Anti-Democracy, Part 2

Marc Andreessen is right:

I think the American system is incredibly well developed. I think the founding fathers were geniuses. I think the founding fathers had lived under effective ­government, and it was called King George, and they did not like it. I mean, they knew what an autocratic government was like. And so they implemented a representative democracy, with the representation layer as a buffer against autocratic change and against mob rule. The other thing I don’t like is direct democracy. This proposition system we have in California is craziness, just lunacy. The last thing you want to do is put the mob in charge.

Let the smartest, richest, most accomplished people decide how the country is run because they stand to lose the most if things go wrong. A person with a net worth in the billions has a much greater personal vested interest in the economy and America succeeding than someone with no money and a room temperature IQ.

Agree 100%:

It’s not just paleoconservtives who want the fed to prematurely raise rates; many liberals do too, to combat wealth inequality. Thus, raising rates – like raising taxes – is just another way to soak the rich by destroying wealth. Conservtives who implore the fed to raise rates and end QE are no different than libs who want to raise taxes; the end result is the same: rich people lose money. Marc Andreessen, who voted for Romney, probably also agrees.

The Grey Enlightenment, despite being a right-wing/libertarian blog, supports the fed because fed policy has been a resounding success at creating economic conditions conductive to the creation of wealth so that in America’s meritocracy the smartest and most-talented can thrive. The same for bank bailouts, which also helped the best and the brightest. The libs whined that the dollar would crash, there would be hyperinflation, or that tax payers would have to pay the bill; as Matt O’Brien tweeted, none of those things happened. The super-effective bailouts were essentially free, but indirectly created trillions of dollars of wealth in the form of rising asset prices and technological innovation. Web 2.0 and Silicon Valley owes some of its recent success to the fed, by letting easy money inflate the valuations of these rapidly growing companies and the real estate of the region. Tax payers didn’t pay a penny for the bailouts. In fact, defying all doom and gloom, the treasury turned a profit just three years later, and those who stayed in stocks and real estate were rewarded with the biggest bull market ever. In 2008, thank congress for coming together in the eleventh hour and rising to the occasion when many on the left sought failure.

The motivating factor behind good policy is: we have a finite amount of resources (time and money); let’s allocate them to those most deserving (high IQ individuals, Wall St., web 2.0) who can produce the most ROI. Giving more money to low-IQ economically disadvantaged people is a waste of resources that will only perpetuate the poverty problem. America’s Fed policy has been so successful that other countries have emulated it to combat their own economic problems.

As shown by the bank bailouts, sometimes the best policy is the least popular, and this is just another argument against democracy in that most individuals are not economic stakeholders and have no clue about what is best for the economy.