Steve Teles: belief

Transcript context

…What’s the biggest thing “the left” could learn from conservative/libertarian law and economics? What is the biggest thing that the… Again, I think the focus on rent-seeking I think people on the left tend to focus a lot on what government can do to solve problems, not enough on where government actually produces it. So in that sense I think, the left needs a more vigorously anti-statist agenda to go with its statist agenda. And that’s even true in areas like finance or taxation. It needs to have a balance between those two sides. And historically in lots of periods in the history, the left had a more vigorous anti-statist component and needs to get more of it. Kludgeocracy, you have a famous piece on this concept, which I take to be the notion there’s so much gridlock that we still have to try to get some things done, but we do it in such convoluted roundabout ways that everything is just a kludge of unwieldy pieces fit together, barely working, and policy just creeks along in a highly ineffective way. In your view, how long can this go on for? Could we just sail along with kludgeocracy for 70 more years? Or is there some kind of breakpoint where it all snaps?…

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