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I read an interesting piece today about how old all the senior people in American politics are. Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell are 78. Nancy Pelosi is 80. Donald Trump is 74.

For purposes of comparison, Jacinda Ardern is 40.

Age can absolutely be a proxy to experience, if not expertise. Ardern was working in national government for nine years when she became PM. Americans have a bipolar relationship to experience. Pete Buttigieg was criticized for not having enough, Biden is criticized for having too much. If I need to hire someone who can lead a team in terms of technical ability and soft skills, I'm not going to hire someone right out of school.

Agreed, but I do think there is a difference between having technical ability and being deeply entrenched in politics.

If we stopped considering "politics" to be a dirty word and pretending that a democracy is like a business, then "deeply entrenched" wouldn't automatically be a bad word either. Some old-school politicians, like Biden or Jon McCain, have given their entire lives to public service. I may not always agree with either one, but I'm tired of pretending that this service is not only worthless, but detrimental.

True. As long a the old-timers adapt and continue to evolve as the world evolves then it works out. But when they promote the That Is The Way We've Always Done It motto then it fails.

I struggle with the balance.

I'm a "less is better" guy. I'm also a "politician shouldn't be a job" guy. When you have people in these positions for lifetimes, you've created a ruling class, not public servants.

But running the country is indeed a tad more complex than the HOA, so I get why tenure and experience is probably necessary.

So where do you put the slider? (Ahhh! That's worth bonus points, right?)

Lets take a step back.

The worst part of this is that trust in government continued to decline for the last few years, while the same people full of distrust advocated for keeping its leader in place. How stupid is that?

Who did you expect someone who distrusted the government to support? The guy who has been in it almost 50 years and promises to bring us bigger government? Seems stupid to me that anyone who distrusted government would ever vote for Joe. Voting for someone not in government wasn't an option short of write-ins.

Biden didn't create that mistrust. His tenure is not the source of mistrust.

Telling lies to the citizens is just one way to create mistrust of government. Incompetence (a government staple) leads to mistrust. Unmet promises do as well. To me a large part of why we have a President Don in the first place is because of unmet promises. People had been told by politicians (on both teams) for decades that government was the solution and this politician or that or this team or that were going to bring those solutions (and only that politician or team could do so and indeed the other politician or team had caused all of your problems). Only to see many of those day to day problems get worse. So they brought in an outsider who made many of the same promises but the appeal was not being from the same crew that had repeatedly already failed to deliver. I think Don is as much a product of the state of the country as he is a driver of it.

but you're trying to make the same ridiculous moral equivalence arguments that Trump supporters make

Now who is completely missing the point?

Biden has been pretty forthcoming about policy mistakes, especially with regard to criminal justice. That sure seems like a trust-building action to me.

So your a fanboy who expects to get everything you thought you were getting last time.

The official GOP playbook has been, for 40 years, "Don't trust the government, unless I'm the government."

Politics does not exist in a vacuum. Its more a trust me because the other team wants more and bigger government which means there will be more to mistrust if the other team wins. Though the GOP playbook isn't my playbook as I am not a republican. So maybe someone can help you clarify that.

Though reality is we will never have limited government because there is no power or money in limited government for politicians and money and power are all politicians are about.

That stands in stark contrast to the post WWII government of, "We can elevate this country as individuals working with strong investment in government." History is really clear about that: This the period of time when the interstate system was built, and marginal tax rates were high on the rich. The outcomes were extraordinary for most people and this is when the American middle class because the ideal we still talk about.

Careful now. Republicans talk longingly of the 1950s and they are called racists and misogynists.

Marginal/nominal tax rates don't mean anything. Its effective tax rates that matter. No one paid the tax at 70%+ tax rates because there were so many tax shelters (there was a cottage industry for them back in the day). You can have a 100% nonimal/marginal tax rate and pay less taxes than you pay today with lower marginal rates. Congress has historically limited deductions when they didn't have the guts to raise marginal/nominal rates.

Post-WWII, pretty much all of the industrialized world was rebuilding from the war. China wasn't really industrialized yet. The dynamics between skilled and unskilled labor and labor and capital have been permanently altered since. I agree the American middle class became the ideal during that time. But that world no longer exists. We struggle to accept that and as a result struggle to move on.

Well, you definitely took a step back. That was an all-strawman response. "Your" ad hominem fanboy comment doesn't even make sense.

Trust in government was measurably higher in the 50's. That doesn't mean that there wasn't racism or misogyny, it means there was measurably higher trust in government. It's reasonable to conclude that it's because government actually did stuff, and people had reason to trust it.

And tell me more about small government when Republicans held both houses and the White House, and still presided over the largest budgets and deficits in history.

