Based Camp: Our Political Philosophy

This is a poor translation of the podcast:

Hello, Malcolm. Hello, Simone is wonderful to be here again with you today. I'm very excited. What do we talk about? We are gonna talk today about our political philosophy and political philosophy in general, you actually changed the way that I look at politics and that I look at the value of running for elected office.

And I think a lot of our views on. Government, economy, culture have really shifted over the past few years, so this should be fun to chat about, check in on this. Absolutely. Yeah. So I think we're gonna divide this into sort of three parts. First we're gonna discuss sort of our economics, because I think a lot of people, they see politics as existing on this spectrum of like, Economic conservatism to economic liberalism and then social conservatism to social liberalism or, or progressivism.

Because you know, liberal, you can mean classically liberal, which is basically conservative, doesn't matter. Point being, that's the way that people largely divide this stuff. However, I think that it is wrong to think of things on these spectrums, and if you look at where we land politically, it's nowhere on this spectrum for either.

Our economic or social beliefs. And then there's other beliefs like where we think about international engagement and stuff like that. So first, let's dive into our economics, because I realize we've been doing a lot of videos on things like communism and libertarianism, and it could give people a misunderstanding.

Of what we really believe optimal economic policy looks like. So first I'd say sort of our larger political spectrum. 📍 📍 We call Bull Moose Republicanism which means that we, we take a lot of inspiration from the conservatism of Teddy Roosevelt and, and what that meant. And economically, what that means is very unlike libertarians.

But also very similar to Libertarian philosophy in some way, which is to say we do think that government is intrinsically and always becomes evil, largely regardless of what the intentions are as a heavy governing body because it leads to inefficiency, which leads to enormous evil. An example is something like the,

great leap forward in China, right? 📍 Which during a period of five years, by, some measurements, led to more death just due to inefficiency than the entire period of slavery in the United States, which I, I do as more like intentional evil. And this is by some statistics, not by all something of you used like the most extreme data, but that you could get anywhere close to that just with inefficiency is.

Shocking to me. So I think that we can just say inefficiency and then people can be like, oh, you must not really hate it. No, no, no. Like inefficiency is, is dramatically evil. It's a cancer. And you talk about that in the Pragmatist Guide to Governance. You talk about this bureaucratic inefficiency as literally being a kin.

In fact, it it kind of, it is an almost literally analogous to cancer in organizations. Yeah. In that you get governing institutions and if every year you create 10 new governing institutions, Like say you're a city government or something like that. If just one of those institutions doesn't shut down when it's supposed to, you know, like a cell that doesn't stop doing what it's doing when it's supposed to and think, oh, my job is just to self-replicate.

My job is just to acquire more resources. It will do that. And normally a governance structure will be good at getting rid of that. You know, we have things that kill the cancer in our bodies, but sometimes it'll hide and it'll convince the governing structure. It's actually useful. It's actually important.

But here is where we're really different from Libertarians. So while we see large government as intrinsically evil, we also see this is where we take a lot of inspiration. For Teddy Roosevelt, trust busting is very important which is all large governing bodies be they companies. Or governments are intrinsically evil and the larger they get, the more of like a global governance structure you get, the more they will trend towards evil action.

So we are as antagonistic towards a large institution like Google or Facebook as we are to the US governance system because these institutions. Are no longer really affected by economic forces. They begin to get ideas internally that can create little cults around what they think is good and what they think is evil, which can then be used to justify almost any action.

And so I think that you do need some. Things to be handled by the government and some things to be handled by company. And one of the most important things that the government needs to do is to prevent power from coagulating in any area while still working to maintain international competitiveness.

And this is a big problem here because a huge aspects of a country's international competitiveness is through these large companies. And so you need to build very. Unique. I mean, we wrote a whole book on this, the Fragment Guide to Governance, very unique governance systems to off play these two things.

What are your thoughts on, on the economic side of things, Simone? Would you have more nuance or No, I mean, I, I think this is actually pretty standard government policy theory. I mean, when, when I. Did that technology policy masters at Cambridge. Like the, the common thing was I could tell you were like, oh, do I actually mention Cambridge?

Am I gonna look like a, am I gonna name drop this? You, you, you like swallowed it for a second there, you're like, I'm not gonna do this. Yeah. Then I, yeah, I just vomited it. But yeah, I mean the very common thing is governments should intervene when there's a market failure. Period. And then otherwise they should not intervene.

But then of course, the question is, what is the right way to intervene when there's a market failure? And I think that's where things start to fall apart. You could think of a government as a steward of a healthy ecosystem. And if you see that your pond is starting to stagnate and build a monoculture, you know, if it's being overcome by a certain type of scum, maybe you need to aerate the pond better.

Maybe you need to make sure that water's flowing through it better, et cetera. So this is, it is about, Stewardship of systems and ensuring a diverse ecosystem, a functioning ecosystem, an evolving ecosystem, and a sustainable ecosystem. So you can look at it from that end. I mean, I think another part of our sort of bull moose style republicanism is our views towards conservationism which obviously Ted Roosevelt was very famous for.

And I think if you look at. The existing environmentalist movement, I largely disagree with it. I think that the way that they are approaching climate change and stuff like that is not really data driven in a way that is just really damaging. So, I mean, the, the statistic we always come to here is that if you look at The Covid period where no one could drive cars, no one could fly planes like the world shut down to some extent.

I mean, some people could, but it was huge, a huge change in everyone's everyday life. And we only just met the incremental change and carbon release we would need to cumulatively make on top of that every year for like the next 15 years to have a dent in climate change. What that showed me is that any sort of change that is pushed as a policy or something like that is always unrealistic.

Anyone who's looking at the data right now could see that, that means the solution needs to be technological in, in origin. I'm wondering what your thoughts on, on that aspect of this are Simone, having started in the climate change industry, cuz you did. Yeah, I mean, I, I just, well, I think the bigger problem with the climate change industry is that it has become focused on signaling and not solving the p