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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • I’m someone who actually calls myself socially liberal but fiscally conservative, and that’s because my primary concern (in the terms of moral foundations theory) is the liberty/oppression axis. In other words, I think leaving people alone is a good thing, and while it’s not the only good thing and it needs to be balanced against other concerns, we should still be doing it more than we are now.

    Two caveats:

    1. I’m socially liberal because a free society requires tolerating even the people you hate. This is hard, and even many people who consider themselves tolerant because they simply don’t hate a particular group aren’t (and often don’t want to be) tolerant in this sense.

    2. I’m economically conservative because the freedom to act without government interference even in an economic context has great inherent worth (but I’ll repeat here that I don’t value it to the exclusion of all else) but also because the free market usually does a better job than central planning at making everyone prosperous. I don’t care much about wealth inequality - a world in which I have two dollars and you have two million dollars is a better place than a world in which we both have just one dollar.

    Edit: in practice I always end up voting for moderate Democrats at the national level, both because I think social issues are generally more important than economic issues and because neither party usually does what I would want regarding economic issues. However, I have more options at the state and local level.



  • I was confused about how the restraining order could conceivably lead to shutting down the agency but apparently Leland Dudek simply wanted to spite the court.

    “My anti-fraud team would be DOGE affiliates. My IT staff would be DOGE affiliates,” he said to Bloomberg News on Thursday. “As it stands, I will follow it exactly and terminate access by all SSA employees to our IT systems.” He continued, “Really, I want to turn it off and let the courts figure out how they want to run a federal agency."

    I hope that the “clarifying guidance” he received from the court before he changed his mind included an explanation of the judicial smackdown which he would receive if he tried this bullshit.