Gonch, I'm not gonna tell you where to put your slider, but I would generally agree that less is better. The problem is, that's used as an inflexible ideology and not a slider at all. Deregulate all the things has had real economic and moral consequences in more ways that I could ever list, which is just as bad as regulating all the things.

Jeff said:

Deregulate all the things has had real economic and moral consequences in more ways that I could ever list, which is just as bad as regulating all the things.

Yeah, but if I'm going to be wrong in either direction, I'll always try to err in the direction of less.

As a total aside, your recent-ish tendency to include morality in most arguments vexes me.

The slider has continually moved to "more government" for eons. Sometimes it moves slower than others. But I don't know why you bring up ideology when we never come remotely close to "deregulate all the things" and never will. However, I can absolutely see regulation of everything happening eventually.

By the way, I'm probably last in line for the vaccine roll-outs. Which is cool, I'll get to see if it has any whack short term side-effects in all of you guys before I decide whether or not to take it.

Congress could spend each of its sessions over the next 4 years doing nothing but repealing statutes and regulations and we would be no where near deregulating all things 4 years from now.

Lord Gonchar said:

As a total aside, your recent-ish tendency to include morality in most arguments vexes me.

Why is that? Believing that there should be less regulation is just as much a moral argument, just not one I agree with. Morality has a slider, too. I can't find a good emoji for a slider.

I generally subscribe to Bloomberg's Matt Levine's theory of regulations:

There are two kinds of regulations: custom regulations and bulk regulations.

A custom regulation is designed to accomplish a particular goal. You want people to do something, so you write a rule mandating that they do it and punishing them if they don't....

Bulk regulations are the kind that you buy by the yard, ones that you measure by quantity rather than purpose. They don't have a purpose, really; they are just generic red tape These are the regulations that presidents frequently announce they will cut in half, or freeze with an executive order. They're the regulations that come not from a reasoned desire to achieve a particular goal, but from a pure impulse to regulate. Bulk regulations are bad because they prevent businesses from doing business-y things without accomplishing anything good.

All regulations are custom regulations. All discussion of regulation is about bulk regulations, which do not exist.

Nothing in this theory is disproved by the present discussion.

Man, that's some hard truth.

Jeff said:

Why is that?

I dunno. But it's been enough or in a way that it's actively grabbed my attention.

Morality has a slider, too.

I think that just might be it. Morality is pretty much the definition of shades of grey, personal credo, outlook, "what's right for me", literally-exists-on-a-slider sort of stuff and I have a hard time reconciling that as a definitive argument for anything.

Moral high ground is only high ground if our morals align. Claiming a moral outcome literally only applies to one's own morality.

(I think it's possible to try to refute my take with specific examples where arguing against it just makes one look like an asshole - specific humanities issues come to mind - but the reality is that those are a moral call too.)

In a nutshell, for the most part, morality is not an objective thing. A moral win or loss for you might not be the same moral win or loss for the next guy.

Morality is neither fact nor truth. It's a strange piece to play - especially given that nature of the discussions around here and the propensity towards hard numbers and science. It lets us know where you might stand, but also implies (I think) that disagreement with that is incorrect in some way...and that's just not true.

And now that I've talked myself through it in type, I think it's that very last half sentence that causes the vexation.

I suggest that injecting a moral argument isn't what suggests where you stand, but it does provide insight as to why you stand there.

Perhaps this is bothersome because you feel that these discussions should be inherently amoral?

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Different views in these discussions are just that. Not a matter of one being right and the other wrong. Just different. But to frame the discussion with moral arguments is typically an attempt to elevate one's view (as being right/moral) and devalue another's view (as being wrong/immoral). But given that absolute right/wrongs are few and far between (particularly in matters of governmental policy) the moral argument pretty much always falls short. One isn't right and the other wrong; just different.

And injecting a moral argument is as likely (particularly when talking politics) a matter of why I want you to think I stand there as it as why I actually stand there.

How a nation responds to a pandemic should not be about morality or about politics. It should just be about science. Why do I think that? Because politics got in the way of the AIDS response and far too many people died from that for no reason whatsoever. Sound familiar?

Well, wait. If your goal in argument is to score points, then sure, "injecting" a moral argument might be an attempt to seize the high ground. If your goal is enlightenment (either your own or others'), then it can be pretty useful to know what first principles a person is beginning from - whether those first principles are moral, scriptural, "natural law," the constitution (or the principles embodied therein), or something else - if only to know what we can debate and what is pointless to debate.

Views on various issues for very few people are that simplistic. They are a combination of some or all of those first principles. So it will be rare the case when you have clarity on those first principles. And even when it exists, the person has to be honest about it (and before that know the actual basis for themselves). So you are unlikely to ever have that which you view as pretty useful. And unless the person is willing to change his/her view its pointless to debate no matter what that first principle(s) may be.