there, for one thing. Are we really going to decisively defeat Russia in anything, ever? Who knows? But I wouldn’t count on it.
I’m very struck by this recent conflict between Thailand and Cambodia, which is a nothing burger, but I think people are making a mistake by ignoring it. What it’s showing us is that two countries can find it worthwhile to conduct a nothing burger war every now and then a few weeks, and it’s never really over.
It never really escalates. It just goes on and I think we’ll just see more of that. East Africa feels quite dangerous at the moment.
Murphy: I mean, Azerbaijan.
Cowen: Things like that. And they’ll just multiply and not quite. You know, some of them will be settled. But as a whole, they won’t be settled, and they won’t give birth to, like, the new UN, the new Bretton Woods, the new whatever. The A’s will build their own institutions. Let’s wish them luck.
That was recorded several months ago with Nebular, here are the links:
We’ve just published the video on YouTube, X, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. We also published some extended show notes and the transcript on Substack.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act appears likely to pass the Senate. The bill contains some genuinely good ideas alongside some very popular—but bonkers ideas.
Let’s start with the good ideas.
The bill would streamline NEPA review for federally supported housing, primarily by expanding categorical exclusions. Federal environmental review does impose real costs and delays on housing construction, so reducing unnecessary review is a step in the right direction. The gains will probably be modest—most housing regulation occurs at the state and local level—but removing friction is good.
The bill would also deregulate manufactured housing by eliminating the permanent chassis requirement and creating a uniform national construction and safety standard. The United States once built far more factory-produced housing; in the early 1970s, by some accounts a majority of new homes were factory-built (mobile or modular). Long-run productivity growth in housing almost certainly requires greater use of factory construction. Land-use regulation remains the dominant constraint on supply, but enabling scalable manufacturing is still welcome.
Another interesting provision involves Community Development Block Grants (CDBG). The bill allows CDBG funds to be used for building new housing rather than being largely restricted to rehabilitation of existing housing. More federal spending is not automatically appealing, but the bill adds an unusual incentive mechanism.
The bill creates a tournament for CDBG allocations. Localities that exceed the median housing growth improvement rate among eligible CDBG recipients receive bonus funding. Those below the median face a 10 percent reduction. The key feature is that the penalties fund the bonuses, so the system reallocates money rather than expanding spending.
This is a clever design. It creates competition among localities and benchmarks them against peers rather than against a fixed national target. In effect, the program rewards relative improvement rather than absolute performance—a classic tournament structure. (See Modern Principles for an introduction to tournament theory!).
Ok, now for the popular but bonkers ideas. Section 901 (“Homes are for People, Not Corporations”) restricts the purchase of new single-family homes by large institutional investors. Elizabeth Warren is a sponsor of the bill but this section was driven almost entirely by President Trump. Trump passed an Executive Order, Stopping Wall Street from Competing With Main Street Home Buyers, that cuts off institutional home investors from FHA insurance, VA guarantees, USDA backing, Fannie/Freddie securitization and so forth. The bill goes further by imposing a seven-year mandatory divestiture rule, forcing institutional investors to convert rental homes to owner-occupied units after seven years.
No one objects to institutional investors owning apartment buildings. But when the same investors own single-family homes, it breaks people’s brains. Consider how strange the logic sounds if applied elsewhere:
…a growing share of apartments, often concentrated in certain communities, have been purchased by large Wall Street investors, crowding out families seeking to buy condominiums.
Apartments are fine, hotels are fine, but somehow a corporation owning a single family home is un-American. In fact, the US could do with more rental housing of all kinds! Why take the risk of owning when you can rent? Rental housing improves worker mobility. When foreclosures surged after 2008 and traditional buyers disappeared, institutional investors stepped in and absorbed distressed supply — helping stabilize markets. Who plays that role next time?
Institutional investors own only a tiny number of homes, so even if this were a good idea it wouldn’t be effective. But it’s not a good idea, it’s just rage bait driven by Warren/Trump anti-corporate rhetoric.
What does “Homes are for People, Not Corporations” even mean?–this is a slogan for the Idiocracy era. “Food is for People, Not Corporations,” so we should ban Perdue Farms and McDonald’s?
A simple way to improve your thought and conclusions
Take some policy, action, or person whom you regard as morally questionable and indeed is morally questionable. That same policy, action, or person does some bad things, bad in conquentialist terms I now mean. Practically bad, utilitarian bad.
The odds are that you overrate the badness of those consequences by some considerable degree.
Even very smart people do this. Sometimes they do it more, because they can come up with more elaborate arguments for why the bad consequences are completely disastrous.
They might overrate the badness of those consequences by as much as 5x or 10x (gdp is a huge mound of stuff!).
So if you want to have better opinions, look for the cases where you do this and stop doing it.
Easy-peasy!
And good luck with that.