
Peter Thiel: Trump has taught us this year’s most important political lesson - w1ntermute
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/peter-thiel-trump-has-taught-us-this-years-most-important-political-lesson/2016/09/06/84df8182-738c-11e6-8149-b8d05321db62_story.html
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vtempest
>>Trump’s heretical denial of Republican dogma about government incapacity is
exactly what we need to move the party — and the country — in a new direction.

It's contradictory for libertarians to be calling for more government spending
on the economy. Most of the issues, like crumbling infrastructure, would be
better spent not by advocating for effective spending, but rather
privatization and letting people vote online on which firm to contract out to
various public works paid for by tax money that we vote on how to allocate.

~~~
whamlastxmas
>Most of the issues, like crumbling infrastructure, would be better spent not
by advocating for effective spending, but rather privatization

I think the hundreds of billions of tax dollars we've spent on privatizing the
expansion of internet hardware/fiber is a iron-clad evidence to this being
flat out wrong. It's been a complete and total failure with no accountability.

> letting people vote online on which firm to contract out to various public
> works

This is getting into an entirely different argument about direct democracy.
How about just having an election and voting system that is better for voters
and the public will, and actually being able to elect officials who are
willing to implement a fair and balanced bidding system for government
contracts?

Your next door neighbor Jim who listens to Rush Limbaugh 2 hours a day and
watches mainstream news outlets another 2 hours every evening and makes his
voting decisions based off television commercials is not the person I want
selecting a government contractor. It will become a marketing contest and
needlessly increase the cost to tax payers as a result.

~~~
tzs
> I think the hundreds of billions of tax dollars we've spent on privatizing
> the expansion of internet hardware/fiber is a iron-clad evidence to this
> being flat out wrong.

Well, it _would_ be evidence it it had actually happened, but the claim of
hundreds of billions of tax dollars on this is very questionable [1].

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556)

~~~
whamlastxmas
Ok, not _literal_ tax dollars, but dollars from the American population at
large, essentially tax dollars that aren't going through the government first
and instead straight into the pockets of telecom providers.

Here is my understanding, which largely disagrees with the guy in your link
arguing against the $200 billion statement:

It's 1991 and the US government says "our telecom infrastructure sucks". They
knew there'd be tremendous economic impact based on the quality (or lack
thereof) of this infrastructure. The monopolistic nature of a system involving
hardware infrastructure installed literally everywhere on essentially public
land (easements) meant that existing companies owning this infrastructure have
no incentive to expand it.

The options we were faced were either:

1\. Using tax payer money and having the government directly build out this
infrastructure to the tremendous and direct benefit of everyone

2\. Changing the regulations around the existing infrastructure so that the
barrier of entries were lower and more people could theoretically participate
in expanding the infrastructure

These two options are the subtext for the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The guy
in the thread you posted is trying to argue that the act wasn't about quid pro
quo, but about deregulation. He's correct but also misleading. The _act
itself_ is marketed as being about deregulation, but the entire reason the act
existed was quid pro quo. This is blatant and obvious - the most visible part
of the entire act are the goals that the telecoms were _required_ to reach in
terms of expansion. It's also funny how this is marketed as deregulation when
there's a huge list of requirements regulating what has to be done by certain
dates.

Of course, as it often happens, immediately after this passes we have the
exact opposite of expectations. There is tremendously less competition and
constant mergers to create only a few massive telecoms. Today it's literally
only three companies providing long distance according to Wikipedia - AT&T,
Sprint and Verizon. Instead of having a government lead initiative to expand
what is inarguably a utility service, we naively trusted private companies to
fulfill their end of the bargain and meet the legally required goals.

Obviously this didn't pan out. Our infrastructure is shit and the progress
was/is laughably short of the specified requirements.

The short summary is: we allowed private companies to continue operating in a
space they really should not have, or at least in a manner they should not
have. We did this because they said they would, as legally required, expand
the infrastructure. That didn't happen and there's never been any
accountability for it. As a result, Americans have paid hundreds of billions
of dollars to these companies in excess of what they would have otherwise
paid, and that excess was _legally required_ to spent on infrastructure and
never was to any significant extent.

So yes, Americans were scammed out of hundreds of billions of dollars, even if
it wasn't money that went to the government first as tax income. This is also
entirely ignoring the economic impact from our lack of infrastructure, which
could be estimated anywhere from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars.

------
darawk
While I agree with most of what Thiel has to say here in terms of policy...I
don't see how this leads him to conclude that Trump being president would be a
good idea.

------
11thEarlOfMar
During the current democratic presidency, and whether it can be justifiably
blamed or not, we've seen:

\- Housing bubble burst and destroy the assets of tens of millions of
Americans;

\- Private health insurance costs increase 100% [0] as the administration
bungled the implementation of the solution to those incredible cost increases;

\- College tuition costs increase 50% [1];

So if you're the 2-income family and over the last 8 years, while your kids
became college age, you've seen health insurance and tuition skyrocket.

If you took a second mortgage in 2007, you lost it all by 2009 and had a high
probability of being wiped out as the stock markets went on a tear over the
next 6 years. You had to watch from the sidelines.

If you're blue collar, there's a high probability you were unemployed and
possibly laid off more than once.

That's a lot of people with recent, seriously adverse, major life
circumstances who need to point the finger somewhere. They are hurt and angry
enough to rally around a candidate who curses the incumbents to their face.

[0] [http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/04/16/public-vs-
private-h...](http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/04/16/public-vs-private-
health-insurance-on-controlling-spending/)

[1] [http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-
col...](http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-
college/articles/2015/07/29/chart-see-20-years-of-tuition-growth-at-national-
universities)

~~~
whamlastxmas
Additionally, if you look at "real" numbers, unemployment has only gotten
worse since 2008: [http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-
chart...](http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts)

Funnily enough, it was the HW Bush years when unemployment trend was improving
(aside from 2001 bubble).

~~~
kesselvon
Don't tell me you actually believe the bs coming out of shadow stats.

~~~
whamlastxmas
What exactly is wrong with it? They use the same numbers as the BLS, they just
don't remove BLS's own figures for discouraged workers etc.

It's ridiculous to say that because someone has been so unsuccessful in
finding a job and gave up searching over a certain period that they shouldn't
be counted in the most commonly accepted unemployment figures.

To say that "unemployment has become less of a problem" is an outright lie and
yet that's the phrase we constantly hear due to "convenient" sampling for
U3/U6.

According to U3 and U6, we could have 99% of Americans out of work and totally
given up trying to find work, but still only have 5% unemployment.

------
kapauldo
Thiel is overrated.

------
byebyetech
Palantir -> Access to Big Data -> Election Prediction -> Support Trump as
President -> Get More Contracts for Palantir.

~~~
astrange
Prediction markets are already public data:

[https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/773996014046998528?...](https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/773996014046998528?lang=en)

